On Reading; Form, Fictionality, Friendship

ATROPOS PRESS new york

•

dresden

General Editor: Wolfgang Schirmacher Editorial Board: Pierre Alferi Giorgio Agamben Hubertus von Amelunxen Alain Badiou Judith Balso Judith Butler Diane Diavis Chris Fynsk Martin Hielscher Geert Lovink Larry Rickels Avital Ronell Michael Schmidt Victor Vitanza Siegfried Zielinski Slavoj Zizek © 2012 by Jeremy Fernando Think Media EGS Series is supported by the European Graduate School ATROPOS PRESS New York • Dresden 151 First Avenue # 14, New York, N.Y. 10003 cover design: Yanyun Chen all rights reserved ISBN 978-0-9853042-1-8

for Tykhe …

Authors Jeremy Fernando Robert Lumsden Mark Brantner Julia Hölzl Nicole Ong Lim Lee Ching Michelle Wang Jeremy Fernando Michael Kearney Paoi Wilmer Setsuko Adachi Shaoling Ma Cui Su Wernmei Yong Ade Jeremy Fernando

Contents Foreword—To read or not to read .................................... 8 In Difference .................................................................. 23 I hear Dead People

......................................................... 75

Fidem Frangere .............................................................. 103 The Trauma of Language ................................................. 133 Reading in Practice ......................................................... 169 Encountering Formal Beauty ........................................... 195 Randori with Franz Kafka

............................................... 233

The Unknown Pleasures of Interpretation ......................... 263 The Spirit of Exercise ...................................................... 313 Negotiating Isolation ....................................................... 339 Reading Chinese Women in Two Maoist Ballets ................ 387 Printed Matter Or, Towards a Zinetic History of Reading ... 423 Obscenity, Ruin or the Metaphor of the Eye ...................... 459 Afterword—With friends like these … ............................. 487

Jeremy Fernando 10 January , 2011 Singapore

9

Foreword— to read or not to read That is the question.

And here, we must never forget that in every question, we can hear echoes of the question the serpent asks woman: “Did God really say you were not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?”1 This is the question that is never answered, can never be answered. In many ways, this is a hermeneutical question: it asks whether Yahweh really meant what (S)He said. And it is this that opens a question within both woman and man: perhaps they had misunderstood the prohibition, misheard the injunction notto. It is not for us to judge whether they were 1

Genesis 3:1 italics added. All references to the Bible are

taken from the Jerusalem Bible.

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On Reading

correct or not: after all, we never hear Yahweh’s command. But the question doesn’t remain at a hermeneutical level: for, even if both woman and man had heard Yahweh’s prohibition, they had no—will never have—access to Her intent: it can never be ascertained if this statement was constative or performative. In other words, regardless of whether they obeyed, they would be doing so blindly. The serpent’s question opened a moment of reading in both man and woman. More than that, it opened a connection between them and Yahweh. Not just in the banal sense of attempting to decode what the command was, meant, its signification, or even the significance of it; but more profoundly the realisation that even as they attempted to understand Yahweh “understanding”—to echo Werner Hamacher’s elegant phrase—“is in want of understanding.”2 For, all they have is language: and since language is based on correspondence, it is an act of memory. As such, language can never account for forgetting: which happens, can happen, to any one, anytime. Since it happens to one, it is beyond 2

Werner Hamacher. “Premises” in Premises: Essays in Philo-

sophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, translated by Peter Fenves. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1.

Foreword

one’s control, perhaps even outside of one’s knowledge. Thus, there is no reason to believe that each act of memory might not always already bring with it forgetting.3 So, even as they attempt to reach out, touch, connect with, Yahweh, there is always already a gap between them. Here, we can hear another echo, that of Avital Ronell, and her teaching that “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading.”4 This is a connection that is nothing more than an openness to the possibility of a connection, that perhaps foregrounds that there is always already a space in any connectivity. That the dial tone might always be engaged. This is reading as a phone call. Not just that one may be attempting to answer the call of the text, but that as one is attempting to read, one is also making a call to the text. One is calling out

3

Another way to put it might be: forgetting is always alrea-

dy accounted for in language; it is just that we are blind to it even as it affects us, has effects on us. 4

Avital Ronell. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizo-

phrenia, Electric Speech. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 380.

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On Reading

possibilities to the text—whilst perhaps never getting any answer. Thus, as one reads, one might as well be in a conversation with oneself: if the response to one’s call is through one’s reading of the text, there is no guarantee that the response(s) might not just be voices in one’s head. Hence, as one is reading—even with the best of intentions, in fidelity to the text—one might well be reading into, over, the text; re-writing. After all, one should never forget Paul de Man’s reminder that “not that the act of reading is innocent, far from it. It is the starting point of all evil.”5 And here, if we allow the trace of evil and the serpent to resound with each other, the very evil that de Man is warning us of is the question. Of the heresy in all reading. But it is not as if turning away from reading is a solution. For, even though we might well be able to put down the text, refuse to look, break the connection with the other as it were, once the question is opened in us, we might never be able to exorcise it. Even though the woman and man 5

Paul de Man. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in

Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 194.

Foreword

were forced to leave the garden, were banished, they can never leave behind the consequences, effects, of their heresy. It is not as if one can ever leave language. It is not as if one can ever unlearn what one has learned: the ability to will ourselves to forget is beyond us. It is not as if one can ever stop reading. No one ever said that reading was safe. And here, if we pay attention, we can hear Plato’s warning resound—poetry can be dangerous. And in particular poetry that moves, affects, that puts one out of one’s mind. For, such a poetry quite possibly causes effeminacy, causes one to lose reason: such a poetry allows pathos to overcome logos. However, Plato also teaches that rhetoric in its highest form requires divine inspiration by way of the daemon; who whispers in your ear. This is a moment that seizes you—that puts you beyond yourself. Hence, a good rhetorician must be open to the possibility of otherness. One could posit that Plato was being ironic in his eviction notice: he serves this very notice in the very form he warns against. Moreover, the aim of the philosopher is to corrupt the youth. And this corruption is precisely by opening in youths a questioning of the very polis in which they lived— opening the question in them. By moving them to

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On Reading

question. In this sense, the very divine inspiration that the rhetorician requires to move the audience cannot be distinguished from the affective power of good poetry. Even whilst poetry and rhetoric are different forms, at their zenith, both require a touch of the divine: the role of both the poet and the rhetorician is to be open to the possibility of otherness. And what else is this openness to the possibility of otherness than reading. If one takes into account the fact that, according to Plato, the poet and the rhetorician speak from memory, then good poetry and rhetoric are a combination of the embodiment of the craft with an insemination from without. And since one has no control over the daemon, there is no reason to believe that the divine moment may not be a whispering that is contrary to memory itself: in other words, the highest point of poetry and rhetoric might well be the moment when memory fails—a moment of forgetting. Perhaps then, we might even posit that reading is nothing but an openness to forgetting. Which puts this very collection in question. For, if reading is nothing but the possibility of forgetting,

Foreword

what does this say about a group of people who come together to write about reading? One might well be tempted here to cite, call on, call forth, Jacques Derrida and his meditation in Archive Fever: whilst a collection commemorates, remembers, there is also always already an inevitable omission, a leaving out, a forgetting as it were.6 Even as one is creating, putting together—writing—the archive, one has no choice but to choose, pick, select from. In other words, when archiving, one is always already reading the object of one’s archive: this is a reading that happens at the very moment of creating, writing. A reading that is indistinguishable from writing. In this sense, even as everyone here is writing about reading, they are always already demonstrating reading whilst writing. But that would be a tad too easy, too simple, too convenient a way out, as it were. One should also not forget that in summoning another, the other, in order to make one’s case, one is always also engaging in acts of necromancy. 6 Jacques Derrida. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. translated by Eric Prenowitz. (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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On Reading

In writing about, in writing one’s reading, there is also an act of remembrance at work. After all, this is an act of violence on their work, thought, perhaps even their being: by writing on, about, one inevitable wrenches the other out of context. Hence, even as reading might be an opening of possibilities, even if reading is the insemination of life, the writing of, on, is a particular kind of murder. One should never forget that to be raised, they first have to be dead: in writing, through writing, one might well have had been the one to kill them. After all, the root of writing is scribere (Latin) grapho (Greek): scratching, tearing. Thus, each writing brings with it a certain pulling, breaking away—but one that is not devastating, for even as there is a measure of destruction, there is always also creation. By writing about the object of one’s reading, one always already runs the risk of creating another object, an object that might have nothing to do with the object one is attempting to read in the first place; by writing about one’s reading, one might never quite be reading at all. Perhaps though, it is the acknowledgment of the risk involved in writing that makes the contributions of these writers so special. There is no doubt that they are first and foremost readers;

Foreword

more than that, they have a love for texts, for reading. By highlighting the fact that they are reading these texts, they have also foregrounded the fictionality of, in, their readings. Thus, all readings will be readings. With no possibility of verification, legitimisation—they cannot be made kosher. By exposing themselves as the readers, they cannot defend themselves through the usual strategies of hiding behind theory, objective distance, or canonical, established readings— in other words, there is no hiding behind the academy. Hence, they are exposing themselves to critique, to possible attacks—not just on their work, but also on their very beings. By exposing themselves as readers, they have made the line between themselves and their readings indistinguishable. By allowing their writings of these readings to be read, they have opened themselves to being read. And for that, I would like to thank their acts of friendship—and acknowledge their courage in being associated with such an attempt to read reading. But it is only in taking these risks that we can potentially open new readings in reading itself. Here, it might be helpful to take a little detour, and channel Gilles Deleuze; in particular,

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On Reading

his beautiful reflection on thinking in Pure Immanence, where he mirrors Nietzsche in opening a new register of thinking and the thinker: a thinking that “replace[s] the ideal of knowledge, the discovery of truth, with interpretation and evaluation … [where] interpretation establishes the ‘meaning’ of a phenomenon, which is always fragmentary and incomplete [and] evaluation determines the hierarchical ‘value’ of the meanings and totalises the fragments without diminishing or eliminating their plurality.” 7 This is a thinking that is always already thinking itself as thinking, and reopening itself as a question; a thinking that never ceases thinking. This is a thinking that doesn’t allow itself the assurance of having thought. Hence, a thinker can not only have no metaphysical comfort of having thought, (s)he can not only never stop thinking, her very status as a thinker—her very self—is open to thinking, to being thought. In reading, by reading, by writing as readers, our writers—friends—are not only opening themselves to be read, they are foregrounding the possibility of themselves as readers who have, can, never read: they are 7

Gilles Deleuze. Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life.

translated by Anne Boyman. (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 65.

Foreword

opening the possibility of themselves as a nonreader, as other to themselves. Thus, all that can be said is that they have attempted to read—a reading that never ceases reading. Since these readings are always “fragmentary,” remain plural, remain readings, this suggests that to attend to them—to read these writings of readings—requires an imaginative gesture. And here, there is a crucial lesson to be gleaned from Oscar Wilde: “if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you will stay at home and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere.” 8 Perhaps, to even conceive of reading, one must first imagine the possibility of reading itself. If one closes oneself to it—in the interest of ideology, particular preconceptions of what reading is, or even in the adherence to a single, absolute truth—one might never be able to see it anywhere, even if it was 8

Oscar Wilde. Intentions. (Iowa: 1stWorld Library, 2005),

40.

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On Reading

staring one in the face. Here, we should never forget that Wilde addresses the imaginative gesture through an imaginative one: the notion comes through Vivian, a character in dialogue with Cyril. It is not too difficult to hear a whisper of the epigraph in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes here: “it must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.”9 For, if reading can only posit itself as reading— with no grund to rely on—then all readings are but positions. And our writing readers, and you whom are reading this, are also taking these positions—same or otherwise—as you read. So, even as our friends are playing characters in the very stages they set up to explore reading, you, our readers, are fellow cast member, characters— hopefully this is our connection to each other. But then again, didn’t Shakespeare already teach us that … Perhaps then, all we can do is to open our receptors to the “as if,” and attend to possibilities, uncertainties, unknowns.

9 Roland Barthes. Roland Barthes. translated by Richard Howard. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Epigraph.

Foreword

Perhaps, all we can do is read … as if we can …

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Robert Lumsden

1

Merleau-Ponty realised that he had been wrong

to assume that he could render a pre-conceptual experience in the moment of perception in terms of accounts of such an experience, which must always be later and other. As he, reconsidering, writes: “My hold on the past and future is precarious and my possession of my own time is always postponed until a stage when I may fully understand it, yet this stage can never be reached, since it would be one more moment bounded by the horizon of its future, and requiring in its turn, further developments in order to be understood.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. translated from the French by Colin Smith. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 346. And see Robert Lumsden, Immediacy and the Impossible Poetic, arts.monash.edu.au/.../proceedingslumsden-immediacy-and-the-impossible-poetic-ttp-

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In Difference

After the death of the author and the multiple failures of text to signify in ways that prove generally agreeable, what remains of communicational certainty? Various versions of phenomenology, it can be argued, founder on the problem of how immediacy can be rendered without dissolving into reports about it;1 attempts to secure public communication work within the presumption of a generosity of reception (Richard Rorty, Emmanuel Levinas, Hans-Georg Gadamer)2 which is undermined by the frequency of misreading, misunderstanding, and resistance to understanding in language groups of all types. 3 When the hermeneutic systems and their contrarian critiques have been heard, a fundamental question remains: in opening a text to the multiple voices set loose even by a naïve reading of it, who is overheard speaking, and

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On Reading

conference.pdf 2

An account of a conversation between Gadamer and

Derrida on trust and the hermeneutics of suspicion appears in ed. Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989). A worthwhile account of Gadamer’s “living present of conversation”, and of the views of Lyotard, Rorty, Derrida and Levinas on the place of generosity in reading can be found in S. Gallagher. ‘Conversations in postmodern hermeneutics’, in H. Silverman, ed. Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics and the Sublime. (London: Routledge, 2002), 49-60. 3

“The relation of ‘mis’ (mis-understanding), mis-

interpreting, for example, to that which is not ‘mis’ is . . . that of a general possibility inscribed in the structure of positivity, a normality of the standard.” Jacques Derrida. Limited, Inc. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 157. 4

Lyotard writes of this ‘A’ reader (‘Mode’): “he does

not presuppose the rules of his own discourse, but only that this discourse too must obey rules”. Jacques Lyotard, The Differend, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press,

In Difference

by whom? What is the basis for the selection of one voice above the many possible voices for our credulous regard? Who speaks, and to whom? Not even the sharpest critics of transparency seem immune to the call of the objective. As Jean-François Lyotard in the opening pages of The Differend for example invites assent for the argument that is to follow by setting up a “first reader,” it is soon evident that it is a veiled appearance of the author himself we are overhearing.4 In satirising the professorial voice he will also continue to employ, Lyotard shows a nervousness about his ability to regulate The Differend itself, the book as a sustained argument, by readers whose interpretive dispositions remain unpredictable. It is a distinctive post-modern poignancy, not so much a nostalgia for lost origins, as the apprehensive foreshadowing of a loss yet to be experienced. Though the need to establish some principle which legitimates critical enquiry after it has taken steps to move itself beyond its imprisonments has a long provenance, it is informative to see it persisting in the writing about writing of some of those who work with a kind of designatory iconoclasm. Jacques Derrida, no less, makes his trace incontrovertible, not in

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On Reading

1988), xiv. Lower on the same page (‘Style’), Lyotard provides a fuller description of the ‘A’ reader: The A’s naïve ideal is to attain a zero degree style and for the reader to have the thought in hand, as it were. There sometimes ensues a tone of wisdom, a sententious cast, which should be disregarded. The book’s tempo is not that of “our time.” A little out of date? The A. explains himself at the end about the time of “our time.” Given that the last major section of The Differend bears the title ‘The Sign of History’, we can infer that Lyotardas-whimsical-narrator identifies with this ‘A’ reader in the act of distancing himself from it somewhat. We are also justified in hearing some discomfort in the ‘naïve ideal’ ascribed, tongue-in-cheek, to his straw-man reader, given that Lyotard claims flatly as conclusion to a previous section (‘Thesis’, p xii); that “There is no ‘language’ in general, except as the object of an Idea” -- an impossible notion to sustain in the case of an enquirer insisting that, whatever they are, and however difficult to discover, his discourse must obey rules of some sort both peculiar to themselves, and – insofar as they do indeed keep the usual characteristics of a language—transmissible: “The book’s mode is philosophic, reflective. The A’s only rule here is to examine cases of differend and find the rules for the heterogeneous genres of discourse that

In Difference

displacing it from the centre of signification, but by making it peripherally in potentia omnipotent to the signifying chain. There is no refuting a semiotic ante system whose anchorage is a spectral absolute.5 Prior to the language turn in philosophy and critical theory and literary criticism, the desire for accuracy in analysis rested largely with variations of the idea of disinterested enquiry, a presumption, taken into the humanities from the scientific method, that the purity of seeing of an observer could match the passion of his or her intent. This ideal of an idea persists, largely uninspected, to the present, especially in the work of (even) some of the better cultural theorists.6 Fundamental to the account of the reception of beauty in Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement7 and bequeathed to English letters by Matthew Arnold, especially in ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, it depends on the curious idea that it is possible to shed one’s preconditioning by deciding to do so, at least for the moment of judgement. Only a little removed from Lyotard’s rhetoric, The Differend attempts to set out versions, ‘phrasings’, of such distancing. The disinterestedness project continues into the Anglo-American New Criticism of the nineteen

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On Reading

bring about these cases”. Lyotard also puts the differend “at the heart of sublime feeling: at the encounter of the two ‘absolutes’ equally present to thought, the absolute whole when it conceives, the absolutely measured when it presents”. (Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 6-7). But in trying to access the sublime by relegating the mode of thinking that took him to its threshold, Lyotard seems to make his conclusion an incontrovertible part of his proposal. 5

“In an oblique way, everything I have written has

to do with the uncanny, especially in/relation to the question of spectrality, of ghosts. There are ghosts everywhere in my texts.” Also: “I tried . . . to pay attention to the generality of this aspectrality.” 6

Pierre Bourdieu’s field work rests on the assumption

that the observer is able to remove him or herself from the object of study in dividing the act of research into two movements, the first an objective stage where one surveys the field of research, and the second involving a subjective analysis of social interaction. “[…] while Bourdieu was correct to highlight the dualisms and theoretical antinomies that have figured in social theory and its resulting de-historicising of emergence or reification of objective condition, his view of the

In Difference

forties and fifties as putative, rather than actual, practice, though it has since gone underground somewhat. One of its current versions is an impatience with ‘theory’ which sometimes borders on disgust, “the weariness with regard to ‘theory’, and the miserable slackening which goes along with it”, as Lyotard puts it (The Differend, xiii). This “miserable slackening” of critical thinking is often to be found claiming disinterestedness as its agent and enjoyment for goal, but the consequence of its labours is frequently a watery impressionism which, allowing for the occasional adjustment for idiom, would not have been out of place amongst some of the critic-as-author impressionists of the late nineteenth century.8

The unconscious of reading In Freud’s account, because of the dream work’s transformations of it, we never experience the latent content of our dreams, their raw stuff, in its original state. Analysis is bound to work back on a best guess basis to an idea of an original through distorted evidences of its existence; though Freudians would claim that such ‘guesses’ can be instinctively accurate, depending on the skill and the experience of the analyst.

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On Reading

dialectic between positionality and dispositionality (termed as first order and second order of objectivity) was unable to overcome the dualisms identified. Instead it pushes analysis in a direction focusing on objective conditions and so, as second order objectivity, objective intentions – a non-individuated subjectivity – is derivative in the analytical prism in the dialectic.” ‘Ontological complicity and the dialectic between positionality and dispositionality’. See Pierre Bourdieu. Pascallian Meditations. trans. Richard Nice. Stanford. Stanford University Press, 2000, Chapter Four. 7

It will be apparent that the association of aesthetic

feeling with empathy proposed here in effect erases the distinction Kant draws between judgements of beauty and the agreeable in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. Kant’s view that a pleasurable experience of beauty is ipso facto universally valid seems to be part of a circular argument, given that he also concedes that there is no principle by which we can compel admiration in another for the beautiful object we ourselves experience. 8

Chernowitz, quoting Proust on Mme de Sévigné,

declared that “the Impressionist order of presentation [in literature is] showing things ‘in the order in which

In Difference

In Sartre’s view, to enable repression the censor must have more knowledge of the material of the unconscious than it pretends to in Freud’s explanation of it. 9 To image the conscious mind in conflict with the unconscious, and in some degree prey to it, Sartre thinks, too readily exonerates the individual from the responsibility of choice which is required of him or her. An interesting consequence of this critique is that in making it Sartre puts himself in a position for which Freud has been taken to task, that of reasoning from premises which are not open to refutation. Sartre is correct if we allow as he does that reason can choose freely from among options which seem to be enjoined upon it, as they well up, seemingly from nowhere. Since this ‘nowhere’ is certainly a feature of cognition and decisionmaking, Sartre leaves us with the question of what it is and where (‘where’) it comes from. Viewed from a different angle, Sartre’s system of explanation is really a mirror-image of Freud’s, insofar as it supposes a point of observation outside the action in which both he and Freud— and we all—are involved; yet no description of such a point, and no suggestion of how it might be conceived, is offered by either theory. It is a variant of Sartre’s objection to Freud which

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On Reading

we perceive them, rather than first explaining them in terms of their causes’”. John G. Peters. Conrad and Impressionism. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, (169). ” The enclosing quotation is from Berrong, Richard M. Modes of Literary Impressionism, 205. 9

“[...] we perceive that the censor in order to apply

its activity with discernment must know what it is repressing. In fact if we abandon all the metaphors representing the repression as the impact of blind forces, we are compelled to admit that the censor must choose and in order to choose must be aware of doing so . . .” Jean-Paul Sartre. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, translated by Hazel E. Barnes. (London. Methuen, 1957), 75.

In Difference

will most concern us. Sartre also questions how access to the pre-reflexive can be achieved by a reflexive consciousness which knows itself largely by its otherness from it. Freud’s later attempt to establish a pre-conscious element as clearing house to the unconscious on one side and an ante-room to the conscious on the other, fails to eliminate the problem by subdividing it, Sartre thinks. Sartre’s point holds, logically speaking. It holds, and as it does, underscores our initiating question: what can we comprehend with any certainty concerning the transactions between our pre-reflexive (or unconscious) and reflexive (or conscious) states, whether we take Sartre as guide, or Freud? We might conclude that the answer to this development of our question is, even more than it was before we watched the phenomenologist set about the psychologist: nothing definitive, however deep we delve. The confirmation of a conviction rather, that this is where enquiry leads and where it ought to lead, not to a clearing up of difficulty and the making of dark things light, but that sufficient of the unknown should remain surplus (as indeed it does) to any explanation brought to bear against it.

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On Reading

10

E. L Mascall. Existence and Analogy. (London:

Longmans Green, 1949), Mascall takes the view that the gap between analogy and analogate can be closed by attributing being equally to both terms, thus his division between analogy of proportion (God loves us as our human fathers love us, only to an immeasurably greater degree) and analogy of attribution (though the degree of love shown in the two cases is different, this can be resolved by attributing being as a shared substrate). Far from solving the problem, this assumes the case Mascall wants to prove – that qualities are not only sui generis, but universal in and through their particular appearances. He has been credited with adopting a neo-Aristotelian perspective, or accused of it, depending on one’s point of view, but appears to be neo-Platonic in taking instances in and by their very appearance as demonstration of universals whose existence would not otherwise be known. He does not, at least, capitalise Being, preferring the more modest lower case presentation of the cosmic appropriate to the Anglo-Saxon tradition.

In Difference

Analogy All discursively presented reasoning is analogic, and all analogies are partial. 10 Knowing this does not tell us in what aspects or to what degree insufficiencies lie as we seize upon such items in a particular analogy perceived as being helpful to whatever case we had been inclined to favour. Such icons of quasi-rationality encourage the deception that we are extending our understanding when we cannot know but that we are doing little more than confirming dispositions to image the world in one way and not another, realisations already inscribed as expectations to which we might have little access. Here as an example is an analogy from a book which relates western scientific findings to Eastern cosmologies: The quantum vacuum turns out to be responsible for the fate of the universe as well. The universe could be flat. So that light—except near massive bodies—travels in a straight line, or open (with an infinitely expanding

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On Reading

11

Ervin Laszlo. Science and the Akashic Field: An

Integral Theory of Everything 2nd. ed. (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2007).

In Difference

space-time that is negatively curved like the surface of a saddle), or else closed (where expansion is overtaken by gravitation in a space-time that is positively curved like the surface of a balloon). In its future development it could continue to expand, or it could reverse, contract, and collapse, or else it could remain permanently balanced between expansion and contraction.11 This does little to explain the universe until I select from the images it offers so that the picture I make best suits what I am prepared to see; and it is hard work to make a picture of it I can take seriously against the comic grain, even then. In the matter of the universe shaped like a saddle, for instance, I can hardly prevent myself—my mind refuses chastisement—imagining a backside on that saddle, a particular backside, wearing cream coloured jodhpurs, recently washed. This is what I am compelled to see because of the figurative materials from which the analogy is made, and it is as pointless to tell me not to imagine the universe in this fashion as it would be to instruct someone that whatever else they do, they must not think of a pink elephant.

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12

“ […] there is no ‘deep further fact’ about the self

[…] when we look inward and try to discover it we find nothing more than a bundle of fleeting sensory impressions, memories, anticipations, and so forth”. Jacques Derrida, Life After Theory, eds. Michael Payne & John Schad, (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), 24. But Derrida’s importatation of the trace as a type of l ur-generator and spectral reference point for signification does, in effect, provide continuity for these “impressions, memories, anticipations and so forth”. See Robert Lumsden. Reading Literature After Deconstruction. (Amherst: Cambria, 2009), 352-9.

In Difference

When I enquire what it is about this invitation to silliness and my response to it that is so inadequate, it seems clear that the fault lies not with the crudeness of the analogies themselves, but in their degrading of a hiddenness which is lost in the attempt to rationalise the arcane. It is a fundamental respect for the mystery of things which we feel should remain to some extent (because it does) after our attempts at explanation are completed which is squandered by such jejune illustrations. This desire to pay due regard to the irreducible would explain our esteem of the unconscious across cultures which are in other ways variant. Not that the imperative to explain and illustrate diminishes, not even among the foes of systemic thinking; nor should it. Both Nietzsche’s Will to Power, and more recently, Derrida’s trace, have deepened our sense of the subject turning vigorously upon itself in trying to secure some anchorage by means of which the critical intelligence might hold the line in its relation to the essentially indefinable. What sets apart their reaching for definition is the ongoing questioning of their conclusions which are generated by, and which generate, their enquiry. 12 Not empiricism alone, then, nor theory by

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analogic example discursively extended; and not the casting of the gaze exclusively outwards. Nonetheless, short of becoming disciples of the inward gaze entirely, we are bound to continue to look to instances in the physical world to try to illuminate such arcane connections.

The Mirror Neuron System, Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex, and the consensual spectrum We approach a consideration of aesthetic ‘objectivity’ by way of a more obvious connection between a given, out-there experience, and its conversion to an inner state: the physical process of seeing, and of colour perception, in particular. We know that the light spectrum extends beyond what we can see of it, but so confined are we by that seeing that we have trouble allowing material existence further extension. Gamma rays do not have, they cannot, the degree of reality of light reflected from the surface of a swimming pool in a David Hockney painting. To perceive something as having objective existence, we must submit to

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13

Norman Doidge. The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories

of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. (London: Penguin, 2007).

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a neurological predisposition to see just as we do and in no other way. Seeing is submission to an uninspected automaticity. This spectrum, in both parts, the visual outthere, and inward and pre-primed, both permits and constrains invention. We might invent a new name for a tint made from a mixing of the primary colours on that spectrum, but we cannot invent a new primary colour. In literary terms, we can mix anew from given fundamentals: that would be Coleridge’s primary imagination: a radiant blending. Or, we can contrive stories about previously unknown primaries which are so much at the lurid limit of probability that imagining them seems slightly or greatly inappropriate: these would be works of fancy, in Coleridge’s terms. Imagination would be a variation or blending within the given parameters of the neurologically credible, which we experience as objective, or, at least, persuasive, insofar as they are drawn from a place nearer to the centre of what we, having once experienced, are primed to know anew. Fancy seen through this prism would be the speculative invention of a ‘new’ primary colour, the promotion of it as though it were possible; and this might subsequently shift nearer imagination’s centre, given the brain’s plasticity, once it has been lifted,

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Both seeing, and the beating of a heart, indicate— demonstrate, we might say—the systemic preorganisation of a somatic function operating within a restricted parameter, or spectrum. In the case of the heartbeat, there seem to be two broad possibilities. Either such a governing matrix exists, not visible except as it ‘outcrops’ in brain and nerve centres which are distinct and removed from each other; or we are dependent, seventy times a minute through life, on a random interaction. Taking a line from aesthetic responses to their neurological grounding involves considering three specialised groups of cells, sometimes known as mirror neurons, located in the inferior frontal cortex, superior frontal cortex, and the ventral pre-motor cortex, and their interaction with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the right side of the amygdala, especially. While details of the engagement between aesthetic responses and these cell groups remain in dispute, the weight of evidence is that they are crucial in allowing human beings to exercise empathy and judge well. If they fail through disease or injury or genetic malformation, empathy is compromised. Disagreement about the mirror neuronventromedial cortex involvement in aesthetic

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14

Trends in Cognitive Science Vol 11 No. 10 October

2007, p. 411 ‘Mirror and canonical neurons are crucial elements in esthetic response’. And: ‘Mirror and canonical neurons are not constitutive of aesthetic response’, Roberto Casati and Alessandro Pignocchi. 15

Friederike Range, and L. Huber and Z. S . Viranyi,

‘Selective imitation in domestic dogs’ in Current Biology 17, May 15, 2007..This group nonetheless comes down on the side of an “associative sequence learning theory” which suggests that the ‘mirror neuron system’ and the capacity to imitate are forged through sensory motor learning rather than being inborn.

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judgement helps focus on a literary perspective. In a recent debate, for instance, Vittorio Gallese and David Freedberg’s claim that “the activation of mirror or canonical neurons often have a crucial (though not perhaps a sufficient) role to play in aesthetic responses” is met by the Roberto Casati and Allessandro Pignocchi’s objection that such findings rest on a selection—Michelangelo, Goya, Caravaggio, Jackson Pollock—whose reception can be explained by cultural conditioning, without recourse to theories based on neurological encoding.14 This objection overlooks refinements of response which are readily found in the culturally ‘unschooled’, ranging on the ‘rejection’ part of the spectrum from repulsion to indifference. That Gallese and Freedberg restrict their study to visual art also rather strengthens than qualifies the case for mirror neuron mediation from the literature point of view, given the strong crosscultural acknowledgement of the fundamental connection between the judgement of excellence in literature and story-telling which excites empathy.15 A related criticism, that too close an association of aesthetic responses with empathy overlooks the pleasure we take in modes such as the grotesque and the macabre, has some purchase, and I will return to this point in

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considering some comments of Jean-François Lyotard on the melancholy sublime. Nothing in the Casati-Pignocchi approach disturbs the case for a fixed spectrum of aesthetic responses which we feel, not altogether mistakenly, to be ‘objective’. It is objective as perception of the colour blue, or an experience of desire, is objective. It is not objective—Kant (and all who have followed him) is surely unchallengeable on this point—insofar as a felt conviction of the objectivity of a phenomenon does not by that fact put that object in the world just as we have perceived it. The absoluteness of the divorce between noumenon and phenomena which becomes a topic of discussion in post hoc critical consideration of experience matters less, a century after Nietzsche and a decade after Derrida, than it did in the years immediately following Kant’s introduction of the news to western philosophy, the idea having been taken up, largely due to the work of such men, into a general realignment of the terms of engagement of consciousness with its subjects. Whether inscribed by nature or by nurture or by a shifting balance of both, the normative nature of the empathetic response in its ethical connection is widely codified in other areas of

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16

Oxford Journals, Life Sciences & Medicine Vol 10,

Issue 3 Cerebral Cortex. Special Issue: The Mysterious Orbitofrontal Cortex. ‘Decision Making and the Orbitofrontal Cortex’, Antoine Bechara, Hanna Damasio and Antonio Damasio, pp 295-310.

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human interaction. Systems of jurisprudence are so universal and similarly restricted as to suggest an inscribed regimen of right seeing which parallels the affective-aesthetic spectrum, or they can be based on little more than an ongoing cultural impregnation. One who takes this view would need to find an explanation for the universal, cross-cultural acceptance of such law, within such restricted parameters. The foundational propositions, the predispositions, of such spectrums are distinctly end-stopped, astonishingly so, given the range of excluded possibilities. Eating people is generally reckoned to be wrong and phoning 999 when someone is drowning, right and proper, at the opposite end of the spectrum.

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the subject-object ‘divide’ It is the ventromedial prefrontal sector in the orbitofrontal cortex that “provide(s) the substrate for learning an association between certain classes of complex situation on the one hand, and the type of bio-regulatory state (including emotional state) usually associated with that

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17

Oxford Journals, Life Sciences & Medecine Vol 10,

Issue 3 “[…] decision making is a process that is influenced by marker signals that arise in bioregulatory processes, including those that express themselves in emotions and feelings. This influence can occur at multiple levels of operation, some of which occur consciously and some of which occur unconsciously”. Also: ”Neuroscience can now see the substrate of moral decisions, and there’s nothing rational about it. ‘Moral judgement is like aesthetic judgement,’ writes Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. ‘When you see a painting, you usually know instantly and automatically whether you like it. If someone asks you to explain your judgement, you confabulate’.” Lehrer, Jonah, The Decisive Moment: How the Brain Makes Up Its Mind. (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2009), 166. There is a useful list of current research at the University of Chicago research website: http://home.uchicago.edu/~decety/journal.html

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class of situation in past individual experience.”16 Significantly, “decision making does not arise from the orbito-frontal cortex alone, but […] from large scale systems.17 Localisation, together with this distribution across brain regions, indicates an underlying connection between the mirror neurons and other brain regions (the mirror neuron system), much as otherwise unspecifiable coordination of the ‘outcrops’ of the cell groups which engineer the heart beat, or legal systems, indicate matrixes of which they are part. In affective-aesthetic terms, the consensual spectrum would constitute a link between these groups of cells and be shown by their measurable behaviour, much as the matrix from which the impulse to the sinoatrial node arises stands as index of an individual’s general state of health. As we cannot see health as a whole except through its declared instances (a good colour to the cheeks of the face, an ability to run the marathon without breathing hard) for which we posit an underlying network which becomes its (‘good health’s’) deduced base line, so the existence of a matrix linking the mirror neurons, limbic system, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex can be supposed on the basis of their cooperative endeavour

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18

Elizabeth Zabriskie Wheeler finds that “in high level

tasks blending affect and decision-making (people with lesions to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex) are often highly impaired.” Examining Theories of Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Function. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, http://d-scholarship.pitt. edu/1104. As far as the spread of aesthetic affective responses across brain regions is concerned, Cinzia Di Dio, Emiliano Macaluso and Giacomo Rizzolatti in experiments done on the response to original (classical) and modified sculptures find that “the observation of original sculptures, relative to the modified ones, produced activation of the right insula as well as of some lateral and medial cortical areas (lateral occipital gyrus, precuneus and prefrontal areas).” Also, that “most interestingly, when volunteers were required to give an overt aesthetic judgement, the images judged as beautiful selectively activated the right amygdala.” The Golden Beauty: Brain Responses to Classical and Renaissance Sculptures in PSICOART n. 1—2010 Their conclusion, that “in observers naïve to art criticism, the sense of beauty is mediated by two non-mutally exclusive processes: one based on a joint activation of sets of cortical neurons, triggered by parameters intrinsic to the stimuli and the insula (objective beauty); the other based on the activation of the amygdala, driven by one’s own emotional

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in processing affective, as they do emotional, responses.18 This presents us with a neurological structure part of whose function is to retrieve ‘dispositional’ responses (“the term ‘dispositional is synonymous with implicit and non-topographically organized”),19 and with it, a means of situating affective responses (principally) in a neurological register rather than a continual cultural overwriting of previous dispositions. Though ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ do not merge in this perspective, they do devolve by visceral agreement upon single phenomena.20 The distinction between them reduces to a difference of naming about aspects of the same experience: an ‘out-there’ feeling towards the thing which we call ‘objective’, and an ‘in-here’ sense of it by which we are persuaded that our perception of that object is correct. The construal spectrum in this view would stand as deep structure matrix to the aesthetic experience we have, and to our objectifying of that experience. ‘Canonicity’ would be what we deem to be central to the invisible spectrum from our current location, one of whose peculiarities is to imagine itself beyond topography. Universality

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experiences (subjective beauty),” can be retrieved for the current proposal by pointing to the initial division into groups of subjects who were instructed to respond to the images presented to them with three different mind-sets: as though they were in a museum, or responding ‘aesthetically’ or (in due) ‘proportion’. Such an overt pre-ordering of responses is bound from my point of view to reinforce a pre-existing inclination. 19

Oxford Journals, Life Sciences & Medicine Vol

10, Issue 3, Damasio et al. “Structures in (sic) ventromedial prefrontal cortex provide the substrate for learning an association between certain classes of complex situation, on the on the hand, and the type of biorgulatory state (including emotional state) usually associated with that class of situation in past individual experience. The linkages are ‘dispositional’ in the sense that they do not hold the representation of the facts or of the emotion previously paired with it in an individual’s contingent experience, but hold rather the potential to reactivate an emotion by acting on the appropriate cortical or subcortical structures.” A. R. Damasio. (1989) ‘The brain binds entities and events by multiregional activation from convergence zones’. Neural Computat 1:123–132; A. R. Damasio. (1989) Time-locked multiregional retroactivation: a systemslevel proposal for the neural substrates of recall and

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in this perspective is real, but temporary. Dogma is revealed to be the provisional imposition it always was. As far as the literary consequences are concerned, previous encounters with the film or novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame would be seen as dispositions, seemingly freely decided but to some extent neurologically pre-primed, crucial in shaping a reader’s later responses to Frankenstein, novel or film. From the other end of the spectrum, an unresponsiveness to James Joyce’s Ulysses, especially if characterised by a blankness of the never-seen-the-like-before sort, is explicable by the want of a pre-existing disposition by means of which a reading of the book might have been comfortably organised, a flat spot in the construal spectrum analogous to the gaps in a glaucoma sufferer’s visual field. Disinterested decision-making would be seen as the expression of a false sense of objectivity, much as the glaucoma patient supposes his visual field to be normal (up to a certain point of degradation) until his physician tells him there is something he is missing. Similarly, a predisposition to judge, or the lack of a means to do so, being invisibly inscribed, comes to feel objective. As indeed it is, since there

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recognition. Cognition 33:25–62 20

“This link between perception and the motor

cortex, changes how we understand the aesthetic of anatomical realism. Presently, realism is understood in terms of artists’ capturing visual likeness – and thus surface similarity. (This) research opens up the possibility that realism might also result from artists’ capturing the motor look (through accurately representing its muscle tautness and pose) of a body in action (or state of rest). Thus while Archaic Greek and other artists might have sought to stimulate the look of a body as recognised by the viewer’s visual cortex, Classical Greek artists went further and sought to stimulate the viewer’s motor cortex and so give them a sensation of a living body.” ‘Motor perception and anatomical realism in Greek art’.

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is no quarrelling with what is felt to be the case, especially not when the feeling is not open to inspection.

Reading Stages If aesthetic judgements are infillings of neurological matrixes from the invitations each text presents, initial reading will be seen, not as a resolution top down of the often competing requirements of whatever the reader is able to command of her or his latent intent, but a coolness of the surface congealing chaos into tolerably acceptable forms. First reading is a primal matter of the unconscious coursing towards disclosure, fluid, in flux, and falling always out of those forms it assumes, unceasing in sleep and waking. The image for it is, not a desk lamp shining steady on the open pages of a book, but a decorative oil lamp, lit from within, whose matter takes on form prior to dissolving back into the undifferentiated mass from which it arose, to rise again in new forms, sliding up into and over the visible surface. Re-reading re-visits this first acceptance of the previously unknown to take it in the direction of a reasonable account, a description suitable for public conversation.

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First reading bears similarities to meditation, or to the experience of meeting a startling new truth about the universe. Re-reading is akin to drawing up a balance sheet for scrutiny by a roomful of shareholders. For instance, the range of seemingly sensible things engaged readers have found to say about James Joyce’s Ulysses, having been distributed in the academy and in part absorbed by that audience, becomes comprehensible as versions of the deep structure spectrum attractive to a subset of the acceptably in-formed. The book will prove most congenial to readers primed to choose a mix and match of interpretive possibilities from a place near the centre of the construal spectrum, its ‘sweet spot’, so to speak. Readings deemed to be unusual, ‘adventurous’ when the word is given a certain tone, marginal, or ‘far-fetched’ are akin to new shades made from the spectrum’s prime colours, up for sale but not yet the sort of thing people in general would want to use to paint their houses. Since the brain is ‘plastic’ as well as predisposed, such unaccustomed hues might come in time to be experienced nearer to the construal spectrum’s sweet spot. Their other possible destiny is to be considered forever fanciful, accounts of the imaginary of new primes impossible except in unlikely tales about them.

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21

ΠΑΙΔΕΙΑ (Paideia), Contemporary Philosophy.

‘Lyotard on the Kantian Sublime’, Antony David, 18 Anthony David. Quotation from ‘Answering the Question What Is Postmodernism’ in The Postmodern Condtion: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 81.

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Lyotard, melancholia, novatio, and not-knowing The question of the status of the critical intelligence returns with renewed force in a distinction Lyotard makes between several modes of the sublime in art—the melancholy sublime, which he characterises as a “powerlessness of the faculty of presentation [...] the nostalgia for presence felt by the human subject [...] the obscure and futile will which inhabits us in spite of everything,” and novatio, which he associates with avant-garde art, and which he conceives to be “an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain.”21 In this second, higher, sense of the sublime, the untenable quest to present the unpresentable is abandoned. A passage on Kant prepares the way for the development of Lyotard’s distinction: The reader of Kant cannot fail to wonder how the critical thinker could ever establish conditions of thought that are a priori. With what instruments can he formulate the conditions of legitimacy of judgements when he is not yet supposed to have any at his

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22

Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: ‘What is

Postmodernism?’, 32. 23

Thomas Huhn, Review of Lyotard’s Lessons on the

Analytic Sublime in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (Winter 1995), 91.

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disposal? How, in short, can he judge properly ‘before’ knowing what judging properly is, and in order to know what it might be?22 By such means, critical thought which was previously ensnared in a ‘neurosis’ of exactitudes, achieves a type of sublimity in realising its highest destiny as “an infinite inventive capacity undetermined by principles but in search of them.”23 This prospect plays well initially because it seems to outmanoeuvre sorrow. By a mere shift in thinking about it, we have taken sorrow in as part of a super-sensible sublimity, not distinct from pain, but able to draw upon it. But then it doesn’t play well, for the same reason—that it does diminish the impact of something which can be overwhelming as experienced. Unless it present in one of its attenuated variants, self-pity kept at an arm’s length, perhaps, or a comfortable relish in the passing maudlin, or the wearing of left bank black to celebrate kinship with a doleful rejection of restriction, melancholy, not even when it falls a good way short of the clinical depression of which it is often the grim precursor, cannot be depended upon to elevate itself in being considered from a different point of view. Dissolved in the sublime,

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24

Jean François Lyotard. Lessons on the Analytic

Sublime trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 122.

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as like as not after the first introduction is over, it will spread like ink in clear water, rather than make the sublime more available to exhilaration. It is unconvincing at best, and perhaps disappointing, to be told that we can be done with sorrow by means of a theory of sorrows. The question with which we began is returned, underscored by Lyotard’s approach to the sublime: what is the relation of the enquirer to this sense of stepping (somewhat) outside the process of enquiry? Is it, possibly, no more than an aspiration to exceed the critical moment, an attenuated form therefore of the afflatus of transcendence, recycled in an idea of it? If it is actual, whether neurologically grounded or inexplicably epiphenomenal, as some suppose mind itself to be, how might this relation, of the self of language to the self which listens in on its later accounts of its presentations, be described? In attaching a version of the sublime before the critical intelligence confines thought by “forms of sensibility, assembled in schemas, known by concepts, or estimated according to the good,”24 do we not come into a fashion of being in which much that is usually comprehended by the word ‘critical’ is rescinded rather than, as Lyotard supposes, celebrating thought knowing itself

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as it always truly was prior to opposition by its sensible objects? This, at some possibly limbic level, is surely a prospect offensive to the agency of thought in its pomp. It wears, to the present listener-in, the contrived urgency of belief, inclined to confuse bliss with release from doubt. How does Lyotard’s ‘supersensibility’ differ from The Cloud of Unknowing? Critical endeavour consigning itself to retirement might, as Lyotard claims, be precursor to celebration beyond mere analysis, but if it were, by what language, whether or not floating above its points of containment, might we bring back news of this development to those speaking the old language, and thinking in its terms? The impress of imagination unreconciled to constraint would surely tend—if no more—to compromise whatever account we might provide of that ‘out there’ as we struggle to make of it something we can recognise. The unconscious is unlikely to be appeased at the prospect of supersession by some ‘higher’ condition, nor is it obvious that critical intelligence is generally enhanced by absorption into a more diffuse cognitive state. As indication that going with the avant-garde might not always be an unmitigated good, we might consider some recent developments in the

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heady mix of freedom and free expression which drives the urge to make it new, in particular the violence done to form and intellect as they attempt to conspire to find a representation of the moment which will be adequate to both. We might consider the increase in schism, sturm and splatter along the line of experimentation in the last half century between the cool geometries of Rothko and Bridget Riley and Mondrian with their re-phrasings of classical harmony, to the graffito-grounded aerosol chaos we currently have on the blanks of public spaces, whose message, underlying and upfront, seems to be, because we like the feel of untrammelled selfexpression, it follows that no public space may remain unspoiled, as no late night convenience store may consider itself off limits to the plunder of big spenders who find themselves short of cash. Lyotard’s theory, of the sublime as of his later theory of perception-reception, though useful in its undermining of some reprehensible versions of the easy transcendentalism of early twentieth century post-Romanticism, is mistaken in proposing that the critical intelligence achieves apogee by legislating certain of its achievements out of business. Too much of the contemporary points in another direction.

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Mark Brantner

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I Hear Dead People: Reading as Responding to Written Voices When I read a text, I hear voices. For example, when I read Plato, I hear a voice that always teases me, always tests me, always makes me guess whether he’s serious, whether he means it. His voice has the sense of a wink in it. It says, “Get it? Get the joke?” Plato says one thing, but his voice suggests that he’s saying more. And it is my desire to get at this “more” that keeps me returning to him. When I read Plato there always seems to be a difference between the meaning captured by his words and another meaning that lies beyond the page, that seems to lie in Plato himself. It is this other meaning, this excess over the meaning of the words, that I ascribe to Plato’s point of view. In short, I hear more in Plato’s voice than what his words mean; I hear what Plato means. This

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admission suggests that I’m willing to be duped by Wimsatt and Beardsley’s famous intentional fallacy.1 At this point in my career, I should know better than to say that I hear Plato’s point of view. To demonstrate that I’m a good postmodernist, I’d be better off simply saying that I hear the “text’s” point of view, that I hear the text’s voice. The truth is that I don’t only hear Plato’s voice. When I read someone like Slavoj Žižek, I hear a very different voice. I hear a voice that—like Plato—seems more interested in provoking me than in communicating. But having seen him in person and on video delivering his frenetic lectures, I hear his lisp, his stammering, his punch lines as I read the text. Surely, this voice that I hear, then, is Žižek’s, and my hearing Žižek’s voice as I read his writing comes from the fact that I would recognize his voice on the street, on the phone, in passing. His voice is distinct. And when I read Žižek, I hear it. And I still think of it as his point of view. So maybe it’s not quite so strange in this case that I hear a voice. And maybe it’s possible to hear a voice and not fall victim to intentional fallacies.

1

William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley. “Intention-

al Fallacy.“ Sewanee Review, vol. 54 (1946): 468-488.

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I’m not very unique in that I hear people’s voices when I read; in fact, I think that it is not only quite common but necessary. Without this voice, the “text,” whether it’s Plato’s or Žižek’s, would not have a point of view. I would not be able to understand what the text says, what the poem or novel means, what the philosopher argues, what the journalist reports. This book, the one you are reading right now, is thinking reading as a mode of response rather than an act of interpretation. In sharing this common ground, I argue that what we respond to in a text is not the text alone but the voice that we hear in the text. Without supposing a voice, a text remains a series of dead letters, devoid of meaning. It is only through positing a voice, with its point of view, that a text comes to mean anything at all. When we read, we are engaging a voice that we hear. But when we read, whose voice is this? Is it the voice of the writer? Do those voices I hear belong to Plato and to Žižek, making me believe the intentional fallacy? Or is it my voice, a voice within me that I place on the text? Is it my subjective position caught in the text? If so, then why do I “hear” Žižek’s lisps? Is it the text’s voice? Can the written word somehow contain a voice? Or, at least, can we compare the voice of a piece of writing to the spoken voice? All of these questions are variations on the same question: What is the material

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ground for the voice? This essay is a preliminary attempt to point toward some possible answers to this question. First, it problematizes the relation between an empirical voice and the voice that we hear in writing. Discussions of the written voice have relied on a metaphor that ties the written voice to the spoken voice through an over-reliance on the body. Through Lacanian psychoanalysis, I will demonstrate a conceptualization of an aphonic voice that is appended to yet irreducible to the body that produces it. Second, by responding to a poem by Pulitzer-Prize winning poet W. S. Merwin, I will demonstrate a tentative mode of reading that responds to this aphonic written voice.

Voices and Bodies Peter Elbow, the most steadfast champion of the voice in writing, admits that, when he speaks about the voices that he hears in his students’ writing, he writes in a metaphor that ties the written voice to the spoken voice. He explains, “[T]he voice metaphor highlights how discourse issues from individual persons and from

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physical bodies.”2 As such, the spoken voice has a materiality, which ties it to the body that produces it and to the situation in which it is spoken. The voice’s tie to the body as its cite of production is, arguably, the most common idea of the relation between the spoken voice and the body. When all else is stripped away, a body produces a voice. The argument for this relation does not originate with Roland Barthes; this argument goes back, at least, to Aristotle’s De Anima. Nevertheless, Barthes’ claim that, in the voice, one hears the “grain” of the body serves as an oft-cited touchstone for this position.3 Elbow gains a material tie from this metaphor, and this material tie allows him to account for differences among writers’ texts. He writes, “Just as the spoken voice is connected to the body that produces it, the voice metaphor calls attention to the difference from one person to another.”4 Elbow uses the voice to name the difference among writer’s texts. Voices shout differences 2

Landmark Essays on Voice and Writing, edited by Peter

Elbow (Mahwah: Hermagoras, 1994) 3

Roland Barthes. Image Music Text. translated by Stephen

Heath. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 179-190. 4

Landmark Essays on Voice and Writing, edited by Peter

Elbow (Mahwah: Hermagoras, 1994)

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between writers. Therefore, it should be no surprise that when writing teachers try to help students develop their “written voices” they ask them to revise their writing to sound more like they would sound if they were to speak the essay rather than write it. “Read it aloud,” teachers often advise students, “and revise your paper so that it sounds more natural.” Elbow’s admission, far from being idiosyncratic, makes a standard assumption about the voices that we hear in the texts that we read: Spoken discourse comes prior to written discourse and written discourse imitates spoken discourse. There are, however, two central problems with this metaphor. First, we commonly don’t think of a text as a body—and certainly not one that produces a voice. Second, a voice is not, as Elbow asserts, simply connected to the body that produces it; rather, at the end of the day, a voice is never fully reducible to the body that produces it. In short, there is something in the voice that cannot be accounted for by the body that produces it—a voice is in excess over that which sounds it. Mladen Dolar points out this tricky and paradoxical relation between the physical body and the spoken voice: “[N]ot only does [the voice] detach itself from the body and leave it behind, it does not fit the body either, it cannot

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be situated in it [...] It is a bodily missile which has detached itself from its source, emancipated itself, yet remains corporeal. [...] The voice stems from the body but is not its part.”5 If we take this position seriously, then it challenges the standard metaphor that links written and spoken voices, and more importantly, the assumption that spoken discourse simply precedes written discourse. As I am arguing here, the voices that we hear when we read are tied to the text but cannot be fully reduced to them. At the same time, we may still be able to maintain the voice as the name of difference—or more to the point, the voice resounds within difference. Before getting to that point, let’s look at some examples of “bodily missiles” in Dolar’s sense. In a truly uncanny scene of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts and Laura Harring go to a theater where they watch a beautiful woman sing an aria.6 Halfway through the song, however, the singer collapses on stage, yet her voice, the song, continues on reverberating throughout the concert hall holding 5

Mladen Dolar. A Voice and Nothing More. (Cambridge:

MIT Press, 2006), 72-73 6

Mulholland Drive. Directed by David Lynch. Universal

Pictures, 2001.

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the two women spellbound. But it shakes the film viewer. That the viewer should be shaken is strange given that this has already been set up. Just before the woman came on stage, the film indicates that she will not be the singer by showing an audiotape being cued up for the song. In other words, the film viewer knew all along that, in the dreamy world of that theater, she was always lip synching, Milli-Vanilli style, yet the beauty of the voice and the singer makes the viewer forget that her singing is a sham. This forgetting is compounded by the double world that is reflected in the watching experience. First, a dark theater is depicted on screen, a live theater where people are on a stage engaging an audience, which differs from the movie theater in which the moviegoer sees the film on a screen and the actors are images that cannot interact with the audience. In other words, in the film’s world, there is a living connection between the audience and the person on stage. They are together in the same room. But this togetherness between the living audience and the living performer is a sham because the performance is recorded, taped decidedly not live. And the same thing is happening in a parallel way between the audience and Lynch’s film. The audience of the film gets moved closer to an illusion of being in a live theater, the film depicting the proscenium stage and highlighting

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the singer. In this way, the moviegoer is brought closer to the singer on that stage, caught up by her beauty and the beauty of “her” voice. In watching this scene, the moviegoer forgets that she is being duped and is moved by the song emanating from the singer. It is only in the collapse, when the song carries on without the singer, without the material support that sustains it, it is only when the voice freed from the body reverberates through the hall and the movie theater that the moviegoer is reminded of what she knew all along—this voice isn’t tied to this body. But this uncanny remembrance is something known even before this scene gets played out, precisely because this is the way that film is made. In movies, the voice is always recorded and separated from the material body that seems to be supporting it. This is the uncanny underside of film that has been around since the advent of talkies. One could think of the way this has been parodied and pointed to by films themselves. In Singing in the Rain, for instance, the female lead of the new talking film has a gratingly highpitched voice and cannot sing.7 The producers and director, fearing a loss of revenue, cast her in 7

Singing in the Rain. Directed by Stanley Donen and Gene

Kelly. Metro-Goldwyn Mayer (MGM), 1954.

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the film for her beauty and hire another woman to provide the voice for her. To a similar end, avant garde filmmakers developed the photographed moving image onto the sound strip on the side of the film so that one would hear the image, so that the sound would be directly tied to the visual image that can never appear on the screen. A more recent phenomenon demonstrates the repeated troubling relation between the body and the voice. Recall Susan Boyle, who became a phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic when her rendition of the Les Miserables song “The Dream” surprised the judges on the game/variety show Britain’s Got Talent.8 When her segment on the show’s talent search portion was broadcast, the show was edited in such a way as to make sure that her powerful singing equally surprised the at-home audience. From the very first image of Boyle, the show played up the fact that she does not look like a star. Her introduction shows Boyle sitting in the background of two young and attractive women, while she shoves what appears to be a very large sandwich or piece of cake into her mouth. This is, of course, accompanied by a 8

Original Version. Susan Boyle—I Dreamed a Dream [Vi-

deo] Retrieved October 8, 2011, from http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=wnmbJzH93NU

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frumpy melody that accentuates the impression that the audience should not take her seriously. The show amps it up in the following interview segment when Boyle introduces herself as fortyseven and currently unemployed. She says, “At the moment, I live alone with my cat Pebbles. But I’ve never been married, never been kissed. [She makes a face, drawing her chin back into her neck and wincing her eyes.] Shame!” [She says giggling. Then she pulls up her hand and leans forward as though she’s confiding in the camera,] “But it’s not how I feel!” The show has clearly edited this portion of her interview in order to give the impression that she is an old maid, not to be taken seriously. It is also meant to highlight her body. It highlights her eating, the shoving of oversized portions of food into her mouth, the place from which her song will originate. It highlights her age and employment. Most of all, it highlights her lack of beauty, by playing up that she’s never been married or even kissed. Further, at the first move, it engenders audience sympathy for an old maid. But on a second move, this sympathy is compounded by the very fact that she doesn’t feel that she has missed out on anything. When she says “Shame,” she’s referring to what she knows others feel. But she points out, in false confidence, that she feels no shame. She doesn’t feel that she’s missed out. This compounds

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the sympathy the at-home audience has and further pushes them to not take her seriously, for she doesn’t even know what she’s missed out on. Boyle’s introduction focuses on her body and the expectation that such a body cannot be taken seriously as a singer, given the current situation in which Beyonce Knowles, Shakira, and Britney Spears gain stardom and acclaim. Boyle concludes her interview by saying that she has wanted to perform in front of an audience since she was twelve. And she concludes her interview emphatically: “I’m going to make that audience rock.” But by now, the audience is taking this as silly, not as a woman confident in the power of her own voice. How could this frumpy, old maid wow the audience, let alone the difficult judges, like Simon Cowell, the acerbic Brit who became popular in the U.S. on American Idol for his cruel yet funny comments about people’s voices and appearances? The show clearly sets up her audition to be a back and forth between Cowell and Boyle. The audience is expecting great entertainment. It’s expecting a frumpy woman to sing horribly and later be humiliated by Cowell. Cowell asks her about herself and reacts with disbelief when she tells him her age and that she wants to be a famous singer like Elaine Paige. This exchange is exacerbated by a series of off-camera

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voices—whistles and catcalls from the audience. Finally, when she says she’s going to sing “I Dreamed a Dream,” a very difficult song with a wide range from Les Miserable, the judges laugh in incredulity. Finally, the at-home audience, the judges, and the studio audience are prepared for a great and entertaining disaster. And she sings. Her powerful voice rises throughout the auditorium, and the camera cuts to each judge and then to the audience to highlight the shocked looks on their faces. It cuts to the audience to show both their surprised looks and their cheers. At this moment, the joke has been played. We’ve been had, Simon has been had, and the studio audience has been had. And their cheers show they’ve been won over. Their cheers apologize for their own expectations that she would fail. Their cheers demonstrate the audience’s shame at judging her by a set of expectations. Finally, the camera cuts to the backstage commentators, who look and point into the camera and speak directly to the viewers: “You didn’t expect that, did you? Did you? No!” The audience has apologized to her for us. It has told her that it and we are now on her side. We are pulling for Susan Boyle.

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After singing, the judges weigh in. Piers Morgan tells her, “Without a doubt that was the biggest surprise I have had in three years of the show. When you stood there with that cheeky grin and said I-I want to be like Elaine Paige, everyone was laughing at you. No one is laughing now. That was stunning, an incredible performance.” The second judge, Amanda Holden, a beautiful blond stage actress, scolds the audience before praising her: “I am so thrilled because I know that everybody was against you [She looks back at the audience, and a single bodiless, nervous laugh is heard from a woman] I honestly think that we were all being very cynical and I think that was the biggest wakeup call ever. [The camera cuts to Simon, who looks stunned.] And I just want to say that it was a complete privilege listening to that.” The juxtaposition of Amanda Holden and Susan Boyle should not go uncommented on. Holden, a Broadway actress in her own right, has the appearance and the look that one would expect for Boyle’s voice. Simon Cowell gave the most honest reaction to her song: “Susan I knew the minute you walked out [Incredulous laughter erupts from the audience and other judges] on that stage that we were going to hear something extraordinary. And I was right.” All the while, the music to “I

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Dreamed a Dream” plays in the background to punch up the melodramatic underdog story that’s being told. Simon and the audience did expect something extraordinary. Every aspect of the show had been set up such that we did not only expect something extraordinary, we expected to hear something extraordinarily terrible. No voice that strong or beautiful could come from such a pathetic person. The phenomenon and example of Susan Boyle does more than simply illustrate the ways that a television show is able to manipulate its audience through standard melodramatic storylines and (by now) overdone juxtapositions of the embarrassingly untalented against acerbic judges. It points to a central problem of the voice—that problem that has been with us, at least, since Aristotle and Quintilian. That is, the voice never quite fits its body. The show was easily able to manipulate the audience precisely because the audience assumes that the voice should correspond to the body, but time and time again, the voice escapes its material confines. Slavoj Žižek goes further claiming that “an unbridgeable gap separates forever a human body from ‘its’ voice. The voice displays a spectral autonomy, it never quite belongs to the body we see, so that even when we see a living person talking, there is

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always a minimum of ventriloquism at work; it is as if the speakers’ own voice hollows him out and in a sense speaks ‘by itself,’ through him.”9 While Boyle presents an extreme case of this situation, Žižek points out that this is a daily experience of the voice. Mulholland Drive, Singing in the Rain, and Susan Boyle share an uncanny aspect of the voice: in each case, a voice doesn’t quite fit, cannot fully be situated within, the body that produces it. As such, what is that material ground and support of the voice? In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the gap between the body and the voice is representative of a gap within the voice itself. For Lacan, the voice is not the voice that we hear. Instead, the Lacanian voice is attached to these audible voices, but remains distinct from them. Dolar explains: Inside the heard voices is an unheard voice, an aphonic voice, as it were. For what Lacan called [the voice]— to put it simply—does not coincide with any existing thing, although it is always evoked only by bits of materiality, attached to them as an invisible, inaudible appendage, yet 9

Slavoj Žižek. On Belief. (New York: Routledge, 2001), 58

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not amalgamated with them: it is both evoked and covered, enveloped by them, for “in itself ” it is just a void. So sonority both evokes and conceals the voice; the voice is not somewhere else, but it does not coincide with voices that are heard.10 It is not simply that the voices that we hear— singers in Mulholland Drive and Singing in the Rain and Boyle’s for instance—do not coincide with the bodies producing them. Lacan’s point is the material voices that we hear both evoke and conceal another voice, an aphonic, which always says more or less than we intend it to say. That the materiality both “evokes and conceals the voice” is what we need to understand about what happens when we hear a voice within a piece of writing. Lacan will go further than most in suggesting that not only does the material voice sounded by humans not coincide with the voice, but that the material voice is not the only material ground for the voice. In other words, the aphonic voice can be attached to other material forms, not simply the tone, rhythm, or pitch of a phonic voice. Other materials can have an “invisible, 10

Dolar. A Voice and Nothing More, 74-75

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inaudible appendage” that we hear, that speaks to us, that makes demands on us—including our own inner voices. If we follow this out, it becomes pointless to reduce the voice that we hear when we read to the material markings on a page. For my point is that the material markings on a page do not simply contain a voice that I hear, but that the material marks on the page both evoke and conceal a voice that I hear as I read. The materiality of the voice on the page was a central problem that eventually silenced it as a critical term. Without the ability to see the voice that we hear—without the ability to reduce the aphonic voice that we hear to phonic representations on a page—the voice remained, for most scholars, a purely subjective aspect of writing. This was a very serious problem for a discipline that was attempting to gain academic standing and importance. Because of this problem, the term came under attack. One of the most zealous and damning critiques came from I. Hashimoto who likened its critical uses to evangelical rhetoric. He condemns the belief in voice: “Indeed, to believe in ‘voice,’ we have to believe that texts contain voices that somehow get activated by eye-contact, or contain something like pixie dust that creates voices in our heads or

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bodies when we read.”11 Other scholars attempted to respond to this devastating critique. Accepting that if readers cannot see it on the page, then they cannot hear it in their heads. For example, Arthur Palacas uses linguistic theory to claim that voice is represented by parentheticals on a page.12 In short, he argues that writers work their voices into their writing by making asides that signal their intentions and stances toward their subjects. Similarly, the anxiety that is produced by an aphonic voice attached to a material page sent Toby Fulwiler seeking the stylistic quirks that he uses in his writing and that signals his more public and more private voices.13 Readers seem to hear a different him than he himself hears. As a result, he begins a search for this voice on the page that eventually produced an essay in which he links his voice to textual devices and his use 11

I. Hashimoto. “Voice as Juice: Some Reservations about

Evangelic Composition.” Landmark Essays on Voice and Writing. edited by Peter Elbow. (Mahwah: Hermagoras, 1994), 80. 12

Arthur Palacas. “Parentheticals and Pesonal Voice.” Land-

mark Essays on Voice and Writing. edited by Peter Elbow. (Mahwah: Hermagoras, 1994), 121-138. 13

Toby Fulwiler. “Looking and Listening for my Voice.”

Landmark Essays on Voice and Writing. edited by Peter Elbow (Mahwah: Hermagoras, 1994), 157-164.

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of stylistic language. Yet, these arguments for the textual/bodily/material basis for the voices that we hear in writing failed—precisely because they were seeking a phonic voice that is attached and reducible to its material grounds. Unfortunately, the term “voice” was silenced because scholars gave in too easily to the demand for the empirical link.

Goodbye How then do we discuss the aphonic voice that we are arguing for here? How do we account for an aphonic voice that is both evoked and concealed in its material grounds? To end, I want to push us toward a possible way of reading that illustrates how we can hear in a written text an aphonic voice, which should not be conceived of in terms of Elbow’s metaphor for the phonic voice. The Lacanian aphonic voice, which is nothing more than an excess produced by the signification process, is what remains of the encapsulation of the real in language and reminds us of that which resists signification. To demonstrate this I want to end with a reading of the appropriately named poem “Going” by Pulitzer Prize winning poet W. S. Merwin.

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Only humans believe There is a word for goodbye We have one in every language One of the first words we learn It is made out of greeting But they are going away The raised hand waiving The face the person the place The animal the day Leaving the word behind And what it was meant to say 14 In this poem, we see the way in which the voice is that which exceeds its material grounds yet produces the poem’s meaning. This poem, at once, describes this process and demonstrates it. The break between lines one and two creates at least two opposed meanings. Although the poem does not employ punctuation, it is easy to understand these lines as forming a single sentence in which the second line is a noun clause that acts as the predicate nominative for the first line. These lines would be read: “Only humans believe that there is a word for goodbye.” Read as a single sentence, it suggests that belief may be a capacity of both

14

W.S. Merwin. “Going.” The Shadow of Sirius. (Port Town-

send: Copper Canyon Press, 2008), 46

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humans and animals, but the particular belief in the ability of “goodbye” to express a feeling concerning separation is unique to humans. And by extension, only humans believe that language, in general, has the capacity of expression. This sentence, then, suggests that there is no word that is able to encapsulate the expression that is expressed in a goodbye. The feeling of separation will always exceed our capacities to express it in language. In this way, “goodbye” reminds us of the fullness of a feeling that existed prior to its entry into language. But, at the exact same moment, its use in this line is the remainder of this process. The word “goodbye” is the only thing that remains after signification. It remains as the word that expresses the feeling that has been subsumed by language. At once “goodbye” is the remainder and the reminder of the inability for the word to express itself. “Goodbye” points to an excess of feeling that preexists language and that is generated through the process of signification. The feeling that precedes the movement of language and the feeling of the excess that exists outside of the word are two different things but are, at once and paradoxically, the idea of the real emotion. And it is “goodbye” that ties these two versions of the real emotional content of the word together.

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The second reading of these two lines reinforces this position through the very opposition that it proposes. Following the poem’s lack of punctuation and the omission of “that,” we are also invited to read these two lines as separate sentences in and of themselves. In this case, belief, in general, is peculiar to humans and not to animals. Only humans believe. This belief is the reason that there is a word for goodbye. In other words, why is it that we as humans have a word for goodbye? It is only because we have the capacity for belief. Without this capacity, we would not be able to overcome the difference between the word and that which it signifies. Only through our belief are we able to ignore the difference between signifier and signified and accept that we are communicating something when we say “goodbye.” So, in the first instance, humans believe there is a word for goodbye even though there is not one; in the second instance, there is a word for goodbye precisely because humans have the capacity to believe that this lost feeling could be communicated. In both cases there is an insurmountable gap between “goodbye” and that which it signifies. But it is also the only thing which remains after signification, after the feeling has been caught up in language, and it is the only thing that points back to this feeling that is outside signification.

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The next three lines universalize the lack that is generated through signification. All people in every language encounter this same gap between the signifier and signified, but it is only the word “goodbye” that names this separation as such. It is the first word we learn in three senses. First, “bye-bye” is among first words that parents teach their children. Second, it is a word that names the loss of that we feel when language cannot communicate fully and self-presently. Third, it is the feeling that the separation of language creates in us. These emotions return as products of signification as excesses over the language that is used. Again, the emotional content that is experienced in a word’s inability to fully express itself points, at once, to an emotion prior to language use and to a feeling that is generated by the movement of language. That “goodbye” comes from a greeting highlights the paradoxical effect of our alienation in language. As a goodbye, we are reminded of that which we have been separated from in the use of language, but as a greeting, our movement into language is a beginning and the generating force of the emotional excess that we experience when we encounter the remainder of language. The concrete going away of a waving hand, a face, a place, an animal, and the day cannot disappear

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fully from the world. They leave behind them a word, the word “goodbye.” After the physical world disappears within language use, language remains in such a way that it generates both the word for this disappearance and the emotion that it was meant to carry. This difference between the word and its excessive content is highlighted by the line break. The word remains. The word was left behind. The poem could easily end here but almost as if it were an afterthought, the last line suggests that there is something extra that was left behind in addition to the word itself. That which the word “meant” to say is also left behind. The word “meant” here has two meanings. The first is the straightforward meaning of the word’s context. In this case, “meant” means “intended.” There was something that someone intended to say. The speaker had an intention that would never be fully encapsulated by “goodbye.” The speaker’s intention is left behind. The second meaning of “meant” is its literal meaning. There is a meaning that was left behind. In this case it has the idea that it was left behind in so far as it was incapable of meaning. But where is it left behind? Is it left behind in the situation in which it is said or is the meaning left behind prior to the saying itself? So we hear the word “goodbye” coming to the fore as the objects in the world disappear. Yet the meaning that was left behind is, at once, in a

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paradoxical position of existing prior to the word and never fully coming into the presence of the statement. At the same time, this meaning is also left behind in the saying of the “goodbye.” Both exist. The word and its excessive meaning that can never be eradicated and this is separate from it but cannot be reduced to it nor separated from it. This saying of the “goodbye” that generates both the excessive meaning and the word is nothing but the voice.

Julia Holzl

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“— But Sade wished to be read. — He did, his books did not.” 1

1

Maurice Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation, translation

and foreword by Susan Hanson. (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 328f.

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Prelude —. If we give credence to Maurice Blanchot,2 there are three ways of reading. First, an “active, productive way of reading, which produces text and reader and thus transports us”; the second, “a passive kind of reading which betrays the text while appearing to submit to it, by giving the illusion that the text exists objectively, fully, sovereignly: as one whole”; and, third, “there is the reading that is no longer passive, but is passivity’s reading”. In what follows, all three ways will be pursued, and a fo(u)rth shall be added—the reading of unreadability, a reading of impossibility. Impossible readings: the only reading possible, perhaps. For what is at stake here is nothing but the(re) is.

2

Maurice Blanchot. The Writing of the Disaster, trans.

Ann Smock. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995),101.

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TENEBRAE Komm auf den Händen zu uns. Wer mit der Lampe allein ist, hat nur die Hand, draus zu lesen.3 Come on your hands to us. Who is alone with the lamp has only his hand to read from. That there is an is, that there is in such is: such is the possibility of possibility to be thought here. Et lux in tenebris lucet, that there is (in and through) such light—that there is to read, that there is to read from: such are the textures we are to depart from. This first beginning, then, co-responds to the Heideggerian Grundstimmung (groundingattunement) of an initial Er-staunen (deep wonder): that there is, that there is (in) such is. In den verfahrenen Augen—lies da: In the eyes all awry—read there:4

3

Paul Celan. Stimmen/Voices.

4

Paul Celan. Les Globes.

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“There is”. That there is in such is: such is the sense to be thought here. In other words, and here we commence to approach the premise of these readings, reading must take into account the il y a of the text, always. The il y a, this “impersonal, anonymous, yet inextinguishable ‘consummation’ of being, which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself ”, we read Levinas,5 this “there is, inasmuch as it resists a personal form, is ‘being in general’”. We could, he continues, “say that the night is the very experience of the there is, if the term experience were not inapplicable to a situation which involves the total exclusion of light. When the forms of things are dissolved in the night, the darkness of the night, which is neither an object nor the quality of an object, invades like a presence. In the night, where we are riven to it, we are not dealing with anything. But this nothing is not that of pure nothingness. There is no longer this or that; there is not ‘something’ But this universal absence is in its turn a presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence. It is not the 5

Emmanuel Levinas. “There is: Existence without Existents”,

trans. Alphonso Lingis, in Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, edited by Seán Hand. (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 30 (pp. 29-36).

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107

dialectical counterpart of absence, and we do not grasp it through a thought. It is immediately there. There is no discourse. Nothing responds to us, but this silence […] There is, in general, without it mattering what there is, without our being able to fix a substantive to this term. There is is an impersonal form, like in it rains, or it is warm. Its anonymity is essential.” Otherwise than Being: These lines are to be read along, along with a certain being-with-out, beside certain seclusions, the closure of such space. She who is alone with the book has only her hands to read from. For, what is out there, the text, remains dark and obscure. For, what is out there is, first and foremost, a “circumcision, circumcision of the word, writing, and it must take place once, precisely, each time one time, the unique time”6 — what must be brought to the fore, then, what must be t/here, then, is a cutting-around; and yet we imagine an Other here, we imagine a reading of reading that were beyond such circum-scription, that were (as) an incision. Reading, thus, marks 6

Jacques Derrida. ”Shibboleth: For Paul Celan”, trans.

Joshua Wilner and Thomas Dutoit, in Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question. The Poetics of Paul Celan, edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 63 (pp. 1-64).

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an incision, marks an incidere, indicates a cuttingin, signals the incident, the befalling itself. The reader is cut by the text, each time, only one time, the only time etc. A(t) once, the never: only once, only one time, the only time ; such once is always a(s) never, and “there is no witness for the witness.”7 There is cannot be witnessed, the only witness[:] there is. To read is to be alone with the word. Reading is (to) utter solitude; she who is alone with the text has only her word to read from. “The work is solitary”, writes Blanchot,8 and “this does not mean that it remains uncommunicable, that it has no reader. But whoever reads it enters into the affirmation of the work‘s solitude, just as he who writes it belongs to the risk of this solitude.” To sacrifice one’s own solitude, one’s “being-alone” (and we are always already alone) to the work’s solitude: there is no greater sole-ness, perhaps. And just as there is no distinction between being and being-with/out—there is no being 7

Jacques Derrida. “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing”,

trans. Outi Pasanen, in Jacques Derrida Sovereignties in Question. The Poetics of Paul Celan, 83 (pp.65-96). 8

Maurice Blanchot. The Space of Literature. Translated, with

an Introduction, by Ann Smock. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 21.

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109

that were not an immediate with-drawal: of essence, of existence, of presence, that is, as “the essence of essence consists in the withdrawal of its own existence”9—cannot and should not the singular act of reading be read as the enactment of writing? Does not every reading ex-scribe, or rather, incise a meaning in, to, the text? There is, then, no difference between reading and writing, or rather, difference is all there is, for all there is is a distance, is the distancing. Such difference is “the movement of distance; that which carries, by carrying off, the becoming of interruption. Difference bears in its prefix the detour wherein all power to give meaning seeks its origin in the distance that holds it from this origin. The ‘to differ/deferring’ of difference is borne by writing, but never inscribed by it—demanding of writing on the contrary that, at the limit, it not inscribe; a becoming without inscription, that it describe a vacancy, an irregularity that no trace can stabilise (or inform): a tracing without trace that is circumscribed only by the endless erasure of what determines it.”10 9

Jean-Luc Nancy. “Elliptical Sense”, trans. Jonathan Derby-

shire, in Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, edited by Simon Sparks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 95 (pp. 91-111). 10

Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation, 170.

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That it not inscribe, that it not de-scribe or even a-scribe, but that it circum-scribes. Such is the task of writing. That is not circumscribe, but that it marks an incision: such must be the task of reading. The question here, then, is not merely a question of the possibility of possibility: the question at stake (the question of the/re is) needs to be asked from a distance. Certainly, all this in order to “cross the distant”, but also, and maybe above all, “to turn the distant back toward the distant without approach.” That it not inscribe, that it not de-scribe or even a-scribe, but that it circum-scribes. Such is the task of writing. That is not circumscribe, but that it marks an incision: such must be the task of reading. The question here, then, is not merely a question of the possibility of possibility: the question at stake (the question of the/re is) needs to be asked from a distance. Certainly, all this in order to “cross the distant”, but also, and maybe above all, “to turn the distant back toward the distant without approach.”11 The task here is thus to name this possibility a 11

Maurice Blanchot. The Step Not Beyond, translated and

with an introduction by Lycette Nelson. (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), 69.

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distance, to name this possibility as distance, to name the possibility of distancing (as) the only possibility of relation. Re-calling Jean-Luc Nancy, “[t]here can only be relation […] if we start with an absolute distancing, without which there would be no possibility of proximity, of identity or strangeness, of subjectivity or thinghood.”12 It is only through distance that reading is possible; distance might indeed be “what perfects the work—if, that is, the reader keeps it pure, and inasmuch as it is, moreover, the measure of his intimacy with the work.” 13 What is must, at the same time, be ex-scribed, must be cut out, and if we attribute a certain presence (to the text, to the reader: to the author, that is) then certainly “not to (re)present it or to signify it, but to let come to one and over one what merely presents itself at the limit where inscription itself withdraws (or ex-scribes itself, writes itself outside itself).”14

12

Jean-Luc Nancy. ”Res ipsa et ultima”, trans. Steven Miller,

in Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, edited by Simon Sparks (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2003), 315 (pp. 311-318). 13

Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 200.

14

Nancy. “Elliptical Sense”, 110.

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On Reading

To let come to one what comes, always. Seen as such, seen as deferred presenciation (and what is presence but an eternal withdrawal of its own existence), reading marks the inscription of a presence that is not, that was never; it is a matter of dis/appearance, always, an(d) appearance at the cost of disappearance, and so forth. Thus “[t]o read would mean to read in the book the absence of the book, and, as a consequence, to produce this absence precisely where there is no question of the book being either absent or present (defined by an absence or a presence).”15 And it is here, where there is neither presence nor absence, that we might want to briefly recall Roland Barthes, according to whom the now infamous “death of the author” is a prerequisite for text to take place: “Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing […] when the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’.”16 Once the text is explained, it is no longer. “No 15

Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation, 427.

16

Roland Barthes. “The Death of the Author“, in Roland

Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 147 (pp. 142-148).

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longer to think, but to come and to let come”;17 to let come to one what comes, always. It is, then, precisely the death of the reader (the writer was never alive) that allows for the text. It is at the cost of the writer (we remember Barthes famous dictum/conclusion that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”18), but also at the cost of the reader that a text can, that a text must be read—simply because it is the reader herself who creates the text: “One ought to say that the reader‘s role, or that which will become, once the work is complete, the power or the possibility of reading, is already present, in changing forms, in the genesis of the work. To the extent that to write is to snatch oneself back from the impossibility where writing becomes possible, writing assumes the characteristics of reading‘s demand, and the writer becomes the nascent intimacy of the still infinitely future reader.”19 Or, to read Barthes20 yet again, “[t]he reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies 17

Nancy. “Elliptical Sense”, 103.

18

Barthes. “The Death of the Author“, 148.

19

Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 198.

20

Barthes. “The Death of the Author“, 148.

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On Reading

not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted”. By no means excluding the essential singularity of the reader, her (ostensible) im-personality is the very condition of and for the act of reading itself. For, as Nancy states for writing, reading “essentially displaces and deports every assigned recognition, every prescribed identification.”21 “The character of the book”, Nancy continues, “consists only in its own tracing, and that tracing ends only by again taking up its own beginning […]. Its reading is interminable, interminably recommenced, reprised, and renewed, for writing seeks nothing other than its own reprise.” Writing seeks its para-phrases. There is no end of writing, as to read is to (re)write the text. As writing, reading “is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being

21

Jean-Luc Nancy. On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books

& Bookstores, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008,), 20.

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formed.”22 Bearing different temporalities, it is through this difference that writing and reading are. Writing, consisting of anticipated readings, always taking place in the not-yet, finds its presence in (its) reading. Reading, lingering on the no longer, finds its presence in and through ex-scription. In between: a there is that can be read as neither absence nor presence.

FIDEM Je suis un prostitué de la lecture Il n’y a pas d’Ithaque ni là ni au-delà de là I am a prostitute of reading There is no Ithaca neither there nor beyond there 23 The presence of the there is is, perhaps, as (an) ex-posure. No text is true to its words, and there 22

Gilles Deleuze. Essays Critical and Clinical (London and

New York: Verso, 1998), 1. 23

Michel Deguy. “Dévotion/Devotion”, in Recumbents. Po-

ems, translations, foreword, and notes by Wilson Baldridge (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 114f.

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On Reading

is no texture for the word. En passant, every word(ing) bears its abandonment. The word betrays, makes us believe, makes us believe that there is a there is. For, the act of reading is an act of t/reason, always. Etymologically to be read as “to advice” or “to explain”, reading does not seek a response, nor does it aim at an ex-change. Rather, it intrudes (always intrudes) and, re-enacting singular wordings, it in-scribes an existence that is not, that has never been; reading, again, is nothing but the imposition of meanings, of conotations external to the text—just as there is no inside inside the text. The intruding reader, reading as intruder, intruded by the text, pretends to understand, imagines possibilities of (its) existence, of presence as such: “as if the work were a preexisting object to which the reader, wholly independent of it, responds, whereas it is in fact a set of coded signals which become a poem or a novel only in a specific reading, and within which the reader too comes into being (as a singular subject partly produced in the reading of the work). Reading a work therefore makes it happen […] a reading is a performance of the singularity and otherness of the writing that constitutes the work as it comes into being for a particular reader

Fidem Frangere

in a particular context.”24 Hence reading is a(s) re-presentation. Reading does nothing but a re-presentation of the singularity and otherness of the text, just as it adds the singularity and otherness of every reader to the text. As Chris Fynsk points out, “the text is a presentation of thought; reading requires a relation to the text as presentation […] and as a presentation of thought […] It requires constant recollection of the fact that as long as we are interpreting, we are not yet reading.”25 We need to begin, we need to begin to read. Only through reading can such relation be established. To write with Avital Ronell, “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading.“ 26 And what is reading, after all? Nothing but an assignation of signs, of the sign as designator of 24

Derek Attridge. The Singularity of Literature (London and

New York, Routledge, 2004), 87. 25

Christopher Fynsk. Language and Relation: ...that there is

language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 4. 26

Avital Ronell. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizo-

phrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln and London:University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 380.

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On Reading

an assumed signation, deferred and at the same time, as Blanchot states for the text, “[a] set of phenomena that hold themselves in view; and what is writing if not bringing into view, making appear, bringing to the surface?”27 And what is reading if not precisely the concealment of such surface, which is nothing but yet another origin? Reading is (nothing but) this: “Reading is ignorant. It begins with what it reads and in this way discovers the force of a beginning. It is receiving and hearing, not the power to decipher and analyze, to go beyond by developing or to go back before by laying bare; it does not comprehend (strictly speaking), it attends. A marvelous innocence.”28 Reading betrays, reading pretends. As every attempt to understand, reading pretends that there was something given, some essence that could be read (inscribed). And yet there is no text, the text is (to be) made, by ourselves. It is us who write the text, each time, and this is why the text cannot be read as such. The text, it seems evident, must remain anOther; it cannot be accessed. “What is a book no one reads? Something that is not yet written. It would seem, then, that to 27

Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation, 165.

28

Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation, 320.

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119

read is not to write the book again, but to allow the book to be: written— this time all by itself, without the intermediary of the writer, without anyone‘s writing it. The reader does not add himself to the book, but tends primarily to relieve it of an author.”29 The impersonality of the reader creates the book, since to read “is […] not to obtain communication from the work, but to ‘make’ the work communicate itself.“30 Thus “[r]eading simply ‘makes’ the book, the work, become a work beyond the man who produced it, the experience that is expressed in it and even beyond all the artistic resources which tradition has made available. The singular property of reading demonstrates the singular sense of the verb ‘to make’ in the expression ‘it makes the work become a work’” 31 As Derek Attridge asserts, “[a]ll reading is an event as much as it is an act”32 and this is why reading could, perhaps, indeed be “an attempt to respond to the otherness, inventiveness, and 29

Blanchot. The Space of Literature, 192.

30

Blanchot. The Space of Literature, 197.

31

Blanchot. The Space of Literature, 192f.

32

Attridge. The Singularity of Literature, 81.

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On Reading

singularity of the work […] When it succeeds in apprehending otherness, in registering the singularity and inventiveness of the work, we may call a reading creative.”33 Yet, there is no other (form of) reading. Every reading that does not surrender to its own impossibility (namely, to read the text as such: again, there is no such that could be read) remains as such: impossible. Only Otherness allows for com-prehension. And such Otherness, in turn, allows for what Derrida claims for writing, namely “a nonsymmetrical division designated on the one hand the closure of the book, and on the other the opening of the text.”34 The closure of meaning allows for the opening of the text. This is why “[r]eading is not a conversation; it does not discuss, it does not question. It never asks of the book, and still less of the author: ‘What did you mean exactly? What truth, then, do you bring me?’ A genuine reading never puts the genuine book into question. But neither does it submit to

33

Attridge. The Singularity of Literature, 79.

34

Jacques Derrida. “Ellipsis”, in Jacques Derrida, Writing

and Difference. Translated, with an introduction and additional notes, by Alan Bass (London an New York: Routledge, 2002), 371 (pp. 371-378).

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121

the ‘text’.”35 Without a text an sich, no book can be read. Reading, again, remains impossible, is possible only as such: as the possibility of impossibility. “As a matter of principle,” we read Nancy, “the book is illegible, and it calls for or commands reading in that illegibility. Illegibility is not a question of what is too badly formed, crossed out, scribbled: the illegible is what remains closed in the opening of the book, what slips from page to page but remains caught, glued, stitched into the binding […] What is illegible is not for reading at all, yet only by starting from it does something then offer itself to reading. Of itself the book is untouched and sealed; it begins and ends in that sealing; it is always its own epitaph: here lies an illegible one.”36 Becoming its own epitaph, always already, the (textual surface of the) book must remain untouched. Its problem, as Nancy rightly points out, is that a “unity and uniqueness are implied in it”.37 The “sacredness of the book,” he states, 35

Blanchot. The Space of Literature, 193.

36

Nancy. On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books & Book-

stores, 27. 37

Nancy. On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books & Book-

stores, 15.

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On Reading

“consists in the fact that the book poses and imposes itself at one and the same time as a given, fully formed, integral and nonmodifiable entity, while also opening itself liberally to reading, which will never stop opening it wider and deeper, giving it a thousand senses or a thousand secrets, rewriting it, finally, in a thousand ways.”38 [« La quantité de fragments me déchire » (René Char)] What is at stake here, thus, is the possibility of the cum—, and the very possibility of possibility itself: Is it, in fact, possible to read? Is it, in fact, possible to enter relation? As is the case with possibility, the act of reading is, once more, an impossible task. Reading, read as such, cannot actually take (its) place, or it is not. Reading, therefore, remains an incomplete act, its act being (its) incompletion. What is is to be read as finite fragment: reading is a(s) fragmentary readings. The fragment is, here, to be read as incomplete. Reading assumes that there is something that could be read—something that could be read as such. For there is no cum either. 38

Nancy. On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books & Book-

stores, 18.

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And such reading, as every reading, is to break one’s word. We will not keep our word here, and never. And still we ask, is the impossibility of reading, then, possible (=and there is no sign of interrogation here)

FRANGERE. « The favorable fragment »39 Thus reading, perhaps, is possible only as (the possibility of) fragmentary reading, a(s) reading of the fragment. It is the fragmentary that “offers the ghost of a chance, not the void of pure absence but the ambiguous image of a word effacing itself.”40 Beyond absence or presence, the fragment is, il y a: The fragment is to be written singularly, the fragment is a written singularity, never to be written in the plural; the fragment happens only once. Etymologically rooted in 39

Blanchot. The Step Not Beyond, 63.

40

William S. Allen. Ellipsis. Of Poetry and the Experience of

Language after Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Blanchot (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2007), 196.

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frangere, “to break,” every fragment de-signates a/ its rupture. Some fragmentary readings of the fragment, then. “Of the fragment, little should be written”, JeanLuc Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe begin their essay “Noli Me Frangere.”41 Claiming that the fragment, being neither object nor genre, “does not form a work”, they assert that “[i]t is a mistake […] to write in fragments on the fragment.” This means, as Blanchot states for writing, that “[t]o no longer be able to write except in relation to the fragmentary is not to write in fragments, unless the fragment is itself a sign for the fragmentary.[…] Still, we cannot, thus, writing, free ourselves from a logic of totality in considering it as ideally completed, in order to maintain as ‘pure remainder’ a possibility of writing, outside of everything, useless or endless, whose study a completely different logic (that of repetition, of limits, and of the return)—still difficult to disengage—claims to guarantee us. 41Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. “Noli me Frangere”, trans. Brian Holmes, in Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 266 (pp. 266-278).

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125

What is already decided is that such a writing would never be ‘pure’, but, on the contrary, profoundly altered, with an alteration that could not be defined (arrested) in regard to a norm.”42 And yet, there is no other way to write, to write on the fragment than to write in fragments. The there is is to be read as and through the fragment/ ary: (the) there is (is) no(thing) outside the fragment, (the) there is does neither refer to (its) completion nor to a hidden totality. All there is are momentary sites. Constituting a rupture, always, the fragment is not to be reduced to its fragmentary “form.” Rather it is to be seen as both content and form, and beyond both (“But as yet”, Schlegel reminds us, “no genre exists that is fragmentary both in form and content”).43 Such is the task of fragmentary reading: reading gives form to content, and vice versa. And of the fragment we know nothing. We must not know: such is the exigency of the fragment. We cannot know: such is the pre-requisite of the 42

Blanchot. The Step Not Beyond, 42.

43

Friedrich Schlegel. “Athenaeum Fragments”, in Friedrich

Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. P. Firchow (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 27 (pp. 18-93).

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On Reading

fragment. We must, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe argue, “not believe that we could know how to fragment, that we could know ourselves in fragments, that we actually could fragment. No one fragments, unless perhaps it is that Noli me frangere that all writing utters: don’t fragment me, don’t wish to fragment me.”44 Noli me frangere, do not dissolve myself, cries the text; the text cries because it does not know. Alien to itself, the text, as the fragment, must come from an outside. The fragment is Other, always, and “[t]he fragmentary expresses itself best, perhaps, in a language that does not recognize it. Fragmentary: meaning neither the fragment, part of a whole, nor the fragmentary in itself.”45 Un-recognisable, the fragment is different, always different. This is why the fragment proves the idea of a whole an absurdity: if there was a whole, how could it be ruptured? By no means does the fragment designate a lack, on the contrary; the fragment ruptures its own existence. As Blanchot showed in his text on Nietzsche, “[f]ragmentary speech does not know 44

Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe. “Noli me Frangere”, 267.

45

Blanchot. The Step Not Beyond, 43.

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127

self-sufficiency; it does not suffice, does not speak in view of itself, does not have its content as its meaning. But neither does it combine with other fragments to form a more complete thought, a general knowledge. The fragmentary does not precede the whole, but says itself outside the whole, and after it.”46 Outside and after it, and the fragment is all there is: in order to be read, the text must remain external. All there is, then, are fragments— The world worlds as wording. Its fragmentation serves as (its) opening; it is self-contained and yet open. “A fragment”, we read Friedrich Schlegel ”has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a porcupine.”47 The fragment eludes its reading, its classification. We cannot “know” the fragment, and all we can know is the fragment. As Nancy (Ludovico) declares: “I’ll claim for writing (not for ‘myself ’, but for ‘literature’) nothing less than the risking of this willingness and the hazarding that writing may shatter, burst apart.”48 Such initial willingness 46 47 48

Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation, 152. Schlegel. “Athenaeum Fragments, 45. Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe. “Noli me Frangere”, 276.

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for (self-)destruction is the conditio sine qua non for every text. If “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin,”49 then reading is originating this destruction. It is the fragment that gives evidence of the alienation between reader and text. “Fragment speech is speech of the between-two […] The speech of fragment does not form a joinder from one to the other, it rather separates them; as long as it speaks, and in speaking remains silent, it is the moving tear of time that maintains, one infinitely distant from the other, these two figures wherein knowledge turns.”50 There is no reconciliation between reader and text. The fragment is conditioned by finitude, just as it is the condition of and for finitude. Every reading is a finite reading, a reading of and in finitude (the fragment, and the fragment alone, allow for readings of finitude). As insinuated above, the reader must not impose a meaning on the text; rather, she must dare to let the text be different. Finitude, here, is sensu Jean-Luc Nancy understood as “the non-fixing of […] signification: not, however, as the powerlessness 49

Barthes. “The Death of the Author“, 142.

50

Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation, 158.

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to fix it, but as the power to leave it open. `Finitude` thus means: unaccomplishment as the condition for the accomplishment of action (or for the accomplishment that action is).”51 Thus reading, then, must account for an ethics of dis/ appearance52 an ethics that follows Heidegger´s interpretation of the Heraclitian ethos as an “abode”, or place of dwelling; it designates an open region. And these ethe are to be seen as l/ethe, with lethe being conceived as concealment rather than as being related to truth, aletheia. What is must be concealed in order to be, to come, to become. The text must remain obscure. In the end, au-delà de là, there is, then, a step/not sensu Blanchot. Reading, the latter reminds us, “is anguish, and this is because any text, however important, or amusing, or interesting it may be […], is empty—at bottom it doesn’t exist; you have to cross an abyss, and if you do not jump, you do not comprehend.”53 A leap/ing in, to, the 51

Jean-Luc Nancy. ” Originary Ethics”, trans. Duncan Large,

in Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, 178 (pp. 172-195). 52

See Julia Hölzl. Transience. A poiesis, of dis/appearance

(New York/Dresden: Atropos Press, 2010), especially pp. 85-92. 53 Blanchot. The Writing of the Disaster, 10.

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abyss. The abyss: it is here where the opening is a-mounted. Only with,in the abyss can there be an opening towards the text: it is with, in such chasm that readings occur. And once again one has to jump in order to sense this sans: A-byssos, without bottom, sans fundament, grund-los. Only through such originary Grund-losigkeit can the text be read as such. As such, the text has neither beginning nor end, nor does it possess an origin/ al. Sub-sequently, the pas is both, is both step and no/thing, and this is why it is the pas, and the pas alone, that allows for such leap. In order to read, we have to leap; in order to leap, we have to read. Non solum: sed etiam.

Nicole Ong

133

The Trauma of Language, in reading, ethics and Beloved. Reading would be a lovely thing, if it weren’t for the words that get in the way. Perhaps reading is not very far from trauma— for trauma, like reading, is a reading of the self. For we can never pre-empt what will become a traumatic event in our lives, or know why something has traumatised one person and not the other, or even why an event that may have not been traumatic to an earlier version of the self now causes such distress. In this way, trauma reveals there is something about the self that is unique, inconstant; the self remains a secret to itself, a secret from the self. Perhaps a similar thing happens as one reads, in the sense of there being no knowing how reading will potentially change the self. In every encounter with a text, there is an unknown part of

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On Reading

ourselves that we exchange for something else. If the process of trauma is a metaphor for reading, it is a foreboding albeit prophetic one: the exchange that we make with the text, for a self that we will not know, could potentially transform us or traumatise us. It is a sacrifice of the self for an unknown one. A sacrifice, like all sacrifices, that is irrational except to the one who makes it. *** So much of humanness and language are intrinsically linked. In more than merely a metaphorical way, Toni Morrison’s Beloved explores the extent to which one’s reality is shaped through language—both the absence and presence of it—and in doing so, alludes to how we can begin to understand the effects of reading. Derrida writes in The Gift of Death that “[one] cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others.”1 To choose one is to neglect the rest. It is perhaps the irony of humanness, where even in an ethical response—an attempt at being humane—we 1 Jacques Derrida. The Gift of Death (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 68.

The Trauma of Language

cannot help but perpetuate a form of inhumanity towards another. If this is the case, the best ethics can hope to do is make the attempt to choose the option of least violence. The failure to do this is the crime that Sethe is charged with. She is constantly judged by others for choosing the ‘wrong other’ to empathise with, for choosing the least of all sensible choices. Paul D accuses her of acting like an animal, quipping “You got two feet, Sethe, not four,”2 when he discovers that she has killed her child. Paul D’s words convey his disgust with her lack of reason and responsibility as a mother. To him, a mother’s role is to ensure the protection of her child’s life at all costs. Therefore, when Sethe chooses to value or empathise with Beloved’s freedom over Beloved’s life itself, it is an incomprehensible thought. Furthermore, Sethe’s inability to explain her actions beyond saying repeatedly, “I took and put my babies where they’d be safe,”3 does little to convince Paul D of her credibility. His instincts exemplify a common impulse, as Derrida highlights: For common sense, just as for philosophical reasoning, the most widely shared belief is that 2 Toni Morrison. Beloved. (UK: Vintage, 2007), 194. 3 Morrison, Beloved, 193.

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On Reading

responsibility is tied to the public and to the nonsecret, to the possibility and even the necessity of accounting for one’s words and actions in front of others, of justifying and owning up to them.4 Since “the ethical is as such is the universal,”5 the act in question must be able to be universally recognised and this is most traditionally done so through the means of language. To be able to speak of it is proof of this universality, of one’s ethicality; it is that which inscribes the realm of the humane. Here, Sethe’s refusal (and perhaps inability) to explain the controversy of her actions seals our perception of her inhumanity. The logic that ‘if it can be spoken, it is acceptable’ prevails; and the reverse is equally at work, ‘if it cannot be spoken, it is disregarded.’ With the ethical being inextricably tied to language, it unfortunately also becomes the very thing that enables the choosing of one over the other. We easily turn a blind eye to our un-ethicality towards Sethe when we can 4 Derrida. The Gift of Death, 60. 5 Soren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling, translated by Alastair Hannay. (UK: Penguin Books, 2005), 98.

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articulate reasons to justify ourselves: her act was so inhumane, for example, that she could not possibly deserve any empathy. Words allow us this duplicity, to be to one what we are not to another. In Sethe’s case, they are the things that trap her from being a part of the “ethical task,” what Kierkegaard calls the unwrapping of “[the act in question] from this concealment [so that it can] become disclosed in the universal.”6 Beloved is the undertaking of such a task, balancing between viewing Sethe’s situation in its singularity, not “in isolation from her history, from the history of her family, and from the institution of slavery,”7 whilst attempting to establish the translation of her story into something universal. Morrison’s novel is a call to justice, one that “involves more than mimesis or the repeated representation of past traumas, so [that] judgement requires a “working through.”8 One of her first calls to justice is to give a voice and language to that which has yet been spoken about. Beloved is an experiment with the concept of black motherhood differing so greatly 6 Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling, 98. 7 Raja Halwani. “Literary Ethics.” in Journal of Aesthetic Education 32.3, 1998, 20. 8 Gregory S. Jay “Other People’s Holocausts: Trauma, Empathy, and Justice in Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror.” Contemporary Literature 48.1, 2007, 123.

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from our traditional sensibilities that it requires an entirely different way of regarding it. Morrison crafts a new language to make sense of this world, allowing one to empathise with the responsibility that characterises black motherhood. In this way, the novel reminds us that the absence of language may not necessarily render something unethical; it may simply not have been written about just yet. For, in The Gift of Death, Derrida proposes a notion of responsibility that is counterintuitive, a responsibility that requires the absence of language and that requires silence: that one must first be irresponsible in order to be absolutely responsible. He states: Such is the aporia of responsibility: one always risks not managing to accede to the concept of responsibility in the process of forming it. For responsibility demands on the one hand an accounting, a general answering for oneself with respect to the general and before the generality, hence the idea of substitution, and on the other hand, uniqueness, absolute singularity, hence nonsubstitution, nonrepetition, silence

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and secrecy.9 To illustrate the aporetic nature of responsibility, where it is both accountability and yet secrecy at the same time, Derrida uses the example of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son, Isaac. In this story, without revealing his intentions, the “secret, hidden, separate, absent, or mysterious,”10 God asks Abraham to offer his son as a sacrifice to him. As father and son prepare to climb the mountain, Isaac asks his father where they will find the sacrificial lamb. Abraham responds by saying that God himself will provide one. He keeps the secret of what God has ordered him to do, and does not speak of it to his son or the rest of his family lest they hinder the process of sacrifice. And, “because he doesn’t speak, Abraham transgresses the ethical order,” that is, “the highest expression of the ethical is in terms of what binds us to our own and to our fellows (that can be the family but also the actual community of friends or the nation). By keeping the secret, and remaining responsible to God, Abraham betrays

9 Derrida. The Gift of Death, 60. 10 Derrida. The Gift of Death, 58.

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ethics.”11 “The ethical is a temptation” that must be resisted because as soon as one speaks, “as soon as one enters the medium of language, one loses that very singularity […] speaking relieves us, Kierkegaard notes, for it “translates” into the general.”12 By justifying his actions, Abraham would “lose his ultimate responsibility along with his singularity, make him lose his unjustifiable, secret and absolute responsibility before God.”13 Hence, Abraham’s absolute responsibility, or faith as Kierkegaard calls it, towards God brings him to a place “where the single individual is higher than the universal,” “where the single individual determines his relation to the universal through his relation to the absolute,” 14 rendering him in a posture of absolute duty. It is this relation with the absolute other, this binding in his singularity with this other that immediately “propels [him] into the space or risk of absolute sacrifice,”15 because Abraham has to sacrifice all else (in this instance, Isaac) in order to respond to God. This is why Abraham becomes “thoroughly incapable

11 Derrida. The Gift of Death, 59. 12 Derrida. The Gift of Death, 60. 13 Derrida. The Gift of Death, 61. 14 Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling, 82. 15 Derrida. The Gift of Death, 68.

The Trauma of Language

of making himself understandable.”16 Derrida emphasises that, “if I put to death or grant death to what I hate it is not a sacrifice. I must sacrifice what I love”17 because: It is indeed this love for Isaac that makes his act a sacrifice by its paradoxical contrast to his love for God. But the distress and the anxiety in the paradox is that he, humanly speaking, is thoroughly incapable of making himself understandable. Only in the instant when his act is in absolute contradiction to his feelings, only then does he sacrifice Isaac, but the reality of his act is that by which he belongs to the universal, and there he is and remains a murderer.18 Though the sacrifice must be of something that one loves, the love for the Other must be greater in order to make that sacrifice. It is not difficult to see Beloved as the greatest sacrifice that Sethe has to make. To the mother, “the best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, 16 Derrida. The Gift of Death, 65. 17 Derrida. The Gift of Death, 63-64. 18 Derrida. The Gift of Death, 65.

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but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing—the part of her that was clean”19 as they represent a part of her that is irreplaceable, a part that has not yet been defiled. Denver describes Sethe as “trying to persuade Beloved […] that what she had done was right because it came from true love,”20 a love that sincerely wanted to prevent her daughter from suffering through the trauma of slavery. Sethe tells her daughter “that anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up.”21 Just like how Isaac is not the sacrifice per se, more precisely Abraham’s relationship with Isaac that Abraham must give up, Sethe sacrifices her relationship with Beloved so that she might have a whole ‘life’ in death apart from her white tormentors. In this way, Sethe makes apparent an irrevocable binary between the slaves and the slave owners. Life without defilement, freedom and humanity is impossible for them in the presence of the slave 19 Morrison. Beloved, 296. 20 Morrison. Beloved, 295. 21 Morrison. Beloved, 295.

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owners. In Beloved, schoolteacher is the epitome of personhood that Sethe does not know and cannot know, he is: The quintessential figure of white male authority, wielding the power of the word as well as the whip. While his students attempt to define Sethe in their notebooks, he tells them to “put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And don‘t forget to line them up.” Sethe‘s assertion of her humanity earns her the scars that form a choke-cherry tree on her back; when she protests the way that schoolteacher has allowed his nephews to milk her—as if she were a cow—he orders them to whip Sethe back into silence.22 Male, female; object, subject; human, animal; voice, voiceless; power, powerless; master, slave; freedom, bondage; selfish, selfless– his presence calls to life all the binaries that exist between them, dictating the posture in which she must 22 Caroline M. Woidat. “Talking Back to Schoolteacher: Morrison’s Confrontation with Hawthorne in Beloved.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 39.3-4, 1993, 528.

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exist before him. Hence, Sethe’s ability to be a mother to her children, an exertion of her self, cannot exist in relation to him. As schoolteacher tracks Sethe down to enslave her and her children back into Sweet Home, he is her absolute Other to whom she must always respond at all cost. When she “recognised schoolteacher’s hat,”23 it was all that was necessary to propel her into action, “into the space or risk of absolute sacrifice.”24 Whilst the element of love is present in Abraham’s Other,25 leading to his extraordinary faith, there is of course the unmistakable absence of love in Sethe’s absolute other. When Sethe responds to schoolteacher’s presence in Baby Sugg’s yard, it is not his face that she reacts to, but a recognition of his hat that sends her flying.26 This encompasses the nature of their impersonal relationship; to 23 Morrison. Beloved, 192. 24 Derrida. The Gift of Death, 68. 25 For God promises Abraham that He “will establish [His] covenant between [Him] and [Abraham], and [He] will multiply [Abraham] exceedingly” in Genesis 17. Abraham’s faith hinges on this promise in Genesis 17:19, that it is through Isaac that God will fulfil the covenant He has with Abraham: to make him a “father of a multitude of nations.” (Genesis 17:5). 26 Morrison. Beloved, 192.

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her, his face is irrelevant. Where the God of Abraham eventually stops him from murdering his son, Sethe’s faceless Horror makes no such intervention. It would be counterproductive therefore to talk about faith in terms of Sethe’s relationship with schoolteacher. Neither faith nor love compels her to action, yet there is an obvious force, one equal to or more powerful than faith, which keeps Sethe stuck in this absolute singularity with schoolteacher. In a relationship that is predicated only upon fear and is empty of love, Sethe’s absolute responsibility towards her other can only be terrifyingly binding, senseless and desperate. It can only be borne out of trauma. Where Abraham’s faith is based upon the certainty of God’s faithfulness, Sethe’s trauma stems from schoolteacher’s consistency in taking her best things away from her. As Dean Franco indicates, “property is the point in the novel, and it is where trauma and material possession meet. […] The experience of the black characters is decidedly the experience of property—stealing or being stolen, freeing or being freed, repossessing, and hauntingly, claiming,” and adeptly identifies the novel’s “particular lexicon of trauma.”27 27 Dean Franco.“What We Talk About When We Talk About Beloved.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52.2, 2006, 425.

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However, his surmising of trauma being part of a collective ‘experience of the black characters’ implies that a culturally and ethnically similar group will always undergo the same traumatic experience, that trauma can be mutually understood. Beloved suggests otherwise. Sethe alludes to this possible source of her trauma as she explains to Paul D the origins of the scars on her back: “After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk. That’s what they came in there for. Held me down and took it. I told Mrs. Garner on em. She had that lump and couldn’t speak but her eyes rolled out tears. Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still.” “They used cowhide on you?” “And they took my milk.” “They beat you and you was pregnant?” “And they took my milk!”28

28 Morrison. Beloved, 19-20.

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As Paul D struggles to comprehend the monstrosity of beating a pregnant woman, Sethe’s indignation lies in the fact that she was forced to release the best thing that, as a mother, she could give her children. That another slave does not immediately understand her distress highlights that trauma is not a cultural or shared experience. It is this assumption that one has the ability to grasp the source of another’s trauma that Morrison cautions us against. For one to assume that trauma is entirely knowable is a violent gesture again falling back into “the system which leaves no room for the absolute alterity of the other.”29 It is a gesture akin to the arrogant notion that anything outside of one’s comprehension is unjustifiable and unacceptable. This is the mistake that Paul D makes, that Sethe’s critics make, as they proceed to execute an impulsive judgement on her actions. Cautious against the repetition of this violence onto Sethe, Beloved offers the possibility that a traumatic experience is one that is utterly that of an individual’s. In Sethe’s case, as schoolteacher and his nephews rape her of her milk, we witness the first possible collapse of assumptive world: a 29 Dorata Glowacka. “Sacrificing the Text: The Philosopher/ Poet at Mount Moriah.” Animus (2), 1997, 38.

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world where she has ownership over her body and her children. Her initial denial of this collapse is evident through her futile attempt to seek justice. Her words, “I told Mrs. Garner on em,” is reminiscent of a child tattling on another child, and the incongruity of such a light-hearted tone with the gravity of the rape is incomprehensible. Yet, this is the extent of the uneven relationship between a black mother and a white slave owner. In a white world, no matter the outrageous things done to her, Sethe will always merely be regarded as an insignificant tattletale. All she is left with is the haunting memory of “two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching and writing it up.”30 Furthermore, written on her body now is the indelible seal of schoolteacher’s authority over her. As permanent as the chokecherry tree scars on her back are, so is his unshakeable presence in her life. Not only does he remove her best as a mother, he also takes away the dignity of her ‘humanness’ as a human being. She tells Beloved: I was about to turn around and keep on my way to where the muslin was, when 30 Morrison. Beloved, 38.

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I heard him say, “No, no. That’s not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And don’t forget to line them up.” I commenced to walk backward, didn’t even look behind me to find out where I was headed. I just kept lifting my feet and pushing back. When I bumped up against a tree my scalp was prickly. […] My head itched like the devil. Like somebody was sticking fine needles in my scalp.”31 Instead of having insight as to why Sethe is so disturbed by what she overhears, we only read of her physical symptoms that act as signifiers pointing to the dissonance within her. In a subsequent conversation with her husband, she has no ability to describe or even make sense of why and how this event has affected her. That language can only describe the exterior effects of trauma on her body and not her interior wounds reflects the way that language is limited to a superficial rendering of the magnitude of the traumatic experience. Trauma, like faith, remains outside of reason and language becomes a symbol of what cannot be spoken, as “words can never 31 Morrison. Beloved, 228.

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be sufficient in their task of representation or substitution, even though they are necessary, in some sense they always “lie”, even as they are used to tell the truth.”32 When Paul D attempts to force an explanation out of Sethe, his attempt is futile: Sethe knew that the circle she was making around the room, him, the subject, would remain one. That she could never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask. If they didn’t get it right off – she could never explain. Because the truth was simple […] Simple: she was squatting in the garden and when she saw them coming and recognised schoolteacher’s hat, she heard wings. Little hummingbirds stuck their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew.33 Here, the third-person narration intrudes on 32 William R. Handley. “The House a Ghost Built: “Nommo,” Allegory, and the Ethics of Reading in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Contemporary Literature 36.4, 1995, 688. 33 Morrison. Beloved, 192.

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her initial first-person perspective and allows the readers to see and hear things that she cannot express to Paul D. It has no choice but to do so, because Sethe cannot explain the event, not even to herself. The return of the “fine needles” sensation suggests that schoolteacher’s reappearance is a trigger for Sethe. Matsakis defines a trigger as “anything that reminds [one] of [one’s] trauma and thereby activates stressrelated emotions and/or physical symptoms.”34 Following that, “triggers can bring forth not only memories of the trauma, but the physiological states of terror and high anxiety (adrenaline) or the physiological states of shutdown and withdrawal. People who have been severely or multiply traumatised often live in an “altered state of arousal” and even decades after the event, they may exhibit […] reactions to reminders of the trauma.”35 Here, Morrison uses a metaphor of the hummingbirds in attempt to communicate the state of Sethe’s hyperarousal. The assonance of “needle beaks” creates the piercing effect that conveys the insistence of the imaginary birds’ attack, paralleling the way she is triggered into action by schoolteacher’s arrival. The beating 34 Aphrodite Matsakis. Trust After Trauma. (California: New Harbinger Publications, 1998.), 95. 35 Matsakis. Trust After Trauma, 96.

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of the hummingbirds’ wings portrays an inner turmoil that is so chaotic it cannot be merely swatted away and dismissed. Finally, the words “she just flew” are ironic, as unlike even the little hummingbirds that can fly away freely, Sethe has nowhere to go. In doing so, Morrison creates poignancy for her character, but even more importantly, the irony here emphasises the difficulty of being able to mean what one says. Sethe calls the event “simple” since narrating the event is evidently possible, but it is also the last word that can even begin to represent this event. Simply put, “at its core, the trauma remains inaccessible to knowledge.”36 This is what makes it difficult to understand—how can something be said without saying anything at all? In this way, Sethe’s trauma renders her silent to the point where it becomes a secret even to herself. It is this traumatic singularity with schoolteacher (since it is only Sethe that he has this specific effect on) that compels her to the same sacrificial end. Two things are happening simultaneously as schoolteacher’s presence triggers Sethe into a traumatic return. Her response is immediate. She reacts firstly as a slave: only as a slave does she 36 Judith Greenberg. “The Echo of Trauma and the Trauma of Echo.” American Imago 55.3, 1998, 321.

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need to feel fear in the presence of a white slave owner; only as a slave does she have a reason to respond to him at all. The need to protect, however, comes from her second response as a mother. It is after all only a slave’s recognition of her slave master’s power that leads her to realise as a mother that her children are in danger. In this instance, unlike Abraham’s absolute loyalty to his Other, Sethe is not entirely faithful to the slave/master binary opposition. Her act of ‘flying’ demonstrates her attempt to respond to the mutually exclusive categories of both slave and mother at the same time. By running, instead of submissively yielding to him, Sethe attempts to break free from this bind with him in order to be a mother to her children and to protect them from harm. Her maternal instincts are understandable, the want to protect her child from slavery and the self-preservation of wanting to keep the things most precious to her. Though her body is literally inscribed with this mark of white male dominance, Sethe ultimately defies schoolteacher‘s authority by killing her own child. She kills Beloved so that “no one, nobody on this earth, would list her daughter‘s characteristics on the animal side of the paper.”37 Reaffirming her own humanity as well as her children‘s, 37 Morrison. Beloved, 296.

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Sethe denies schoolteacher the right to “possess” her family as slaves.38 Here we can read her motherhood as an attempt to break the binary between them. But it comes at a major sacrifice. By attempting to assert herself, to have everything that he has (that is, the freedom to choose another other to respond to), to be the mother that she was never allowed to be, the gift that she can give to her daughter is one of death; a gift of death. It is a double paradox and tragedy: not only does her gift of death take away her ability to ever be Beloved’s mother again, it is also the only freedom she can ever have. She can never know any other. The binding paradox of her reality leads her to sacrifice without restraint, to the point of physical death. The strength of Sethe’s motherhood is traditionally celebrated, yet to merely consider this aspect of her sacrifice is inadequate. Though her attempt to assert herself already renders her to such a tragic sacrifice of her own motherhood, the greater sacrifice ultimately still lies in her relationship with schoolteacher. Her transgression in loving her children that ‘thickly’ in Paul D words, and existing outside the boundaries 38 Woidat. “Talking Back to Schoolteacher”, 528.

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of slavery cannot go without penance, since “loving as a slave, according to Paul D, meant loving small, loving in an unobvious way so that whatever was loved did not become part of a technique for punishment.”39 Consider the essential outcome of her actions, in that “by the time she faced him, looked him dead in the eye, she had something in her arms that stopped him in his tracks. He took a backward step with each jump of the baby heart until finally there were none.”40 The baby’s heartbeat and schoolteacher’s footsteps moving as one beat portrays the way they are united by an inextricable tension. One cannot be present with the other; yet Sethe’s life is as powerfully defined by one as it is by the other. We can read the scene as the horror of the baby’s impending death pushing schoolteacher away, or conversely, signifying that with each step he takes away from Sethe, he pulls her baby’s life away with him. In this we see a familiar echo of Sethe’s past traumatic encounter returning to her present situation. It is as Caruth argues: [Trauma] cannot be understood in 39 Ashraf H. Rushdy. “Daughters Signifyin(g) History: The Example of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” American Literature 64.3, 1992, 577. 40 Morrison. Beloved, 193.

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terms of any wish or unconscious meaning, but is, purely and inexplicably, the literal return of the event against the will of the one it inhabits. [...] It is this literality and insistent return which thus constitutes trauma and points to its enigmatic core: the delay or incompletion in knowing, or even in seeing, an overwhelming experience that remains, in its insistent return, absolutely true to the event.41 Against Sethe’s will, schoolteacher’s presence triggers a re-experience and a re-living of her past traumatic experience in the present. Morrison underscores the overwhelming extent of her trauma by suggesting that the event does not merely repeat itself in memory, but it compels her to repeat the very act that traumatised her in the first place. If Sethe’s trauma stems from continually having to surrender her best things to schoolteacher—her breast milk, her human dignity—this is exactly how she reacts in this situation. His sudden presence triggers her to kill her baby. By holding the dead child in her arms as she looks at him, she has once again, 41 Cathy Caruth. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. (Maryland: The John Hopkins UP, 1995), 5.

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inevitably, sacrificed her “best thing” to him as a result of their slave/master relationship. It proves to be such a powerful bind, that even when Sethe attempts to act on her own terms, she still reinforces his supremacy over her life. Beloved leaves us with no sentimental notions as to what it means to be absolutely responsible to another. The consequences of something so unspeakable—ignoring of the other others for the absolute Other—is traumatic in itself. Schoolteacher’s response to Sethe’s sacrifice epitomises the very nature of these difficult consequences. When he sees the “nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand,” “right off it was clear [to him] that there was nothing to claim,”42 and the absence of any emotional response is deafening. In comparison to Abraham’s Other, who intervened and prevented him from committing such a traumatic act, even after Sethe has once again sacrificed her best to schoolteacher, she is discarded and considered worthless. To him, the assertion of herself as a mother and the extremity of her humanness, reduces her the status of a wild, mishandled creature. His words are heavily ironic as he reflects on his own magnanimity, 42 Morrison. Beloved, 175.

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saying that he “had chastised that nephew, telling to think—just think—what would his own horse do if you beat it beyond the point of education,” and to “see what happened when you overbeat creatures God had given you the responsibility of—the trouble it was, and the loss,”43 in order to teach the boy about being a humane slave master. It is precisely his lack of thought and education that has led to such tragedy. The extent of his warped sense of humanity unveils itself as he regards the entire situation before him as a mere economical exchange, without a thought towards Sethe’s profound loss. As he mourns the loss of his livestock, since Sethe had “ten breeding years left,”44 he is completely impervious to the fact that a mother, believing death to be a safer option than an impending encounter with him, had just killed her child out of protection. This jarring incongruity highlights that even what appears to be most obvious to one may not factor into the sight of another. In one’s blindness, one has the capacity to be damaging to another without any realisation of it at all. Yet, it is with a complicating gesture that schoolteacher’s blindness and indifference 43 Morrison. Beloved, 176. 44 Morrison. Beloved, 176.

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towards her is the thing that ‘grants’ her the freedom she has always wanted. After he concludes, “something was wrong with her,”45 he walks out of 124 and never returns again. The sacrifice of her daughter’s life frees Sethe from him, allows her to have the things that were previously other to her—freedom, property, ownership over herself and her family. It is as we traditionally expect in a sacrificial transaction, as “sacrifice has predominantly been understood as a necessary passage through suffering and/ or death (of either oneself or someone else) on the way to a supreme movement of transcendent truth.”46 Through exchanging the thing one loves most for this truth, the act of sacrifice becomes an investment for a return. In other words, the sacrifice of Beloved’s life is the thing that pays for Sethe’s release. It is a haunting reality. As a mother, the notion that every additional day in freedom is another day lived in exploit of her daughter’s death is paralysing one. Schoolteacher’s supremacy renders her incapable of a selfless sacrifice as she is forced to benefit economically from her daughter’s death. She fails to give her daughter a dignified death. To allow even that 45 Morrison. Beloved, 176. 46 Dennis King Keenan. The Question of Sacrifice. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005), 1

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would have been to contradict his absolute power; it would have granted her a moment of real freedom. *** It is language that calls us into the ethical task, that connects as well as separates us from being able to respond, that calls us to a sacrifice. As Derrida reminds us once again, “the concepts of responsibility, of decision, or of duty, are condemned a priori to a paradox, scandal and aporia. Paradox, scandal and aporia are themselves nothing other than sacrifice, the revelation of conceptual thinking at its limit, at its death and finitude.”47 If the very things that testify to the essence of humanity in its ethicality exist within in a paradox and cannot fully be explained, how can we even begin to respond to the nature of our own humanity? We have to consider that: Sacrifice is essentially a holocaust. In sacrifice, all (holos) is burned (caustos). There is no remainder. As such, it is essentially essenceless. It involves selflessness, giving without reserve. Sacrifice has to be beyond calculation 47 Derrida. The Gift of Death, 68.

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and hope of a reward, so as not to be construed as self-serving (and, therefore, not a genuine sacrifice).48 If a true sacrifice cannot lead to a goal or a return, the unveiling of a paradox ought to signal the immediate failure of our ethical task. There is no means to move beyond what is present to us; there is no known way to carry on. Does the promise of such an end absolve us from continuing to regard Sethe’s multiparadoxical situation? How can we turn away from responding after witnessing the way these paradoxical concepts can have such a catastrophic effect on a person’s life? As we recall schoolteacher’s inhumane imperviousness to Sethe’s predicament, it is clear that “silence is not an acceptable response to a history of atrocity.”49 Mandel asserts that “the novel’s and its subject’s limits to language is not an ethical gesture of respect to the victims and their suffering” as this trite conclusion has become an excuse to “retreat into a privileged space of silence that effectively elides the inevitable complicity that language, 48 Keenan. The Question of Sacrifice, 1. 49 Naomi Mandel. “I Made The Ink: Identity, Complicity, 60 Million, and More.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 48.3, 2002, 608.

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action, and a history of atrocity forces upon us all.”50 Silence has become a convenient refuge that allows us to avoid dealing with the difficult issues that have no answer to them. Ethics calls us to a higher responsibility even in the face of not knowing how to be responsible. In order to be ethical, we must make an impossible promise: a promise to respond, without knowing how to respond. Morrison’s novel is her very attempt to do so. It is a risky attempt, since reading poses us with the same problem that ethics does. Where an ethical decision is the call to respond to a single other, being blind to all other others in order to respond to that single other, in order to make that decision, one has to ignore in order not to ignore. Likewise, in order to read, we can only choose a single interpretation of the text each time. We have to be blind to other alternative interpretations. In this light, the novel places us dangerously in the realm of repeating schoolteacher’s blindness as “this desire to possess [the novel for ourselves] often leads to brilliant interpretive insights, but it

50 Naomi Mandel. “I Made The Ink”, 608.

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also blinds interpretation to its own hubris.”51 In every instance that we assert ourselves over the text by judging whether Sethe’s actions are immoral, deciding what is acceptable love for her children on her behalf, we become schoolteacher all over again. We are her Other, removing her freedom and demanding her sacrifice. After all, every time we reread the novel, we call her to kill her child again and again against her will. Our position as readers grants us schoolteacher’s power of dictatorship, allowing us to assert ourselves through our interpretations of the text without any accountability. We can easily remain blind to the other alternative interpretations or possibilities of reading the text, simply because we are the ones who do the reading. Having been so explicitly shown through schoolteacher’s actions the kind of destruction that blindness and power can lead to, it seems surprising that Morrison would employ a form of expression that fosters the very thing she heavily critiques. Therefore, it is with a leap of faith that Morrison calls us into this ethical space. As she presents us with a magical realist text that cannot deny 51 James Phelan. “Towards a Rhetorical Reader-Response Criticism: The Difficult, the Stubborn, and the Ending of Beloved.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 39.3&4, 1993, 715.

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its own fictional nature, Beloved refuses us any convenient conclusions or answers. By deviating from the form of a realist novel, she prevents us from regarding it as though it is a factual, historical account. Instead, it is an offer to constantly challenge her text. Regarding her own work, Morrison explains, these spaces, which I am filling in, and can fill in because they were planned, can conceivably be filled in with other significances. That is planned as well. The point is that into these spaces should fall the ruminations of the reader and his or her invented or recollected or misunderstood knowingness. The reader as narrator asks the questions the community asks.52 As such, Morrison invites “her readers to arrive at readings which may or may not coincide with those intended by the author,”53 in an attempt to 52 Toni Morrison. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. (The University of Utah, 2007), 157. 53 Koolish. “To be Loved and Cry Shame”, 172.

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prevent a totalitarian reading of the novel. For example, when Sethe’s daughter returns to her as a ‘ghost’, it is impossible to be certain of what she is. For the characters, “who Beloved is, is not merely ambiguous but multiply inscribed. Simultaneously, she represents many things, many people, each of which are true.”54 She “is a paradigm case of the stubborn. Despite the best efforts of many careful readers, her character escapes any comprehensive, coherent account. No matter how we arrange or rearrange the information about Beloved, there is always something that does not fit with the experience of everything else.” Beloved’s elusiveness is the thing that allows us to suspend a final judgement on who she is and by “letting the stubborn remain the stubborn means that we accept the possibility that the struggle to interpret and perform a shareable world is one we cannot entirely win.”55 We have no choice but to suspend our conclusions, allowing the novel to affect us, as we remain open to it. It is not for us to possess. The multiplicity that Beloved embodies 54 Phelan. “Towards a Rhetorical Reader Response Criticism”, 715. 55 Phelan. “Towards a Rhetorical Reader Response Criticism”, 716.

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continually opens up new possibilities of regarding the novel, compelling us to a reread, in the hopes of a further illumination. The novel does not hide the ethical dilemma. Rather, in bringing this notion to the forefront of our consciousness, we are constantly reminded of the things we do not see, the things that we cannot see. The glaring inadequacy of every conclusion that we come to presses us to further consider another perspective, another other. This posture with which we read Beloved signifies the way Morrison calls us to read ethically. In the same way that Beloved remains a question, our resistance in passing a final judgement on Sethe similarly keeps her act remaining as a question. We can never read enough to answer it. As we can do nothing except to reconsider her situation every time we read Beloved, we offer her our own gift of death: the sacrifice of our time.

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Reading in Practice: Literary Silence and Violence in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” George Eliot, Middlemarch.1

In “The Noise of Freedom: J.M. Coetzee’s Foe”, Robert M. Post attempts, among other things, an allegorical reading of Foe, in which he presents a direct scheme that attempts to trace in the novel direct resonances with the various aspects of

1 George Eliot. Middlemarch. (New York: Signet Classic, 1981), 191.

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apartheid South Africa. Post identifies, for example, Cruso and the scheming shipmaster in Bristol with the Afrikaner government; Susan Barton with the liberal white South African, and simultaneously, Mother Africa.2 Other patterns are also observed, such as the ideas of confinement and interlopation being read, not incorrectly, but no less predictably, as representative of the full spectrum of colonisation, isolation and segregation, with the obvious immanence of dominion suggesting white ownership. While not exhaustive, the foregoing nonetheless gives a good idea of the analogous way in which Post furnishes his reading. By extension, it may even be argued that the intent domestic episodes in the novel represent the restriction of congregation, of the address to an audience, and of the dissemination of any written material, as well as the house-arrest that form the cumulative effect of a apartheid-era banning-order; and Barton and Friday’s misidentification as gypsies and denial of hospitality at the inn are further evidence of the widespread practice of racial segregation at a social level. But such critical responses may be 2 Robert M. Post. “The Noise of Freedom: J.M. Coetzee’s Foe.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, (vol.XXX, No.3, Spring, 1989: 143-154), 145.

Reading in Practice

useful only in their directness, and are unfortunately also simplistic. Foe can be read as a kind of political allegory, but not in the specific, grounded sense that a text like Animal Farm is. In many ways, Coetzee’s novel defies the limiting confines in which allegorical correspondence operates. He says in an interview that: Foe is a retreat from the South African situation, but only from the situation in a narrow temporal perspective. It is not a retreat from the subject of colonialism or from questions of power. What you call ‘the nature and processes of fiction’ may also be called the question of who writes? Who takes up the position of power, pen in hand?3 The kind of allegorical procedure that is worked out in Foe takes place at a more general level, which challenges the social and political status quo in an indirect but nonetheless vigourously intellectual manner. This includes raising questions about the nature of power-formation, its consequences on the making and manipulation 3 Tony Morphet. “Two Interviews with J.M. Coetzee, 1983 and 1987.” TriQuarterly, 69 (Spring/ Summer, 1987: 454464), 462.

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of history, and the implied subjection by time and temporal concerns, as well as the notions of violence and rhetoric inherent to these processes. The critic Joseph Frank, in an attempt to identify defining aspects of Modernist narratives, notes that these writings adopt a spatial form in the substitution of sequentiality with simultaneity. This mode of reading into narrative structure may provide a useful entry to understanding the way which aspects of temporal organisation operates in Foe, while also allowing for a way to read Coetzee’s attempts at formulating a coherent view of history and historical construction in his novel. An extract from Frank’s essay may be in order here: The meaning-relationship is completed only by the simultaneous perception in space of word-groups that have no comprehensible relationship to each other when read consecutively in time. Instead of the instinctive and immediate reference of words and word-groups to the objects or events they symbolize and the construction of meaning from the sequence of these references, modern [writing] asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until

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the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity.4 This results in narrative arrangements that delineate temporal and historical boundaries. The implication is that the structure of a modern literary text is no longer defined by its linear narrative logic, but by what Frank calls a “spatial logic”. This re-formulation of the temporal dimension creates a sense of spatiality by drawing together disparate instances of time to form a singular, unified and all-inclusive moment. While Frank’s ideas, originally written in 1945, are a response to the aesthetics of the High Modernist movement, much of it remains applicable to the consideration of Postmodernist writing, such as Coetzee’s novel—a writing defined, also, by its appropriation of simultaneity and fragmentation. Frank’s implication is that, for literature, the urge to subvert the restrictiveness of conventional associations between narrative and linear/temporal experience necessitates the foregrounding of spatiality; and that this spatiality unifies a multitude of narrative elements. The 4 Joseph Frank. The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 13.

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constituent fragments of the text, then, work together simultaneously and take on a spatial logic in the same way that the individual parts come to make up the aesthetic whole of, say, an object of plastic art such as sculpture or architecture. Frank sees in all of this removal of temporal distinctions a discontinuity that “encompass all times.”5 The very “palimpsest effect” that he speaks about is evident, for example, in Susan’s preoccupation with temporal undecidability: her urging of Cruso to mark time, and his resistance; and her incomplete dating of the letters (no year), and subsequent abandonment of the attempt. These straddle the text simultaneously in the realm of a no-time, and a kind of temporal universality. The novel exhibits a proclivity for discontinuity and fragmentation as a way to transcend temporal strictures. This reinforces the spatial simultaneity of time and history by foregrounding the circularity of temporal and historical processes. An aspect of the circular narrative process can be seen in the way that the novel begins in medias res, but with “At last” at the start of text. The narrative, logically, ends at Part 3, but it 5 Joseph Frank. The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature, 59.

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ends at a kind of beginning: “It is a beginning …. Tomorrow you must teach him a.”6 This necessitates the emergence of Part 4, which serves as a return—to the site of convergence of the novel’s various narrative threads: Where Cruso ended up and where his narrative ended; where Friday ended up, origin unknown, future unknown; where Susan ends up, and leaves off with a manufactured identity and narrative on hand—“Mrs Cruso”, searching mother becomes female castaway. The missing frame of Part 1 is completed in Part 4, with the near repetition with: “Dear Mr Foe, at last I…” (emphasis added).7 Part 4 also gestures towards Friday’s—and everyone’s— history. It does not pretend to represent this history but acknowledges that it exists, an aspect which will be considered later. There is an indication that much of the novel’s vitality is created by its multitude of ontological complications. There is here an introduction of a previously-non-existent fictional character by one author into the fictional narrative of another, already-deceased author, fictionalising the latter but returning to him his patronymic identity, and allowing these two characters a confabular 6 J.M. Coetzee. Foe. (London: Penguin, 1986), 152. 7 Coetzee. Foe, 155

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relationship that attempts to chart the narrative of a third character, who straddles two separate but similar narratives (Defoe’s and Coetzee’s)—alive in one, dead and marginalised in most of the other. This attempt is further thwarted by the persistent presence of yet a fourth character, whose narrative it is that may be able to complete the novel’s (Coetzee’s) narrative tapestry, and whose silence in the later text is precisely that which prevents the novel from completing itself. In part 4 of Foe, the confabulators Susan and Foe die, twice, while the narrative takes up a voice of its own— projected in the previous sections by Susan—and returning them near to the site of the novel’s—not the proper, temporal—beginning. She returns to die at the beginning of her own narrative, setting Foe on a kind of ontological instability. Much of the discontinuity of Foe is also the direct result of Coetzee’s weaving of disparate allusive sources. Central to the intertextual quality of the novel is Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, but also his Roxana (whose plot about missing daughters, and the notions of patronymy: Susan, Foe/Defoe, are at play in Coetzee’s novel), Captain Jack, and even bits of Moll Flanders. These intertextualities work alongside others in the novel, such as its biographical (Defoe’s), mythical (the babes of the wood legend is visited upon twice), theological,

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Shakespearean (Tempest) allusions; and even its Beckettian patterns. Foe’s discontinuous narrative structure is unified by the simultaneity of its intertextual impulse, which reveals itself to be at once fragmentary, repetitive, and circular; highlighting its postmodernist impulse by subverting its own ontological grounds. It is possible, at this point, to suggest that parts of Coetzee’s allegorical impulse are situated in the intertextual complexities that he weaves into the novel. The network of relationships at work in the South African context, one can infer, does not lie merely in the dialectics of black-white, master-slave, but also in the range and depth of its histories, cultures, and experiences. In this way, the novel’s allusive tendency points to a kind of allegorical strategy that takes on a spatial logic, as befitting the imagery of South Africa’s endearing identification as a “Rainbow Nation,” and one that needs to be understood in its multitudinous, and later, reconciliatory, whole. David Attwell reminds us of Coetzee’s own argument that a confessional’s “self-examination is endless … The confessant does not have the pow-

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er to end the discourse but merely to abannon it.”8 Susan Barton’s account of “The Female Castaway” is a narrative of her largely uneventful year spent on Cruso’s island, a narrative of which is suspended in the simultaneity of her self-conscious awareness of its mundanity and its dramatic sensibilities being predicated upon its own circumscription by her arrival at and departure from the island, and her reluctance to include those aspects of these ‘back-stories’. It is further caught in a number of other resistances: Cruso’s refusal to add meaningfully to the account by severely limiting his own narrative; Susan’s own refusal to embellish her own account, as Captain Smith and Foe suggest; and, most problematic of all, Friday’s silence. The overwhelming effect of Friday’s silence lies in the persistent latency of his part in the overall narrative being articulated. That it continues to haunt, yet resist, Barton’s struggle for a satisfactory account overturns any meaningful notion of his inexplicable mutilation being a source of disempowerment. In his muteness, Friday holds the key to unlocking, not just his own history, but also that of the island, one that continually threatens to subvert those of Cruso’s and Barton’s, and even 8 David Attwell. J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. (Oxford, England: University of California Press, 1993), 112.

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overshadow any that Foe may have attempted to invent. The voice that cannot yet speak is ultimately the voice that can, as “the faintest faraway roar,”9 complete the confessional of a history of mastery and enslavement. Friday’s silence is defined by its boundaries, themselves formed by the varied linguistic attempts to inscribe his narrative/history. Susan’s and Foe’s— and even Coetzee’s—discourses on the mysterypuzzle-void that is Friday’s story, at best, trace, metaphorically, the outline that forms Friday’s “o,” without being able to locate where his narrative resides—inside or outside of this narratorial void. This perhaps raises the question of marginality— whose narrative and which narrative does the novel marginalise, and does it even marginalise at all? Foe articulates the necessity to “make Friday’s silence speak, as well as the silence surrounding Friday.”10 This marks an interesting resonance with the partial circumscription of Susan Barton’s island narrative, and the deliberate attempts by Cruso to subvert, even reduce and deny, his own, as well as Friday’s stories. The questions of the how‘s and wherefore’s of their arrival upon the island are obvious here, and are complicated by 9 Coetzee. Foe, 154. 10 Coetzee. Foe, 142.

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Cruso’s stance on memory and time as modes of narrative articulation: “Nothing I have forgotten is worth the remembering.”11 The issue of marginality, then, becomes one that concerns the notions of origins, and the denial thereof, in both spatial and temporal sense. Unlike Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, who obsessively makes records in his journals and all manner of date-keeping, Coetzee’s Cruso, we are told, keeps no journal and is insistent on not marking time, save the rocks used in the terrace-building, which, though serving as time fillers, essentially empties Cruso’s island experience of any temporal sense by its repetitive and apparent illogic. How, then, does Friday come to be so named? The novel provides no answer to this, but this deliberate denial of access to Friday’s origins, in spite of its nominal rootedness in a temporal specificity, is indicative of a loss of identity—just as Susan Barton intermittently questions her own and the nature of her being—as the cost of relying on an arbitrary means of delineating experience and existence, which time invariably proves itself to be. Friday’s centrality, as a result, can be read in relation to what he is not: Cruso’s near-absolute denial of time, and Susan’s over-reliance on it, defeats them. 11 Coetzee. Foe, 17.

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Friday, on the other hand, and in his inarticulacy, overcomes the strictures of time and, indeed, comes to define it: ‘He is writing the letter o.’ ‘It is a beginning,’ said Foe. ‘Tomorrow you must teach him a.’12 Friday’s O is a symbol open to much interpretation and, in this short exchange, temporally-loaded, there is a simultaneous embodiment of the alpha and the omega, borrowing from scripture an all-encompassing, omni-present significance that is affixed to and which yet transcends time. Central to the understanding of Coetzee’s considerations in this respect is his appropriation of the traditional apocalyptic motif as a means of grasping the significance and the implications of the novel. Apocalyptic narratives inhabit a pattern that is driven by a need for the summation of the meaning of history, and other associative existential truths, in preparation for an impending end of the world, and its replacement by a new and salvational one. Foe seizes this premise of the scriptural narrative as a way to make sense of the 12 Coetzee. Foe, 152.

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acute uncertainty in which the world is plunged. This is no mere attempt at deriving assurance amid the highly deliberate representations and articulation of doubt in the novel. Coetzee’s is a response to history that situates the ideological aspects of power, authority and subjugation as predictable aspects of a history that is cyclical. Therein lies Coetzee’s modification of the conventional apocalyptic preoccupation with the convergence of thematic meanings and narrative conclusions. Even as violent historical forces presage potential annihilation, he is convinced that they form part of a cycle of destruction and regeneration. There is, in his model, an absence of assurance that accompanies the promise of a messianic element, as the biblical revelation does— and scriptural allusions play an important role in the attempt to situate the various tensions centred on the relationships at play in the novel. Friday’s possible castration, is hinted at only subtly, when Susan, addressing her own uncertainty: “I saw and believed I had seen, though afterwards I remembered Thomas, who also saw, but could not be brought to believe till he had put his hand in the wound.”13 This echo of the biblical Doubting Thomas references Christ’s wounds and the resur13 Coetzee. Foe, 119-120.

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rection it implies and, by attributing a salvational value directly to Friday’s wound, presents the savage as saviour. It also situates the allusion as an attempt to overturn the kind of messianic rhetoric commonly associated with the colonial enterprise. More importantly, as repeatedly acknowledged by Barton and Foe throughout the novel, Friday’s mutilation—and hence silence—is both the foe to a comprehensive reading of the text, and whose surmounting promises to be the source of its salvation. For Susan, inducting Friday into language is imagined not just to be the way in which to save her narrative, but also to his freedom, as well as her own freedom from a reverse bondage to Friday, and her own sense of guilt: “He desires to be liberated, as I do too. Our desires are plain, his and mine.”14 The vision here is one that is held in suspension between a sense of assurance, or at least hope, and a resignation to the inevitability of failure. This is sustained by the tension of the perpetual imminence of an end, itself suspended between death and deliverance, which ties the novel in an interminality between promise and denial. There are further manifestations of this in skewed religious terms, in the identification of writing 14 Coetzee. Foe, 148.

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and speech: We are accustomed to believe that our world was created by God speaking; but I ask, may it not rather be that he wrote it, wrote a Word so long we have yet come to the end of it? May it not be that God continually writes the world, the world and all that is in it? 15 What is thrown into relief is not just the notion of theological linearity but also established eschatological concerns. These form a trajectory that the novel’s structure readily subverts, and whose non-linear, discontinuous narrative structure, and spatial logic can only be intimated but never fully grasped, because the implied vastness lies in the text’s continual re-inscription of itself. The issue raised by Foe’s words transcends even these to question the very nature of creation itself: that there is a foreboding possibility of reading all the world in its textuality. The ontological implication, then, lies in the problematics of signification, because language is persistently and potentially a failed vehicle, as witness the impossibility of Susan Barton’s inscripted emancipation of Friday. These relate pointedly to the question, and sug15 Coetzee. Foe, 143.

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gestion, of Friday’s role as deliverer and subject of hoped-for deliverance: What concerns us is the desire [to be free], not the name [of freedom]. Because we cannot say in words what an apple is, it is not forbidden us to eat the apple. 16 Religion, as with politics, is necessarily ideological, and if, as with all semiotic constructions, they inhabit an inescapable element of arbitrariness, then the question of existence itself becomes problematic, not least any political posturing and its attendant salvationist bent—which in turn may explain the nature of Coetzee’s own seemingly inscrutable, non-committal political position. The original sin that transgressed upon divine prohibition and broke the most fundamental of human unions is a kind of pride and vanity that forms the basis for all of human kind’s subsequent discontents, namely a proclivity for organisation by division and hence difference. The basic division of a self and an Other parallels the kind of adversarial stance that takes root in doctrines of ‘them’ and ‘us’. It is such doctrines 16 Coetzee. Foe, 149.

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masked in the rhetoric of theology and ideology that inevitably precipitate humanity’s impulse to homogenise and exclude. There is a sense of recognition in the novel that humanity’s divisional instinct is continually and potentially rapturous— in the Christian sense—though not necessarily redemptive: there is a tension and constant undecidability between communalisation and abandonment that surrounds the characters, especially Susan Barton. Her instinctive need to rescue Friday from the island, for example, is a measure of this inclination: “it is our duty to care for him in all things, and not abandon him to a solitude worse than death.”17 Her attempts to homogenise Friday by committing him to her version of civilisational community, as well as to the realm of language, fails because they achieve nothing but to foreground Friday’s difference and to further alienate him. She comprehends yet subjects Friday to “being re-shaped day by day in comformity with the desires of others.”18 The instinctive need for identity—and to impose identity—it may be inferred, results not in inclusivity but in the magnification of humanity’s separateness, with the only true unity falling to the experience of humanity itself. Susan 17 Coetzee. Foe, 39. 18 Coetzee. Foe, 121.

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ultimately takes up this recognition: “We are all alive, we are all substantial, we are all in the same world”, despite Foe’s retort that “You have omitted Friday.”19 As much as choices determine history, these choices are also made in accordance to lessons of a past. Coetzee presents in Foe a history based on the circular relationship between repetition and disappointment. Civilisational and political concerns, with their thrusts towards arriving at ideals, are temporal by design, given that arcadian and utopian motivations have their rootedness not in the geographical but along a temporal trajectory of nostalgia and aspiration. The island and its history, residing only in the mind of Susan Barton, occupy no spatial ground, and its topography exists merely in the realm of the imaginative will. Humanity’s distinguishing characteristic lies, in many ways, in its inventiveness, indulges a sense of superiority by pitting the self against its own capabilities, and hence of humanity against itself. And human kind’s insistence on resorting to violent, reductive choices—such as war, occupation, colonisation, tyranny—becomes a kind of defeatist attempt to project the merely imaginable—such as moral, intellectual and civilisational 19 Coetzee. Foe, 152.

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superiority—onto actual experience, is doomed to failure. Similarly, there can be no absolute end to human conflict because the idea lies only in the adoption of an absolute pacifism, an idea as utopian as that of a “just war” or “just occupation.” These remain unattainable because to choose to avoid involvement in violence does not absolve accountability—that is Susan Barton’s failure, not Coetzee’s. To return to an allegorical consideration of the novel’s place in its proper historical and political context, it may finally be necessary to take up Coetzee’s own position in relation to the articulation of the South African situation. Brian Macaskill and Jeanne Colleran have treated of the issue of political resistance and representation—“an issue Coetzee refuses to leave uncriticized.” 20 For them Coetzee’s strategy builds into the text a set of critical mechanisms that fends off the obligation “to dictate to or speak for the proletariat.”21 Macaskill and Colleran 20 Brian Macaskill and Jeanne Colleran. “Reading History, Writing Heresy: The Resistance of Representation and the Representation of Resistance in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe.” Contemporary Literature, (Vol. 33, No. 3, Autumn, 1992: 432-4570), 21 Macaskill and Colleran. “Reading History, Writing Heresy”, 446.

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address the issue of art, specifically Friday’s, but do not articulate the significance of it implications to Coetzee’s transcendence of the specific and restrictive way in which allegorical procedures and their direct correspondences usually rely upon. Friday’s art and his silence resonate not just the novel, but also throughout most critical treatments of the novel. What Coetzee offers in his novel is not merely the resistance to a singular, albeit extended, climate of oppression and tyranny that can be articulated. Superficially, the reader is offered no access to Friday’s thoughts and consciousness not merely because of his silence but also because his history has been denied, first by Cruso’s resistance to filling—if he actually has access—the gaps of Friday’s biographical details, and then by Cruso’s own silencing in his death. And yet, Friday is not totally silent and his very presence and the vagueness of his actions do imply a rich biography. Literally, he hums in what Cruso calls “The voice of man” and manages even to repeat the utterance “Ha-ha-ha” as an assertion of his tongueless-ness but not voicelessness.22 For Susan, just merely the scene in which she witnesses Friday scattering petals out in the 22 Coetzee. Foe, 22.

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water offers a series of possible explanation; she initially thinks that he is fishing, but then hypothesises that it may be an act of supplicative offering or “some other such superstitious observance,”23 before settling for the possibility of it being an act of mourning and remembrance. This scene bears much significance, as when he is described as having “launched his log upon the water—which was deep at that place—and straddled it.”24 The description is loaded in it sexual connotations, suggesting a kind of vitality associated with Friday, even as it parallels Susan’s own straddling of Cruso and, later, Foe; and even as it is set as a counter-narrative to the later suggestions of Friday’s castration. These varied associations between Friday and his actions, however confused or contradictory they may be, nonetheless point to a personal, cultural history that he understands and can articulate to himself. The indecipherable nature of this history, it would seem, is part of Coetzee’s point: that it is impossible to delve meaningfully into any personal history, not least that of a people and a nation; and one with as conflicted a history as the one of his immediate experience. The key, then, lies in the acknowledgement and acceptance that 23 Coetzee. Foe, 31. 24

Coetzee. Foe, 31.

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even a history that is defeated and silenced is an inevitable aspect of a grand historical narrative. Its existence cannot be effaced. Barring language, Friday’s communion with whatever history it is that the flower-scattering scene may imply is one that is direct and unmediated. This is unlike the difficulties that language and its associative silence may present to other modes of accounting for one’s history, such as is faced by Susan Barton. Friday, though mute and inarticulate, is nonetheless the most multilingual and charismatic of all the characters. His linguistic repertoire includes his own systemic set of musical notes and dance routine, the primitive language imparted by Cruso, the pictographic ones offered by Barton, as well as the alphabetic ones that both Barton and Foe impose upon him. Considered thus, we can read a multiplicity of access to Friday and the interpretation of his representation, lending to his narrative a range of possibilities while also suggesting a kind of universality that can be attached to his role in the politics of the novel. Friday’s spinning, mystical dance, his repetitive musical notes, and his rows of repeated inscriptions all point to a confrontation with a larger aspect of an unending history with all its manifestations of violence and oppression as cyclical and repetitive. This

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prescribes, in its own way, a process by which art can be seen to take on a kind of universality that disarms the inherent power relations at play throughout history. Early in the novel, Cruso explains to Susan that:“The planting is reserved for those who come after us and have the foresight to bring seed. I can only clear the ground for them. Clearing ground and piling stones is little enough, but it is better that sitting in idleness.25 Even as this is the closest that Coetzee comes to directly addressing political reality in his novel, there is, like Walter Benjamin’s space-making Destructive Character, and like Coetzee’s own character, an acute awareness of history’s weight, and of one’s profound, if seemingly insignificant, effect on the course of its development.26 Accusations of Coetzee’s representations as historically unsituated and hence in apparent silent complicity with white South African oppression miss the point: it is not that Coetzee is not political, but that he realises

25 Coetzee. Foe, 33. 26 Walter Benjamin. “The Destructive Character.” (Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Selected Writings: Volume 2: 1927-1934. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1999: 541-542).

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any political strategy cannot be successful in and of itself. The seeming failure of the novel to articulate any meaningful political position can therefore be seen as a reflection of his view of the reality of the “South African problem” as a larger universal and philosophical problem of humanity. In this sense, the portrayal of Friday can be said to be a vital, literary version of Coetzee himself. But even that may be a limited way to view the construction of Coetzee’s position. He is the composite of his characters, whose cumulative contributions to the overall narrative of Foe gives a fuller perspective of the attempt to inscribe the South African and, indeed, any power-political narrative. As much as we can read the novel as a loose allegory of historical reality, it is also possible to identify its narrative voices with that of their author and his reaction to the immediacies of his political and historical environment, such as when Foe and Barton discuss the nature and possession of narratorial meaning: “there comes a time when we must give a reckoning of ourselves to the world”; “he has the last word who disposes over the greatest force.” 27

27 Coetzee. Foe, 124.

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Encountering Formal Beauty: An Aesthetic Reading of Saramago’s All the Names The sense of literature as a mass noun referring to “written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit,”1 underpins our general understanding and, subsequently, our readings of literary texts. However, as Allan Singer and Allen Dunn observe, while the study and reading of literature characteristically proceed from the assumption “that the literary text is a work of art […] far less frequently do [we] inquire what this means or entertain the proposition that it matters.”2 In this vein, the reading I undertake in this chapter, of Portuguese novelist 1 Literature. Oxford Reference Online. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Web. 2 Allan Singer and Allen Dunn, eds. Literary Aesthetics: A Reader. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 36.

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José Saramago’s All the Names, is not only an attempt to respond to the text, as Jeremy Fernando puts it, but a further endeavor to respond to its intrinsic artistic merit. Compared to other functional responses we may have to the text, aesthetically-oriented readings of literature proceed from the fundamental premise that the text is a literary work of art and derives at least part of its significance as literature when we appreciate it as art. In their readings of Saramago’s novels such as All the Names, literary critics tend to pass cursorily over the extraordinary beauty of his writing in order to get at some innate symbolic “meaning” of his work, whether this has to do with its function as an existential allegory or a commentary about epistemological instabilities. Steven Kellman, for instance, emphasises the novel’s function as “an allegory about the impossibility of knowing another and knowing oneself,”3 while Margaret Birns describes its milieu as a “nightmarish dystopia.”4 A reviewer from Publishers Weekly also observes, “Alternately farcical, macabre, surreal and tragic, this mesmerizing narrative depicts the 3 Steven Kellman. “All the Names.” Magill’s Literary Annual, 2001. 4 Margaret Boe Birns. “All the Names.” Magill’s Survey of World Literature. (Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2009).

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loneliness of individual lives and the universal need for human connection.”5 These analytical observations are of critical significance in interpretations of Saramago’s work, but they also signal critics’ tendency to neglect aesthetic dimensions of his writing. The narrative, readers are informed, is “surreal” and “mesmerizing,” but how or why it is so remains a mystery. I propose, as Walter Pater does for art critics, that it is perhaps even more important for literary critics (and for readers of literature in general) to possess a certain “temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.”6 For, it is the aesthetic properties of art objects, Noël Carroll asserts, that “alert us to the qualitative dimension of the world at large and improves our capacities for understanding them.”7 Reading that responds to the beauty of the text, that allows for the discernment of pleasurable shapes and forms—thereby propelling our 5 “Review: All the Names.” Publishers Weekly 247.35 (28 Aug 2000): 53. EBSCOhost. Web. 27 May 2011. 6 Walter Pater. “Studies in the History of the Renaissance.” Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 643. 7 Noël Carroll. Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction. (London: Routledge, 1999), 99.

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emotions in specific, powerful ways—thus offers readers an alternate recourse through which we can experience the world. Integral to the design and creation of all art, form is essential to most theories of the beautiful. The English art critic Clive Bell insists that form is the “one quality without which a work of art cannot exist.” The “supreme quality in art,” he explains, “is formal; it has to do with order, sequence, movement and shape.”8 Translating Félicité Lamennais’s sentiments in De l’Art Du Beau, Étienne Gilson affirms that beauty exists in a work of art “inasmuch as it is endowed with a form, and thus form is the proper object of art.”9 Denis Donoghue too asserts that “form can’t be evaded; it is the coherence of the work of art— this is Adorno’s main emphasis.”10 It is as form, Donoghue further argues, that “the beautiful can be materially grasped.”11 Form, therefore, offers a tangible means by which we can gesture towards the beauty we find in literary texts. Form’s order8 Clive Bell. Proust. (London: Hogarth Press, 1928), 13; 67. 9 Étienne Gilson. The Arts of the Beautiful. (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2000), 30. 10 Denis Donoghue. Speaking of Beauty. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 121. 11 Donoghue. Speaking of Beauty. 114.

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ing devices direct the diverse, “chaotic forces”12 we tend to find in complex works of literature, conveying their sense of wholeness to readers through the use of sophisticated shapes and frames that impose a sense of unity on the text. Form is crucial because it gives the novel a distinct shape. Novelistic plot, Donoghue explains, “is grasped as the force of organization that comes after the form.”13 This force of organisation has alternately been called “the golden thread” by Robert Schumann, in reference to the order and arrangement we find in music.14 Gilson explains Schumann’s proposition that a common thread runs through a brilliant piece of music, cohering all parts to the whole such that we discern its overarching unity, which is the “principle of distinction”15 in the art object. By comprehending how “parts of an artwork serve larger designs,”16 we gain a better appreciation for how the art object’s wholeness, as manifest in its design and composition, offers keen aesthetic pleasure in 12 Donoghue. Speaking of Beauty. 123. 13 Donoghue. Speaking of Beauty, 123. 14 Schumann; qtd. in Gilson. The Arts of the Beautiful, 49. 15 Schumann; qtd. in Gilson. The Arts of the Beautiful, 49. 16 Carroll. Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction, 150.

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readers’ experience of reading Saramago. In keeping with the spirit of this collection, my encounters with formal beauty in Saramago’s novel can be made manifest in a close reading of these parts that serve the design of the whole in All the Names.

Traversing Labyrinths As Schumann’s “golden thread” does for music, another legendary thread gives organisational force to the yarn Saramago spins in All the Names.17 I use the word yarn richly in the sense of its meaning as both thread and story, for the organising principle that lies at the heart of Names is the mythological story of Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth.18 Names derives its shape and wholeness from the overarching narrative frame that the Grecian myth provides, where rich, 17 The novel’s title, All the Names, will hereafter be shortened to Names. 18 Ariadne is the Greek weaving mistress who comes to the aid of the hero-figure Theseus with her ball of red yarn, allowing him to follow her thread to safely make his way out of the monster Minotaur’s labyrinth, and to eventually save the day.

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recurring symbols of threads and trails leading through the novel’s labyrinthine archives and mazes greet readers at every fork in the narrative. Names is predominantly filtered through the perspective of the banal everyman Senhor José, a general clerk working in an unnamed city’s Central Registry, who is prosaic down to his very name. His life is unexpectedly altered forever when, chancing upon the birth record of an unknown woman one day, he decides to follow Ariadne’s thread to find this woman. Though there is nothing to suggest why Senhor José should take an extraordinary interest in this ordinary woman, the novel is a record of his adventures in the quest for his unknown lady-love, only to learn that she has killed herself during the course of his search. Though there are multiple ways Ariadne’s story ends in Greek mythology, in one version, “her forlorn despair” at being abandoned by Theseus after he escapes the labyrinth causes her to “hang herself with her thread.”19 In an enigmatic affirmation yet simultaneous rewriting of Ariadne’s myth, the unknown woman too dies by her own hand in the curious reverse-labyrinth of Names. She is thus at once Ariadne and her faithless lover 19 J. Hillis Miller. Ariadne’s Thread. (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 1992, 11.

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Theseus: for not only is the unknown woman the thread that leads Senhor José out of his lonely web of solitude, she is also the faithless lover (albeit an unwitting one) who dies out on Senhor José’s love before he reaches her at the other end of the tenuous Ariadne’s thread that unites them—a thread that likewise holds the narrative of Names together. Names weaves a rich tapestry of images that bring labyrinths, threads and trails, and narrative/writing together. Senhor José’s quest begins in a literal labyrinth at his workplace in the Central Registry: “avalanches of files, which are always happening however firmly the masses of paper are held in place, have made [the walkway] intended to provide direct, rapid access [to the Registry] into a complex network of passages and paths, where you are constantly confronted by obstacles and cul-de-sacs.”20 Registry employees are constantly navigating the confusing shelves of archives and towering piles of paper that form the veritable walls of this labyrinth. To successfully traverse the tangled maze, the Registrar instructs his subordinates to make use of “Ariadne’s thread.”21 20 Saramago. All the Names. 1997. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. (London: Harvill Press, 1999), 145. 21 Saramago. All the Names, 7.

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The term “Ariadne’s thread,” used on at least six other occasions22 in a variety of contexts, both in its literal and figurative configurations, refers in this case to the physical ball of yarn the Registrar keeps in his drawer for employees’ use in the archival maze. To find a birth, marriage or death record, Registry clerks must descend into the labyrinth with its “twists and turns,” “skirt round mountains of bundles, columns of files, piles of cards, thickets of ancient remains” and “walk down dark gulleys, between walls of grubby paper,” while “yards and yards of string will have to be unravelled, left behind, like a sinuous, subtle trail traced in the dust, there is no other way of knowing where you have to go next, there is 22 Other instances in which the term “Ariadne’s thread” is used in Names: “the end of his Ariadne’s thread was there, to use the mythological language of the Central Registry” (39); “not daring to use the real Ariadne’s thread, despite the fact that the drawer in the Registrar’s Office where it was kept, along with a powerful torch, was never locked” (141); “suddenly, from unknown depths, the longed-for solution welled up within him, like the end of a new Ariadne’s thread” (174); “In the Central Registry, we use Ariadne’s thread, it never fails” (194); Senhor José “walked over to the Registrar’s desk, opened the drawer where the torch and Ariadne’s thread were waiting for him. He tied the end of the thread round his ankle” (244).

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no other way of finding your way back.”23 These recurring symbols of labyrinth, thread and trail, which are critical to the artistic design of Names, constitute a narrative frame that coheres the whole. The Central Registry is not the only physical labyrinth in Names, but finds its haunting lookingglass in the General Cemetery. Edifices become mirrors of each other in Names: “One enters the cemetery via an old building with a façade which is the twin sister of the Central Registry façade. There are the same three black stone steps, the same ancient door in the middle, the same five narrow windows above,”24 and “[l]ike the façade, the interior of the building is a perfect copy of the Central Registry [with …] the same long counter, stretching the whole length of the enormous room, the same towering shelves, the same arrangement of staff.”25 Relations between Registry and Cemetery employees, we are told, “are openly friendly and full of mutual respect, because […] they know that they are digging at either end of the same vine, the vine called life and which is

23 Saramago. All the Names, 143-44. 24 Saramago. All the Names, 184. 25 Saramago. All the Names, 189.

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situated between two voids.”26 Patterns of images are established not only between objects and characters that serve as foils to one another, but more importantly, emphasise the wholeness and perfection of the narrative structure in the methodical, symmetrical patterns of events created. The reader learns that straight lines in the Cemetery “are like the straight lines in a labyrinth of corridors, they’re constantly breaking off, changing direction[:] you walk around a grave and suddenly you don’t know where you are.”27 This “labyrinth of corridors” is further convoluted by the “mischievous shepherd”28 Senhor José encounters at the unknown woman’s grave, in the section for suicides. So what is the truth about the land of suicides, asked Senhor José, Not everything here is what it seems [. . .] it’s a labyrinth, You can see when something’s a labyrinth, Not always, [t]his is the invisible kind, I don’t understand, For example, the person lying here, said the shepherd, touching the mound of 26 Saramago. All the Names, 189. 27 Saramago. All the Names, 194. 28 Saramago. All the Names, 209.

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earth with the end of his crook, is not the person you think. Suddenly, the ground began to shake beneath Senhor José’s feet, the one remaining piece on the board, his final certainty, the unknown woman who had at last been found, had just disappeared. [….] None of the bodies buried here corresponds to the names you see on the marble stones, […] They’ve all been swapped around.29 The disorientation perpetuated by the physical labyrinths of Names, with their avenues of ambiguity and the hopelessness of certain direction, is multiplied exponentially as “invisible” labyrinths like the Cemetery’s section for suicides add to the confusion. A metaphor for the impossibility of certain knowledge, the symbol of the labyrinth allows Saramago to undermine “certainties in favour of possibilities. To walk the labyrinth,” as Senhor José does in Names (and the reader along with him), is, as Saramago’s translator Giovanni 29 Saramago. All the Names, 208. Dialogue in Saramago’s writing is never delineated by quotation marks; his use of punctuation is limited primarily to commas and periods. Alternations between characters’ speech when they are in dialogue is given in the use of capitalisations.

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Pontiero puts it, “to journey at random through time and space, a human adventure which demands courage and imagination.”30 Formal parallels between labyrinths of the Central Registry and the General Cemetery create harmonious echoes across disparate sections of the text, reinforcing the sense of unity we find in Names, which in turn conveys the novel’s integrity and wholeness to the reader.

Through Mental and Metaphorical Labyrinths Apart from the physical labyrinths we encounter in the novel, Names also presents several metaphorical journeys through the labyrinth. The symbols of labyrinth and thread predominantly link and cohere Senhor José’s trail of the unknown woman. At one point, he deliberates with the notion of simply calling her, for “on the other side of the pavement, was a telephone box, […] just twenty paces away and he would reach the 30 Giovanni Pontiero, trans. Introduction. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. By José Saramago. (London: Harvill Press, 1999), x.

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end of a thread that would carry his voice to her, the same thread would bring him an answer, and there, in one way or another, his search would end.”31 At another point, his investigations, which “indicated no route along which to continue,” seem to place “before him an unscalable wall”32 in the maze. Obstacles that surround this labyrinthine search are also described as a “hole” that Senhor José has gotten himself into, “with all the doors shut and not a single clue to follow.”33 When he eventually finds an avenue of escape, “the longed-for solution well[s] up within him, like the end of a new Ariadne’s thread.”34 Rich imagery relating to the labyrinth—of threads, routes and walls—pervades Names, relating not only parts of the novel to each other but also to the whole. Just as Senhor José is on the unknown woman’s trail, the Registrar himself is on Senhor José’s trail: the Registrar tells him at the end of the novel that “I’ve been keeping a regular track of your activities.”35 The Registrar in fact becomes a foil to Senhor José over the course of the novel, 31 Saramago. All the Names, 69; emphasis added. 32 Saramago. All the Names, 134; emphasis added. 33 Saramago. All the Names, 35; emphasis added. 34 Saramago. All the Names, 174. 35 Saramago. All the Names, 242.

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divided as they are by hierarchy at the beginning of Names. For instance, Senhor José’s insomnia over his difficulties in locating the unknown woman causes him, for the first time in his life, to be late for work one morning when he oversleeps. He leaves the house dishevelled and “at a crazy gallop quite inappropriate to his age and condition.” More than an hour later, “the Registrar arrived. He looked rather withdrawn […], at first sight, anyone would say that he had slept badly too.”36 His unknown Ariadne thus links Senhor José to the Registrar as well. On another occasion, Senhor José is left trembling in the fearful dark, during his nocturnal expedition in the archive of the dead, after his torch goes out. He then talks himself back into composure: “Look, apart from being afraid, nothing really bad has happened to you yet […] you’ve got the string tied round your ankle, with the other end tied to the leg of the Registrar’s desk, you’re safe, like an unborn child attached by the umbilical cord to its mother’s womb.”37 The imagery of Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth, which forms the novel’s central narrative frame, is endlessly perpetuated as characters make both their literal and metaphorical journeys through the labyrinths of Names. 36 Saramago. All the Names, 175. 37 Saramago. All the Names, 152.

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Saramago further capitalises on his use of the Greek metaphor by including its meaning as a reference to logic-solving processes, such that narrative and writing become intimately woven into a tapestry of associations and are transformed into Ariadne’s threads of their own. Likewise deriving its name from the Grecian myth, “Ariadne’s thread” can also refer to the process of resolving logical difficulties through an exhaustive record (physical or otherwise) of all possible alternatives. Saramago’s writing style, which embraces “theoretical alternative plot developments,”38 thereby transforms the novel into a veritable record of multiple possible alternatives. In this way, the narrative itself becomes another Ariadne’s thread. Theoretical alternative plot developments in Names often materialise as part of Senhor José’s imaginary meanderings or playful thought experiments. His mind is a metaphorical labyrinth where, having “reached [a] point, his thoughts stopped, then took another route, a narrow, uncertain path […]. The thought broke off again and

38 David Frier. The Novels of José Saramago: Echoes from the Past, Pathways into the Future. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), 3.

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abruptly retraced its steps.”39 Slipping “through the confused labyrinth of his unmetaphysical head,”40 Senhor José’s mind takes imaginary meandering voyages guided by Ariadne’s thread, at the other end of which lies the unknown woman. As Mary Daniel points out, “[h]ypotheses crowd the pages”41 of Saramago’s novels and take the shape of lengthy asides and digressions that play out in Senhor José’s sometimes far-fetched imagination. For example, after he conducts his initial investigations under deceptive pretexts at the building where the unknown woman was born, his mind races ahead as he conjures a mental picture of the terrible consequences that would ensue if his deceit were to be exposed before his boss, the Registrar.42 In another instance, his mind constructs an imaginary run-in with an (also) imaginary concierge at the unknown woman’s apartment.43 When he hesitates over the option 39 Saramago. All the Names, 66-67. 40 Saramago. All the Names, 28. 41 Mary Daniel. “Symbolism and Synchronity: José Saramago’s Jangada de Pedra (The Stone Raft).” José Saramago (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views). Ed. Harold Bloom. (New York, NY: Chelsea House Publications), 2005, 18. 42 Saramago. All the Names, 126-27. 43 Saramago. All the Names, 235.

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of calling the unknown woman’s parents from the Registry telephone on a Sunday—a day when no one is presumably at work—he once more imagines the disastrous consequences, should the Registrar have the call traced: “Senhor José’s imagination did not stop at creating this troubling dialogue, once it was over, he went on to enact in his mind what would happen afterwards, the unknown woman’s parents coming into the Central Registry and pointing, That’s the man, or else […].”44 These ambivalent “or else”s typify our experience of reading Names. Saramago pushes these alternative possibilities and the nature of Senhor’s Jose’s imaginings to the limit, when the latter begins to converse with the ceiling in his own home. [T]here was no reason why you should go on looking for this woman unless, Unless what, Unless you were doing it out of love, Only a ceiling would come up with such an absurd idea [. . .], You wanted to see her, you wanted to know her, and that, whether you like it or not, is love, These are the imaginings of a ceiling, They’re your imaginings, 44 Saramago. All the Names, 217.

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a man’s imaginings, not mine [. . .]. After this, the ceiling decided to remain silent, it had realised that Senhor José’s thoughts were already turned to the visit he was going to make to the unknown woman’s parents.45 For most of the dialogue, it is easy to dismiss the multiple conversations Senhor José has with his ceiling as cathartic articulations to soothe his anxieties. Yet Saramago continually slips such odd, whimsical comments into the narrative that forbid such simplistic rationalisations. The extraordinary notion that the ceiling’s own consciousness prompts its decision to remain silent when it realises that Senhor José’s attention was now engaged elsewhere takes the reader by surprise.46 This account of Senhor José’s mental labyrinths, in its exploration of alternative plot developments, thus becomes symbolic of the logic-solving process of Ariadne’s thread, giving

45 Saramago. All the Names, 215. 46 See p.135 and pp.213-14 of Names for other examples of Senhor José in conversation with his ceiling.

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the novel its richly textured surface.47

Symmetrical Patterns of Silence Saramago maintains the harmonious structure of his writing by weaving corresponding episodes into distinct patterns of images that pervade the text, where these strands of reverberation give the novel its sense of wholeness and integrity. Orchestrations of silence, in particular, find enormous resonance in Names, where encounters with these muted moments in our experience of reading Saramago are imbued with surrealistic beauty. 47

These alternate possibilities that play with the cores of

chance and chaos in the novel are also constantly tossed about playfully by the narrator, who experiments with make-believe scenarios in which some trifling action by Senhor José might alter the entire course of the novel. For example, when Senhor José goes to the unknown woman’s old school district in search of more information about her, the possibility of an imaginary run-in with one of the Registry’s deputies—an unmitigated calamity for Senhor José—is posited: had Senhor José revealed his identity and produced his fabricated Registry-letter of authority, we are told that he would undoubtedly have been exposed (Names 132-33).

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When Senhor José makes his first illicit nocturnal journey into the Registry, the narrator observes in the dimness of the shadows that the “strange shapes” of “shelves laden with papers seem[ed] to burst through the invisible roof and rise up into the black sky, [and] the feeble light above the Registrar’s desk was like a remote, stifled star,”48 as the clerk sat in the Registry “until dawn, listening to the faint rustle of the papers of the living above the compact silence of the dead.”49 The enigmatic vision of the “strange shapes” of Registry shelves crammed with papers, bursting through the invisible roof to at last reach the black skies of night, is a wonderfully defamiliarised presentation of the Registry as compared to previous descriptions of it in daytime. To complement the strange new surroundings we find ourselves in, Saramago illumines the scene with only a “feeble light” coming from the bulb that hangs above the Registrar’s desk “like a remote, stifled star.” At the literal level, the passage is merely a portrayal of the poorly-lit Registry in the nighttime: shelves appear to extend to infinity because Senhor José cannot differentiate the roof in the darkness and the lamp above the Registrar’s desk 48 Saramago. All the Names, 15. 49 Saramago. All the Names, 18.

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provides only a weak source of illumination. Yet Saramago creates an irresistible iridescence to the moment as his beautifully poetic use of language, depicting the Registry, captures the reader’s imagination. The magic of the moment is complete as Senhor José sits listening to the “faint rustle of the papers of the living above the compact silence of the dead.” There is something extremely tenuous about the nature of reality at this point. It is unclear why papers in the archive of the living should rustle faintly while papers in that of the dead should remain sombrely silent. Yet it makes perfect poetic sense because the dead, of course, are silent; they no longer have voices. By the same token, however, these are references to inanimate objects, to papers, which have neither voice nor volitions to move in the first place. Images of such fragile, tremulous silences that threaten to crumble at the slightest disturbance are repeated throughout the novel, imbuing the narrative with an enigmatic breath of beauty. When Senhor José spends a solitary night by the unknown woman’s grave, he is acutely sensitive to the tremendousness of the surrounding silence. Walking for “long hours” through the General Cemetery, he passes through “epochs, eras, dynasties, through kingdoms, empires and republics, through wars and epidemics, through infinite

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numbers of disparate deaths, beginning with the first sorrow felt by humanity and ending with [the unknown] woman who had committed suicide only a few days ago.”50 He sees, on the graves, angels with wings spread, angels with wings folded, tondos, empty urns, or urns filled with false stone flames or a piece of languid crepe draped about them, griefs, tears, majestic men, magnificent women, delightful children cut down in the flower of life, old men and women who could have expected no more, whole crosses and broken crosses, steps, nails, crowns of thorns, lances, enigmatic triangles, the occasional unusual marble dove, flocks of real doves wheeling above the cemetery. And silence. A silence interrupted only from time to time by the steps of the occasional, sighing lover of solitude drawn here by a sudden bout of sadness from the rustling outskirts where someone can still be heard weeping at a graveside on which they have placed bunches of fresh flowers, still damp with sap, piercing, one might say, the very heart 50 Saramago. All the Names, 202-03.

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of time, these three thousand years of graves of every shape, meaning and appearance, united by the same neglect, by the same solitude, for the sadness they once gave rise to is now too old for there to be any surviving heirs. 51 Universal human history is encapsulated in this movingly eloquent description. Saramago creates the sense of a vast expanse of time through the ages via effective use of counterpoint, contrast, and groups of associations: of majestic men and magnificent women, of delightful children and the venerable aged, and of nails, crowns of thorns, lances, and broken and whole crosses that allude to Jesus’s crucifixion, arguably the most famous death in all of Western human history. Historical watershed events (the rise and fall of epochs and dynasties, of bitter wars and frightful epidemics) have now become ghosts of the past that need no longer be mentioned by name, for they have sunk into a silence that has been reduced to unified neglect, sameness of solitude and forgotten legacies of sadness. The mighty weight of this silence is tremulously broken intermittently by the quiet, sentimental sobs and hushed footsteps of solitary mourners. 51 Saramago. All the Names, 197.

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On another occasion, as Senhor José sits in the empty house of the unknown woman, “[t]he silence, which had seemed to him absolute, was interrupted now by noises from the street, especially, from time to time, by the passing of a car, but in the air too there was a slow breathing, a slow pulse, perhaps it is the way houses breathe when they are left alone, this one has probably not even realised it yet that there is someone in it now.”52 The occasion parallels the instance in the novel when Senhor José is eating a lonely dinner at home (an adjacent edifice to the Central Registry, with a connecting door between them) and the narrator observes that “[t]here was an absolute silence, you could scarcely hear the noise made by the few cars still out and about in the city. What you could hear most clearly was a muffled sound that rose and fell, like a distant bellows, but Senhor José was used to that, it was the Central Registry breathing.”53 Such transpositions of reality—descriptions of breathing edifices with evolving consciousness of their own—suffuse the text with a surreal beauty that does not necessarily have logical substance, yet make perfect poetic sense. The recurring pattern of images in the tremulous silences of Names vividly evokes 52 Saramago. All the Names, 237; emphasis added. 53 Saramago. All the Names, 174; emphasis added.

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George Eliot’s famous line from Middlemarch: “and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”54 For, these inaudible hums of muffled bellows, faint rustles and slowly pulsing buildings roar at us from the other side of silence, in a muted murmur that drowns out even the noisy cars passing in the streets, deafening us in the majesty of their beauty.

Concentric Progressions and Interpenetrations These echoing parts, as manifested by symmetrical patterns of silence that mutely reach out to one another across the novel’s expanse, allow Saramago to create a concentric rather than sequential narrative progression. “Rather than a linear sequence of cause-and-effect,” Daniel proposes, “there is perceived throughout the [narrative] universe a meaningful and concentric overlapping and interpenetration of lives and events at

54 George Eliot. Middlemarch. (Charleston, SC: Forgotten Books, 1950), 145.

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all levels.”55 The concentric narrative progression thus confers the text with formal structure to direct its chaotic forces, as seemingly disparate episodes are rendered meaningful by such overlapping of events. I raise two instances in Names to explain this. Senhor José begins his search for the unknown woman at the only existing address he has on Registry record: the house in which she had been raised as a baby. Upon arrival, he hears a baby’s cries through the closed door.56 For a moment, nothing seems odd about the situation, until the realisation that the crying baby cannot possibly be the same one from thirty-six years earlier (the unknown woman as an infant) hits the reader. Though it is fairly conceivable that another woman with a baby may live there now (as indeed turns out to be the case), the curious coincidence of the timing and purpose that brought Senhor José to this doorstep on this night gives the moment a singular sense of unreality. Echoes of the past of which he has come in search, of the baby girl who herself once cried in the same house, 55 Mary Daniel. “Symbolism and Synchronity: José Saramago’s Jangada de Pedra (The Stone Raft).” José Saramago (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views), 20. 56 Saramago. All the Names, 35.

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make it difficult to shake the surreal sentiment that this moment can just as easily have been thirty-six years earlier, a sentiment that does not slide by unobserved. [It was as if Senhor José’s] brain had suddenly run out of control and gone shooting off in all directions, as if time had collapsed everything, backwards and forwards, compressing everything into one compact moment, he thought that the child whom he had heard crying behind the door was, thirty-six years before, the unknown woman, that he himself was a boy of fourteen with no reason to go looking for anyone, far less at this time of the night. Standing on the pavement, he looked at the street as if he had never seen it before, thirtysix years ago the street light shone more dimly, the road wasn’t tarmacked […]. Time moved, began to expand slowly, then faster, it seemed to buck violently […], the roads succeeded one another, became superimposed, the buildings appeared and disappeared, they changed colour, shape, everything jockeying anxiously for position before the

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light of day came to change it all back.57 The intensity of this non-linear moment creates the sense of two concentric tales being laid out, one on top of the other, which finds their common centre in the crying baby. Time collapses unto itself, disrupting the sense of linear, sequential order, giving the narrative its spherical shape. In the possible order that form divines, two different dimensions of time are collapsed together, creating a new sense of the narrative’s progression for the reader. The concentric nature of narrative in Names is also reinforced by the image of an unanswered telephone. When Senhor José goes to inform the lady in the ground-floor apartment that the unknown woman, her goddaughter, is dead, he is caught unawares by the discovery that the two had conversed over the telephone only days, perhaps moments, before the latter’s suicide. Relating the incident to Senhor José, the lady in the ground-floor apartment recounts the conversation with her goddaughter: “I couldn’t cope with all the memories, I couldn’t sleep […] It didn’t take long before we were both crying, as if we were bound to each other by a thread of tears 57 Saramago. All the Names, 35.

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[…] We left it that she would come and visit me as soon as she had time.”58 Again, the ineffaceable image of Ariadne’s thread weaves its way into the narrative. The reader and Senhor José’s understanding that the unknown woman will never have the chance to make this last visit heightens our sense of the moment’s tragedy, as the old lady adds that her attempts to reach the unknown woman over the past few days met only with a response from the answering machine. [I]n the following days I tried several times and at different hours, I phoned in the morning, I phoned in the afternoon, I phoned after supper, I even phoned at midnight [...]. The conversation could not continue to roll around the black hole hiding the truth, the moment was approaching when Senhor José would say Your goddaughter is dead [...]. It was as if what the lady in the ground-floor apartment had to tell him might still, who knows how, make time run backwards and, at the very last moment, steal the unknown woman back from death. 59 58 Saramago. All the Names, 166; emphasis added. 59 Saramago. All the Names, 167.

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The episode, in its heartrending bleakness, finds enormous resonance when Senhor José goes to explore the unknown woman’s empty apartment at the end of the novel. An inexplicable sense of loss leads him to sit dejectedly on her sofa after a short rummage of her apartment, unable to bring himself to resume his search of her private belongings, knowing well that she will never again return to them. And “[a]t that moment, the telephone rang”: The answering machine came on, a female voice said the telephone number, then added, I’m not at home right now, but please leave a message after the tone. [...] he is so troubled by the few words he heard [...] no, she’s not at home, she’ll never be at home again, only her voice remained, grave, veiled, as if distracted, as if she had been thinking of something else when she made the recording. Senhor José said, They might ring again, and nurturing that hope, he did not move from the sofa for another hour, the darkness in the house grew gradually thicker and the telephone did not ring again.60 60 Saramago. All the Names, 238.

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It is moments like these that suffuse the text with what C. A. R. Hills calls “an unearthly, muted beauty.”61 Both episodes are laid in concentric overlaps that have the unanswered telephone and the unknown woman’s voice on the answering machine—her sole remaining legacy for Senhor José at the end of his search—as their common centre. The reader wonders if the unanswered call Senhor José heard was made by the old lady from the ground-floor apartment trying to reach the unknown woman for the last time, to verify if her goddaughter is indeed gone. Or, if narrative time has once more folded into itself, where this instant, in which Senhor José finds himself in the unknown woman’s apartment, is that same moment from before when the old lady earlier tried to reach the unknown woman by telephone. The richness of the narrative is rendered meaningful by these associations between events and images (of the weeping baby and the unanswered telephone) rather than through a linear narrative sequence. As a writer, Pontiero remarks, Saramago “is motivated by the desire to establish patterns of sym61 The quotation is taken from C. A. R. Hills’s comment about All the Names in Literary Review, which is reprinted on the novel’s back cover.

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metry amidst the chaos, [and] to discover unexpected links between men and symbols.” Pontiero does not explicitly articulate to what ends these “patterns of symmetry” and “links between men and symbols” serve, but I offer the suggestion that it must inevitably have to do with the formal artistry of Saramago’s writing. The novelist himself affirms Pontiero’s observation when he writes in The Double: “chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.”62 This order, I propose, may be discerned by making sense of standards in wholeness (of formal structures and narrative shapes) and principles of harmony (including symmetry, corresponding echoes and patterns of images) that are purposefully constructed for artistic ends in Saramago’s novels.

Aesthetic Readings of Literature As with my analysis of All the Names, most art philosophers and literary aestheticians agree on the centrality of formal appreciation in reading literature or fiction as art. An aesthetic reading that privileges the artistry and formal qualities of Saramago’s writing—in his narrative construc62 Saramago. All the Names, 98.

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tions that resist realism, the poïesis of his eloquent expressions, and especially the wholeness and harmony of its narrative unity—is congruent with the novelist’s own outlook on his work. As Onésimo Almeida affirms, “Saramago himself has disavowed all attempts to identify cleavages, ruptures, or breaks in his works, and has openly supported the critics who privilege readings of his writing where unity prevails.”63 The prevailing unity of Saramago’s writing, I contend, is most comprehensively expressed in an aesthetic reading of his novels. More importantly, however, I hope to have demonstrated the significance and value of an aesthetic reading in the approach of literature or fiction as art. The kind of analysis I have undertaken with Names, with its focus “on literature as an art form,” is, as Peter Lamarque observes, “rarely found within Theory, and where literature as art does get mentioned it is usually in dismissive terms. Yet literature [...] has been designated an 63 Onésimo Almeida. “José Saramago: O Ano de 1998. Colóquio/Letras 151/152 (Janeiro-Junho 1999).” Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies 6: On Saramago. Ed. Anna Klobucka. (Dartmouth, MA: University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, 2001), 249.

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art form for over two millennia.”64 “To think of literature as art,” Lamarque explicates, “is minimally, to think of works as artifacts or designs of some kind, exhibiting ‘artistry,’ comparable in certain respects with other arts, and capable of affording distinct kinds of pleasure and the relevant literary qualities are essentially explicable in aesthetic terms.”65 The centrality of the notion of literature as art underpins my aesthetic interpretation of Saramago’s Names as well as my firm contention that reading literature or fiction as art is fundamental to literary criticism. Although there are other appropriate types of critical approaches that address the subject matter present in works of fiction, these approaches usually attend much less closely, if at all, to the literary qualities of, or what is artistic about, the art object. An aesthetic reading of the literary work as art acknowledges the fundamental significance of its artistry, which I argue is the main characteristic that distinguishes it from other types of writing that tend to be more discursive in nature; it is what makes literature irreplaceable as a unique 64 Peter Lamarque. The Philosophy of Literature. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), 12. 65 Lamarque. The Philosophy of Literature, 16-17.

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form of art. Lamarque, in fact, goes as far as to suggest that “appreciating literature as art is not simply one among other critical ‘approaches.’ It is more fundamental,” since there is a “conceptual connection between literature and art such that it would be paradoxical to speak of appreciating a work as literature but not as art. In contrast, there is nothing paradoxical in speaking of appreciating a work as literature but not in deconstructionist, new historicist, or psychoanalytic terms.”66 My point is that attending to a work’s formal properties is essential to our fundamental understanding of the category literature. Though cognitive, moral and social experiences are legitimate and appropriate responses to literature do much to enrich our interpretations of texts, they are not specific or elemental to literary writing in particular. While aesthetic interpretations do not represent the only kind of legitimate response to art available to us, it is necessary to a reading of any literary text that considers itself a work of art and/ or makes a claim to beauty. Works of fiction that lend themselves to an aesthetic reading tend to be more creative in the ways they use language or experiment with form. This does not imply that literature that contains rhetorical or social calls 66 Lamarque. The Philosophy of Literature, 16.

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to action cannot be considered art, but these, I argue, are not the emphases of literary art objects. The tipping point between artistic and non-artistic works of literature, I suggest, lies in the balance between the text’s formal beauty and discursive elements that distract from the poetic illusion created; its rhetorical qualities, in short, should not drown out its imaginative possibilities as a work of artistic creation. Literary criticism today is increasingly being saturated by theoretical readings of literature that pay little attention to its literary qualities—and virtually no attention to its aesthetic pleasures—which, I argue, should instead be its emphasis; our readings of literature need to be compatible with its aims as art and artistic creation. Reading practices that attend to the formal artistry and aesthetic pleasures of fiction are a necessary complement to what Daphne Patai and Will Corral call “theory’s empire.”67 Only then can we defend the value of our encounters with beauty in reading, which add to our rich experience of the world; to say with conviction that literature is indeed one of the great arts of the times. 67 Daphne Patal and Will Corral, eds. Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent. (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005).

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Randori with Franz Kafka; ‘’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’ on reading, irony, and the law …1 As in judo, the best answer to an adversary manoeuvre is not to retreat, but to go along with it, turning it to one’s own advantage, as a resting point for the next phase. Michel Foucault Since we are attempting to speak—write—of randori, of a grappling that is always in relation with another, it might be apt to open with a line from one of my favourite thinkers of the body— not just the body as corporeal being, but a body in

1 A version of this paper was presented at an open lecture at Kogakuin University, Tokyo on 10 June, 2010.

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relation, in relationality, a body with other bodies, sometimes even a body in communion, in touch, in movement, with another, and itself; in other words, a corporeal becoming as it is attempting to be. And here, we might momentarily want to keep in mind the potential question that accompanies all thought, all cited thought, all quotations, in particular the notion of whether one is always only choosing a quotation, a thinker, a kind of thinking, because one likes it, because it happens to suit one at that particular moment. This opens various registers of citationality: whether we are citing to pay a certain homage, an acknowledgement that the thought comes from another, from elsewhere; whether we are deferring to another; whether that moment of deference brings with it a shielding of ourselves, as if to say, ‘if you have an issue with that thought, don’t argue with me; pick your fight with the other—Foucault in this case’. By speaking of citationality, and bodies, we have opened a thinking on how forms, rules, regulations, affect our selves, have an effect on our bodies, our corpus. And here, we cannot ignore the trope that the term ‘like’ comes from ‘lich’, which

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etymologically can be traced to corpse.2 So, even as we are attempting to consider the notion of preference—perhaps even to guard against it for fear that biasness may cloud our thinking—we cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that there are effects on our corporeal being even as it may be affecting our very thinking. In other words, even as there are laws governing the way we may be approaching—the manner of our thought—these laws themselves are not entirely divorced from us. Hence, we might not only be dealing with laws that are not entirely clear, that we might not be able to fully see, we are also always already potentially blind to the manner in which we are affecting the law, even as it has effects on us. This is akin to the problem that K faces when he is brought before a power that he neither knows— and can never know—nor can see, but which clearly has effects on him. This is due to the fact that K is faced with a law that he must approach, and which has power of judgment over him, but 2 Here, one might open the register that we call the oeuvre of an author her ‘body of work’. One should note that etymologically speaking, there is no mention of the body specifically in the term: it traces itself back to opus, or work. Hence, the ‘body’ that we are referring to might well be that of the author—the work that is written on her self.

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at the same time always hidden from him. And it is this that the priest attempts to highlight to him through the famous parable of the Law, the tale from within Franz Kafka’s The Trial which goes: Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. A man from the country comes to this doorkeeper and requests admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he can’t grant him admittance now. The man thinks it over and then asks if he’ll be allowed to enter later. “It’s possible,” says the doorkeeper, “but not now.”3 It is not that the man is not allowed into the Law, not allowed to see what it is that is judging him, but that he is not allowed to at this very moment. Since there is no time stipulation to “but not now,” it is not that the doorkeeper is lying to him, but that the moment of admittance is deferred, not necessarily eternally, but perhaps for just one moment, perhaps only a moment longer than the life of the man. However, it is not as if the Law has no effect on their lives. On the contrary the man from the country waits outside the doorway till the end of his life; and in the larger context of the 3 Franz Kafka. The Trial, translated by Breon Mitchell. (New York: Schoken Books, 1998), 215.

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novel, K’s trial fully occupies his daily existence. In other words, both of them are completely consumed by the Law, by a force that they do not—and cannot—see or comprehend, by a force that they remain completely blind to. Even though the Law is a force that affects them, has an effect on them, it is not as though they are compelled to be before it. The man, of his own free will, decides that “he would prefer to wait.”4 At no point is he forced to remain. This opens the possibility that it is the man, unlike the doorkeeper, who is free. The latter is captive to his duty, to the Law, as not only has he to wait for the man to appear, but must also wait there till he decides to leave. In this sense, it is the executer of the Law who is most bound to it. As the priest explains to K, the man is in fact free: he can go wherever he wishes, the entrance to the Law alone is denied to him, and this only by one person, the doorkeeper. If he sits on the stool at the side of the door and spends the rest of his life there, he does so of his own free will; the story mentions no element of force. 4 Kafka. The Trial, 216.

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The doorkeeper, on the other hand, is bound to his post by his office; he is not permitted to go elsewhere outside, but to all appearances he is not permitted to go inside either, even if he wishes to.5 So, even as the doorkeeper is bound to the Law, it is not as if he knows what the Law is. As he tells the man, “I’m only the lowest doorkeeper … the mere sight of the third is more than even I can bear.”6 Moreover, it is the man who “in the darkness … now sees a radiance that streams forth inextinguishably from the door of the Law.”7 Nothing is said of whether the doorkeeper sees this light. This suggests that both, regardless of whether they are there by choice or duty, are affected by a power that is beyond their comprehension. And even though the man sees this light, he never knows what it means, or even what the light is. The unknowability of the Law becomes even more curious if we take into account the fact that the doorkeeper tells the man, “no one else could gain admittance here, because this entrance 5 Kafka. The Trial, 221. 6 Kafka. The Trial, 215. 7 Kafka. The Trial, 216.

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was meant solely for you.”8 This suggests that it is a personalised Law; and this opens the register of the paradox that every law—that the Law itself—faces. In order for something to be Law, it has to have a certain universality: it is applicable to everyone without distinction or discrimination. However, each application of the Law is situational, unique, singular. Hence, at best, the Law can only be known—if that term can even be used in the first place—at the very moment in which it is applied; to the man, to K, to you. In other words, the Law can only be glimpsed by the effects it has on one, but can never be known as such. This is precisely why the priest tells K, “you don’t have to consider everything as true, you just have to consider it as necessary.” For, it is not so much that one cannot distinguish what is true from what is not (which is the misunderstanding that K has in thinking that “lies are made into a universal system”9) but more radically that each truth—and by extension each lie—is only provisional, situational, singular. It is the situationality of the Law, of each positing of the Law, that allows the “commentators [to] tell us: the correct understanding of a matter and misunderstanding the matter are not mutually 8 Kafka. The Trial, 217. 9 Kafka. The Trial, 223.

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exclusive.”10 One can, at best, guess whether it is a correct understanding—which suggests that every misunderstanding is not only potentially a correct understanding, but that it is impossible to distinguish between them in the first place. One might even posit that within every understanding lies a misunderstanding. It is for this reason that even the executer of the Law remains blind to it: all the doorkeeper is doing is carrying out the Law in that particular situation, the situation of the Law being “solely for you”; in other words, the only knowledge that the executer of the Law has is of its effects; the only time that the executer knows of the Law is at the very moment (s)he is executing it. Here, we might take a slight detour, maybe even a little step backwards, and reopen the register of citationality when it comes to the law. After all, whenever one turns to the law, one has to also evoke the notion of precedence, of something similar that has happened before. If it happens to be a new situation, one has to then draw parallels with something else. And here, it is not difficult to hear an echo of a phrase that we have been using rather regularly in the last few minutes; that of “in other words.” This opens the question 10 Kafka. The Trial, 219.

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of exactly who’s words are we using here: if I go back to the beginning, then firstly are those words of Foucault, not in a sense of did he say—or write—them (that would be easier to verify, even though one must never forget the entire history of mis-attributions that haunts the legitimacy of citations); secondly, and probably more importantly, every citation, attribution, is always already out of context. In this sense, whenever we say “in other words,” we are not only pointing out the fact that these are not exactly our words, we are also covering, veiling, the notion that these are precisely our words—if not in content, then surely in form, in sequence, words that are ordered according to our needs, desires. Hence, we are once again unable to do away with one of our initial concerns: the notion of biasness, preference. In creating a particular corpus, are we always already writing our own bodies into it: by evoking Foucault, by resurrecting him through a séance of language—by playing medium here— am I always already injecting, inseminating, my self in that dissemination? And it is no coincidence that quotation marks are occasionally referred to as vampire marks—not only do they look like puncture wounds, whenever one quotes one is enacting a violence of context by abducting—dragging—out of context. More than that, one is also appropriating the life, the force

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(by way of its effects), the energy, of the words, for one’s own purposes. In other words—for what choice do I have here but to foreground the otherness in what I am attempting to say—whatever I am saying, even as much as I am attempting to legitimise through, and with, the other, is always already haunted by the spectre of illegitimacy. For, even as one—I—am attempting to back up what is said with others, I—one—is never able to distinguish which are my—one’s—words, from that of the other. Hence, it is not just that one is unable to tell one self from the other, both one and the other are now also potentially indivorceable. In other words, one’s words are always already potential other to oneself. This brings us to the question of the author, of writing, of whether is it possible to write something, to create something. And of course, it would be absurd to say that one can’t: one only needs to look around to see it happening everywhere, everyday. The problem is the attempt to link authorship to authority; as if the writer of the situation can play at being God—allseeing, and in full control. The trouble with authority is that it is illegitimate. For, if something is legitimate, access to it would be open to

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everyone—governed by the Law. It is only when something is illegitimate that the authority of a person is required to enact it. In other words, authority is the very undoing of the Law. For instance, a death-sentence can only be pardoned by the authority of the sovereign. In doing so (s)he is going against the legal system which sentenced that person to death; the same legal system that upholds her/ his very sovereignty. To compound matters, any enactment of the law requires an executor of that law; in other words, a figure of authority. Hence, authority is both authored by the law, and its very author at the same moment—the hinge on which it operates, and also its very finitude. Moving back to Kafka, and the Law, we now notice that if there was a figure of authority who chose to let the man from the country pass through the door, he would have been able to do so. For, what would happen is an undoing—a re-writing—of the Law, at that very moment in time. The result of which would have been: the door would be open, “solely for you.” And this would be precisely a moment of authorship, where the Law is being written, for you, and only for you. But what if we are on the other side: after all, how often are we in a position to write, in a place of authority? And we have to take into consideration

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the fact that even if we are in a lofty position—in a seat of power—one cannot enact one’s authority on oneself. Even a President, or a King, cannot pardon her/ him self: so, even as one cannot put the sovereign in front of a court, and one has to impeach her/ him (or in the case of a King, assassinate him), when that occurs, the sovereign’s hands are tied. Another figure of authority, the authorship of another, is needed in order to save themselves. Hence, whenever one is faced with the Law, one is always already in the position of a reader; where one is attempting to respond to this Law, without necessarily knowing what it is one is responding to, or even reading. The fact that, as the priest tells K, “the correct understanding of a matter and misunderstanding the matter are not mutually exclusive,”11 gives us some hope. For, this suggests that not only are they never quite separate; they are always already potentially part of each other. Here, one has to consider the fact that whether something is correct or not is based on the notion of correspondence. However, in order for that to occur, it has to be at least the second encounter between the object and the word—hence, correspondence is premised on the memory of 11 Kafka. The Trial, 219.

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the relationality between the two in question. A thinking of memory would hardly be complete (not that a complete thinking may ever be possible) without a contemplation of forgetting. In order to do so, we should momentarily stop and consider what it means to say “I forgot.” One can always posit that “I forgot” is a performative statement. What is more interesting is to consider the possibility that “I forgot” is a constative statement: in this case, for the statement to be true, there cannot be an object to it; the moment there is an object to “I forgot,” one has strictly speaking remembered what one has forgotten. For instance, when one is at the supermarket intending to buy something, one can utter “I forgot what I want to buy”—there is still no object to the statement. Unless one eventually remembers, there is nothing more that can said. Hence, all the person can utter is the very fact that (s)he has forgotten, and nothing more. And since there is no referent to forgetting, this suggests that there is always already an element of unknowability—an unknowable element—in forgetting. In other words, there is an element that lies beyond the cognition of the subject, beyond the subject herself. The implication is: one cannot choose forgetting; one cannot choose what one forgets. Forgetting happens to one: it is something

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other to the subject that has an effect on her. And if this is so, there is absolutely no reason each act of memory—each remembering—might not bring with it the possibility of forgetting. In other words, forgetting is not an antonym of memory, but is potentially part of memory itself. By extension, if all we know—if knowledge itself—is composed of memory, this would suggest that we can never be sure if what we know is complete; we can never be secure of our understanding. If this is so, this would then suggest that there is always already a potential gap within our understanding, within our knowledge system itself. And there is no more appropriate graphical denotation of this gap that the ellipsis. Rather than being a marginalised figure of writing, an aberration to the conceptual totality of writing, the ellipsis is the very figure of writing itself. And here, it might be helpful to momentarily turn again, this time to Werner Hamacher, and his position that the ellipsis is the rhetorical equivalent of writing: it depletes, or de-completes, the whole so as to make conceptual totalities possible. And yet every

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conceivable whole achieved on the basis of ellipsis is stamped with the mark of the original loss. Like writing, it withdraws from the alternatives of presence and absence, whole and part, proper and foreign, because only on its ever eroding foundation can conceptual oppositions develop: it withdraws from its own concept. Ellipsis eclipses (itself). It is the “figure” of figuration: the area no figure contains. 12 In other words, even if we don’t see an ellipsis within a sentence, there is always already the possibility of its presence. For, it is the very figure of forgetting. And it is precisely forgetting that allows one to write, and read, in the first place; for, if everything has already been said, there is nothing left to write, there would be no more need to read. It is only the fact that one can never be sure if one has forgotten that leaves us the space to continue thinking, to continue negotiating.

12 Werner Hamacher. “Hermeneutical Ellipses: Writing the Circle in Schleiermacher” in Premises: Essays in Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, translated by Peter Fenves. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 74.

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If we momentarily reopen the register that all knowledge is a form of memory, this suggests that all that we know is a citation, a quotation. And since we can never do away with the possibility of forgetting, we will not only be uncertain of our knowledge, of what we know, we will also never quite know whether what we know is from us, or from another. As Hélène Cixous reminds us, citation is the voice of the other and it highlights the double playing of the narrative authority. We constantly hear the footsteps of the other, the footsteps of others in language, others speaking in Stephen’s language or in Ulysses’, I mean in the book’s language … It reminds us that we have been caught up in citation ever since we said the first words mama or papa.13 In other words, each utterance, every attempt to speak, write, brings with it the notion of otherness. Hence, the very stability of the ‘I’ is always already called into question—the self and the other can no longer be seen as antonyms. Not only is the self and the other in relation with 13 Hélène Cixous. Stigmata. (London: Routledge, 2005), 135.

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each other, the self is potentially other to itself. The potential uncertainty grows if we take into consideration the teaching of Paul de Man, who never lets us forget that, it is impossible to say where quotation ends and ‘truth’ begins, if by truth we understand the possibility of referential verification. The very statement by which we assert that the narrative is rooted in reality can be an unreliable quotation; the very document, the manuscript, produced in evidence may point back not to an actual event, but to an endless chain of quotations reaching as far back as the ultimate transcendental signified God, none of which can lay claim to referential authority.14 In this manner, it is impossible to distinguish a moment of reading from a potential re-writing. And since reading and writing are haunted by illegitimacy—both ultimately lacking any necessary referent—all reading is a potential 14 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 204.

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writing (which can only happen if all writing is also a reading of sorts). It is this inability to know if we know, to be sure that we have understood, that allows us to continue reading, to continue negotiating with the text; that ensures that we have possibly never quite read the text. It is this unknowability—this ellipsis that both allows one to know yet never allows this knowing to be complete—that Jacques Derrida notes in Right of Inspection when he argues that even though the reader has a “right to see,” it also take a certain “skill to see.” It is not a random, purely arbitrary act as (s)he is always already bound by a “law of seeing.” And here, one must never forget—or at least attempt to never forget—that in reading, and in writing, one is always already governed, bound, by the law of grammar. Hence, “you are free but there are rules.”15 In this way, reading, and seeing, is a negotiation between the reader and the text. One is free within a certain set of rules, and one’s reading is an interjection, an interplay between the reader and the text, within the rules laid out, the rules before which both the reader and the text must stand; “there is a law that assigns the right of inspection, you must 15 Jacques Derrida. Right of Inspection, translated by David Wills. (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1998), 1.

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observe these rules that in turn keep you under surveillance.”16 In order to play the game—the game of seeing, the game of reading—you have no choice but to “remain within these limits, this frame, the frame-work of these frames …”17 And more than that, a text gives both you and itself (through its characters, through the outcome of its own narrative), a right to look, the simple right to look or to appropriate with the gaze, but it denies you that right at the same time: by means of its very apparatus it retains that authority, keeping for itself the right of inspection over whatever discourses you might like to put forth or whatever yarns you might spin about it, and that in fact comes to mind before your eyes.18 It is in this way that every seeing reveals and conceals at the same time; every seeing always already involves a certain inability to see, an inability to know. In effect, every reading is a positing, taking a position, making a choice, 16 Derrida, Right of Inspection, 1. 17 Derrida, Right of Inspection, 1. 18 Derrida, Right of Inspection, 2.

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which comes with a moment of madness, of blindness.

So, what’s randori got to do with it … So far, we—or at least I—have managed to skirt around the issue of randori: after all, the implication of it being in the title is that one is obliged to at least mention it. In fact, one is usually expected to let it play a main role in whatever one is writing—or speaking—on. These are the rules of the game. If we slow down a little again, we might notice that this is premised on a relationality between the title and the content of whatever is entitled so. We can also recast this question in the realm of art, in particular the notion of how the title of a work bears a relation with the actual work itself. If we extrapolate a little, it is a question of whether a work of art has a relation to its framing—is van Gogh’s Sunflowers still a masterpiece if it was found in a street-corner, painted on a wall, or is much of its allure due to its position in a gallery, or a museum? This is, of course, the question of whether the frame is the art, or whether art itself has an essence—whilst this is not quite

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the time, nor place, to address the issue (which already opens the register of thinking having a particular grounding, even if not a grund), we can still allow the resonances of these registers to remain with us, and affect our thought. If we were to yield to temptation and touch on it too fleetingly, it would be hard to disagree with the notion that art is probably an interplay of things: the setting, the work, the signature (and here we reopen the notion of author, authorship, and authority once again). After all, the famous ‘aura’ that is often spoken of, most famously by Walter Benjamin, means ‘breath’: there is no reason why the ‘breath’, or even ‘spirit’ of a work, cannot come from somewhere else, somewhere other to the work itself. Socrates famously drew inspiration from daemon that whispered into his ear; in Roman thought it was a genius that gave one the stimulation to create; the more contemporary version of this would be one’s muse. In all instances, it is a flash from elsewhere—other to the self—that affects one: in other words, the art is always already other to the artist. All the artist can do is prepare her self to be the medium through which the art is expressed. But back to randori. In a typical situation, randori is the place, and time, where one tests whether one’s techniques work against another person;

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one who often-times has a similar skill-level, and more importantly is trying to do exactly the same thing to you, that is test her technique on you. This is by no means a free-for-all situation: both parties are bound by the same rules. Hence, it is a contracted situation: where both, in principle, negotiate in advance what is allowed, and what forbidden; and unless both parties agree, the bout is off. Which means that strictly speaking, randori is a game. It is worthwhile to note that in the Anglo speaking world, randori is often translated as either ‘free-sparring’ or ‘play’. In the first instance, it implies a certain freedom within restriction— you can try anything within the rules of the game to beat your opponent. ‘Play’ brings with it a more interesting connotation: it suggests a certain trickery, gamesmanship, involved whilst testing. This is especially true when the levels of both judoka are similar: since both basically know the same things, one cannot use what the other doesn’t know against them—by definition, you wouldn’t know it as well—but rather, you have to use what they know against them. In other words, you have to turn their knowledge against them. And this brings us back to the very beginning, and Michel Foucault, as we recall his words: “in judo the best answer to an adversary manoeuvre

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is not to retreat, but to go along with it, turning it to one’s own advantage, as a resting point for the next phase.” But since it is only a “resting point for the next phase,” this suggests that the play continues, the game continues—after all, your opponent-partner (for (s)he is both an adversary, and at the same time completely necessary to the game; you cannot play on your own)—can react in the same manner as well. And since your partner-opponent is reacting, responding, at the same time as you are, both of you are always playing whilst blind to the attempts of the other, until it happens. Hence, it is a dual relationality; each attempting to play, to out-play, the other, potentially in blindness to the other, in order that the duel continues. Here though, let me run the risk of exposing myself, and potentially show all my cards, by offering you an example of this play, of this playfulness in testing, in relation with the law. Whilst in middle-school, there was a rule that one’s hair could only reach a certain length: being an all-boys mission school, it was strictly enforced, and anyone’s hair that reached either their collars, or beyond their eyebrows was severely reprimanded. There were, of course, those who didn’t mind this: some people just like wearing their hair short; and if one is fine with a

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law there is really no need to oppose it (opposing something for the sake of doing so is not only rather silly, but is, in fact, a strict law onto itself). Amongst those who felt that this was an infringement of one’s rights, there were two main ways of resistance. The vast majority protested in standard fashion—by attempting to confront the law head-on: they wore their hair long, and ended up sacrificing their bodies and time, through systematically offering themselves up to detention and punishment (it was a time when one could still get publicly caned, and whipped, by the headmaster). There was a small minority that had a far more playful method: instead of going directly against the law, they read it closely, and took it extremely seriously. Since the prohibition was regarding length, hair was cut extremely short; some even went the whole hog and took it all off. In this manner, the head-master knew that it was clearly a protest, but could do nothing about it: at no point were any laws broken. The only thing he could do was to alter the law itself: a week later, it stated that one could not grow it longer than the collar nor the eyebrow, but neither could it be shorter than an inch. The resistance was to “go along with it, turning it to one’s advantage.” Of course, not all laws are quite so straight forward. Some are downright tricky. Take

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pedestrian crossing lights for instance: there are basically two lights—green to signal ‘go’, and red to signal ‘stop’. However, green is an invitation (one can choose to walk, or not to, whenever green is showing); red on the other hand is an order, an imperative (when the red light is on, one has no choice but to stop). In other words, the law itself is not consistent. To compound matters, if one is crossing the road (whilst the light is green, so no law is being broken) and the light suddenly turns to red, one cannot stop—in fact, at that point, the thing to do is to run like hell. Hence, sometimes one is required to break the law in order to follow the law. The problem is: a policeman who has seen you crossing the road whilst the light turns red on you can then summon you both for not stopping, and also for stopping. Either way round, you are infringing the law. The policeman in this instance is the writer of the law, as (s)he is judging you by the very law that (s)he has just written. After all, it is a game: so even as you are trying to “[turn] it to [your] advantage,” so is the other. Since every game happens in a particular time and place, it is situational. But like everything, there are patterns to this situation—even though strictly speaking each day is a new one, and one

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cannot predict the future based on the past, one does get better and better at it the more days one has seen. For, if we are speaking of patterns, it is the significance of something that matters, and not its signification. There is a parallel here to the law. When enacted, the law occurs in a particular situation, but it is written as a general statement: for, in order for something to be law, it has to have a certain universality—it has to apply to in general to everyone, regardless of anything. However, each application has a context, a time and place. Hence, it is always applied in exception to the general, and sometimes even undoes the generality itself. This is why the policeman can fine one person for crossing whilst the light is red, and let another off scot-free for doing exactly the same thing; this is also why every judgement passed in court can only be passed “beyond reasonable doubt”—there is no claim that the judgment is absolute truth. And here, of course, there is an echo of Kafka’s earlier teaching in the background: that “the correct understanding of a matter and misunderstanding the matter are not mutually exclusive.”19 This suggests that we can perhaps only catch a glimpse of the significance of a law (through its effects), without necessarily ever knowing its meaning. But since it affects 19 Kafka. The Trial, 219.

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us, we have no choice but to act as if we know what it entails, as if we can understand what the law requires of us: for, it is not as if claims of ignorance (even if they may be real) will spare us from being judged. Perhaps the only thing that the man from the country could have done was to have gone through the door, taking the notion of the door being “solely for you” extremely seriously—whilst remaining blind to the fact that he is always already blind to the law itself. So, at the end of the day, the gap—of understanding— is always already potentially present in the law; the law that affects our bodies, and our very lives. It is the gap that sometimes works against us, but it is also this very gap that allows us to continue reading, thinking, negotiating. And what is this gap, this space between, other than the gap of irony—the distance that is needed in order to both take the law seriously, and the non-seriously, within the same breath, same time, even the same space. For, at the end of the day, all we are doing—all we can do—is test the other, test ourselves even; each testing being situational, singular, sometimes even testing the very test itself. All we can do is randori.

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And as I attempt to end off, perhaps it is only appropriate to end at the beginning—for there is rarely a necessary end to play; only a momentary one, perhaps one that is necessitated by circumstance, by situation. In order to do so, we might invoke again “other words,” the voice of another, different from the first, but still similar: another judoka, the Dada artist Yves Klein. For his Anthropometries series, he set up a camera, and white canvasses: then he told models to cover themselves in paint, roll on the canvas, and left the room, whilst the camera filmed them. Later on, at the gallery, he set up the canvasses, and also played the film recording of the persons rolling on the canvasses. His question to everyone was, ‘where is the art’, ‘when did it happen’? His suggestion is that we always see it, for it is always already happening in the moment; and at the same time it is always already past the moment we try to cognitise it, know it, understand it. And as a final peek at what we have been attempting to do here—read the law, whilst playing with it—perhaps it is only whilst we are grappling with it that we can out-manoeuvre it, even as it is attempting its own moves on us. We play with it, even whilst being blind to it. For, in the words of Yves Klein, “the painting is only the witness who

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saw what happened.”20

20 It was Giorgio Agamben who brought Yves Klein’s phrase to my attention at a seminar entitled Homo Sacer at the European Graduate School, August 2005, Saas Fee, Switzerland.

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The Unknown Pleasures of Interpretation: Reading the Shadows of Joy Division Reading Icons(?) I first heard Joy Division in the summer of 1978, probably June, but it could have been July; actually, it might even have been 1979, or even as late as the early summer of 1980, which would be just after the death of Ian Curtis1, and which would make a lot of sense. Anyway, it was definitely in Ireland, and I am pretty sure I heard them on a tape my friend Frank played in a car outside his house; although, if my first exposure to Joy Division was in 1979 or after, there is a good

1 Curtis committed suicide on May 18, 1980 at age 23.

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chance that it was through Dave Fanning’s2 radio show rather than a tape Frank played. The truth is that while I think I know that it was the song “She’s Lost Control” from the album Unknown Pleasures, it might have been “Interzone” from the same album, or it could even have been Dave Fanning playing the single “Love Will Tear Us Apart” since it became somewhat of a hit3 after Curtis hanged himself. I must admit, I am not exactly sure; I know I am only reading my own memories, and I want to be honest rather than construct a reading that would be really cool, a reading that would thicken the grand-narrative of Joy Division, a reading that would further polish the iconic aspect of Joy Division and Curtis.4 I am writing this piece as a reader of Joy Division, so a little about reader A (me), to assist in reader B’s (you) reading of what I am timidly 2 Dave Fanning was an RTE Radio 2 DJ starting in 1979. 3 In an underground sense, not a Beatles, Michael Jackson, Madonna, or Lady Gaga sense. 4 Here honest does not mean true as in the Real, as opposed to a reality (the difference will be explained a little later in the chapter); what is meant here is that I will attempt to guard against my reading being subjective for my own ends, to be as completely objective as possible, without preconception, even though this is no longer possible.

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proffering, might be due. In a Barthesian5 sense, I am here providing possible readings of my reading, at this moment,6 of Joy Division to myriad readers, and I want to put forth plainly that I am merely reading Joy Division and Curtis from my own perspective(s), which have no more credence than almost all other readings of Joy Division and Curtis. No matter, it is where I, as a writer, want 5 In that you the reader will have authority over the meaning of the notions expressed in this chapter; while I the writer, relinquish upon submission, and perhaps even before that, any authority over the text or iconic images that it may discuss. 6 In the same vein as Harold Pinter stated at The National Student Drama Festival in Bristol in 1962: “I’m speaking with some reluctance, knowing that there are at least twenty-four possible aspects of any single statement, depending on where you’re standing at the time or on what the weather’s like. A categorical statement, I find, will never stay where it is and be finite. It will immediately be subject to modification by the other twenty-three possibilities of it. No statement I make, therefore, should be interpreted as final and definitive. One or two of them may sound final and definitive, they may even be almost final and definitive, but I won’t regard them as such tomorrow, and I wouldn’t like you to do so today.” John Russell Brown. Theatre Language: A Study of Arden, Osborne, Pinter and Wesker, (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1972), 15 -16.

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to lead you, as a reader; although I am rather sure you will not follow. I was from New York, but my parents were born and raised in Ireland and every summer we went home. We, my extended family, never said that we were going to Ireland; we were always “going home this summer.” This division of homes, New York and Ballymahon, generated distinct multiple identities within me. In New York, to some people I was Mike, a local kid; to others, I was Mike, an Irish kid. In Ireland, to some I was “a Yank,” “a narrow-back:” child of an immigrant who does not know how to do hard labour/labor.7 To the Ward children, I was their friend Mike, who happened to live in New York from September to June. People would read who I was based on how their particular Symbolic Orders programmed them as to how to interpret other individuals. The Wards lived down the road, a typical family of the area and time: large, six boys and a girl, a small farm, and the father had a trade. The eldest 7 Not merely the spelling of words, British as opposed to American, were different between rural Ireland and suburban New York; the concepts of work, play, cool, existence, what was good music, etc., were all vastly different; in hindsight, this was an excellent situation to experience, it greatly shaped how I would read everything.

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three children, Frank, a year older than me, Jerry, my age, and Deirdre, a year younger than Jerry and I, were my Irish friends, as opposed to my New York friends, and I spent most days while in Ireland with them. Their father’s trade was automechanic and his shop was right behind their house, just outside the small town of Ballymahon in county Longford. The Wards’ yard was strewn with cars, tractors and bits of cars and tractors: it was oily and dirty and at times it resembled a junk yard. However, there was always an available car that had a working radio and cassette tape player. Most days in Ireland, after helping out in the garage with very minor tasks (for me, a young teenager at the time, tinkering around with cars and tractors was play) Frank, Jerry, Deirdre, and I would listen to music in one of these cars. This is where I think I am sure I first heard Joy Division, for it is where I heard most punk, post-punk, and alternative music for the first time. In the junior and senior high schools I attended in suburban New York, the music that was being listened to by my peers was the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, the Doors, Ted Nugent, Aerosmith, AC/DC and the core and remnants of the rock genre. Thus, to me, once back in New York, Joy Division were a distant yet very personal group: no one

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I went to school with knew of them, they were not on TV, nor played on any radio station that I was able to tune-in. There was no internet. I had no access to music magazines like the NME or Melody Maker in suburban New York to provide me with any story or image of the band other than those formed by myself from listening to their songs and from gazing at the album covers8 alone in my room, as teenagers, I surmise, often do. I did not know what any of the band members looked like: there were no pictures of the band on the albums’ covers nor on the records’ sleeves. No lyrics were included in the albums, so often I was unsure of what Curtis was singing. As it turns out, his band members9 admit that they really did not pay much attention to what Curtis was singing: “we never really talked about his lyrics, in fact we never really listened to his lyrics that much.”10 Between the summer of 1980, aged 14, and the summer of 1982 the only new data on Joy Division that I received was a poster of Paul Slattery’s 1979 photo of the band leaning over a chain-link 8 Unknown Pleasures (1979), Closer (1980), and eventually in 1981, Still. 9 Bernard Sumner (guitar), Peter Hook (bass), and Stephen Morris (drums). 10 Bernard Sumner interview: Grant Gee (director). Joy Division, (Santa Monica, CA: Genius Products, LLC, 2008).

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fence in Stockport, England. However, I could not at first put the names of the band members to the faces in the poster. It took a return trip to Ireland and seeing New Order on Top of the Pops to figure-out who was who. As I mentioned earlier, my time-line regarding these points is very hazy: I might have put the names’ and faces’ of the band members together as early as late summer 1981 or as late as the end of the summer of 1983. The only other thing about Joy Division I was relatively sure of was that they probably liked the Velvet Underground since Still contains a live recording of them covering “Sister Ray.” Therefore, during my first few years of exposure to Joy Division, the understanding of the band that I formed was almost solely from the music they made and the album artwork of Peter Seville. I knew they were from England, but not necessarily the Manchester area, which would not have really mattered since I, at that time, knew little of Manchester’s history or the punk/post-punk music scene that was developing there: I had New Order, Buzzcocks, and Magazine albums, but knew little about them apart from the music. To me, they were merely bands from England that I liked, the same as I liked the Damned, the Sex Pistols, the Cure, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the same way that I liked the U.S. bands the

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Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, and the Dead Boys. I knew that Curtis had committed suicide, but I knew none of the particulars of his life, such as that he was married, had a baby daughter, and that he had an extra-marital affair. I also knew that New Order was comprised of the other members of Joy Division plus a woman, Gillian Gilbert, but that was all I had to go on. However, I did form my own personal iconic reading of Curtis. Why? Before this “why” can be answered, I must first foreground my reading of the concept of icon. A dictionary entry defines it as “a devotional painting or carving,” or “an object of particular admiration, esp[ecially] as a representative symbol of something.”11 This most suits religious icons, but the popular culture icons of the 20th and 21st centuries’ modernised, capitalist regions follow the same process of generation. Two key terms here are “devotional” and “admiration:” the perceiver, or reader of the icon, must be a fan. Therefore, let me propose that an icon is comprised of a physical aspect (an image) and a narrative aspect. Moreover, and most importantly, there must be a gap, distance, between the 11 Della Thompson. The Oxford Compact English Dictionary, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 492.

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individual from which the icon is formed and the fan, the perceiver or reader. There cannot be a personal, intimate, relationship between the individual upon which the icon is constructed and the fan. The fan, or reader, cannot come to know the Real of the icon. Jacques Lacan has posited that the Real “stands for what is neither symbolic nor imaginary.” The Real “remains foreclosed from the analytic experience” because this experience is one of language. The Real, in being “prior to the assumption of the symbolic,” may not be known. It “may only be supposed.” The Real should “not be confused with reality, which is perfectly knowable.”12 Reality is the reader’s perception of the Real. The reality that is held by a reader is then formed not of absolutes but out of a mass of perceptions, with these perceptions being based on images and narratives which are attached to the Real. Thus, an icon is a supposition that is based on images and narratives that lead she/he to become a representative of something (coolness, rebelliousness, sexiness, successfulness, toughness, etc.) that evokes admiration or devotional feelings in the reader, the perceiver. Without the proper images and 12 Jacques Lacan. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, translated by Alan Sheridan. (London: Vintage Random House, 1998), 280.

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narratives, there can be no devotion. From this point, let us refer to the grund13 upon which the icon is situated as the image-narrative. Moreover, the image-narrative should remain relatively fixed or frozen. It is no problem for aspects to be added that reinforce or enhance the iconic position, but the icon may be tarnished or destroyed by images and/or narratives that undermine its status as a representative of something that evokes admiration or devotion: consider that Keith Richards having another blood transfusion (did he have one, or is it merely a myth in his narrative) will serve to maintain his iconic status, but that if it were to be revealed that for all of these years he was faking his wild partying image, that he never imbibed a single drop of alcohol or a single drug, then his iconic status would be tarnished if not indeed destroyed. The fixedness of the image-narrative is achieved in the maintenance of the gap between the icon and the reader. Regarding human beings, it is 13 In the strictest sense, this image-narrative is not a grund: a grund must be set, timeless, unshifting. However, here the image-narrative, arbitrary and fluid because of the narrative aspect, acts as a grund for the fan: in this case, the image-narrative is a groundless grund. I must thank Jeremy Fernando for working with me on this point.

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best if they are dead. The main Catholic icons of Jesus and Mary are set: Jesus died at thirty-three, and we do not find paintings or statues of an old, wrinkled, Mary.14 The icons of the capitalist regions of the world in the 20th and 21st centuries are mostly limited to sports figures, actors, actresses, singers, and musicians. Many of the actors, actresses, musicians, and singers died at a relatively early age: James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, John Lennon, and Kurt Cobain, for example. However, early death, or even death for that matter, is not essential for the construction of an icon; although it is very helpful. Here are two examples to consider. John Wayne is an icon of U.S. rugged masculinity; however, the Duke did not die until the age of 72. His iconic status has been preserved because even at an advanced age, in films like True Grit (1969), Rooster Cogburn (1975) and The Shootist (1976), his last film, Wayne remains a tough and undaunted hero: of course this image is constructed by the magic of Hollywood. Keith Richards, contrary to all good sense and some biological laws, is still alive. He is a living icon of 14 The doctrine related to Mary’s Assumption into Heaven leaves open the question of whether or not she suffered bodily death; however, this point is irrelevant since images of her are fixed as a relatively healthy young woman.

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the true rock and roll life style; haggard, wobbly, wizened, he continues on: the one who did not, would not die. Finally, in order for the image-narrative to reach true iconic status, in a strict sense of the term, it is necessary to have an extended group of perceivers. This assemblage of perceivers (which may be grouped according to nationality, ethnicity, religion, a shared knowledge of a Hollywood film star or sports figure, a shared taste in a particular music group or personality, etc.) must hold a similar “cultural knowledge” that “refer[s] back to [the signified]”15 upon which the icon has been built. This similar “cultural knowledge” can be held to be the narrative that is attached to the image. Although any image may have a narrative attached to it, in order to reach iconic status, the image-narrative must be generally known and must lead the readers to devotion or admiration, to being fans.16 For the adorers, the fans, of the icon, the icon is their reality. 15 Roland Barthes. Image Music Text, translated by Stephen Heath. (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 35. 16 I have an image, a picture, of my grandfather, I know the narrative that goes with that image, and I admire what he represents; however, he is not an icon: unfortunately, he has not achieved a sufficient number of fans.

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However, this reality is particular to the fans. While aspects of the Real function in the fans’ reality of the icon, these aspects are only supposed by the fans; moreover, these suppositions, functioning as reality, supersede the Real because the Real can never be known: it can only be perceived. Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych underscores this point and serves as a fine example of how the concept of the icon functions in our modernized capitalist world. Placing the black and white photographic images of Monroe next to his coloured productions of the same photographic images, Warhol offers the viewer the chance to consider similarities and differences. The contrast strikes first, but then the similarity between the two Marilyns becomes evident. The notion can be formulated that one image of Marilyn is just as contrived as the other. Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe’s Lips pushes this point even further. Reducing the portrait of the icon to “the most erotic symbol of her widely familiar features,”17 Warhol makes the point that the fan can only ever grasp a part of the worshipped figure. Warhol explains that “[i]n the early days of film, fans used to idolize a whole star – they 17 José María Faerna. Warhol: Great Modern Masters, translated by Alberto Curotto. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated, 1997), 40.

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would take one star and love everything about that star … [n]ow fans only idolize parts of the stars.”18 Warhol’s comments can be related to the commodity driven environment of the United States as he saw it: “[b]uying is much more American than thinking.”19 Warhol’s work exposed the “institutional structures of commodity capitalism”20 through “the repetition of brand-images.”21 He identified the world of “commodity capitalism” as a world operating on the worship of icons. People place their faith in an icon whether it is a statue of Jesus, or a can of Campbell’s soup. The icon is a sales advertisement. The icon can be considered to be as much of a commodity as Brillo or Campbell’s soup. The Hollywood icon was “a human brand-

18 Andy Warhol. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1977), 84 – 85. 19 Warhol. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), 229. 20 Steven Shaviro. “Warhol Before the Mirror” in Colin MacCabe, Mark Francis & Peter Wollen (eds), Who is Andy Warhol? (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 93. 21 Christopher Hitchens. “The Importance of being Andy: the ‘Warhol’s Worlds’ Keynote Lecture, 1995” in MacCabe, Who is Andy Warhol?, 5.

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image”22 presented to the consumer through fanzines, promotional clips and other forms of advertisement, and sold to the fans in the form of movies.

My Own Personal Icon Now back to the “why” of how could I, with such a limited narrative of Curtis available to me and in almost complete isolation from any other fans of Joy Division, hold him in iconic status prior to 1984.23 The answer is that I was programmed to do it. Having been raised in the world of “commodity capitalism,” I imbibed the cultural constructions, the “institutional structures,” of

22 Hitchens, “The Importance of being Andy: the ‘Warhol’s Worlds’ Keynote Lecture,” 1995, 5. 23

I entered college in September 1983; by the Spring term

of 1984 I had become friends with other fans of Joy Division, punk, post-punk, and alternative music, and I started frequenting clubs and shows, so from this point on I was imbibing the pre-constructed narratives attached to Curtis.

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the rock music Symbolic Order.24 I listened to the music of, read about, and knew about, the deaths of Hendrix, Morrison, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, and in December 1980, John Lennon. My brain was programmed to turn dead rock stars into icons. Having been formatted with the discursive formations of rock icon-dom, I did not need to be provided with much of a narrative. The knowledge of Curtis’s early death, the one image of Joy Division from the poster, the stark album covers, and the songs were enough material to raise Curtis to iconic status, albeit almost solely on a personal level. Perhaps this is the purest form of iconisation since it is derived 24

Symbolic Order in the Lacanian sense; however, Setsuko

Adachi, of Kogakuin University, and I have developed this concept into what we have termed the Identity Matrixing Model (IMM). In the IMM, individuals are programmed by the myriad Symbolic Orders they encounter. This programming encompasses not only what they perceive as truths and their processes of interpretation, but all of the discursive formations that govern their patterns of cognizant and non-cognizant organization. For detailed discussions on the IMM see: Michael Kearney & Setsuko Adachi. “Mapping Hybrid Identities: A Matrixing Model for Transculturality” in Michael Kearney, From Conflict to Recognition: Moving Multiculturalism Forward, (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2012).

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solely from the artistic creations of Joy Division: no marketing was fed to me, except maybe the poster, by business people or managers. In the circumstances relative to my particular situation prior to 1984, Curtis had escaped being commodified. Peter Seville commented in regard to Joy Division that “there are two works, Unknown Pleasures and Closer, everything else is merchandising,”25 and it is most solely from these two works that Curtis became an icon to me, not as “a human brand-image,” but rather as an artist whose art struck a chord within an isolated admiring fan. After becoming too familiar with the Beatles, Stones, Who, Kinks, Cream, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath in my early teens (I am not sure why I was drawn so much to British groups), the newer music I was exposed to through my Irish friends in my mid-teens (the late 1970s) refreshingly excited me. One of the newer (to me) bands immediately became my favourite, New York’s26 Velvet Underground (actually a mid to late sixties band). I loved the Ramones, Blondie, and the Sex Pistols, but in the haunting sounds of 25 Gee. Joy Division. 26 While John Cale, a founding member of the Velvets, is from Wales, the band was formed in New York City.

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the Welshman27 John Cale’s droning viola and his bass parts that were “illogical—inverted almost,”28 in Sterling Morrison’s frenetic guitar riffs, in the deep, rhythmic, driving of Moe Tucker’s drums, almost solely tom-toms, and in the dark content of Lou Reed’s lyrics, I found an affinity. The Velvets cinematic technique of arranging music to match the lyrical content of a song seemed to me to coincide with the styles and sensibilities of the writers in which I was most interested: James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, and William S. Burroughs. I identified the same cinematic technique when I first heard Joy Division. As I explained earlier, I am not sure which song I heard first. I might even have heard Joy Division 27 The other members of the Velvets, Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker, were from Long Island, New York, the same suburban sprawl from which I was spawned. I have purposefully not included, although I do really like her, the German chanteuse Nico, from Cologne, because she was a Warhol add-on to the Velvets and only appeared on the first album, The Velvet Underground and Nico, Verve, 1967. 28 Sterling Morrison in an interview with Victor Bockris. Victor Bockris & Gerard Malanga. Up-tight: The Story of the Velvet Underground, (London: Omnibus Press, 1996), 142.

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songs a couple of times before I took notice of them; however, I can be sure that at some point I heard them, was interested in what I heard, and procured the albums Unknown Pleasures and Closer. While in actuality it is impossible, because I am tainted with too much exposure to their music and their narrative, I will try to recount what drew me to Joy Division at that point, how I read their music, and how Curtis became a personal icon to me. Since the Real of what occurred is lost to me, I will through analysis of the song “Disorder,” the opening track of Unknown Pleasures, construct a reality based upon my reading of myself from that point in my life. “Disorder” begins with Stephen Morris’s drums for four measures. The sequence is comprised of crisp, sharp shots to the snare drum, a quick, steady, subtle ride on the hi-hat, and a double kick to the bass drum that is similar to a heartbeat. He ends these four measures with a flourish; at which point, Peter Hook’s bass enters into the composition. Morris and Hook play together for eight measures. Hook plays a bass phrase that takes four measures. The first three measures descend while the fourth measure rises; Hook plays the phrase twice; thus, forming the eight measures of drum and bass. Surrounding the

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junction of the first playing of the phrase and the second playing of the phrase, there is an electronically produced swoosh.29 After the eight measures of drum and bass, Bernard Sumner begins playing a guitar riff that sounds slightly shredded. The three instruments play eight measures together; after which point, Curtis begins singing. I will deal with Curtis’s lyrics separately; however, his voice, his style of singing, must also be regarded as an instrument. The song is structured along the following: introduction, verse, instrumental, verse, instrumental, verse, and ending. Throughout the song, the instruments sound hollow, distant, yet crisp and sharp. The song has a fast tempo; however, at the beginning, as the instruments are layered, the tempo seems to be slower than it actually is: this has the effect of drawing the listener into the music through a subtle build-up of sound. This is unique for the punk/post-punk genre at that time: consider the explosive beginnings of songs by bands such as the Sex Pistols and Ramones, which were aggressive, almost an attack on the 29 I did not know it at the time, but this was incorporated into the song by producer Martin Hannet. For details on the recording of Unknown Pleasures and Hannet’s recording techniques see: Chris Ott. 33⅓ Unknown Pleasures, (New York, Continuum, 2008).

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listener. As the song progresses, the instruments in conjunction with Curtis’s singing, grow harsher, more desperate. In the first verse, Curtis’s voice is calm, removed. The guitar solo in the first instrumental is echoey, lonely. With the second verse, Curtis’s voice has grown tenser, but it is still restrained. In the second instrumental, the guitar solo, as it progresses, grows more ripping, harsher. The final verse sees Curtis’s voice intense, almost frantic, on the edge of being frantic, but it does not hit this mode until the repeated lines that comprise the ending of the song. Here at the ending, the music accompanying Curtis’s outburst rises in a frenzied crescendo: Sumner’s guitar is strummed/struck rapidly and harshly; Hook abandons the earlier phrasing and repeats a quick bass riff; Morris thrashes the drums and cymbals in an agitated flourish. Finally, voice and instruments fade-out, and the song ends with a soft swirling swoosh of electronics. What I have just done in the preceding paragraph in regard to “Disorder,” I can do for any Joy Division song. Sitting here in Japan in 2011 listening to Unknown Pleasures and Closer and trying to look back to around 1982, I do remember becoming absorbed in the music. At times I was not exactly sure of the lines Curtis was singing, although the sentiment was, at

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least I thought, and still do think, always clear to me; however, I always had the music. It suited me: it was heavy, yet subtle, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but always powerful, urgent, and orchestrated in a cinematic manner. What caught me about the music was that it was, yes, dark, but it also had great energy. The music had great power, but the musicians were not merely pounding away at their instruments: they had control and direction. I did not know it at the time, but a substantial portion of the sound, of the texture of the songs, on Unknown Pleasures and Closer was due to Martin Hannet’s innovative production: “Martin Hannet proposed a way to understand Joy Division: he heard something, he saw something, he felt something from them and was able to project in his mind what it could be.”30 While not knowing its origins, I discerned the complicated technique utilized in meshing together the three simple instruments and the voice to produce something that as a collective transcended the norm. However, the credit for this aspect of the music cannot be given solely to Hannet. The major portion must be given to the band members (Curtis, Sumner, Hook, and Morris) because when listening to live versions

30 Peter Saville interview: Grant Gee. Joy Division.

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of the songs that comprise these two albums,31 the intricate structure of the compositions, and the blending of instrumentation and Curtis’s voicing, sans production, is evident: this meshing is also evident on the tracks of the Warsaw CD, which were recorded pre-Hannet;32 therefore, it is obvious that this orchestration was occurring during the song-writing phase, prior to the application of any studio production techniques. To a young man deeply interested in the intricate methods of literary construction exemplified in Joyce’s Ulysses, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Burroughs’s cut-up trilogy, I was enthralled with having discovered Joy Division: they seemed to me to be the musical equivalent of my favourite writers.

31 In the early 1980s live versions of Joy Division songs could be heard on Still and on the video Here are the Young Men, Factory (Fact 37) 1982; however, the best and the most extensive concert recordings, that are not bootlegged, can be found on the reissues/collector’s editions of Unknown Pleasures, Closer, and Still, London Records 90 Ltd., 2007. 32 Warsaw: Plus Bonus Tracks, (Portugal, MPG, 1995). Before becoming Joy Division, the band was called Warsaw. Bernard Sumner is listed as Bernard Albrect, and Steve Brotherdale, Stephen Morris’s predecessor, plays drums on tracks 13 – 17.

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Others obviously also saw something worthy in Joy Division’s work: Unknown Pleasures received critical acclaim when it was released; however, Sumner and Hook did not originally like the album. They thought it was, as a result of Hannet’s production, too dark, too heavy, too impenetrable: it was too subtle, not loud and fast like playing live.33 According to Sumner and Hook, they just wanted to play in a punk band like some of their heroes, icons. This makes perfect sense considering they were two working-class youths influenced by seeing the live Sex Pistols show at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester on June 4, 1976. Hook and Sumner wanted to play like Iggy Pop live: they just wanted to “lob people’s heads off [they were] not interested in depth [they] just wanted to kick ‘em in the teeth.”34 Yet, their compositions show something far beyond this. I want to reiterate that at the time, I had no knowledge of any critics’ reviews, or that Sumner and Hook were not pleased with the album: I did not get to read reviews or interviews in the NME or Melody 33 Interviews with Sumner and Hook: Grant Gee. Joy Division; also James Nice (director). Shadowplayers: Factory Records & Manchester Post-punk 1978 – 81, (Norfolk, UK: LTM Recordings, 2007). 34 Gee. Joy Division.

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Maker; I did not get to hear John Peel, and I only got to listen to Dave Fanning a couple of times a year. I only learned of Sumner’s and Hook’s original feelings regarding the production of Unknown Pleasures in 2007. In New York, before going to university, I was in complete isolation with my Joy Division albums, and a single poster. Yet something in the music drew me in, and then the lyrics hooked me. With “Disorder’s” opening line of “I’ve been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand,” Curtis communicates that he is looking for direction; not unusual at all when you consider that he most probably wrote that line between the ages of 20 and 22. However, what is more important here is the listener, the reader of that line. As a 15 year old sitting in a darkened bedroom in suburban New York, feeling somewhat isolated, feeling confused about in which direction his life should/would go, never mind the day to day turmoil of high school life as a short, skinny, border-line geek/nerd, I immediately read that Curtis was expressing the same feelings that I had. For me at the time, the next line, “[c]ould these sensations make me feel the pleasures of a normal man?” was charged with both physical and non-physical love. I wanted to have sex; I wanted to have a girlfriend, but

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relationships at that time were difficult to develop and attempts were always awkward for me: it was impossible to express how I felt because I was always unsure of how the other felt. I was probably thinking, “is this what everyone goes through or just me?” Back then I must have thought, “well obviously not only me because this guy in Joy Division is singing about what I am thinking.” The line most repeated in the song is “I’ve got the spirit, but lose the feeling.”35 The angst with which it is delivered by Curtis is particularly alluring to youth, although the sentiment it expresses is ageless. The coarseness of the world scars the individual, hardens them. They have the desire to connect with others, to attempt new experiences, but the fear of the possible pain that can ensue from connecting, from venturing into new realms, makes them reticent, leads to mental paralysis,36 to a loss of feeling. As an uncomfortable youth, sitting in my room, trying to write prose and poetry, trying to learn how to play guitar, I wanted to become like Jim Morrison, or Lou Reed, or William S. 35 When sung at the end of the first and second verse, the “but” is omitted. 36 Paralysis is a theme that runs through all of the stories in Joyce’s Dubliners, a book that I was very interested in at the time.

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Burroughs, or James Joyce, or Ian Curtis:37 I wanted to be talented and become cool. It was easy to make Curtis my own personal icon: he represented what I aspired to become. For me, his death was irrelevant in making him a personal icon: at that time, at least to me alone in my room with Unknown Pleasures and Closer, Curtis was not a commodity; he was a kindred spirit. I treated him like an icon, but I was not aware of what I was doing. It was only much later in my life, that I became aware that I had been holding Curtis in iconic status.

Ian Curtis, Icon(?) It was not until 1985, at about the age of 20, that I first saw Ian Curtis move. A friend of mine at university loaned me his copy of the video tape

37 This type of idolisation is common among young people, especially with young men in relation to music: consider the lyrics from Radiohead’s “Anyone Can Play Guitar” from the 1992 album Pablo Honey, in particular “I wanna be wanna be wanna be Jim Morrison.”

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Here Are the Young Men.38 I was unsure of what to make of his bizarre dance style: was he cool or was he just weird? If I danced like that in a club, would it be easier to pick-up girls, or would the strange gyrations make it more difficult? Then I learned he had epilepsy, so I decided the dance was cool, artistic: he was utilising his illness as a shamanistic performance piece. Among the university’s literary, music, and art crowd, Joy Division was très chic, although no one would ever have used that term: that would have been very unchic. Rather than the typical rock and roll icon, which represented wild excess that led to an early grave, Curtis became an icon that represented the tortured poet/artist, too sensitive to exist in this world: “Trying to find a clue, trying to find a way to get out! Trying to move away, had to move away and keep out.”39 Instead of dying accidentally from alcohol and/or drug use, Curtis was the deep, contemplative rock/post-punk icon who could just not take the cruel pressures of the modern world any longer, so he decided to leave it behind: for many of the fans, this was considered a much better means of death, a much 38 Released in 1982 by Factory (Fact 37), it contained live footage of the band and the video for Love Will Tear Us Apart. 39 From “Interzone,” Unknown Pleasures.

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more aesthetic death than dying by suffocating on one’s own vomit. His suicide was read by many of his fans as romantic. He was in love with two women: his wife Deborah, mother of his daughter Natalie, just over a year old when her father abandoned her by killing himself, and his lover Annik Honoré, and it tore the poor lad apart. Ian Curtis became more famous after his suicide than he was before it. An industry of merchandising sprang-up, and it is still generating new aspects to the Curtis narrative. Appropriate narratives must be generated and maintained for this industry to sustain itself. Thus, beginning with Still, we have album/CD releases of outtakes, rarities, live performances, greatest hits, remastered studio album reissues, books, movies and documentaries. Here is a list, not including the two studio albums to which Seville referred, of what I have been able to procure (legally): the CDs Warsaw: Plus Bonus Tracks, Unknown Pleasures (Collector’s Edition), Closer (Collector’s Edition), Still, Still (Collector’s Edition), The Best of Joy Division (includes Peel Sessions and Richard Skinner interview with Curtis and Morris), Joy Division: Let the Movie Begin (includes excerpts of Mick Middles’s interviews with Curtis, Sumner, Morris, Hook, Hannet, and Rob Gretton, Joy Division’s manager), Heart

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and Soul: Joy Division (the complete studio back catalogue plus previously unreleased material) and Factory Records: Communications 1978 -92 (an anthology of Factory music artists); the books Touching from a Distance, 40 Joy Division Piece by Piece: Writing about Joy Division 1977 – 2007, 41 Joy Division,42 The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club,43 and the aforementioned 33⅓ Unknown Pleasures; the movies Control44 and 24 Hour Party People,45 and the aforementioned Joy Division and Shadowplayers documentaries. As I compiled this extensive, though, I am sure, incomplete, 40 Deborah Curtis. Touching from a Distance. (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1995). Labeled as the inspiration for the film Control. 41 Paul Morley. Joy Division Piece by Piece: Writing about Joy Division 1977 – 2007. (London: Plexus, 2008). A collection of Morley’s different pieces on the band. 42 Kevin Cummins. Joy Division. (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2010). A book of photos. 43 Peter Hook. The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club. (London: Simon & Schuster, 2009). While not directly related to Joy Division, any true fan must have this. 44 Anton Corbijn (director). Control. (Santa Monica, CA: Genius Products, LLC, 2008). 45 Michael Winterbottom (director). 24 Hour Party People. (Japan: The Film Consortium/Revolution Films Limited, 2003), Japanese version.

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list, I grew ashamed at the thought that I was a collector. I have been buying, both figuratively and literally, the commodified image-narrative, the icon, of Curtis/Joy Division. However, I then rationalized my purchases: I like Joy Division, but I am not, or have not been for the past say twenty years, idolizing either Curtis or the band. Except for the original versions of Unknown Pleasures, Closer, and Still, and of course the poster, all of the other purchases were done in order to find out more about the narrative so as to be able to write this chapter. However, in doing this, have I not perpetuated the myth fuelled industry? Have I not been the consummate consumer? Honestly, the answer to these questions is no. Curtis in not an icon to me, and he has not been one since the mid to late 1980s. A major element of the myth which forms the Curtis icon is the grand-narrative of the early death of the artist. In reading Curtis, we can say that to some degree this aspect may be historically accurate. However, until he actually committed suicide, this part of his character, his interest in death, was not read by those closest to him (at least that is what the narrative communicates) as anything too unusual: it was read as a common trait among many young artists. His wife, Deborah wrote that “[t]he fact that most of Ian’s

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heroes were dead, close to death or obsessed with death was not unusual and is a common teenage fad.”46 However, two pages later she writes: When Mott the Hoople’s ‘All the Young Dudes’ hit the charts, Ian began to use the lyrics as his creed. He would choose certain songs and lyrics such as ‘Speed child, don’t wanna stay alive when you’re twenty-five’, or David Bowie’s ‘Rock and Roll Suicide’, and be carried away with the romantic magic of an early death. He idolized people like Jim Morrison who died at their peak. This was the first indication anyone had that he was becoming fascinated with the idea of not living beyond his early twenties …47 Mott the Hoople released “All the Young Dudes,” which was written by David Bowie, in July 1972, almost eight full years before Curtis’s suicide: I suppose people read things differently in hindsight, or at least in this case, more seriously. Terry Mason, Joy Division’s manager before Rob Gretton, and afterward their roadie, stated that 46 Curtis, Touching from a Distance, 5. 47 Curtis, Touching from a Distance, 7.

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“it’s only years on, when you see them [Curtis’s lyrics] wrote down, when Debbie published them, [that you think] oh my God, is that what he was singing?”48 Tony Wilson admitted to reading Curtis incorrectly: in an interview where Wilson discussed talking to Curtis’s mistress, Annik Honoré, after she expressed how worried she was about what Curtis was singing in his lyrics, he said he told her “no, no, no, don’t worry it’s just art:” regarding his own reading of Curtis, Wilson said “how fucking stupid can you get.”49 Perhaps the people closest to Curtis had difficulty reading his state because of the mood swings he suffered from after he was diagnosed with epilepsy; although it must be noted that his interest in death predates his epilepsy. There is a chance that the mood swings were interpreted as a natural part of his artistic temperament: “together with the band [he was] one of the lads, joking, having a laugh. On stage, he became a different person, possessed by some very strong power.”50 However, according to two of his friends, Curtis did communicate to them that he was struggling. Sumner revealed in an interview 48 Gee. Joy Division. 49 Gee. Joy Division. 50 Interview with Annik Honoré. Grant Gee. Joy Division.

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that “for Closer Ian felt all his words were writing themselves; [he] also felt he was in a whirlpool being pulled down, drowning.”51 Genesis P. Orridge, from Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, said that Curtis told him that he “felt he was becoming more and more shut-off from what people perceived him to be”: Orridge believes that “the actual Ian Curtis … was hurt, angry, lost, very lonely and didn’t feel that people would treat him with respect if he explained who he really was”;52 this reading by Orridge becomes very important when we consider the phrase “duel of personalities”53 and the notion of the shadow play, both of which will be discussed a little later in the chapter. It seems such a shame now that Sumner, Hook, Morris and Mason never really listened to what he was singing and that Wilson saw it as merely art. It seems that only Honoré was taking things seriously. Yes, what a shame, because when reading the lyrics a deep despondency is so clearly evident; it courses through every song: From “Insight” on Unknown Pleasures: Guess your dreams always end. They don’t rise up just descend, 51 Gee. Joy Division. 52 Gee. Joy Division. 53 A line from “Dead Souls” from the album Still.

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But I don’t care anymore, I’ve lost the will to want more, I’m not afraid not at all, I watch them all as they fall, But I remember when we were young. From “Passover” on Closer: Watching the reel as it comes to a close, Brutally taking its time, People who change for no reason at all, It’s happening all of the time. Can I go on with this train of events? Disturbing and purging my mind, Back out of my duties, when all’s said and done, I know that I’ll lose every time. … This is the crisis I knew had to come, Destroying the balance I’d kept, Turning around to the next set of lives, Wondering what will come next. Despondent may have been an understatement: driven toward death may be more accurate. In what could be viewed as a vicious type of circular logic, his impending early death may have been controlled by his own belief that an early death

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was his destiny. To this reader, the lyrics of “Shadowplay,” on Unknown Pleasures, standout as being poignant regarding this point: To the centre of the city where all roads meet, waiting for you, To the depths of the ocean where all hopes sank, searching for you, I was moving through the silence without motion, waiting for you, In a room with a window in the corner I found truth. In the shadowplay, acting out your own death, knowing no more, As the assassins all grouped in four lines, dancing on the floor. And with cold steel, odour on their bodies made a move to connect, But I could only stare in disbelief as the crowds all left. I did everything, everything I wanted to, I let them use you, for their own ends The room with the window in the corner is in the house in which Curtis and Deborah lived in Macclesfield; it is the room where Curtis did his

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writing; where he would be introspective, where I surmise that he discovered the truth about himself and his situation(s), where he discovered that he was living in multiple realties.54 From this reading we can posit that Curtis was engaged in an inner “duel of personalities” between multiple Ians: for example public Ian and private Ian, and the conflicting situations which these Ians faced. Therefore, the “I” and the “you” in “Shadowplay” can be read as referring to different Ians: for example, the “I” who did everything that he wanted is the public Ian, the Joy Division Ian; the “you,” who has been used, is the private Ian. The term “shadowplay” suggests many plausible readings, which can work singularly or in union. One could be Plato’s cave, where only the shadows are known: was Curtis intimating that reality is only our interpreting the shadows of the Real? Another is strongly connected to performance, the dramatic style of the shadow play where the audience sees only the shadows of the puppets/ actors on a screen: remember the Orridge comment that Curtis felt people’s perceptions of the actual Ian Curtis were far removed from how Curtis perceived himself. Of course, there is also the possible reading that Curtis is referring 54 Consider the line “That stretch all true realities” from “Dead Souls.”

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to the shadows of and within the mind/soul: an introspective questioning of one’s own motives, desires, etc, which could lead to the battle between inner personalities. The assassins on the dance floor and the crowd all leaving substantiate the statements made by Orridge regarding Curtis’s concerns about the possibility of being treated negatively if he did not give others, the audience in this case, what they expected. Was Curtis considering that the private Ian had to die in order for the public Ian to exist and gain acceptance? Is this to what the line “acting out your own death” is referring? Does the “knowing no more” that follows this line mean that all Curtis foresaw was his own early death? Is this the whirlpool to which Sumner referred in the statement above? Is Curtis writing about losing control over his Ians? No matter the reading, or combination of readings, what is evident is that Curtis’s thoughts are infused with his own death. I read Curtis’s lyrics, as I believe Anton Corbijn also does since he titled the movie Control, as demonstrating that Curtis believed he was losing control: epilepsy, romantic relationships, and fame are just some points to be considered. On stage, Curtis did not directly address the audience other than the usual “good evening,” “this song’s called …”; however, he did say something very

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interesting, at least I read it that way, on July 13, 1979 at a concert at the Factory in Manchester: during the drum introduction to “She’s Lost Control,” Curtis says “There are some things you’ll never understand, She’s Lost Control.”55 To me, it is clear that Curtis is didactically attacking the audience: a short brief utterance saying you people don’t get what this is about. That the song is “She’s Lost Control,” with its obvious references to an epileptic seizure, is poignant: Curtis is subtly crying-out: look at me, tortured, twisting in agony, losing control. What is the onus of this crying-out? Why would one do this? The obvious, and most probably correct, answer is that he was hoping for help, hoping for someone to reach out to him, to connect with him, to provide him with love and security that could sustain him and get him past his demons: read through his lyrics, this is a motif that runs rampant through them. But wait, if we hold on to this reading as accurate, would it not cut against the reading that Curtis wanted to die young, to establish himself as a rock icon? According to his wife’s book, Curtis’s longtime friend, Helen Atkinson Wood “was sure that the ordinary held no magic for Ian and, though he never actually said it outright, she suspected 55 Unknown Pleasures (Collector’s Edition).

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that he found the idea of dying young magic in itself and was not surprised when he carried it through.”56 This statement was obviously given after Curtis’s suicide, so we must ask, is this what she really discerned, read of Curtis, before he killed himself, or is it only hindsight in action. My reading, now at this point, on this day, at this moment of writing, is that all of these points were active components in Curtis’s mind. He was despondent, depressed, about his epilepsy, his relationships with Deborah and Honoré, the possibilities of where his career with Joy Division would lead him, with the everyday struggles of a poet in the modern world; these type of circumstances, sickness, love, career, are faced by many people, and while they all too often lead to one committing suicide, this is not an inevitable end. Yet it is vital to note that, as dark as Curtis’s lyrics are, they express struggle through difficult circumstances: struggle with the modern world, struggle with relationships, struggle with the other, which is often presented from the point of view of righteousness, and while there is struggle, there is still hope. I do not think the songs would have become as popular as they did if these elements of struggle and hope did not exist in the lyrics. Consider “The Sound of Music” from Still: 56 Curtis, Touching from a Distance, 13 – 14.

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See my true reflection, Cut off my own connections, I can see life getting harder, So sad is this sensation, Reverse the situation, I can’t see it getting better. I’ll walk you through the heartbreak, Show you all the outtakes, I can’t see it getting higher, Systematically degraded, Emotionally a scapegoat, I can’t see it getting better. Perverse and unrealistic, Try to make it all stick, I can’t see it getting better, Hollow now, I’m burned out, All I need to break out, I can’t see life getting higher, Love, life, makes you feel higher, Love of life makes you feel higher, Higher, higher, higher, higher, Higher, higher, higher, higher, Love of life, makes you feel higher. Curtis is vacillating between continuing on and ending the struggles. This inner conflict can be seen as manifesting itself in the opening verse of

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“Dead Souls” from Still: Someone take these dreams away, That point me to another day, A duel of personalities, That stretch all true realities. This battle of personalities might have been occurring between the different identities that comprised Curtis: public (Joy Division) Curtis and private Curtis; or it could have been between Curtis husband to Deborah, Curtis father to Natalie, Curtis lover of Annik, and Curtis lead singer of Joy Division; or it could have been between, what Curtis might have held as a single complete Curtis and the personalities of dead rock stars: the refrain “they keep calling me” could be read as the voices of dead rock stars calling Curtis to join them in icon-dom. This last case helps to solidify the notion that his idolisation of artists who died young helped him to rationalise his act of suicide: it was his destiny to join their ranks. On this point we can never be sure; we can only suppose, interpret, read what might have been occurring in Curtis’s mind. Perhaps it was all of the above, and perhaps Curtis was astute enough to understand that all of the above were acting upon him.

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The lyrics, the testimony from friends, the actual act of committing suicide all clearly indicate that Curtis was a deeply troubled young man, and now at the old age of 45, this is how I view Curtis: a talented, disturbed young man that threw his life away; a youth so conflicted by his own existence that he abandoned all hope and his infant daughter, Natalie (this is the father aspect of my identity that is reading Curtis’s suicide). Yet there still also lie shadow indicators that point toward Curtis’s suicide being, at least partly, motivated by his desire to become an icon, and this mythpossibility, is perpetuated by the Joy Division/ Curtis icon production industry. In 24 Hour Party People there is a scene where Curtis and Wilson are sitting in the front of a car, Wilson driving, listening to “She’s Lost Control” on cassette just after Joy Division recorded the track so that they can get the proper feel of the song. Wilson remarks that the track is Bowie-like, to which Curtis becomes upset because he considers Bowie a liar for not dying at or before the age of 25: Curtis: I hate fucking Bowie. In “All the Young Dudes,” he sings about how you should die when you’re 25. Do you know how old he is? 30, 29, he’s a liar. Wilson: Look, it doesn’t matter; a lot of

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great artists produce the best work when they’re older, you know W.B. Yeats? Curtis: I never heard of him, mate. Wilson: Yeats is the greatest poet since Dante, if he’d have died when he was 25 … Curtis: I would’ve heard of him, Tony 57 Did this conversation actually ever take place?58 The answer is irrelevant. There is enough evidence supporting the supposition that Curtis idolised dead rock stars; however, was this the major contributing factor to Curtis committing suicide? Only Curtis really knows. If it was his plan to gain iconic status by dying young; then his plan worked, but at what cost? That can only be supposed. What is of more important concern here is that from the moment of Curtis’s suicide, the wheels of human brand-imaging, of commodity capitalism, of icon building began turning. That this was done purposefully by Wilson and Factory is clear. A scene from 24 57 Winterbottom. 24 Hour Party People. 58 I doubt that it did: Curtis was rather well read, consider the allusions in his writing to Ballard, Burroughs, Huxley, etc., so I would be very surprised if he never heard of Yeats.

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Hour Party People foreshadows the construction of Curtis as an icon by displaying Wilson’s and Gretton’s understanding of the functioning of symbol and sign systems. As Wilson enters the Factory Club’s opening night, a female fan of his Granada television show, So It Goes, which had recently ended its run, accosts him in order to tell him how she thinks they can get the show back on the air, at which point Gretton enters the exchange: Gretton: He don’t want it to come back. He wants it to be gone forever, so it can become a legend. Wilson: There is a man with a grasp of semiotics. 59 Again, whether or not this exchange actually took place is not important: both Wilson and Gretton did grasp semiotics and their role in marketing. After Curtis’s death, Wilson and Gretton worked hard to ensure that Curtis’s image and the narrative of his life and suicide would be circulated so that Joy Division would remain a viable, and profitable, commodity. That this tactic has obviously worked is witnessed in the 59 Winterbottom. 24 Hour Party People.

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post-suicide position occupied by both Curtis and Joy Division: they are more famous now then when Curtis was alive, then when Joy Division was an actual active band. The Joy Division/Ian Curtis merchandising industry has been instilling within fans a quest-like desire to understand the events, emotions, and impetus that led Curtis to hanging himself while on the verge of the musical success he had craved for so many years: one must admit, it is a great story, and one that is not all that difficult to sell. Generating the market to which you will sell your goods is a common practice in the 3rd paradigm of economics:60 the marketing sector programs consumers to feel/ think/believe they must procure the goods being proffered. Marketing creates the feeling of a need within consumers and then satisfies that need; while I despise this system, I must admit that in today’s capitalistic world, it is proving to be very successful. However, perhaps Curtis’s iconic status is not a negative thing. Joy Division’s music is art, and it does have a lot to offer readers/listeners. It is surely not shallow, unlike so much of what is 60 The notion of the 3rd paradigm of economics is developed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire. (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001).

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produced by the music industry. The iconic status also ensures accessibility to new, younger, fans: my own children, Patrick aged 16 and Michael aged 13, are now fans, but that is more due to me than to Curtis, and Joy Division, being icons. If Curtis had indeed been motivated to kill himself to adhere to some twisted rock/art ethos of dying young to become, as the Gretton character in 24 Hour Party People terms the status of that which is no longer with us, a legend; then he was successful. However, reading this narrative at the age of 45, I must admit that it is saddening to contemplate the death/suicide of such a young person, and I think it is lamentable that Curtis’s suicide destroyed the chance for Ian and Natalie to experience a parent-child relationship. However, objectively, in strict terms of analyzing Curtis’s iconic status, his suicide must be read as having been successful because his act of selfnegation inscribed both the living and the dead, both Joy Division and Curtis himself, as icons. This past semester, Spring 2011, a number of my students were wearing t-shirts and carrying bags emblazoned with Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s image. However, none of the students knew anything about Guevara, they did not even know the name of this person on their shirts and bags. They bought these items because the image was

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fashionable. Guevara’s iconic status, as it is at this point in time, is a much sadder state of affairs than Curtis’s iconic status. Imagine, Guevara became an icon of Marxism, of anti-capitalism; now forty-four years after his death, he has become a brand-image. The original narrative of the icon is lost to these fans, consumers. Guevara’s case is the ultimate commodification; what an ironic twist, to go from the premier icon of anticapitalism to an empty signifier of consumer society.

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The Spirit of the Exercise: Ley-lines in Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory At its very roots the existence of language is based on people agreeing to read the same message in the given signs. However, people often glean different messages from an identical passage because the meaning conferred by words is open to interpretation. The true spirit of reading, according to Jeremy Fernando’s Reading Blindly, is to give the text the power to lead its reader down a spontaneous route of discovery, a route that can never be repeated, not even by the same reader in another sitting. In order to read, the reader must be free to respond fully to the text. In this way, we face two contradictory demands: one must read as if for the first time,

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that is, without any preconceived notions of reading or of the text, but at the same time, it is impossible to read without any prior knowledge of reading—and this makes the situation aporetic. After all, we are born into reading; reading precedes us, and much of reading relies on conventions. But it is precisely in this space that negotiation and choosing take place. Each decision, and each choice, is temporal, and each instance of reading is a new one—no two readings will be the same.1 By interacting with a text a person is given the chance to explore outside the confines of the self: it is “an encounter with an other—an other who is not the other as identified by the reader, but rather an other that remains beyond the cognition of the self. Hence, reading is a prerelational relationality, an encounter with the other without any claims to knowing who or what this other is in the first place; an unconditional relation, and a relation to no fixed object of relation.”2 And, the 1 Jeremy Fernando, Reading Blindly (Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2009), 2. 2 Fernando, Reading Blindly, 4.

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ultimate pleasure of reading is the knowledge that encounters with a single text are repeatable but unique in every repetition: “the very repetition of this process (in the realization that it is never completable) […] brings the reader pleasure, as it is precisely the gap—in the form of the fact that the reader will never be able to totalize the text into a book—that ensures that the pleasure principle is never ruptured.”3 In many ways, psychogeography is the physical application of this idea to a reading of the city where the wanderer, or flanêur, allows signs to lead him down varying paths; which may reveal the city to him in a new light. Christopher Gray explains drifting as “a sort of free association in terms of city space,” “the idea being simply to follow the streets, go down the alleys, through doors, over walls, up trees […] that one found most attractive [...] following no plan but the solicitation of the architecture that one desired unconsciously”; psychogeography is the “study and correlation of the material obtained from 3 Fernando, Reading Blindly, 64. And, it is “the attempt to fully grasp the meaning of the text—in order that words contain a totality of meaning, under a particular category of understanding—that ultimately destroys the text, that destroys the potentiality of a text” (26).

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drifting […] used on the one hand to try and work out new emotional maps of existing areas and, on the other hand, to draw up plans for bodies of “situations” to be interlocked in the new Utopian cities themselves.”4 The implications of psychogeography and reading are similar in that both rely on a certain familiarity of meaning to produce nuances of understanding, yet by its very act, both are also very subjective and personal; a profound irony lies in any attempts to capture and relate one’s experience of something that is supposedly so fluid one cannot even be sure of experiencing it in the next session. In other words, if the spirit of spontaneity lies at the core of an action, then one can, at most, promote an experience by encouraging others to repeat the action rather than attempt to tell them what the experience was. Are “pre-relationality” and the “spirit of spontaneity” the elusive ley-lines that one can hope to get a grasp of in order to find meaning in reading and drifting? Indeed, the personal involvement in both acts makes it impossible, if not futile, for any type of discussion besides the relevance and authenticity of the materials collected for an accurate repetition 4 Christopher Gray, “Essays from Leaving the Twentieth Century,” in What is Situationism? A Reader (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1996) 3-23, 8.

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of the process. The first question to this then is whether language is cut out to convey any kind of authenticity. And, the second question is what constitutes authenticity? Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory is a fine example of a text embroiled in both these issues. Sinclair’s main concern does not lie with the beauty and promotion of the English language. Rather, it focuses on the language’s efficiency as a tool for communication and the recording of meaningful experiences. This is shown in his endorsement of graffiti. Sinclair deals in signs, with graffiti as the “first true languagecontour.”5 Graffiti is a language that is symbolic, that carries the meaning of life; it is an “ecstasy of transcription” that allows us to read places. How it appears nobody can really say, when it is erased it can be quickly replaced. Due to its sparseness and ephemeral quality, reading graffiti is largely about reading absence. With its presence something is said; with its absence something else is also being said. An important role for graffiti has been to act as a voice for the powerless to attack the hypocrisies of the powerful. Because graffiti represents a volatile identity and is not 5 Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory (London: Granta Books, 1998), 48.

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easily pinned down, it offers safety in anonymity. “The public autograph is an announcement of nothingness, abdication, the swift erasure of the envelope of identity.”6 (1-2). As Sinclair says, graffiti is a “thirst for text,” but this thirst emphasises absence that is open to any kind of interpretation that the reader desires.7 But, if a voice belongs to nobody can it really be taken seriously? Graffiti is strictly speaking an “unsophisticated” language, but what Sinclair hopes to convey with it is its ability to capture meaning. Can graffiti successfully carry messages? Yes. Can it convey the same message to different readers? That is very difficult to say; hence, its beauty and irony. If this is the case, how does Sinclair himself hope to capture graffiti and its messages? And, if he attempts to interpret it for us what purpose would 6 Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory, 1-2. 7 It can be a most objective tool since anything can be said or read without authorial, grammatical or political censorship. No history and no future need interfere with the message; with graffiti everything happens in the present tense. However, is this truly possible since one is born into a language and, as Fernando suggests, reading anything in a language will always bring with it the histories that are already tied to that language.

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that serve? Surely, if we really want to understand non-text we have to see it and read it for ourselves. In Lights Out for the Territory, Sinclair seeks to perfect a documentary form with his observational note-taking through what he calls “writing on the march.” The textually exhibited article is “genuine” in the sense that it is a record of all that he perceives without prejudice—“ECO TEN HAT OEVE BELLE I OULD NO PB”8— call it a new language, read from it what you want, it is what he saw and it is what he records. Without any intention of getting entangled in philosophical debates about semiotics, Sinclair also attempts to describe in simple terms what he sees in order to convey the purity of the impulse communication that graffiti is: “Hammer and sickle imposed on star. Karatas cartoon with raised fist in universal salute. Neat black stencil on blue hoarding.”9 Unfortunately, even if the graffiti were to be captured in photographs, which Sinclair invites his friend Marc Atkins to do, what has been captured would be full of omissions; omissions that result from the photographer failing to notice or choosing not to include certain elements in his rendition.

8 Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory, 31. 9 Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory, 25.

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Of course, Sinclair admits to the occasional mistake as well which, retrospectively, must be forgiven because it is a human inadequacy where even the act of admitting to mistakes is itself a signal of honesty and goodwill: I had to copy the EOKA glyph into my notebook, so that I could have it analysed by someone more knowledgeable in the subtleties of Turkish splinter group politics. And then, looking more closely at the letters, I realised that I had got it all wrong. TOKi. The bandit penman of Hackney was a tagger. A juvenile smoker customising the word “toke.” What I had taken to be an outburst of political sloganeering was no more than the territorial flourish of a peculiarly persistent dope-freak. 10 However, as an example to the rest of his endeavours, this passage is slightly worrying on several levels. Firstly, what kind of writing allows you to mistake EOKA for TOKi? Secondly, if graffiti is more baffling than Shakespearean spelling, is it really a reliable form of signification 10 Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory, 13.

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that we want to encourage and return to? Thirdly, is the alley where we really hope to find the last authentic materials of cultural expression? And if so, who would be in the best position to decipher serious political messages from dopefuelled impulses? Sinclair clearly has enough knowledge to spot a bit of Turkish sloganeering and is experienced enough to be able to identify the work of a particular Hackney tagger, but, from the example above, does his reading of politics in conjunction with teenage ennui also suggest a very personal take on the inseparability of what are potentially diametric issues? Furthermore, if the tagger was so “persistent” in his territorial marking, how come such a well-read walker as Sinclair didn’t recognise the trademark straightaway? Is Sinclair, after all, an unreliable transcriber? Despite his own obsession and earnest attempts to textually capture and share graffiti, Sinclair is quick to castigate Richard Makin for adorning a university wall with publicised graffiti. Granted, graffiti at its core is impulsive and private, it is not something that can be commissioned and sold without losing credibility. Yet, to desire posterity and popularity for such a pervasive form of expression is not far from what Sinclair is attempting to achieve himself with his book.

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Sinclair’s disdain for Makin’s sell-out move reveals, maybe unintentionally, the shallowness of the form itself. I don’t want to make it sound as if we discussed and debated Makin’s wall for as long as the intensity of his involvement merited. A wall is as good a place to publish as anywhere else, but it’s difficult to browse. Annotation is out of question. My take on the affair was over with the nod of acknowledgement. If the poet hadn’t been around, we’d [sic] have been back in the corridor in seconds. Fine, got it, nice plot; check out the photo at home.11 Coming from someone who has spent countless hours on the ephemeral trails of graffiti, who would have us believe that random signs left by disparate taggers can be collected to reveal profound cultural messages, who has himself dedicated a whole tome to the capture and preservation of graffiti, this impatience with someone else’s commercial success reflects badly on Sinclair’s own claim to fame. The snubbing of Makin’s work contrasts greatly with his own 11 Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory, 46.

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excitement at the prospect of analysing the fourletter EOKA, and the cutting remark at the end effectively condemns his own lengthy readings. When the content of an upheld piece of work is called into question, style is often resorted to as its saving grace: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Lights Out for the Territory both sharing this reputation. Despite strong arguments to remove Huckleberry Finn from the national school curriculum for its racist portrayal of black people, Twain supporters have argued that the work is an invaluable asset to the American tradition because of its authentic language and American style. The prose of Huckleberry Finn established for written prose the virtues of American colloquial speech … It has something to do with ease and freedom in the use of language. Most of all it has to do with the structure of the sentence, which is simple, direct, and fluent, maintaining the rhythm of the wordgroups of speech and the intonations of the speaking voice … [Twain] is the master of the style that escapes the fixity

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of the printed page.12 In a similar and more recent argument about Sinclair’s rightful place in British writing, James Wood has argued that “anyone who cares about English prose cares about Iain Sinclair, a demented magus of the sentence.” So purely is he a stylist that he returns prose to a state of decadence that is to say, one can find Sinclair’s mind limited, his leftish politics babyish, his taste for pulp writing tiresome, his occultism untrue, and forgive all of this because the prose, gorgeously amoral, is stronger than the world it inhabits. It consumes the world it inhabits.13 Certainly, literature is the arena where champions for the preservation and the innovation of a language battle for their causes, but when language alone takes precedence in 12 Lionel Trilling, “The Greatness of Huckleberry Finn” (1950). Reprinted in Huck Finn Among the Critics, edited by M. Thomas Inge, 81-92. Frederick, Md: University Publications of America, 1985. 13 James Wood, “Magus of the City”, Guardian, 23 January 1997, 10:2

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a writer’s claim to literary posterity we need to cautiously weigh the other aspects of the writer’s “worthiness.” Sinclair’s interest in language is engaging and his writing style is unusual in that it tries to imitate reality, but if we allow language to dominate the discussion then we overlook the cultural spirit of his endeavour. After all, he did not trawl the alleys of London for lessons on English spelling and grammar; he chased fleeting glimpses of graffiti for cultural signs and elusive identities that no textbook in a classroom could offer. And, in order to preserve what he found, he not only wrote about his subject but also collaborated with photographers and artists to better convey this “spirit of the exercise” as he called it. Sinclair’s writing of London is meant to be the visible residue of his actual experience living and walking it. Hence, on the one hand, we can consider what it is that Sinclair’s walks and thoughts have brought to the English language; but, on the other hand, we need to examine the more “tiresome,” “babyish,” “untrue,” or “amoral” qualities that are part of his work and parcel to our own readings of the book. Lights Out for the Territory not only challenges the boundaries of writing but also the boundaries of art and culture. London is the centre around which many elements revolve, yet what is under the London that we know?

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Sinclair believes that London has become a tourist spectacle with officially marked historical features that cater to commercial consumption. As Robert Sheppard has pointed out, Sinclair’s cultural criticism rests on the principle that “the official map of the culture, at any time, would always fail to include vital features.” Thus, his own writing of a more unofficial history of London is the attempt to fill this gap.14 Sinclair’s quest begins with the idea that the only way to finding true culture is going straight to the source, finding the places where cultural operators reside; in other words mapping the less trodden paths. As Pierre Bourdieu has suggested, connections can be made between vital nodes of local or repressed cultural activity to visualise a ghostly template of an alternative culture.15 In order to capture the spirit of London, Sinclair borrows the idea of drifting but gives it a twist. He invents a technique employing “premeditated spontaneity” where, instead of wandering, he prowls the streets with clear intentions, even though at the same time he welcomes accidental occurrences that may enrich the meaning of the overall experience. 14 Robert Sheppard, Iain Sinclair (Devon: Northcote House Publishers, 2007) 17. 15 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 1993) 29-73.

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The concept of “strolling,” aimless urban wandering, the flanêur, had been superseded. We had moved into the age of the stalker; journeys made with intent—sharp-eyed and unsponsored. The stalker was our model: purposed hiking, not dawdling, nor browsing … The stalker is a stroller who sweats, a stroller who knows where he is going, but not why or how.16 Thus psychogeography is converted to schizogeography; and, instead of simply looking around for random messages, the wanderer purposefully connects vital nodes in the hopes of finding alternative perspectives on the city. Sinclair presents Stewart Home as a bona fide schizogeographer. Home lives in the “psychogeographical badlands” where poets, dole bandits, avant-garde musicians and all the Invisibles mix amidst displaced Kurdish restaurants and magnificent Eygptian cemetery gates.17 This badland is a direct reference to Huck’s Ingean Territory, a space on the margins of 16 Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory, 75. 17 Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory, 26.

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civilisation where lawlessness provides room for open-mindedness, and in the psychogeographical case, creative freedom. Home’s probing of the badlands, or “interzones” as it is also called, is Sinclair’s best example of a writer stalking the scent of creativity. The eccentricities of those catalytically mixing in the “badlands” provide Home with an endless source of stories that he manipulates and is in turn manipulated by, as Sinclair wryly commented: “he had simply to open his windows and plug in his word processor [and t]he books wrote themselves.”18 Significantly, Home’s works speak for “The Unspeakable” and his voice belongs to those living on the margins. Hence, his vision is purposely conveyed through “anti-language” writing, where anything said is not as important as the unsaid.19 Sinclair admires Home’s method of writing because it reflects his own endeavours. Home “has one client and its name is London. ‘The only character in my books is the place itself.’ He wants to drop any notion of impartiality. He’s hot to fuck the city. But he is as frustrated as one of Buñuel’s lecherous old dons, he can’t find a centre.” Like Sinclair’s own observation of London as a “sorry heart” with “fissures in the brainpain,” and his experiences 18 Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory, 216. 19 Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory, 216-218.

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ambling along London’s waterways in Downriver, Home experiences “the sharp contrasts between the variegated zones that make up the city,” which helps him realise that the hero and lover of London “undergoes psychic breakdown as the price he must pay for acting as a cipher through which various oppositional currents can pass.”20 Sinclair’s own schizogeographic explorations reveal London to be a land once conquered by Romans now reliant on Saudi oil coffers directed by “native” British bankers; the “London Stone” is a trophy of the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation; the new site of the displaced Temple of Mithras houses Sumitomo Banking. Sinclair’s writing breaks down the illusion of a centre by implying that London belongs to all. London is shown to be made up of Scottish, Irish, English, Japanese, Kurdish, Nigerian, Turkish, Pakistani, Cypriot, Italian and Greek communities and influences. London is an “inverted” centre, “a lacuna at its centre, a termite concourse for passengers in transit.”21 The London that Sinclair 20 Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory, 220. Home is an apt name for a schizogeographer — after all, the whole notion of the unhomely (unheimlich) is one of the hinges around which Freud’s notion spins. 21 Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory, 221, 309.

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sees is not the traditional British image that official sources promote, it is a fluid city inhabited by a variety of foreigners mapping out their various cultural incongruities. Sinclair brings to light the “relentless mythologizing of [the] forgotten and re-forgotten” and exposes London as a text that can be endlessly recomposed, ensuring that the city and what it stands for is forever on the move with its boundaries being forever redefined.22 London is a medium that lends itself to everything and everyone; everyone can read it differently and no matter how long you may stay there or how much you may claim to know about it, everyone is a foreigner there. Sinclair’s early conversation with his friend Jock, who is Cockney and arguably an aborigine of London, makes this clear: “We’re both foreigners here … It’ll never change, no matter how long we stick it out.”23 Ironically, Jock has lost his birth certificate and does not know his real name, but he is not interested in justifying his right to belong. This sense of “being” is the spirit of London that Sinclair seems to promote— everybody can feel at home because they are all aliens. It is the ability to hold everything and 22 Rod Mengham, ‘The Elegiac Imperative,’ The Kenyon Review 23:1 (Winter 2001) 173-177, 177. 23 Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory, 21.

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everyone, but have enough space to let each individual assert their creativity, that allows London to succeed as a good “interzone.” However, official versions of London don’t only erase the presence of its more foreign inhabitants but, more importantly, it overlooks hidden streets where the untainted spirit of a London past resides. The most crucial job for self-appointed schizogeographers like Sinclair is to ensure that these corners of the city survive, even if that past is a spectre that can only be momentarily glimpsed in the dappled sunlight of an empty park. Phil Baker has traced Sinclair’s influences to the Earth Mysteries school, with his seminal work Lud Heat (1975) carrying ideas from John Michell’s The View Over Atlantis (1969), which was influenced by Alfred Watkins’ The Old Straight Track (1925); each explaining in their own fashion their belief of a sacred geometry drawn by ancient lore that allows us to perceive ley-lines and energy alignments in the landscape. Peter Ackroyd’s works best exemplify London’s historical layering in this manner. Ackroyd relates his psychogeographical exploration of locations as a divining of “the aura possessed by a place in which energies have been discharged by intense individual experience, whose imaginary sedimentation over centuries

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has become the foundation of true historical meaning.”24 His London: The Biography presents London as the Eternal City radiating “an ‘echoic’ haunting process that controls human activity within them.”25 As artists who specialise in “notforgetting,” Sinclair similarly mines London for its “secrets,” for parts that have been forgotten and overlooked hence still retain their original essence. Ironically, “the notion of the secret has, of course, been recuperated to give guide books themselves extra frisson.”26 As a result, there has been a surge in interest for literatures of conspiracy theories and paranoid systems: “twentieth century history is revised to conform with an attempt to decode and render coherent its alleged hidden meanings to the obsessional fictions […] which attempt to reconstruct the unofficial and encrypted histories of a specific terrain.”27 While Sinclair’s documentary nonfiction lends itself to historical readings, it also 24 Rod Mengham, An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999) 3. 25 Phil Baker, “Secret City: Psychogeography and the End of London” in London from Punk to Blair (London: Reaktion Books, 2003) 323-333, 328. 26 Baker, “Secret City: Psychogeography and the End of London,” 329. 27 Mengham, An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction, 7.

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poses as an alternative to mainstream history and cultural discourse and is meant to be antimainstream and anti-status quo. What is happening with Sinclair’s reading of absence, his search for substance beyond the superficial and his rebellion against the mainstream is a condition that Jean Baudrillard has so aptly described as the state of hyperreality. Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning […] More and more information is invaded by this kind of phantom content, this homeopathic grafting, this awakening dream of communication. A circular arrangement through which one stages the desire of the audience, the antitheater of communication, which, as one knows, is never anything but the recycling in the negative of the traditional institution, the integrated circuit of the negative […] Thus not only communication but the social functions in a closed circuit, as a lure—to which the force of myth is

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attached. Belief, faith in information attach themselves to this tautological proof that the system gives of itself by doubling the signs of an unlocatable reality.28 The hyperreality of communication and of meaning is the abolition of the real by making the real more than real. In more ways than one, Lights Out for the Territory can be seen as a quest for absence: it is a book written in the name of anti-language; its search for culture unveils anticulture; its faith in spiritual pasts does not extend beyond sensations of the moment. As Sheppard’s observation so astutely points out, Sinclair’s disparaging of celebrities only makes way for his own batch of anti-celebrities, who inevitably fill in the void left by their predecessors.29 Again, Sinclair’s reading of Rachel Whiteread’s work exemplifies his own endeavours: “Her work, whose essence was its privacy, its slow-cooking, meditative acts of repetition, was stripped bare on the street: asked to explain itself, when any explanation would negate the enigmatic stillness 28 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 80-81. 29 Sheppard, Iain Sinclair, 84.

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she worked so hard to cultivate.” 30 Whiteread’s artwork belongs with the invisible church of St Mary Matfelon in Whitechapel, a removed structure from which that district took its name. An absence, a brick outline in the grass, that gave credence to the surrounding crush of business and development. The church appeared, disappeared, and reappeared in many forms, soliciting destruction … All that is left is the skeletal tracing, a psychic barrier […] The reservoirs of psychogeographical energy are identified by being resistant to the attentions of cameras and recording instruments. Only when the frame is blank can you be sure that something worth looking is there.31 Like Rachel Whiteread’s House whose guarantee to posterity resulted from the death sentence it received with its conception, like Bill Drummond whose artistic statement on money required his burning a million pounds to ashes, like Davin Jones who needed to vanish whenever his artwork 30 Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory, 224. 31 Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory, 231.

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about entropy got shown, Sinclair writes about absence with the intention of erasure. To ensure his posterity, he actually needs us to erase him— he needs to disappear from his work if only so that he can reappear in some other guise. But, the price of published fame, even when it is fame acquired in the name of obscurity, means that he undermines his own endeavour. If we were to truly honour the spirit that he seeks, we would have to forget him just so that we can stumble upon him again one day, as he did on David Rodinsky in Rodinsky’s Room. Davin Jones fuels his art by sex and alcohol in order to epitomise entropy; he knows that the creative spirit cannot be summoned thus what he produces lies in the hands of uncontrollable forces. The insincerity of Sinclair’s endeavour lies in his knowledge that—“Life was a series of rehearsals for the kind of novel that is best left unwritten”—not only because such a novel wouldn’t do life justice but more importantly it wouldn’t serve any purpose either. The purpose of life is to live it: hence, it is not possible to tell another person about the meaning of life; it is only possible to leave its impact, as you live it, on what and who may be close enough to you to react to its repercussions. Yet despite his preferences or intentions, Sinclair has secured

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a place for himself in posterity by writing about London in such a way that he will henceforth be called upon as one of the spirits of the city. In order to survive in the capitalist climate that he dislikes so much, Sinclair ultimately realises that he has to make a choice between the path taken by Stewart Home and the path taken by Richard Makin; the former to genuinely embrace and perpetuate obscurity or join the latter as a mainstreamer in “the advertising/ media/gallery/fashion nexus.”32 As Sheppard has indicated, Sinclair’s dilemma lies in the spirit of his endeavour. If Sinclair is able to negate the dominant world of the culturally validated historian and commercially successful literary hack, who and what is he going to use in replacement to justify his own version of the map? “Like all empiricism it is the slave of what is discoverable, and what Sinclair finds first are his artist-friends and immediate associates,” and through them he risks mythologising them, as well as himself, but when the connections are forced “the results are wilful, even desperate.” 33

32 Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory, 215. 33 Sheppard, Iain Sinclair, 18.

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Negotiating Isolation: A Reading of Japanese Illusions Surviving the Globalisation Force of AICS Watching BBC, CNN and/or cable TV anywhere in the world, say Ontario, Oxford, Putrajaya, Singapore or Tokyo in the first decade of the 21st century, one would notice charming and alluring invitations were made to international tourists in English from Asian nations: “India, Incredible India,” “Korea, Be Inspired,” “Malaysia Truly Asia,” “My Indonesia: Just a Smile Away,” and “Uniquely Singapore.” These catchphrases clearly reflect the national readings of how to survive and be successful politically and economically in today’s globalised world. The catchphrases show their awareness of the globalised capitalistic

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economic system that they are competing in: to achieve their goals they utilise Advanced Information and Communications Systems (AICS), which reach any of those who have access to AICS regardless of time and place in the world, to disperse information or to advertise commodities to consumers. Moreover, they are aware that the lingua franca today is English. Obviously increasing international tourism means increasing foreign income and that will stabilise their position not only domestically but also in the world: unsaid, but understood, is that inviting international tourists means transcultural exchanges and hybridisations will occur through direct human-human contact and through interpersonal exchange, which means that any regional cultural identity set holding onto identity ideology myths claiming a homogenised pure race and rejecting mutually respectful consideration for coexistence will end in failure under the globalising force of AICS. Then, at Narita Tokyo International Airport, a Japanese Tourist Bureau’s catchphrase aimed at the global market for the same purpose as any other Asian nation’s catches one’s attention:

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Yokoso! Japan.1 My colleague and research partner, Dr. Michael Kearney, quickly and sarcastically commented, “Why use yokoso? No one knows what it means; so ‘Yokoso! Japan’ could be ‘Visit! Japan,’ ‘Beautiful! Japan,’ ‘Exotic! Japan,’ ‘Exciting! Japan’ etc., but ‘Welcome! Japan’ would be strange because it would be ‘Welcome to Japan.’ Why not have both Japanese and English welcomes so that people would learn something?” Indeed, how would the non-Japanese speaking population know that yokoso is equivalent to “welcome?”2 The catchphrase is off. Japanese are not reading their targets in the world correctly; they believe the phrase is written in English and that it is 1 “Yokoso! Japan” is the catchphrase for the Visit Japan Campaign started in 2003 under Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi as the governmental promotion for global tourism. The phrase was painted on the bodies of international airplanes and ads were posted on domestic transportation (why target Japanese with it?) without any explanation of the word yokoso; however, the awareness that yokoso needs to be explained increased over the years. One witnesses ads or websites with the added explanation, “Yokoso Means Welcome” or supplementing the phrase with “Japan Welcomes You” or “Visit Japan.” 2 The comment was made on February 9, 2010.

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exotic and attractive to lure non-Japanese tourists, to bring in non-Japanese currencies. Later that the same day after arriving in Singapore, I turned the TV on in my hotel and I could not help but laugh: there it was again, a visit Japan campaign, an ad-show, a supposed infomercial, targeting Singaporeans in Japanese. These are good examples that exhibit the current failures of Japanese identities in the paradigm of globalisation. The catchphrase displays their interest in the world in economic terms: to bring in non-Japanese currencies to enrich Japan; moreover, it also reveals that the interest is somewhat a façade, making a convoluted effort to invite non-Japanese speakers in a language that the target audience, the readers of the ad, are not expected to understand. A double standard is at work: Japanese identities want to engage and benefit economically but do not want to have direct contact with non-Japanese identities: they want to exclude, foreigners, gaijin, which literary means outside people, or gaikokujin, outside countries’ people, from entering their territory; keep the nation isolated. The Japanese identity’s failure to read and adjust to on-going globalisation lies deep within the cultural psychological system that is constructed as part of Japanese identity: they believe that a

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double standard, where they interact solely to earn money and in a strict one way direction, but otherwise foster complete isolation, will secure a safe and stable state. The idea is solely to benefit Japan, screw everyone else. Japanese identities operate in this illusion, and negotiate with nonJapanese, and within themselves, to maintain the illusion. The catchphrase is a manipulation of the mind, after all yokoso is a word to welcome visitors. Between themselves the Japanese see no exclusion of non-Japanese tourists, yet there is. For the language used simply denies access to its meaning. In reality, they are extending the invitation only to those that will strike a deal with the illusion, not quite an open invitation to the global market. Furthermore, the illusion rejects non-Japanese identities, which is not compatible but rather in conflict with the AICS interlinked world where interpersonal exchanges are promoted and the respectful coexistence of diversities is becoming ever more significant. It is a critical situation for any regional cultural set, which posits itself in illusions of isolation: in order to survive, they need to make a shift to exist within the structures of coexistence. Japan is struggling in the already intertwined interrelated global platform. This chapter delineates how Japanese peripheral centrism came about, how

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it functions as a controlling, and at times selfdestructive, discursive formation in Japanese culture, and how Japanese peripheral centric readings of intercultural situations inhibit Japan from mutually respectful, benevolent coexistence with non-Japanese cultures and peoples. The chapter will cover pub-talk/communication strategies, the Japanese Constitution, which can be read as the legalisation of the Japanese illusion, kamikaze attacks as a consummation of Japanese national identity, and the confusion over Dr. Yoichiro Nambu, a US citizen who won the Nobel Prize. Hopefully, this chapter offers some insights that will increase constructive engagement for coexisting conversations.

Peripheral Centrism: Preference for Isolation Before considering the detailed readings of the troubled discourse to maintain the opportunistic isolation of Japanese identities, it is worthwhile to look at why and how people become the beings that behave in the way they do: the process of identity formation. The Identity Matrixing

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Model (IMM)3 was formed by Michael Kearney and I based upon the developed understanding that it is not one Symbolic Order4 that an individual encounters but myriad Symbolic Orders. The IMM is a theoretical model that explains identity as an ever-changing process. The encountering of the same Symbolic Order by different individuals will create shared traits in them because the cultural constructions of the Symbolic Order will be matrixed into the individuals’ identities; furthermore, the myriad combinations of different Symbolic Orders that are transmitted to individuals through the Identity Matrixing processes create diversity and

3 For further details on Identity Matrixing Model (IMM), see Kearney & Adachi, “Mapping Hybrid Identities: A Matrixing Model for Transculturality,” in From Conflict to Recognition: Moving Multiculturalism Forward. M. Kearney (Ed), (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2012). 4 Jacques Lacan postulated that human entities, after birth, encounter a Symbolic Order, which is the culturally constructed systems that transmit to the child “the language, customs, concepts, and ‘truths’ upon which identity is founded;” it is these that will be internalised and govern the engagement of the child with the world; moreover, the medium through which the discursive formations of Symbolic Orders are transmitted to individuals is language.

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differences in individuals.5 Through the Identity Matrixing process, the enculturation of interhuman relationships, the worldviews of respective Symbolic Orders, and realities and truths, are provided to individuals. Thus, the question that needs to be asked here pertains to the discursive formations that construct an illusion as a reality in Japanese identities. The perception of non-Japanese existence for Japanese identities is strongly related to the geopolitical state that historically was available for them to exist in: it locally developed a worldview that can be termed peripheral centrism.6 Peripheral centrism derived from China being the long-time regional cultural power center in relation to Japan: it is a binary 5 In the paper titled “Deconstructing the Frameworks of Identity: The Identity Matrixing Model,” Kearney and Adachi address the complexity of identity and that combinations of Symbolic Orders operate beyond the laws of spatial-temporal phenomena. Presented at the 5th Global Conference, Multiculturalism, Conflict and Belonging (MCB5), Mansfield College, Oxford University, September 2011. 6 The impetus for the concept of peripheral centrism grew out of discussions and research conducted with my colleague, Michael Kearney.

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positioning of a central-superior power, China, as opposed to a peripheral-inferior power, Japan. Japan was able to fabricate a false sense of being the center of the world because China tended to over-look Japan and/or be disinterested in it. Japan was peripheral, a rural place on the edge of the Chinese domain. The desire of the Japanese ruling powers was to maintain control over Japan. In order to secure their power, they implemented policies and educational systems that conveniently diminished and degraded anyone and anything outside of Japan. Through these, Japan was able to construct the illusion that it was the center of the world. Furthermore, this enhanced what would be a desirable relationship with the central power, China, for the peripheral, Japan: as long as Japan did not attract China’s attention, and China did not exercise power over Japan, the Japanese peripheral authorities could enjoy power and control over their territory. Thus, the peripheral centric aim was to avoid involvement with non-Japanese Symbolic Orders, with those that were not constructed by Japanese linguistic/cultural discursive formations. Linguistic divides, as well as geographical divides, were useful mediums for disconnecting with the rest of the world and they aided in devising a psychological isolation that maintained Japan’s

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peripheral centric existence. Thus, peripheral centrism is self-conclusive. It can be said that peripheral centrism is a form of diminishing coexistence; as will be explained later, it entails identities focusing on being sycophantic with the peripheral centric groups and oblivious to the rest of the world. Peripheral centrism empowers the local authorities and consolidates their rule: it is a system that prevents its members from engaging with those outside the system.

Peripheral Centric Harmony: Wa The cultural and psychological implementation of peripheral centrism, through creating disconnecting mechanisms to seclude identities into the illusion of isolation, thus undermining non-peripheral centric power, can be traced back to the Nihongi (Nihon Shoki), the Chronicles of Japan, the second oldest piece of literature on Japanese classical history, which was completed in the year 720. It records the Seventeen-Article Constitution drawn by Prince Shôtoku, the nephew of Empress Suiko, in the year 604. The constitution is “a series of precepts of social behavior which he [Prince Shôtoku] hoped his

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countrymen would follow.”7 Prince Shôtoku and his aunt, Empress Suiko, were working to build a centralised system at the time. To build a centralised system, they also introduced the official twelve-rank system in the year 603, which was a rigid hierarchical system with the Emperor/ Empress as sovereign. The key concept, and a controlling mechanism that appears in the constitution, is wa, translated as harmony or peace. However if harmony in English is “a state of peaceful existence and agreement”8 with respect to differences, such as those described more explicitly in musical terms as “the way in which different notes that are played or sung together combine to make a pleasing sound,”9 wa is not harmony because it rejects combinations of differences to constitute harmony: equality is denied in wa and the “peace” is a result of subjugated non-objection.

7 Hyman Kublin. Japan: Selected Readings, Houghton Mifflin, 1968. Found under, “Traditional History: The Constitution of Prince Shôtoku,” http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ japan/japanworkbook/traditional/shotoku.htm 8 Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). 9 Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary.

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The constitution reveals that wa is accomplished through sycophantism which keeps its members’ focus introverted and keeps them loyal to the group that they exist in. The constitution’s first article introduces wa: Harmony [wa] is to be valued, and an avoidance of wanton opposition to be honoured. … [W]hen those above are harmonious and those below are friendly, and there is concord in the discussion of business, right views of things spontaneously gain acceptance. Then what is there that cannot be accomplished!10 The third article makes it explicit that the ultimate power in this hierarchy is the Emperor/ Empress, and that what is translated as harmony really means to “harmonise” sycophantically, to enact the will of the Emperor/Empress, who is the peripheral centric embodiment of the transcendental signified:

10 “Suiko,” Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697, translated by W. G. Aston. (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1985), 129.

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When you receive the Imperial commands, fail not scrupulously to obey them. The lord is Heaven, the vassal is Earth. Heaven over spreads and Earth upbears. When this is so, the four seasons follow their due course, and the powers of Nature obtain their efficacy. If the Earth attempted to overspread, Heaven would simply fall in ruin. Therefore is it that when the lord speaks, the vassal listens; when the superior acts, the inferior yields compliance. Consequently when you receive the Imperial commands, fail not to carry them out scrupulously. Let there be a want of care in this matter, and ruin is the natural consequence.11 The tenth article makes three significant points regarding peripheral centric Japanese discursive formations. One, individuals’ opinions and issues of right or wrong do not count: what matters are giving into the “multitude,” which is the correct; the multitude is a reflection of the peripheral centric power. Two, if not in concordance with the multitude, the fault lies with the individual. Three, that if an individual has a different 11 “Suiko,” Nihongi, 129.

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opinion, it should not be made known, it should be suppressed. Let us cease from wrath, and refrain from angry looks. Nor let us be resentful when others differ from us. For all men have hearts, and each heart has its own leanings. Their right is our wrong, and our right is their wrong. We are not unquestionably sages, nor are they unquestionably fools. Both of us are simply ordinary men. How can any one lay down a rule by which to distinguish right from wrong? For we are all, one with another, wise and foolish, like a ring which has no end. Therefore, although others give way to anger, let us on the contrary dread our own faults, and though we alone may be in the right, let us follow the multitude and act like them.12 Though the word wa is not mentioned in this article, this article devised the basic psychological structure for wa. The basis for identities to develop a fear to be different and a fear to engage those that do not adhere to the wa 12 “Suiko,” Nihongi, 131.

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system is implanted. For example, Sogi (14211502), a scholar living in the Age of Civil Wars and who sought for ideal human relationships for peace, found wa as the ideal medium to construct a “sublime human relationship.”13 Sogi, commenting on a Japanese poem, said: The part that says ‘it is my fault’ teaches us the essence of the Japanese poem. No matter how bad human relationships may be, no matter how cold the world seems to you, never feel resentment toward others or the world; this is the utmost crystallization of the wa spirit. It is the wa spirit that will best mediate for the peaceful ruling of the nation and good morals.14 Sogi’s wa explanation brought forth the second point in the tenth article about when one is not in concordance with others, it automatically means the fault lies with the individual: never find fault with others or the world, but singularly blame yourself is the gist of wa when human 13 Keiji Shimauchi. Genjimonogatari monogatari. (Tokyo: Shincho, 2008), 112. In the paper, unless it is noted, the Japanese-English translations are mine. 14 Shimauchi. Genjimonogatari monogatari. 109-110.

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relationships/communications do not go well; in other words, keep yourself inferior and follow the multitude/power: right or wrong does not count and practicing individual autonomy is to be avoided. Handing all the responsibilities over to the peripheral centric multitude/power, individuals blinded themselves from seeing and reading any other that was not in concord with the multitude/power. In this wa system, everybody is subjugated into sycophantic oneness; if not in the same wa group, the other is erased from the mind and becomes what Japanese call tanin, people that have no connection to them, people that do not need to be given any consideration, they are treated as non-existent, which is the opposite of what Jeremy Fernando says as being “responsible” in Reading Blindly: In order to be responsible, one must be able to respond to the needs of the other without subsuming the other under one’s conception; in other words, the other must not merely become a reflection of one’s self. That would be merely the construction of the other in order to react to her or him: the result is a literal circle, a masturbatory circle, the self responding to itself.

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In order to have true responsibility, one must maintain the otherness of the other whilst responding. 15 Wa is a peripheral centric mechanism to erase the other and their existence from people’s minds: this peripheral centrism control functioning in peripheral centric identities can be observed from narrow levels, such as an individual, to the broad levels, such as a nation. A feature of peripheral centric identities in interpersonal relationships is that they read the other in an “acutely subjective”16 manner, “a one-way projection of the self onto the other,”17 expecting the other to hold and respect the peripheral centric wa isolation. Even though the peripheral centric wa mechanism erases the other from the peripheral centric mind, the other does exist; the peripheral centric individual pretends the other does not exist, or pretends to not to see the other: this occurs in order to keep the illusion of wa group isolation going, this situation will be seen in the next section. The problem is they expect nonperipheral centric identities to do the same. 15 Jeremy Fernando. Reading Blindly. (New York: Cambria Press, 2009), 31. 16 In a conversation with Kearney on August 15, 2011. 17 Fernando. Reading Blindly, 31.

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Peripheral Centric Communication Rules: Rubber Dolls and Nomunication The implementation of wa discursive formations produced what Yukichi Fukuzawa called “rubber dolls.” Fukuzawa was one of the most influential figures during the period of Japanese modernisation: he introduced and explained many Western concepts to the Japanese during the Meiji era. In a section called “They are like a rubber doll” he describes a typical peripheral centric identity’s communication traits: It was in the fifth year of Meiji (1872) when I was invited to visit Lord Kuki, whom I had known intimately for some time, of the clan of Sanda in Settsu. … I first went to Osaka and from there I was to travel some thirty-seven miles over to Sanda with a night’s stopover in Nashio on the way. … … After a while I began to feel the lack of someone to talk with, so I stopped a man who looked like a farmer

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and asked him the way. Probably there was something of the samurai manner in my speech and, without realizing it, I may have sounded commanding. The farmer replied very politely and left me with a respectful bow. “Well, this is interesting,” I thought. I looked at myself and saw that I was not carrying anything but an umbrella; I was very plainly dressed too. I thought I would try again, and when another wayfarer came up, I stopped him with an awful commanding voice: “I say, there! What is the name of that hamlet I see yonder? How many houses are there? Whose is the large residence with the tiled roof? Is the owner a farmer or a merchant? And what is his name?” Thus with the undisguised manner of the samurai, I put all sorts of nonsensical questions on the stranger. The poor fellow shivered at the roadside and haltingly answered, “In great awe I shall endeavor to speak to your honor …” It was so amusing, I tried again when another passerby came along, this time taking the opposite attitude.

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“Moshi, moshi,” I began. “But may I ask you something, please? …” I used the style of an Osaka merchant, and began the same nonsensical questions. I knew all the dialects of Osaka, having been born there and lived there as a student. Probably the man thought I was a merchant on the way to collect money; he eyed me haughtily and walked on his way without giving me much of an answer. So I proceeded, accosting everyone who came along. Without any allowance for their appearance, I spoke alternately, now in samurai fashion, now merchantlike. In every instance, for about seven miles on my way, I saw that people would respond according to the manner in which they were addressed—with awe or with indifference. Finally I became disgusted. I would not have cared if they were polite or arrogant so long as they behaved consistently. But here it showed that they were merely following the lead of the person speaking to them. … Even though the situation was the

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result of the unfortunate government of hundreds of years in our history, yet these poor farmers knew nothing else but to bow and make apologies to the persons accosting them. Not only that but they would grow arrogant the instant one talked to them modestly. They were exactly like a rubber doll. What hope for their future? 18 Fukuzawa’s depictions of the communication and behavior of the people in Meiji are consistent with what was formed in the seventh century. Fukuzawa is pointing out the results of wa implementation such as the inconsistencies in individual behaviour, where integrity is not an issue. The priority in cultural codes of communication is to be sycophantic to the power figure with whom one is engaging at the moment: “following the lead of the person speaking to them;” the hierarchically superior is right and the hierarchically inferior is automatically wrong, so “bow and make apologies.” Fukuzawa criticises this tendency as the result of the “fearful weight

18 Yukichi Fukuzawa. The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, translated by Eiichi Kiyooka. (New York: Columbia UP, 1966), 244-246.

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the old customs had with the people”19 of Edo’s centralised feudalism. Japan, in a romanticised way, has marked this time period as an age of peace and stability, and it is sometimes referred to as the Pax Tokugawa. The Pax Tokugawa flourished under the seclusion policy, which actualised the peripheral centric ideal of disconnecting itself from contacts with nonJapanese identities. The period served to enhance the idea of “only Japanese,” that having no contact with the non-Japanese world would bring success and peace. Fukuzawa depicted a typical communication where no effort, automatic, programmed, automaton behaviour is put into maintaining a sycophantic sameness, to diminish the other. To gauge the differences in communication systems, compare it with the following conversation taken from Flann O’Brien’s Third Policeman; a quite different inter-human communication system where the focus is on engaging the other and this is considered as, being “human” by the “I:” ‘Will you answer a straight question?’ I asked. He stirred somewhat, his lids opening slightly. 19 Fukuzawa. The Autobiography, 244.

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‘I will not,’ he replied. I saw that this answer was in keeping with Joe’s shrewd suggestion [Do you not see that every reply is in the negative? No matter what you ask him he says No.]. I sat thinking for a moment until I had thought the same thought inside out. ‘Will you refuse to answer a straight question?’ I asked. ‘I will not,’ he replied. This answer pleased me. It meant that my mind had got to grips with his, that I was now almost arguing with him and that we were behaving like two ordinary human beings. … ‘Very well,’ I said quietly, ‘Why do you always answer No?’ He stirred perceptibly in his chair and filled the teacup up again before he spoke. He seemed to have some difficulty in finding words. ‘“No” is, generally speaking, a better answer than “Yes”,’ he said at last.20

20 Flann O’Brien. The Third Policeman. (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1999), 28.

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The expectation for “ordinary human beings” is quite clearly stated here. “I” is “pleased” because “I was now almost arguing with him” meaning “I” is going to enjoy the engagement with the other, enjoy the “argument,” which wa prohibits. Fukuzawa, who worked to de-peripheral centralise the populace, ended the chapter with: At present the onetime “rubber dolls” have developed into fine enterprising citizens. … Nowadays there would not be a single one in the land who could be cowed by this Fukuzawa however much he wielded his umbrella or used the most pretentious dictions of the old samurai. That, to me, is the greatest blessing of modern civilization.21 While the “rubber doll” mentality may have diminished during the Meiji Era, it definitely resurfaced during Japan’s militaristic period: obviously because of its usefulness in controlling a society through strict hierarchical parameters. Moreover, it has become such a strong element of the Japanese Symbolic Order that even today, in the year 2011, well after the end of Japan’s 21 Fukuzawa. The Autobiography, 246.

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imperialistic period, to what would surely be a grave disappointment to Fukuzawa, “rubber doll” communication is rampant.22 One easy place to observe “rubber doll” communication in practice in today’s Japan

22 Kearney utilised his knowledge of this Japanese trait when he went to reactive his Japanese visa in early 2001. At Immigration Office A, his wife, who is Japanese, presented the necessary documents (as delineated over the phone by the immigration bureau); however, she addressed the clerk in a modest and apologetic tone, thus sending the signal that the public servant was the superior. She was told by the said clerk that not only were their documents incorrect, even with the proper documents it would take at least three months (which is outlandish). Throughout the exchange, his wife kept apologising to the man. Kearney discerned that rectifying the situation at Immigration Office A would be nearly impossible as the bureaucrats would not backpeddle and lose face. Thus, he went to Immigration Office B and addressed the clerk, who happened to be older and of a higher rank than the clerk from Office A, as a professor; affably but authoritatively. The clerk quickly perused the documents, stated that everything was in order and promised to have the visa processed as quickly as possible. And the visa, which would usually take a couple of weeks, was ready the next day.

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is at the izakaya, Japanese style bars,23 where nomunication, which is “[a] portmanteau of the Japanese word for drinking, nomu, and communication,”24 takes place. Nomunication was explained in the New York Times on March 12, 2009: The country’s business and political culture has long depended on alcohol to smooth out differences between bosses and subordinates or between parties in a negotiation, Nozaki [managing director of Alcoholics Anonymous of Japan] said. “Drinking is part of the job,” said Satoshi Miyazaki, an employee at a Tokyo advertising agency who says he accompanies his section chief to a bar most week nights. “If the boss invites you, you don’t feel comfortable saying no.” The intimacy that drinking fosters

23 Izakaya behaviour has been pointed out to the author by Kearney. 24 Jason Clenfield. “Nomunication,” New York Times. http:// schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/nomunication/ Viewed on July 24, 2011.

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between friends, clients and colleagues25 has given rise to a new word: “Nomunication,” …26 Every evening “rubber dolls” are busy at izakaya engaging in peripheral centric communicative strategies for wa. Sycophantic affirming sounds are produced so that they will be secured in the group and the group members can witness their absorption into their group world, oblivious to the other people in the bar, with the noise level becoming louder and louder without any consideration to those around them.27 The fact that it is a public space is erased from their minds; the illusion of isolation takes place 25 It should be noted that family is not listed. The importance of family is usually below any of these relationships. 26 Clenfield. “Nomunication.” 27 For cultural analysts eating out is always a good chance to observe and in Singapore it was quite interesting that Lim Lee Ching would pick out Japanese groups quite correctly from far away where you cannot make out what they are saying: he would read the behavior and the audible Japanese sounds, such as the sycophantic “hai (yes)” sound from inferiors and the dictatorial grunts of the superior. I must add that Lim, who does not speak Japanese, is very good at reproducing these tones to quite the comical effect.

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and they behave loudly and obnoxiously as if there were nobody else around: and for them, psychologically there are no other people around. Their main concern is pleasing the multitude/ power in the group. The “intimacy” between “friends, clients and colleagues” is established by forming an isolated group, which gives a sense of security. Between “rubber dolls,” or peripheral centric identities, loud and obnoxious behaviour, as if nobody was around, is actually desired and even essential: if you do not behave like this you will be in trouble with your boss. Even though this obnoxious behaviour is visible and audible, the Japanese people around will remain obtuse since they are doing the same thing. However, non-Japanese are often uncomfortable with, even shocked by, the behaviour being exhibited at the surrounding tables. To the Japanese, the people at the surrounding tables are tanin: non-existent. Peripheral centrism maintains the isolation illusion in this manner, and this is the proper way to behave in peripheral centrism. The erasing of the other to focus on a sense of security created through isolated oneness is a feature of peripheral centric identities. The isolation illusion is only possible because the peripheral centric other would collaborate in maintaining the isolation illusion. Now, Japan

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was not completely contactless with non-Japanese materials: in fact, over the years the Japanese were not reluctant to bringing “things foreign” in, but these were processed through Japanification and tuned to adhere to and serve the peripheral centric power.28 Though the central power, China and/or the rest of the coexistent others, did not share the peripheral centric isolation illusion, peripheral centrism was able to maintain the isolation illusion because historically, peripheral centrism did not face much threat from nonJapanese. The closest the Japanese came to invasion and to being conquered was by the Mongolians in 1274 and 1281, where stories say that Divine Winds, kamikaze, took care of the threat, thus leaving the Japanese with the myth that they are untouchable. This, combined with little interaction with foreign entities during the Tokugawa period led to the Japanese self-delusion that they have subtly negotiated with the rest of the world to ensure their isolation and autonomy: 28 For how Japanification functions to undermine anti-peripheral centric elements, see Setsuko Adachi, “Undermined Empathy, Undermined Coexistence: Japanese Discursive Formations Related to Empathy,” forthcoming, The Need to Belong: Perpetual Conflicts and Temporary Stability, A. Wagener & T. Rahimy (Eds). (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2012).

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that they had struck a deal to secure a peripheral centric state.

Kamikaze: Negotiation Broken Off For peripheral centrism, Japanese isolation is a one-way subjective understood right. When confrontations that invade the isolation illusion take place and force interpersonal relationships with non-Japanese, the peripheral centric focus is on the survival and propagation of the peripheral centric ideology/identities. A crucial encounter occurred in the late 19th century, through the US, with the West. Japan fortified itself from the threat of being colonised by imperialistic powers by “swallow[ing] whole the entirety of the Industrial Revolution”29 and instituted economic and social modernisation. Modelling itself after the Western powers, Japan set forth on an imperialistic movement to expand their territory and to create colonies that would adhere to their peripheral centric ideologies. However, this modernisation effort ended in 29 William Gibson. “Modern boys and mobile girls,” 4/1/2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/

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a drastic failure with Japan’s unconditional surrender at the end of the Second World War in August 1945. Toward the end of the war, it was not the enemies of Japan that were taking many of the Japanese lives but Japanese peripheral centric ideology. War is about survival, play any video game, it is about the efficiency of killing the enemy, the winner is the one that lived, that gained control over the lives of the enemy. Sacrifice is a valid fighting tactic when that sacrifice can save the lives of other people. However, toward the end of the war, when the Japanese home islands were within the reach of its enemies, Japanese slogans were preparing the Japanese for death in the final battles on the mainland (hondo kessen), pushing them toward ichioku gyokusai (honourable death of 100 million [all Japanese]). The media presented the idea that Japan’s enemies would retreat in fear and horror when they learned of all the soldiers and civilians that would choose to die an honourable death, and even if they all did die, the beautiful spirit of the Japanese race would remain forever. Rather than be captured or surrender, commit honourable death. What is seen in these discourses is that when peripheral centrism saw that the only chance for the survival of Japanese people was to surrender to Ja-

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pan’s enemies, which meant to accept and adhere to anti-peripheral centric ideas, the peripheral centric power, instead of focusing on the survival of the Japanese people, sought for the survival of the ideology, even if only in the memory of the world because Japan would be wiped away. Thus, following true on the slogans mentioned above, the peripheral centric ideology started taking the lives of its own people. The focus was on keeping the Japanese people loyal to the peripheral centric ideology, on prohibiting them from engagement with non-Japanese; within this system, it was out of the question to think of survival at the mercy of the enemy, to seek a path toward coexistence: self extermination was a preferable course. As a result, to prove you were loyal to the peripheral centric ideology, you had to die for Japan, not die in fighting for victory, but rather death instead of existing in a system other than peripheral centrism; people were programmed to accept and believe that it was shameful to remain alive. Thus, the Japanese war against the US was filled with kamikaze attacks and banzai charges, an ideology of gyokusai, suicide attack, revealing peripheral centrism would choose self-destruction rather than coexistence. Kamikaze pilots are an example of the ultimate consummation of peripheral centrism. Many

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kamikaze pilots knew the tactic was not effective enough, but they were given only enough fuel to reach the destination. Listen to the Voices from the Sea30 is a collection of writings, most of which are diaries and letters kept in private, away from public eyes, by student-soldiers, including kamikaze pilots during WWII. The collection reveals the students’ doubts about the war, the awareness of the realities of war situations, and the frustrations of being treated as disposable parts of the war machine, as disposable weapons, it also testifies that they did not raise their voice but chose to obey orders in silent subjugation: they executed kamikaze attacks to prove their loyalty to peripheral centrism. The survival of the ideology became more important than the survival of the people, which is a paradox because without people a nation cannot survive. It must be added that the peripheral centric paranoia to keep the Japanese people loyal is not without ground. The characteristics of the “rubber dolls” are that they follow the lead of that group and that inconsistencies are not that 30 Kike Wadatsumi no Koe [Listen to the Voices from the Sea: Writings of the Fallen Japanese Students]. Nihon Senbotsu Gakusei Kinen-Kai (Comp.). (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2009).

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big a problem: betrayal is not a big problem for individuals: following the powerful leader is the key for survival. In other words, reading who is the power figure to whom an individual needs to be sycophantic is crucial for survival in the peripheral centric system, and this pattern of reading is matrixed into a person programmed by the Japanese Symbolic Order. Thus, change the leader and the following happens: Schooled in the code of honor which requires suicide rather than capture, the Japanese cannot easily be taken prisoner. Even after capture under circumstances entirely beyond his control, (e.g. a pilot who has crashed, and regained consciousness only in hospital), the well-trained Japanese officer may still demand a pistol to shoot himself, though this attitude then smacks somewhat of a theatrical flourish to save face. But once beyond the reach of help and the immediate opportunity of self-destruction, a complete mental reconstruction is not uncommon. The following incident shows the typical attitude of the PW [POW] as soon as the self-destruction phase passes.

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One Japanese interrogated in Melbourne said he had no desire to return to Japan. He believed that his former friends would have nothing to do with him because he had been taken alive by the enemy and that he would be unable to get back into the army. He preferred to stay in Australia. Coupled with the comparative leniency of his captors, this conviction induces in the prisoner a pliancy unusual in PW‘s [POWs] from other nations, say, Nazi Germany. The self-justification is: “Officially, I am dead; legally, I am stateless: why not talk if I can thereby mitigate or improve my position with my captors.” In other words, his security has been more a matter of external training than of inner conviction. In an entirely new environment the traditional supports of his loyalty fall away and leave him ready to answer most questions, though he does occasionally salve his conscience by showing unwillingness to reveal matters which, in his own words, he describes as “firing a bullet at the heart of

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the Emperor.” The names of his superior officers are revealed with reluctance. The above remarks apply particularly to Japanese officers, who have been given some instruction on security. So far as the rank and file are concerned, they do not seem to realize that by talking they may be betraying their comrades. This serves to emphasize the necessity of segregating officers from other troops, as soon after capture as possible. Segregation should be arranged immediately and prisoners sent back to the next higher echelon under separate guard. Aside from officers, information has been forthcoming from straight forward interrogation. Although the Japanese soldier may prefer death to capture, yet, when captured, he has been a valuable source of information.31

31 “Japanese Prisoners of War” in Tactical and Technical Trends, No. 10, Oct. 22, 1942. Retrieved from http://www.lonesentry.com/articles/ttt08/japanese-prisoners-of-war.html. Viewed on September 10, 2010.

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Peripheral Centric Negotiation for Isolation: Japanese Constitution and the United States The Japanese defeat, which Japan calls till this day “the end of the war” and not the defeat,32 was followed by Allied occupation. The peripheral centric reaction to the “end of the war” was that Japan made a mistake of engaging non-Japanese entities. For Fukuzawa, a Meiji man, the Tokugawa period of seclusion was a backward, stagnated, and uncivilised period, and he aspired to be modernised. Once modern nation status was established, then the Meiji enthusiasm was refocused to propagate an expanded peripheral centric hierarchy, which encompassed first East and then Southeast Asia, where Japan held the apex position in relation to its neighbours in Asia, with the rest of the world being shut-out, being tanin.

32 The word choice reflects the peripheral centric tendency to reject interpersonal relationships and/or the existence of the other and keep the interpretation along the isolation logic.

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Japanese peripheral centrism never considered an “equal” co-existence with the other; in peripheral centrism, everything is always hierarchical and the idea of equality does not exist. However, the failure of peripheral centrism’s aspirations with the defeat in 1945 brought about a view that regarded the Tokugawa period as a rosy ideal period of peace and stability: remaining in seclusion, like Tokugawa, was the right behaviour for Japan; it was a huge mistake to engage non-Japanese identities. This is an opportunistic self-deceptive lie to protect the peripheral centric ideology, and it is also a marker of a national narcissistic psychology, where the consequence of the brutal imperialistic behaviour the Japanese initiated and displayed is disregarded, erased from their minds: the peoples atrocities were perpetrated against do not count because they are non-Japanese and therefore tanin. In the Post-war era, the US plays a strange role in protecting Japanese peripheral centrism. The Japanese constitution was drawn up under Allied occupation. Junior high school students in public schools are instructed to memorise a part of the preface because it is an important part for maintaining national peace. It is the part that was drafted by GHQ:

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Desiring peace for all time and fully conscious of the high ideals controlling human relationship [sic.] now stirring mankind, we have determined to rely for our security and survival upon the justice and good faith of the peace-loving peoples of the world. We desire to occupy an honored place in an international society designed and dedicated to the preservation of peace, and the banishment of tyranny and slavery, oppression and intolerance, for all time from the earth. We recognize and acknowledge that all peoples have the right to live in peace, free from fear and want.33 For the Japanese peripheral centric psychology, this is perfect: the lie was bought. It is the first time that an unsaid one-way agreement that serves to maintain a peripheral centric isolation illusion was endorsed: “we have determined to rely for our security and survival upon the justice and good faith of the peace-loving peoples of the world.” Peripheral centrism understands this as a 33 The “draft Constitution for Japanese” by GHQ, Feb 12, 1946. Retrieved from http://www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/ shiryo/03/076a_e/076a_etx.html.

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strong back-up from the US; however, the US has no idea about the opportunistic agreement that the peripheral centric Japanese mind believes it has struck with the US. They believe they have negotiated this with the US, but the US has no idea of any deal. This particular psyche reads this deal as having been “approved.” The Security Treaty between the United States and Japan was signed in September 1951. In the introduction it says: Japan has this day signed a Treaty of Peace with the Allied Powers. On the coming into force of that Treaty, Japan will not have the effective means to exercise its inherent right of selfdefense because it has been disarmed. There is danger to Japan in this situation because irresponsible militarism has not yet been driven from the world. Therefore Japan desires a Security Treaty with the United States of America to come into force simultaneously with the Treaty of Peace between the United States of America and Japan.34

34 http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/japan/bilateral_treaty. pdf

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The US provided the buffer to sustain Japanese peripheral centricity. If Japan is attacked it is the US’s responsibility to keep Japan isolated: Japan will not engage in a coexisting world order involving any militaristic internationalism. Japan wants to have nothing to do with it but needs to be safe. It is the responsibility of the US to maintain the peripheral centric isolation. Japanese peripheral centrism, through these frameworks, begins working for peace and stability the way it knows: through the double standard isolation illusion; benefit economically from the global world but avoid as much contact as possible with non-Japanese identities. Japan avoided direct contact as much as possible even when it enjoyed economic success in the 1980s. It was the products and the money that flowed on the international market, not humans. One main inhibitor, a control mechanism for the Japanese, is the preference for monolinguism built into their identity, which makes them dysfunctional in a global setting.35

35 For further discussion on Japanese monolinguism and identity see Setsuko Adachi. “A Monolinguistic Identity in Transculturality: Japanese and Foreign Languages.” Conference Proceedings for Malaysia International Conference on Foreign Language (MICFL): Languages and Construction of the Identities, (Malaysia: UPM, 2010).

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Nobel Prize Winner Dr. Yoichiro Nambu: Japanese or American To end the chapter, here is a final example, and this one is peripheral centrism being perplexed at losing control over an individual. In October 2008, The Straits Times, a Singaporean newspaper posted online, “Three Japanese Laureates or Two?” WHEN the three winners of this year’s Nobel Prize for physics were announced on Tuesday evening, the Japanese media went wild with excitement. “Three Japanese have won”, screamed the Japanese headlines, blithely ignoring the fact that one of the three men—Yoichiro Nambu—holds American nationality. Even those Japanese newspapers and TV networks that cared to point out that Nambu had acquired US citizenship long ago, continued to regard him as “Japanese” in their

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headlines and reports. However, foreign news media were careful to note that Nambu is a “Japanborn, American” physicist. Their headlines said: “Two Japanese, One American win Nobels”. … The influential Asahi Shimbun daily is so far the only major newspaper to have brought up this issue of whether it is correct to regard Nambu as Japanese. In an article posted on its website, the Asahi quoted a government official as saying however that it would not be right not to add Nambu’s prize to Japan’s Nobel tally. … Curiously, the Japanese media sometimes “disowns” a Japanese even when he or she holds Japanese citizenship.

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A case in point is former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, who never gave up his Japanese nationality. One wonders how the government and the media would have treated Fujimori had he turned out to be a great statesman, instead of the diplomatic embarrassment that he has become.36 Clearly there is a strong peripheral centric desire to claim and “own” Nambu as a Japanese so that he and his achievement can boost the sense of national ego, to fortify the national achievement in the global community, even going so far as ignoring the fact that he is not a Japanese national (in Fujimori’s case Japan “disowned” its national when it did not benefit the Japanese in the global community). Nambu chose to become a US citizen in 1970 and adhered to the Japanese Constitution‘s Article 14, which requires that Japanese renounce other nationalities by the age of 22 if they wish to keep Japanese citizenship. That Japanese peripheral centric desire to retrieve Nambu is quite strong is evident, for this case activated in Japan the discussion for multiple 36 Kwan Weng Kin. “Three Japanese Laureates or Two?,” The Straits Times, October 10, 2008. http://blogs.straitstimes.com/2008/10/10/three-japanese-laureates-or-two

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nationalities in order to keep Japan from losing a “good” Japanese like Nambu to the non-Japanese world.37 The reason Nambu obtained US citizenship was, according to an interview,38 because he wanted to be involved in the US community, and also because he felt uneasy at being an alien (one can read from the interview that Nambu means being an Asian alien, during the Vietnam War era): this demonstrates that Japan‘s discursive formation of peripheral centrism no longer had a strong grasp upon Nambu, for if it did, he would have done as most other Japanese nationals living in the US at the time did: do their work, but remain generally isolated from the US community surrounding them: in other words, ignore the US community just as you would ignore the next table at an izakaya. Nambu is a case where an identity shifted from the peripheral centric concept of nationality to pro-coexistence. It is a case where the strong 37 Minoru Matsutani. “Debate on Multiple Nationalities to Heat Up,” Japan Times, January 1, 2009. http://search. japantimes.co.jp/print/nn20090101a1.html 38 Interview of Dr. Yoichiro Nambu by Babak Ashrafi on July 16, 2004. Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA, www.aip.org/ history/ohilist/LINK

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empowering method of the peripheral centric system failed and the mechanism for containing identity in an isolated illusion did not work. It indicates that the attempts to disconnect its members from the rest of the world do not work when individuals are connected to the nonperipheral centric world. In the AICS interlinked world, Japanese peripheral centric identities are doomed; they need to shift from living in the illusion of isolation and the negation of the other, toward accepting diversity and enhancing communication between themselves and the other, to move toward respectful coexistence.

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Reading Chinese Women in Two Maoist China Ballets Chinese women should not be criticized for not finding that they need what Western feminists think they ought to need or for not getting what they haven’t asked for. It is of interest, however, if Chinese women neither ask for nor crave the liberties which we feel in their places we would. — Judith Stacey1

1 Judith Stacey, “When Patriarchy Kowtows: The significance of the Chinese Family Revolution for Feminist Theory,” Feminist Studies, 2: 2/3 (1975): 102, my emphasis.

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The most innocent of dances would thwart the assignation à residence [if only to] escape those residences under surveillance; the dance changes place and above all changes places. In its wake they can no longer be recognized. — Jacques Derrida2

Prologue If reading can no longer be understood as an act, but an encounter with an unconditional relation around which this collection of essays is gathered, can it be a dance? What kind of dance would such a reading be? Or rather, where would such a dance take place, if it takes place at all?

Act I. Beginnings In 1964 and 1965, two new ballets, Red Detachment of Women and The White-Haired Girl premiered in China, respectively. Together with 2 Jacques, Derrida and Christie V. McDonald, “Interview: Choreographies: Jacques Derrida and Christie V. McDonald,” Diacritics, 12, 2, (1982): 69.

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five modernized Peking operas and a symphony, the two ballets would, as “the eight model plays,” be the only stage works approved for performance during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.3 The impetus for conceiving a Communist-themed ballet came from Zhou Enlai, who after attending the Beijing Ballet School’s performance of Notre-Dame of Paris, supposedly commented to its choreographer that, surely, they could not dance the roles of princes and fairies forever.4 He continued to explain: But of course, ballet is a foreign artistic formation that would be too difficult to completely nationalize from the outset. Could you first revolutionize the subject-matter, and then transition to a nationalized ballet? [For instance], first choreograph a foreign revolutionarythemed ballet that reflects the Paris Commune, or the October revolution.5

3 Daniel S. P. Yang, “Censorship: 8 Model Works.” The Drama Review: TDR, 15, 2: Theater in Asia (Spri ng 1971): 259. 4 Zhong Yao’yun, “Behind the ‘Three Reds’: Zhou Enlai and Lin Mohan,” Tongzhou Gongjin 3 (2008): 43. 5 Zhang, “Behind the ‘Three Reds”: 43.

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Zhou’s bold proposal set the principals of the Beijing Ballet School and the Central Music School, as well as other dancers and intellectual figures immediately to work. However instead of skirting around the more difficult task of nationalizing ballet as Zhou had suggested, the discussants decided that since they were unfamiliar with foreign countries, they might as well be bold and create a piece based on modern China. Zhang Mohan, an important literary critic and government official in culture and the arts, recommended the true story of an all-female Special Company of the Chinese Red Army, on which a popular film was already based, as a suitable material to be adapted for a ballet. 6 A year later when Zhou sat in for the dress rehearsal for the new ballet, Red Detachment of Women, he was moved to tears. “To think that I am more conservative than you all in thinking that we cannot immediately have a nationalized ballet.”7 Zhou’s emotions were understandable. For, since the establishment of Beijing Dance School in 1954 under his patronage, the growing company had invited six renowned Soviet balletomanes and had 6 Zhang, “Behind the ‘Three Reds”: 43. 7 Zhang, “Behind the ‘Three Reds”: 43.

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successfully staged numerous European classics.8 It was an accomplishment for a young Chinese ballet company to perform Swan Lake or Giselle; to execute a Maoist-themed ballet like Red Detachment of Women, on the other hand, could only be revolutionary in every sense of the word.9 The redirection of ballet in new China away from traditional princes and fairies did not end with Red Detachment of Women. A conflict between Zhou Yang, former Vice-Minister of Culture, and Jiang Qing, Mao’s third wife, precipitated in the 1965 production The White-Haired Girl. Zhou Yang, who prior to the Cultural Revolution was responsible for much of arts censorship, was attacked in the later years of the movement. He was accused of openly lauding certain periods of Western classical literature and art, and trying to restore capitalism in China through capitalist works of art and literature such as the Russian ballet classic Swan Lake.10 Unlike Zhou Enlai who also initially supported the Beijing Dance School’s classical repertoire, Zhou Yang was 8 Zhang, “Behind the ‘Three Reds”: 43. 9 Zhang, “Behind the ‘Three Reds”: 43. 10 Daniel S. P. Yang, “Censorship: 8 Model Works,” The Drama Review: TDR, Vol 15, No. 2, Theater in Asia (Spring 1971): 259.

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more unfortunate in that his involvement in the Shanghai School of Dance came up against Jiang, who was trying to launch revolutionary modern ballets such as The White-Haired Girl in the same school. During the years of 1963-1965, the proZhou and pro-Jiang camps fought for what they thought of as genuine proletarian literature and art.11 Chiang won, and from 1966 onwards, she personally spearheaded the creation and revision of the eight model plays.12 At the height of the Cultural Revolution, both ballets were popular in their filmed versions. Red Detachment of Women became known in Western countries after it was performed for U.S. President Richard Nixon during his 1972 visit to China. Zhou Enlai, Zhang Mohan, Zhou Yang and Jiang Qing—none of them were enthusiastic ballet lovers and patrons in the conventional sense. But in the turbulent years leading up to the Cultural Revolution, they found themselves directing their political energies toward redefining a strict art form very much rooted in the Romantic tradition. This essay does not aim to judge if Red Detachment of Women and The White-Haired Girl achieved Mao’s call for art and literature 11 Yang, “Censorship: 8 Model Works”: 259. 12 Yang, “Censorship: 8 Model Works”: 261.

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to be a “component of the whole revolutionary machine,” delivered at his landmark address at the Yenan Forum in 1942,13 or if the Cultural Revolution eventually butchered any potential of revolutionary art altogether. The larger question of Maoist cultural politics of the period demands another reading on another occasion. Since I am only here attempting to understand reading— and writing—as dance, allow me to remain with the historicity of its figures, by which I am not referring to the historical figures of the Cultural Revolution discussed so far, but the figures who were, literally, on the dance stage. I am referring to dancers whose historicity comes from their being called to change places with “princes and fairies,” whose places, to evoke the epigraph from Derrida, can no longer be recognized in dance’s wake. For the real challenge, I would argue, to “nationalize” the Western ballet on the eve of the Cultural Revolution is to redefine the “women question” so central to twentieth-century Chinese politics since the May Fourth movement. If recent dance criticism has questioned dance’s construction of gender hierarchies and structures

13 Mao Zedong, Art and Literature (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 1960), 76.

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of power,14 what kind of women do Qinghua and Xi’er, principle characters in Red Detachment of Women and The White-Haired Girl respectively, play? Through what kind of cultural translation, or indeed, revolution, did fist-clenching proletarian heroines in army fatigues come to take the place of tutu-wearing queens, princesses and sylphs? In the following Acts,15 I propose reading as dance, which is not the same as reading a text like a dance. The difference to me spells the difficult task of a properly materialist dialectical mode of thinking. Here, Alain Badiou’s thinking of materialist dialectics according to structure and tendency, or place and force, and Bruno Bosteels’ patient analysis of it, are fitting for my purposes. 14 See Christy Adair, Women and Dance: Sylphs and Sirens (New York: New York University Press, 1992); Sally Banes, Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Helen Thomas, Dance, Gender and Culture, ed (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993) 15 I use the word act here in mimicry of the different Acts in theatre and dance, but my usage also echoes Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Literature, for whom the question of reading has always been central to his thinking.

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This is not because dialectics is an apt “metaphor” for thinking about the politically charged Maoist ballets. The interchanging of places and forces in dance—can we think of any movement without it?—makes literal any attempt at understanding reading as a figuratively dialectical act.16 Reading, then, has always already been about the logic of places, that is, the putting of one term in the place of an unlikely and perhaps even unthinkable other that constitutes the very possibility of structure, and the logic of forces insofar as every assigned place is constantly transforming as a result of inner splits, breaks and changes.17 With this dual logic of places and forces in mind, I approach Red Detachment of Women and The White-Haired Girl to show how the diegesis of 16 In Politics of Friendship, Derrida unravels the false distinction between the literal sense of a word, in his case, fraternity, and its figurative sense. He calls the mechanism by which the strict sense of friendship, that of the “nature, virile brother” always adds something “more” to the literal sense, thus exposing the figurative sense to be the same as the literal “hyperbolization” or “hyperbolic build-up.” Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, translated by George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 62. 17 Alain Badiou, Théorie de la contradiction (Theory of Contradiction) (Paris: Maspero 1975), 72-80.

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the storyline characterize the female protagonists as individualistic figures who must be subsumed under the greater patriarchy of the party and the state on one hand, and how the fluidity of the dance gives them the force to suspend such assigned roles on the other. Not unlike Althusser’s structural analysis of the interpellation of individuals in a system, the two ballets’ ideological aspect displaces traditional Western femininity onto a Chinese revolutionary model. However, the changing of places only refers to a limited mobility within a closed system.18 In other words, Zhou’s call for a “nationalization” of “princes and fairies” as discussed earlier results in an overemphasis of the structural logic of the place of Chinese women in Chinese society. Supplementing this logic is what Badiou detects in Deleuze’s Marxist dialectics: unlike Althusser’s emphasis on structure, Deleuze and his following of “anarcho-desirers” stress the thinking of tendencies and differentials.19 This focus on the logic of forces would sidestep the structural place of the new Chinese women in favor of rupture, transformation, and pure becoming. I recast this dual logic of places and forces in the ways 18 Badiou, Theorie de la contradiction, 71. 19 Bruno Bosteels, “Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics,” positions: east asia cultures critique, 13 (3), (Winter 2005): 588.

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of reading dance itself: how are we to read the “story” of Red Detachment of Women and The White-Haired Girl in its ideological production of the new Chinese women structurally while, at the same time, paying attention to the “discourse” of the dance in its movement of pure becoming, in order to understand women as an affirmative force? Place and force, force and place, how are we to reconcile such a split correlation without, in Bosteels’ words, “allowing either side of the articulation to deviate and lapse back into a unilateral hypostasis?”20 The philosophical language of materialist dialectics has always moved with this double logic of places and forces—one can think of Hegel, especially the Hegel of The Science of Logic, as a skilled dancer. It is simply that the physical expression of dance allows us to read it more directly. Rather than calling this definition of reading embodied, I prefer to ask if there can be reading at all without bodies in motion. One does not apply reading to dance, or vice versa. One has to mobilize reading in and as movement.

20 Bosteels, “Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics”: 588

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Act II. Places and Forces Red Detachment of Women and The WhiteHaired Girl replace the classical ballet story of individual romance with the revolutionary socialist subject of women as funü . As Tani E. Barlow points out, the Chinese term funü under Communist rule is a feminist category for state mobilization and normative class liberation.21 While Republican era (1911-1949) feminism was concerned with a progressive, eugenicist mode in order to understand women as individual sexual agents in the struggle for social standing, women in the “communist state matrix” was a “normative entity defined in communitarian social practice.”22 The task for the Chinese Communist Party was to develop the inherent human potential of the masses of underrepresented and disenfranchised laboring women who could then represent the new collectivity of funü.23 In the context of the

21 Tani E. Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 191. 22 Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism, 191. 23 Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism, 191.

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two ballets, funü further takes on the proletarian spirit of militancy that legitimates the Party’s political authority. In a 1967 speech to the Peking Opera Company, Jiang’s demand for “the transformation of education, literature, and art and all other parts of the superstructure not in accordance with the socialist economic base” exemplifies the “proletarian spirit” of “militancy.”24 Given the increasingly dominant role of the People’s Liberation Army in Chinese politics from 1960 on, and the high pedagogical value placed on learning from the PLA campaigns, the extreme infiltration of the army rather than the party was unprecedented in the history of the world Communist movement.25 Ballet, as a movement-based art with a highly disciplined physical training, suitably demonstrates the physical and mental demands of a militantrevolutionary education. However, as I propose below, individual militancy is not acceptable and must be re-mustered for the greater aims of the revolution. 24 Margaret Chan, “Negotiating Artistic Spaces: Beijing Opera and the Cultural Revolution in China” in Right to Dance,Dancing for Rights, edited by Naomi M. Jackson (Banff: Banff Centre Press, 2004), 104. 25 Chan, “Negotiating Artistic Spaces: Beijing Opera and the Cultural Revolution in China,” 105.

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Here I turn to Marxist-Feminist scholarship, which foregrounds the relative autonomy of the sex-gender relation in the Marxist study of relations of production to explain my point. According to Barlow, “U.S., Japanese and European historiography ... used to assume that Marxism in China and Maoism were ideologically incompatible with what critics termed Western or bourgeois feminism in the 1940s,” but later Western scholarship and the history of Chinese feminism itself have demonstrated otherwise.26 Judith Stacey’s 1983 work, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China is a prime case in point. Her study offers “a historical interpretation of processes of family and transformation that focus on a patriarchal sex-gender system as it shaped and was shaped by revolutionary China.”27 Like her earlier article “When Patriarchy Kowtows: the Significance of the Chinese Family Revolution for Feminist Theory,” the book examines how the contradictions of the Confucian Patriarchal order contributes to its breakdown on the one hand, and how that very form of contradiction halts the development of a family revolution under 26 Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism, 195. 27 Judith Stacey. Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China. (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1983),12.

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Communist rule on the other. Stacey uses the term “patriarchal-socialism” to describe the nature of the Communist regime’s “new democratic patriarchal alliance” with the peasantry.28 Further, she also refers to this democratization and socialization of patriarchal family life in rural China to as a kind of “public patriarchy.”29 The latter is elaborated in “the metaphorical sense” to refer to an important aspect of authority under patriarchal-socialism “rather than to designate yet a new sex-gender system,” since public patriarchy merely introduces a state-centered sex-gender system into the patriarchal-socialist accommodation.30 Stacey criticizes public patriarchy under Communist China for paying lip service to the relative autonomy of gender relationships from those of production. Ultimately, a state-centered sex-gender system, insofar as it emphasizes productive power at the expense of sex relations and identifies any sexual desire as anti-socialist, fails to liberate women.31 Through a detailed historical analysis of agrarian collectivist reforms 28 Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution, 203. 29 Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution, 227. 30 Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution, 227. 31 Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution, 230.

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during the years of the Great Leap Forward, Patriarchy and the Socialist Revolution concludes that the former has a negative legacy on the peasant family structure: Cooperatives were formed around male lineage links in ‘natural’ neighborhoods, hamlets, and villages. Families joined as units and earned work points, which were paid to their patriarchal heads. Collectivization represented a further democratization of patriarchal authority in the countryside.32 In “When Patriarchy Kowtows,” Stacey attributes part of Communist China’s failure to consolidate a truly revolutionary feminist movement to the Maoist conception of social contradictions that by focusing only on antagonistic contradictions between people of different classes, overlooks how there can be antagonistic contradiction between the sexes of a similar class.33 According to Stacey, the irreconciliation between sex antagonism and class solidarity remains an obstacle for the Chinese Communist Party, since it was also during the time of the Cultural Revolution that 32 Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution, 253. 33 Stacey, “When Patriarchy Kowtows,” 102.

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the official Women’s Movement was disbanded.34 “It was exactly because women were organized as women that their revolutionary commitment was called into question.”35 I argue that Red Detachment of Women and The White-Haired Girl take this conundrum further by staging the problem of what happens when a woman, in the singular, is not yet ready to be “organized as women” in its plural form. Red Detachment of Women is set in the Second Revolutionary Civil War Period (1927-1937), on Hainan Island.36 The story begins with the enslavement of its protagonist, Wu Qinghua, daughter of a poor peasant, by the Tyrant of the South. Her memorable first solo while under captive is punctured by a slow développé en avant, where the right leg is extended high in front of her slightly inclined body before it balances en 34 Stacey, “When Patriarchy Kowtows,” 79. 35 Stacey, “When Patriarchy Kowtows,” 80. 36 China Ballet Troop, Red Detachment of Women—A Modern Revolutionary Ballet (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972), 1. I follow this script for my description of the scenes. The filmed ballet is also available, in ten parts, for viewing on Youtube.com. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=7DX9eIxW8lU (Accessed Sept 1, 2012). When describing specific movements, I will give the time of the clip.

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pointe and is joined by the left leg (5:24). But instead of finishing the développé with a classical relevé and arms in fifth position overhead, she has one arm in front and one at the back in a clenched-fist position. While the militant style in defiance of the softness of classical port de bras is consistent throughout the choreography, I argue that this specific développé en avant emphasizes Qinghua’s individualism by exaggerating her leg extension, as if to extend herself with part of her body. As we shall see, in scenes where she is showing her allegiance to the Red Army, she goes en pointe without the signature développé, or high extension of the right leg. Escaping from cruel beatings and maltreatments at the Tyrant’s house, Qinghua meets revolutionary Hong Changqing and his comrade, who welcome her to the rural base of the Red Guard. Scene Two opens with a vigorous singing of the “March of the Women’s Company.”37 This scene emphasizes the equality between soldiers and citizens, men, women and child, and brings out the militant but compassionate nature of its community. A women’s sword dance is followed by a men’s dagger dance before the entire corps 37 China Ballet Troop, Red Detachment of Women—A Modern Revolutionary Ballet, 16.

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de ballet introduces Qinghua’s embrace of the red flag. Her quick steps, or courus, diagonally across the stage toward the red flag is significant, given how the diagonal crossing is most familiarly associated with lovers in classical ballet crossing the stage to meet each other in a pas de deux. Instead, Qinghua moves toward the material symbol of Maoist China, and her diagonal line symbolizes her entry to this new, utopian society, and more specifically, her desire to join the women soldiers in their new uniforms and the red star on their caps.38 She is no less technically virtuous in this second scene, but lacking is her clear pathos from the first. Even as she recalls the mistreatments she has received under the Tyrant’s oppression with forceful back kicks and jétes, we do not see the développé en avant that accompanies her earlier solo. At this point of the dance, banners appear on stage with sloganlike phrases, which tell the audience that Hong and the Company Commander are planning to infiltrate the Manor during the Tyrant’s birthday celebration. Even though the entire ballet consists of six fairly lengthy Acts, Act III is most significant as a 38 China Ballet Troop, Red Detachment of Women—A Modern Revolutionary Ballet, 22.

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turning point of the storyline. After successfully sneaking into the Tyrant’s manor with the Red Army, Qinghua watches the Tyrant’s men savagely beat up another bondmaid, and “charges out to save her suffering class sister.”39 In this scene, Qinghua’s pas de chat and attitude basse resemble the steps that she previously executes in her escape from the Manor. Starting out with perfectly turned-out grand jetés, the ballerina’s usual softly-held wrists give way to fists. At one point, the striking développé en avant appears again, much quicker than it did during her first solo, and ends in an attitude derrière en pointe (with one leg standing, the working leg extends backwards) (7:47). In my reading, this scene’s technical aspects are similar to the first, and diverges from the Second Scene where Qinghua is introduced to the women’s army. While in the First Scene, her slow, exaggerated extension demonstrates her revolutionary nature to escape feudal domination; here the same move becomes a disruption in the well-conceived plan. “At the sight of the Tyrant, Qinghua’s whole being cries out for vengeance. She has only one thought: ‘Kill the Tyrants of the South! Get revenge!

39 China Ballet Troop, Red Detachment of Women—A Modern Revolutionary Ballet, 29.

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Revenge!’”40 Because of Qinghua’s uncontrollable rage—and not just any rage, but revenge— she prematurely gives the signal for her other comrades to surround the Manor, which results in the Tyrant’s escape. Qinghua is reprimanded for a “breach of discipline.”41 Subsequently, the next scene opens with Hong conducting a political class for the women soldiers. Fittingly, one of the goals of the proletarian revolution, written on the blackboard in bold Chinese characters, says: “Revolution is not simply a matter of personal vengeance. Its aim is the emancipation of all mankind.”42 In this context of women’s education, Qinghua performs several attitudes holding her arm high up with closed fists, but her legs are kept low and controlled without the high extensions that I have highlighted in the First and Third Scenes. As a result of her reeducation, her steps are now steadfast, and also more subdued as if to communicate the very process of humble reflection. “’In the whole world is there any proletarian who hasn’t been steeped in blood 40 China Ballet Troop, Red Detachment of Women—A Modern Revolutionary Ballet, 30. 41 China Ballet Troop, Red Detachment of Women—A Modern Revolutionary Ballet, 35. 42 China Ballet Troop, Red Detachment of Women—A Modern Revolutionary Ballet, 39.

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and tears? Why do I think only of vengeance for myself?”43 Part “political maturation,” part imposition on what was her “natural,” untrained instinct, this scene reinterprets woman’s “consciousnessraising.” On the level of the ballet’s narration, this scene also marks the significant transformation of Qinghua as an enslaved bondmaid to a freed woman, that is, freed from her individualistic desire for self-vengeance. Insofar as the element of the ballerina’s transformation is central in classical ballet repertoires such as Swan Lake, Giselle, Les Sylphides, and The Nutcracker, Qinghua’s transformation is a “detachment” in two literal senses. First, as a detachment from the bourgeois ideology of land-ownership and slavery, and secondly, as a detachment from the ideology of individualism that is still considered too bourgeois and not proletarian enough. I argue that theater and dance enact this problem of individuality at their very core. For, how to distinguish the principal dancer from his or her fellow artistes without idealizing him or her beyond what must be ordinary men and women 43 China Ballet Troop, Red Detachment of Women—A Modern Revolutionary Ballet, 40.

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of the proletarian revolution?44 How does the principal dancer stand out just enough without alienating his or her art from the masses? Hence, although Qinghua is always foregrounded as the principal dancer, such foregrounding weakens after her reeducation. The second to last scene that opens with the Company’s unsuccessful attempt to find the escaped Tyrant subsumes her advanced ballet technique under Hong’s “masculine” sacrifice. Choosing to die rather than to write a “recantation” of total defeat at the hands of the Tyrant, this scene contrasts with the earlier scene of Qinghua’s breach of discipline. Despite how Hong’s sacrifice clearly isolates him as a martyr, his death, once elevated to the greater good of the people, is clearly far from being vengeful and impulsive. “Hong has given his life, but millions of new revolutionaries rise. Beneath the red battle flag, the hard-working women who have just been freed step forward to join the ranks of the Red Company of Women.”45 The White-Haired Girl shares with Red 44 The danger of hero-worship is, of course, a dramatic irony that a decade of the Cultural Revolution eventually accomplishes with the “Gang of Four” and the Cult of Mao. 45 China Ballet Troop, Red Detachment of Women—A Modern Revolutionary Ballet, 77.

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Detachment of Women the liberation of women from feudal oppression and at the same time, from their own personal desires for revenge.46 The ballet is adapted from a legend originating from the liberated area of northwest Hebei, circa 1939. There, the progress of rural reform was hindered due to the peasant’s preoccupation with a local deity, a “white-haired goddess” who occupied a local temple. The peasants, instead of attending a meeting to elect village officers, had gone to the temple to set out food and drink for their “goddess.”47 One of the cadres followed the peasants and discovered that the “goddess” was a young woman whose father was killed by a landlord and who was taken into the landlord’s household where she was raped and tortured. After escaping to the mountain, the girl’s hair turned white due to the cold and malnutrition.48 46 I have not managed to find a similar script for The White-haired Girl. I have thus relied on my own memory of the ballet when describing the main plot and actions. My analysis of specific technical aspects of the ballet is drawn from the filmed version available on youku.com, as referenced below. 47 Norman J. Wilkinson, “’The White-Haired Girl’: From ‘Yangko’ to Revolutionary Ballet.” Educational Theatre Journal 26. 2 (1974): 168. 48 Wilkinson, “The White-Haired Girl”: 169.

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The legend ends with the girl’s reintroduction into society. I am of the opinion that while Red Detachment of Women has superior choreography and dancing, The White-Haired Girl is no less captivating in its dramatic, Gothic-like, portrayal of the mad woman isolated in the mountains. It also narrates a sentimental back-story of domestic bliss and paternal love. When The White-haired Girl was adapted for ballet and set during the period of China’s War of Resistance against Japan, the part of her rape by the landlord was cut while retaining the story of her loving relation with her father.49 In the opening scene, the ballerina playing the central role of Xi’er dances to the traditional Chinese “Yangge” (planting song), accompanied by her father who lovingly buys her a red string for her hair.50 The color red is traditionally significant for Chinese societies, representing not just good fortune, prosperity, but also fertility and feminine virtues. As Wilkinson observes, “’Love’ for the state, for the Party, or for Chairman Mao is usually spoken of quite vehemently, and countless 49 Wilkinson, “The White-Haired Girl”: 169. 50 Wilkinson, “The White-Haired Girl”: 165.

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attempts are made to depict such allegiance, but true affection between individuals is practically non-existent. The warm, endearing love between Hsierh and her father is a rarity in modern Chinese drama.”51 With such “rarity” of expressed affection between individuals, it is not insignificant that the White-Haired Girl will be quick to subdue the individualistic desires of the said protagonist. The ballet also features Xi’er’s sweetheart, her neighbor of a poor peasant family, who leaves the village to join the Eighth Route Army in anger after the death of Xi’er’s father. In addition, the plot complicates the typical patriarchal setting of family dramas. The landlord’s family to which Xi’er is subsequently sold to work as a bondmaid features a matriarch whose unreasonable demands and tortures made Xi’er’s life utterly unbearable. The matriarch seems to rule over the family, towering over even her son. Since the ballet begins with the introduction of the female protagonist in the loving care of her father absent of a mother, the role of the cruel matriarch underscores the impossibility of Xi’er finding consolation in any external, maternal figure. 51 Wilkinson, “The White-Haired Girl”: 170.

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The sixth scene of the ballet proceeds with the Eighth Route Army taking over the landlord’s manor, and the landlord’s subsequent escape to the same temple where Xi’er hides. With the stage shrouded in darkness except for a spotlight shone on Xi’er, the contrast between the darkness of feudalism and the outburst of the lone woman is heightened. When the white-haired girl recognizes her previous master, she bursts into a rage not unlike Qinghua’s “breach of discipline” in the Third Act of Red Detachment of Women, and prepares to attack and possibly murder her adversaries. Here we must note the ballerina’s signature backward jump-kick: she jumps in the air with her legs making almost a straight, diagonal line from the ground, and her arms in clenched fists (4:10).52 When she finally appears in front of her enemies by breaking out from behind the altar, the stage direction can possibly to read to execute the Cultural Revolution’s message of destroying Taoism and Buddhist temples under feudalism. A jump up in the air with one leg raised to the side, turned out, and the knee sharply bent (retiré devant), she approaches her enemies in moves, which like the previous jumps, 52 Youku.com, The White-Haired Girl. Film Version. http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjc1MDc4MA==.html (Accessed Sept 01 2011).

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are maddening and more acrobatic than graceful. With the dramatization of the white-blond wig on the Chinese ballerina, The White-Haired Girl teases the extremity of untamed wildness and desire for vengeance to its bare threads. However the transformation of the female protagonist occurs not only on the level of her appearance, but also on the level of her technical flamboyance. Once again, it is her private desire for vengeance that needs to be transformed, or in this case, her unruly whitehaired madness that must be reddened. Heidi Hartmann cannot be more wrong when she writes: “only in a capitalist society does it make sense to look down on women as emotional and irrational.”53 Her observation that “A society could undergo transition from capitalism to socialism, for example, and remain patriarchal”54 needs to account for the denigration of women’s emotionality and irrationality under patriarchalsocialism. 53 Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Toward a More Progressive Union” in Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, eds. Carole Ruth McCann, Seung-Kyung Kim (London: Routledge, 2003), 217. 54 Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Toward a More Progressive Union,” 214.

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At this point of the ballet, the Eighth Route Army appears in the temple to pursue the landlord. Xi’er seeks to fight off the unknowing army, and is surprised to find that one of its cadres is her former sweetheart who left their village before she is sold as a bondmaid. A rather passionate pas de deux ensues, where it is unclear if there might be a romance underlying the two principal dancers. Together with the successful capture of the landlord, Xi’er is led back to the village commune, where former neighbors and relatives express their alarmed sadness at her white hair. I take the stark discoloration of Xi’er’s hair as indicative of an alienation from her place in the proletariat army that must be re-colored. Hence one of the elderly village women proceeds to dress her hair in a red handkerchief, as if all of her previously experienced trauma can thereby be erased. While the ballet does not show Xi’er going through reeducation in Maoist thought, the underlying statement that subsumes the individual under the greater good of the collective is equally forceful. Once reintroduced into society and shrouding her white-hair in red, the white-haired girl, instead of previously haunting the local temple, claims her place in the communist collective. Precisely because of this ballet’s particular recasting of private, paternal love under the larger context of benevolent rule under the Communist Party, the

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haunted ruins of the temple signifies the “natural,” pre-socialized state of women’s consciousness. Julia Kristeva’s observation on the subject of women during the Cultural Revolution in general seems accurately suited for The White-Haired Girl: This grief-ridden heroine becomes the true champion of the Revolution: the armed militants who seize power for her (and for the people) seem like clever but abstract technicians, agents of an impersonal gesture which she inspires, but does not execute.55 It is all very well to argue that both the Red Detachment of Women and the White-Haired Girl downplays the feminist-will-to power while ostensibly stripping the ballerina of her traditional, somewhat fetishized tutu and frills. However, the question remains, following Stacey, if the two ballets nonetheless highlight the desire for a semblance of individualism that despite the covering of the red handkerchief, will stubbornly be unsocialized.

55 Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women, translated by Anita Barrows. (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), 153.

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Act III. The Third Term Both Red Detachment of Women and The WhiteHaired Girl seek to reinforce gender equality in the PLA’s military training—images of riflebearing men and woman in Maoist uniforms would become a standard poster image of the Cultural Revolution. Their reinterpretation of the female ballerina from traditionally feminine roles to that of the modern, revolutionary solider is reliant on the dramatization of her rebellious, unreformed nature. For it is in these scenes where Qinghua or Xi’er fights her enemies alone that the ballet comes to life. I have tried to show how the choreography for the two lead dancers in these scenes indicates an upstaging of the forces, disruptions, and ultimately, female desires for revenge. Yet the ballets’ final messages must treat the female protagonists’ individuality as one term in the structural contradiction between the collective and the individual. No longer willful in her long, dramatic extensions, développés, jumps and diagonal splits in the air, the new Chinese woman takes her place among others in the larger proletarian struggle. Like Badiou’s critique of Deleuzian “leftisim” in 1960s France for forgoing the structural element inherent in every tendency

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for an unrestrained, affirmative becoming, and his evaluation of Althusserian “rightism” for neglecting the tendential element in the name of objective structure, we are left with either a naively aesthetic view of the two Communist ballets without structure or place, or a vulgarly politicized analysis without tendency, or force.56 For Badiou, places and forces are complementary, but they cannot synthesized in Hegelian unity: “The central dialectical problem is thus the following: how can the logic of places and the logic of forces be articulated—without fusion?”57 At a time when we are still trying to understand the Cultural Revolution, whose history, as the title of a 2006 international symposium attests,58 may still be impossible to reconstruct, the question of Chinese women in the two Maoist ballets may force us to look at the tumultuous decade dialectically. Between the torn articulations of woman’s place in the revolutionary structure, and her movement-in-flux on stage, I propose an attempt at locating a third term by way of conclusion. 56 Bosteels, “Post-Maoism,” 599, 57 Quoted in Bosteels, 600. 58 I refer to the conference held at University of Washington, Feb 23-26, 2006, with speakers such as Badiou. Mobo Gao, Wang Hui, and Rebecca Karl.

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As I have suggested at the beginning of this paper, a new way out is by no means guaranteed by the task of dialectical thinking; but without this possibility, there would be no impetus for thinking to speak of. Badiou’s “solution,” for lack of a better term, is to make room for a diagonal term between “rightist” structuralism “leftist” pure becoming.59 This diagonal term is not therefore middle-of-the-road and moderate. Instead, through a thinking of the concept of deviation and logic of scission, the diagonal term works such that “every entity be split between that part of it that can be understood according to the logic of places and that part that cannot be accounted for without resorting to a logic of forces.”60 What I have preliminarily called the third term is thus not quite the third, but a “divided correlation between the two as split.”61 As Bosteels’ explication of Badiou’s work demonstrates, such a split correlation can take on other names, such as a “symptomatic torsion” that cannot remain within the topology of either the inside or outside.62

59 Bosteels, “Post-Maoism,” 602. 60 Bosteels, “Post-Maoism,” 604. 61 Bosteels, “Post-Maoism,” 604. 62 Bosteels, “Post-Maoism,” 606.

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I very much like this term “symptomatic torsion”, since it brings us right back to the language of dance with which this paper is preoccupied. But I want to suggest another name with which we can think of the third term beyond the logic of places and forces, one that is less philosophically sophisticated, but more historically amenable to what I have been discussing: “culture.” It is culture, that is, the question of what happens when Western discourses of gender assumes certain values and affects when it encounters the other, which is at the heart of my reading of the twin logics of places and forces. It is for this reason that I choose Stacey’s establishment of cultural differences between Chinese women and Western feminists as one of the epigraphs of this essay.63 In the same passage, her admission that Western feminists can and ought to put themselves in the place of Chinese women in craving for a liberty like individualism thus adds the question of the reader to the dialectics of places and forces.64 By what authority do I levy my critique on the ballets’ usurpation of individualism? Is individualism something that 63 Judith Stacey, “When Patriarchy Kowtows: The significance of the Chinese Family Revolution for Feminist Theory,” Feminist Studies, 2: 2/3 (1975): 102. 64 Stacey, “When Patriarchy Kowtows”: 102.

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only Western feminists or someone like myself who is ethnically Chinese but considers herself “Western”-trained crave? If so, how does one even begin to place oneself in the place of “Chinese women”? And with what force of desire? Reading as dance allows me to leave these questions open for now. Describing About Chinese Women as a “journal of facts and inquiries” that do not make up a book, Kristeva writes: “I would have done well to have it reflect the prudence—if not the hesitation—that I believe is warranted by any attempt to speak about women as well as about China.”65 This is not at all to suggest that the question of Chinese women is a singularly Chinese question, but that the question is less interesting if we take for granted what we mean by “Chineseness,” or for that matter, “women” in its plural form. I do not think it is possible to speak about Chinese women without this element of hesitation. A cultural hesitation, that, to risk punning, is one “symptomatic torsion” of the artistic legacies of the Cultural Revolution.

65 Kristeva, About Chinese Women, 1.

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Printed Matter Or, Towards A Zineic History Of Reading. This is an awkward defense of print. As tactics and strategies of defending go, this is an odd one because it is not so much provoked by an attack than it is by the lack-of attack. On the one hand, it comes a little late. Proclamations of triumph, of the proverbial Game Over have been sounding throughout the land for years. Elegies have been written. When there is nothing to defend, writing to defend comes across as being obtuse, like a raving lunatic and indeed, this has all the familiar hallmarks of madness: illogical, repetitive, fixated on a single, somewhat unrelated thing, and prone to anachronisms. Yet the most consummate raves in history were undeterred by the fact that no one’s listening (see Nietzsche) and the best defenses were never the ones directly opposed to a single attack. What follows is, in this sense, a positive defense, an affirmative spin on the negative, a series of thoughts that aims to not to win (or lose) the game, but to keep it going.

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“Printlessness” Many are declaring that print is already dead. Content producers have been migrating in droves towards the World Wide Web since blogs were invented in the late 90s with fervent belief in the power of the online universe for offering new freedoms for reading and writing content: quick, easy and mobile, as the advertorials say. The old and clunky book, the print text, has nosedived in the trend stakes. Print has been abandoned in favor of hypertext; physical content is now regarded as something for old-fashioned hobbyists, nostalgic librarians or stubborn academics.1 Apparently, bookless-ness has arrived. To self-proclaimed digital savvies, Free and Fast has come to characterize the experience of paperless reading and writing, thus explaining the name of one of the most famous and most used online manifestations, Wikipedia: in Hawaiian wiki means quick or fast. Like a closed 1 According to The Guardian, UK academics got together in July 2010 to advocate what they call ‘slow reading’—reading in print form because they thought that skimming online texts is making people ‘stupid’. Patrick Kingsley, “The Art of Slow Reading”. (The Guardian, 15 July, 2010), 1.

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murder case, the killing of print has lapsed into a distant memory of the excited evangelist who is too busy tweeting the revolutionary promises of the ‘digital age’ on her well-worn keyboard to for a verdict written down on paper. Before the Internet, it was the Word (of God) rather than the paper that has always been extolled as the soul of communicable existence. In the New Testament, we are told “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”2 Now evangelists of Internet communications treat the hypertext similarly as if infinite and transcendental. Many students schooled in the language medium of English today will be able to attest to online reading: as long as you have a connection and a computer, you can Wikipedia or Google anything anywhere for any assignment. For them, reading hypertext enters the intuitive level of individual skill, and is as ingrained in their sense of self as learnt habits such as eating and sleeping. A defense of print chases a mode of being in spite of these conditions in which we find ourselves: how do advocates of print make a case for the value of printedness? Not so long ago, Books experienced a similar kind of death against the voracious spread of the 2 John 1:1

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Printed Copy. Prior to mechanical reproduction, as Walter Benjamin tells us, a material presence has ‘aura’ which makes it beautiful and unique— The Original Hard Copy is priceless by virtue of being original and “authentic”. Indeed, early Christian religious life also gave us one of the first valuations of ink-on-paper derived from the Original Material that was Jesus Christ. Hillel Schwartz tells us that over one and half millennia ago, Jesus was believed to be the body incarnate of God; Christ was espoused as “a Son identical and coeternal with the Father” and though in human form, He is both fully divine and fully incarnate. Jesus is the embodiment of God and consequently, of his Word.3 The early Christian bishops, the Council of Nicaea, articulated this first personification of God and from the careful meditation and consideration of this JesusGod equation, inscribed twenty Church Laws. Those who held these canons—the original hard copies—also held religious authority.4 As the book form moved outdoors, into rich hands and later into the mass market, it moved from Divine Word to Literature. Rolf Engelsing describes how Europeans in the eighteenth century shifted 3 Hillel Schwartz. The Culture of Copy, (New York: Zone, 1996), 212-213. 4 Schwartz. The Culture of Copy, 214.

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from “intensive’ reading of a small circulation of religious books to ‘extensive’ reading of many secular works.”5 Yet faith towards the Original Hard Copy endured in the practice of book publishing in what Moylan and Stiles calls “a given, hierarchized arrangement privileging a first edition or an ‘authentic’ text”.6 Followers of the Printed Book still cling to the material’s fidelity to authored subjectivity; the Will to Divined knowledge, the fevered desire to lead the world through the myth of authenticity and Original Reads. In the face of the Digital, these days we see new attempts to bring printed books back from the dead (a transposed desire to resurrect Jesus perhaps?) via another moralized hierarchy. No longer able to make claims for auratic qualities of books, there are voices who directly opposing wiki reading and virtual texts by rousing a moral panic: a belief these days that we have a “reading crisis”1 This phrase was recently coined by The 5 Rolf Engelsing cited in Ian Jackson. “Approaches to the history of readers and reading in eighteenth century Britain”. In Historical Journal, 47(4), 2004, 1050. 6 Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles. Reading books: essays on the material text and literature in America. (USA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 6.

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Evening Standard on the basis of such “shocking” figures in London as: “only one in three teenagers read two books or fewer a year”.7 The allegation is that our future generations (children) have forgotten that reading books is the path toward wisdom—this view now has an effect akin to that of parental nagging: falling on deaf ears. Adding insult to injury, the Standard emphatically points out, that many of these illiterate teenagers have blogs or use Facebook; that is to say, kids these days are engaging in illegitimate or ‘improper’ forms of reading and writing.8 More and more critics are venturing to ask what is lost when reading becomes devoid of labour, suggesting Quick and Easy reading might be the formula for breeding the Slow and Stupid. Here, the premise against wiki reading is that the reading of online hypertexts is fragmented and offers too many hypertextual distractions, taking out the laborious in the experience of reading, and is therefore ephemeral and meaningless. Not so astonishingly, it is worth nothing that this moral panic is invoked in the domain of public education, where 7 Tom Harper. “Shock figures that spell out the extent of London’s reading crisis” (The Evening Standard, 1 June 2011), 1. 8 Harper. “Shock figures that spell out the extent of London’s reading crisis”, 1.

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the mechanisms of professional publication, public validation and critical literary reception— indeed, the capital ‘labours’ of production, circulation and consumption—activate and confer cultural and moral status to the experience of reading, therefore instrumental to learning and knowledge acquisition. The Story of Rising Illiteracy may have been exaggerated but even when we discount the sensational journalism, it still misses the point. While ‘quick’ may be an aspect of reading online texts, this does not make it the opposite of reading print. Online texts have their own materiality and our engagement with them cannot be measured against the [Biblical] fetish of the book. All the accusations of meaninglessness and stupidity leveled against reading and writing on blogs may just as easily be used against printed texts: an example of this comes from literary critic (and a fan of the leather-bound, Original Hard Copy, no doubt), Harold Bloom’s famous put-down of J K Rowling and Stephen King: “why read, if what you read will not enrich mind or spirit or personality?”9 Equally, the assertion that the wisdom gained from ‘slow-reading’— 9 Harold Bloom. “Can 35 million book buyers be wrong? Yes.” (Wall Street Journal, 11 July 2000), 1.

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reading print—somehow eludes ‘quick’ reading borders on technological determinism; the assumption that ‘skimming’ denies the reader deep and proper meaning furthermore reduces the aim of all reading to the reading of authorial content. Reading cannot be reduced to the process of extracting meaning from a conduit, i.e. a document, whether print or digital. At the same time, this is not to say we should be, as poststructuralists often are, allergic to meaningful meaning and place all claims of print’s importance in quotation marks. The quarrel about whether (book) reading is interpretation or explanation originated roughly thirty years ago, when literature and its scholars underwent a kind of existential crisis that now seems like an ironic reversal of the Standard’s ‘reading crisis’. It was an anxiety about loss: what is lost when our engagement with literary texts succumbs to a fixation on meaningful meaning? Poststructuralists such as Derrida have tried to respond to this by dismantling the status of literature, through the question: what is literature?10 Using Kafka’s parable in The Trial, “Before the Law”, Derrida suggests there are 10 Jacques Derrida and Derek Atteridge. Acts of Literature, (London: Routledge, 1992), 181.

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conventions in place that predetermine what may be considered a ‘literary text’ or given the name of ‘literature’. For Derrida, these conventions behave like rules or laws and readers must necessarily know these laws before even reading—entering— the text.11 Reading literature involves crucially, with Derrida, a contract with an abstract textual notion which acts like a law: inaccessible, decipherable and repeatable at the same time. Thus literature is, for Derrida, a possibility rather than a type of text; it refers to the possibility for any text to be read—whether authorial intent, reader’s interpretation or both. His approach renders the worries and doubts about meaningful meaning moot because for Derrida not knowing is half the fun; not knowing which way to enter the text makes it possible to read it: the text is the law, the law is the text. Instead of framing the issue around the crisis of loss, Derrida proposes a celebration that we can, in fact, have a dialogue with all texts, that we can read readability. The value of Derrida’s stance may arguably be extended beyond the realm of textual examination. His emphasis on possibility and transfer rather than on textual meaning allows one to use these qualities to account for the 11 Derrida and Atteridge. Acts of Literature, 197.

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physical properties of a text: can we propose a readability of material and if so, what does it mean to read a material? Of course, there have been claims for both medium and materiality in the 1960s such as Marshall McLuhan’s argument that media technologies transform content and therefore, the subjectivities those content imply.12 However, literary scholars who treated their books as immaterial constructs largely ignored this. Nevertheless, while ink and paper or screen pixels may not be able to think, feel, or act, as humans impact the world, the print or online text cannot be reduced to pure object or subject—not only is it impossible to sieve out the contributions of either reader, author or text in any discussion of meaning, one also cannot ignore the impact of the material which delivers it. The value of reading a text cannot merely be the result of pitting one materiality over another, of pitting its form against other forms. These are rhetorical tricks rather than dialectical debates. Discussions about print has been too often shoehorned into false dichotomies of form versus content, authority versus freedom, physical versus virtual, such that the lived projects of reading—encompassing uneven intelligibilities, 12 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding media: the extensions of man. (London: Routledge & Regan Paul, 1964).

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and singular moments in time and space—are compromised rather than celebrated or heaven forbid, enjoyed.

Textures and Readability I want to propose a justification of print by pointing out its inextricability from meaning, and not just internal meaning of the text, but also meaning forged externally, in fickle ways; a starting point that displaces the separation of form and content with only the former. By form, I mean not only to take the shape of print—paper and ink—but also the way they are combined to give both physical and abstract meaning. To be sure, scholars of bibliography already attempt to account for materiality via historicist and sociological projects about the book form. G Thomas Tanselle is particularly instructive in noting the odd neglect of physical materiality: Presumably many readers do recognize or would quickly do so if they gave thought to the matter that the design of any book is worthy of study as a reflection of the taste of its time, as an indication of the statures of the

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author and genre represented in it, and as a clue to the nature of the audience expected for it. They would then assume that specialized studies of these matters must exist … In the first of these assumptions they would be correct, but not in the second.13 Moylan and Stiles tried to fill this gap in their seminal examination of print culture, Reading Books, asserting their support for the view that “the text and material are inseparable—that texts are always material and that materiality is itself a kind of textuality.”14 I hope to develop this further to ask: is materiality only understandable in textual terms? In other words, I am asking what does it mean to see a text as both textured and textual? What is a printed text and what does it mean to read it? I am re-casting the notion of the print form from the purely tangible and technological definitions. For a printed matter— rather than print—its form or materiality does not only refer to tangible qualities of paper, ink and their delivery, but also to the momentary and 13 G. Thomas Tanselle, “A Description of Descriptive Bibliography,” Studies in Bibliography 45(1992), 4. 14 Moylan and Stiles. Reading books: essays on the material text and literature in America, 4

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singular qualities that emerge between reader and the physical constructs of the text: grain, surface, pagination, binding, colours, smell, and so on. Ironically, some of the most interesting attempts to tackle pre-digital materialities should come from those most outspoken about the digital. These voices are futuristic and anticipatory, rather than nostalgic about print, and they set about debunking the commonplace assumption that Internet communications necessarily implies disembodiment or immateriality: the idea that digital is the separation of words from paper into an intangible cyberspace. Sean Cubitt makes the case for the material of books while writing Digital Aesthetics and in particular, for the idea of texture: The space of the book, the material between its covers, has been for centuries not just a repository, a mnemonic store, but an interactive playground. The whiteness of white sheets has been a lure for doggerel, commentary, digression and refusal. The book is not, and has never been, a self-contained thing. It has always required the services of its readers, the interplay between the way the book unfurls the text materially and the way

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the reader reassembles it mentally, a conflictual or negotiated interface which, for two generations since the massive expansion of university education after World War II, made the study of literature the most popular of the humanities.15 Manifest as books, the Gutenberg printing press detached literature from the single source, allowing literature to develop, as Cubitt points out, into an object of study. Literary-ness soon eclipsed the book’s thing-ness and soon gained its own reified status; thing-ness is treated as constructed or represented, a thing is something outside the literary text. Our interactions with a book—reading—has most often been described in non-physical terms. Cubitt defies this by proposing what he calls a “materialist account of reading” in order to “[expose any] theological concept of the infinite text that inhabits cyberspace”.16 Given that Digital Aesthetics was published in 1998—way before Facebook or blogging were invented—Cubitt’s argument that 15 Sean Cubitt. The Materiality of the Text: Outtake from Digital Aesthetics. 22 June 2011. < http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/digita/materiality.html>. 16 Sean Cubitt. Digital Aesthetics, (London: Sage, 1998). 6

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the material of the text—paper, ink, pixels, etc., affects reading no less profoundly than textual abstraction, seems prophetic. In fact internet reading or ‘wiki’ reading, Cubitt argues, “still respects older distributions of reading” since the Internet borrows its ”metaphors of surfing and browsing from nomadic reading, neither negating place nor universalizing it, but wandering, and taking the hereness and newness of place with it as unstill reference point.”17 By reminding us of the geographies and histories of reading, Cubitt shows how reading can be understood as having different modes—such as wiki reading and book reading—whilst sharing similar functions and language cultures. And within each mode, the physicality of the interface is an undeniable function of the many ‘heres’ and the ‘nows’. Just as we recognize the flickering computer screens, “[w]e can recognize in the physical characteristics of books that that is what they are—books … they must have destinations, or they fade away … they are both strangers and familiar”18. It would take another four years before N. Katherine Hayles embarks on a systematic dismantling of the unrecognized assumption that print texts are embodied texts; she does this 17 Cubitt. Digital Aesthetics, 6 18 Cubitt. Digital Aesthetics, 7

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by combining traditional textual concepts with cybernetic terms. Implicitly, Hayles recognizes the inherent challenge of making a move towards materiality: no matter how strong the plea, the phrase “the materiality of the text” is essentially a theoretical statement, it is an abstraction of the ‘thing’ we want to focus on. We access and speak about things using names and in doing so, commit a gesture of abstraction. Things and their names are inseparable. Likewise, Hayles also notes the reverse: “to change the physical form of the artifact is not merely to change the act of reading but profoundly to transform the metaphoric network structuring the relation of word to world”.19 Therefore, some notion other than ‘textuality’—a term that carries a lot of literary baggage—is required for reading materiality; extending materiality beyond the physical necessitates a Derridean move; what is the metadata of this new, embodied literature? Where and what is the information that gives us recognition of its readability? In their own ways, Cubitt and Hayles both refute the age-old quarrel among critics about whether reading is interpretation or explanation 19 N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines, (Massachusetts Press, 2002). 23-25.

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by tethering the meaning to physical form and its materiality. This immediately discounts the authority of the text as something that can be specified in advance. In its place is, however, no stable notion of materiality either. Hayles’s insistence on what she calls the “emergent property” of materiality focuses on how a text “mobilizes its resources as a physical artifact as well as on the user’s interactions with the work.20 In this sense, the notion of an embodied text is not simply a book or webpage to be read by a ‘reader’ or ‘user’. The reader also becomes maker, creator and writer, rather than merely the reader of a book. Thus, the notion of materiality as an emergent property of the print text reflects a mutual de-emphasis of reading as a gesture that privileges the reader’s needs and actions, and that of our (Biblical) fetish of physical objects. Materiality is not so much a state of being as it is a possibility between the two, like Derrida’s notion of readability. The unit of analysis for any reading is no longer the book or the reader but both, which also calls for a rethinking of the notion of ‘a book’ as a self-contained object. The reader is the book and the book is the reader. This conception of reader/book also diminishes the authorial view of writing with echoes of Barthes’ 20 Hayles, Writing Machines, 33.

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famous claims: “[Unlike the Author] the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate.”21 Although his focus was not on materiality, Barthes’ refusal to treat the book as a mere “predicate” for meaning (being) does pave the way for materiality—as opposed to authority—to join interpretative strategy of the printed text. Of course this is a big challenge. Like Hayles, Christopher Pinney is very much cognizant of the fact that “the purification of the world into objects and subjects cannot be easily undone” and in fact for Pinney, our concerns with materiality deal with questions that are not only ontological but also ethical and epistemological: “the more objectively the object appears, the more subjectively the subject arises, and the more our teaching about the world turns into a doctrine of man.”22 This leads us to a radical break from the efforts of bibliographic studies to treat materiality as part of textuality because the material remains subordinate to the same cultures and histories 21 Roland Barthes, Image, Music Text, (London: Fontana, 1977). 145 22 Christopher Pinney, “Things happen: or, from which moment does that object come?”. In Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality (London: Duke University Press, 2005), 257-258.

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that spawned “literary studies”. In this sense, Hayles is more useful than Tanselle, Moylan and Stiles, because her notion of the “emergent property” of materiality (used to create notions of “material metaphors” and “technotexts”23 ) may be taken to suggest she does not decide in advance that materiality is a manifestation of a textual force. Rather, it is the materiality of the print book that creates its own systemic force field. Materiality is not just another sign in the book’s textual system and its comprehensibility, or readability cannot be reduced to the “triumph of semiology over corporeality”. 24 Keeping this view in mind, I want to use the zine form as an example of the kind of textured and textual form requiring an act of reading that involves uniting material and text, form and content, in which it is their “printedness” that can drives a history of reading. Temporarily, I will call this a shift towards “zineic history” of reading. Crucially, this approach builds on, but moves away from the work of bibliographic studies. Borrowing ideas from Cubitt, Hayles and Pinney, I argue that there are two properties 23 Hayles, Writing Machines, 18-34. 24 Pinney, “Things happen: or, from which moment does that object come?”. In Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality, 266.

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at work in reading the zine medium: materiality and texturality. The former refers to the fused relationship between the zine and the reader while the latter provokes an inquiry into what sort of history of reading may be determined by the struggles occurring at the level of print textures. For this purpose, texturality helps to construct a historical representation of reading in which textures are not simply the set of evidence of closed cultural, social and indeed, religious contexts at work.

Towards a ‘Zineic History’ of Reading Historians and archivists have traditionally categorized zines as ephemeral print among posters, flyers, brochures, comics, newsletters and all kinds of publication that cannot be comfortably classified as books or literature. In the category of ephemera, zines is a relatively recent invention evolved from the comics and fan zines of the 1940s to gain roughly defined dimensions in the punk movement of the 1970s. A zine is usually handmade using rough and ready methods of collage, handwriting, scanning

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and photocopying. Like the term ephemera suggests, a zine is not made for the purposes of enduring posterity or commercial profitability. Early zine makers create zines at their own expense for no other reason except because they can and want to write/make and publish whatever they want for whoever chooses to read them. From the standpoint of the politics of culture, Amy Spencer explains that a zine is a format created for defying the mainstream of published content and for the “celebration of the amateur writer”.25 This attitude, Stephen Duncombe explains, is carried over from low production values in the punk music movement of the 1960s and 1970s both in America and in the UK, lending the term ‘lo-fi’ for describing the aesthetic principle of zine-making.26 The lo-fi zine is an adamantly unpolished object that operates against “fetishistic archiving and exhibiting of the high art world.”27 Visually, Teal Triggs identifies zines as having “a graphic language of [cultural] resistance” in which the “small, stapled format, 25 Amy Spencer, DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi culture (London: Marion Boyars, 2008), 17. 26 Stephen Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zines and the politics of alternative culture (Bloomington: Microcosm Publishing, 2008), 125. 27 Duncombe, Notes from Underground, 134.

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‘spontaneous’ page layout, the production values of the photocopier” are visual reflections of punk identity and anti-capitalistic politics.28 Any typographic and design ‘errors’ or tears in the pages and binding are deliberate, and “instead of allowing readers to relax and slip into the medium, zines push them away … zines are dissonant, their juxtaposition in design and strong feelings in content are unsettling”.29 Duncombe considers this the punk zine’s Brechtian strategy of instigating ‘reading-as-acting’, as Mark G of the 1976 British zine, Sniffin’ Glue, declares: “All you kids out there who read ‘SG’ don’t be satisfied with what we write. Go out and start your own fanzines”.30 Evidently, these examinations of zines demonstrate a keen awareness of the physical qualities of the interface between maker, zine and reader; Duncombe’s Brechtian interpretation of punk zines does go some way to giving focus to the materiality between the zine and reader as a force that mobilizes both the reader’s cultural subjectivity and zine object, an effect not unlike the “emergent property” of print as earlier pointed out by Hayles. Nevertheless, the cultural-social 28 Teal Triggs, Fanzines (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010), 46-49. 29 Duncombe, Notes from Underground, 134. 30 Duncombe, Notes from Underground, 125

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approach risks treating the reading of zines to the interpretative tool of literary textuality. For example, in Alison Piepmeier’s argument for zines and their makers as an “embodied community”, she stresses the importance of “bindings, illustrations, paper, typeface, layout … as parts of a semiotic system, parts of the total meaning of a text”.31 Piepmeier gives the example of how in the mid-1990s Nomy Lamm used her zine, I’m So Fucking Beautiful, to “document her frustration with being a large woman in a culture that derides fat … deploying visual and spatial properties of her medium” to resist social conventions of female representation.32 The zine’s material qualities—handwriting, angry scribbles and scrawls, visible typos and small 4”by 3” size— is viewed as an enabler of a human community of social affect—in Lamm’s case, a community of women—and therefore the zine remains treated as an empty object that owes its significance to pre-given discursive structures of meaning. There appears to be a dialectical process in which 31 Alison Piepmeier, “Why Zines matter: materiality and the creation of embodied community”, American Periodicals: A journal of History, Criticism and Bibliography, 18(2), 2008, 216-217. 32 Piepmeier, “Why Zines matter: materiality and the creation of embodied community”.

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(punk/female) subject makes (zine) object makes (punk/female) subject but as Pinney warns, “to stress the smoothness of this process” is to fully assimilate the object’s disparate specificities of time and places into a “cotemporaneous” context.33 As such, the materiality of zines could all too easily be absorbed into the disembodied histories such as punk culture or feminism. These are valuable polemic projects, but such endeavors act as an ahistorical demand of zines. Thanks to work such as Duncombe, Spencer, Piepmeier and Triggs, the significance of zines as an instrument for deterritorializing culture is now more widely understood than before but arguably, their work produce histories of punk, DIY, craft, politics of the individual rather than that of zines as material and printed (or photocopied) textures. Within these narratives, reading is understood a cultural retaliation affirming both human agency and subjectivities of networked communities both online and offline. And even such claims can be qualified in many ways. For example, these communities are less sharply defined than suggested, since crafted, ‘punk’ and self-styled autographical zines today are also widely circulated and consumed by new cultural 33 Pinney. Materiality, 268-269.

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intermediaries within art and design practice and the creative elite who appropriate white space, typefaces, Xerox ink and paper grammage into markers of class taste for visual feasting rather than real commitment to a (or against) unified ‘big idea’, if such a thing even exists. A more complex account of zines might stress the factors of cultural and commercial economy that both constitute and fragment these zine ‘communities’. This may go some way to suggesting that reading is a differentiated and situated material practice as much as it is a textual one. The task of understanding the materiality and texturality of printed matter is still largely untouched. The readability of zines remains strictly a privilege of specific groups (punks) or individuals (fans) who make culture and history and we are nowhere nearer to dissolving the textual primacy of (non)histories of printed matter. For example, less often emphasized in popular zine histories is the fact that the punk movement had perhaps less to do with the zine ‘revolution’ than the photocopier machine. As Roger Sabin points out: One other factor probably fuelled the small press boom more than punk: the photocopier, increasingly available in

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offices, libraries and high street shops after 1980. The small press equivalent of punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue’s famous rallying call, ‘This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band’ would be, ‘This is a felt tip pen. This is a piece of paper. This is a photocopier. Now start a comic’.34 Furthermore, we can also remove the photocopied materiality of zines from Sabin’s context of punk legacy to show how the Xeroxed surface did not always read as Anti-Establishment and Anti-Design Materialized. The (lo) fidelity of a photocopied copy is to light not to the textual substance and meanings. Chester Carlson, while meditating on psi— a term from parapsychology denoting the transfer of information or energy via unknown mechanisms—in 1967 wrote of his pursuit for “true painless copy”. His invention of the photocopy process that would later give offices all over the world the Xerox copier, held the aim to “reflect a higher-order transcription, its metamorphosis of light into charge into image into record akin to the metamorphosis of spirit

34 Roger Sabin, Punk rock: so what? The cultural legacy of punk. (London: Routledge, 1999), 111.

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from one body to the next”.35 By 1971, billions pages were annually photocopied all over the developed world and somewhere among them were perhaps the photocopies of Sniffin’ Glue zines, moments belonging to True, Painless Photochemical Copies of Corporate Documents on the one hand, and that of DIY Revolution on the other. And while I am being rather flippant here of Schwartz’s superb history of Copy, Carlson’s story shows how photocopied objects diffract, like light, in unpredictable ways to implicate a complex reading of zine materiality and texturality that is not sufficiently explained by the histories of counter-cultural resistance or subcultural movements. My critique is not to suggest that zines are completely unconnected to these cultural histories. What I am positing is that zines are also a part of a textured and material territory that can produce no less political histories of our engagement with printed matter than the usual cultural timelines. This has important implications on how we understand the notion of reading.

35 Schwartz, The Culture of Copy, 232.

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Spatializing Textured Reads The zine form is such that reading them often takes place in bedrooms, pubs, fairs, out of cardboard boxes and specialist bookshops. The idea of preserving, organizing and cataloguing zines is paradoxical since they have such low monetary value and are not usually made to last, however lovingly they are put together by zinesters. Unlike books, the practice of building archives and designating reading areas for zines is a fairly recent phenomenon. In 1993, avid zine collector, reviewer and maker of Factsheet Five zine listing, Mike Gunderloy, donated about 10,000 zines to the New York State Library.36 This donation marks the beginnings of printed zines into public reading spaces. However, before Gunderloy, zines might have snuck into library archives under the umbrella label of ephemera. Institutions have been building collections of printed ephemera over the last 100 years. Oxford’s Bodleian acquired the John Johnson collection of printed ephemera in 1968 and it contains over a million items that date from 1508 to 1939. It is hard to say whether zines, as

36 Spencer, DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture, 40-41.

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we understand it today, existed that long ago but much of the archived material, such as 19th century entertainment, book trade publications, pamphlets, advertisements and popular prints, certainly share some formal qualities with zines. These value of these collections is not dissimilar to book libraries who, in their founding statements, express “a conception of reading as knowledge”, a view that Cubitt reminds us, is “an imperial conception”.37 Libraries value printed ephemera as a research instrument for scholars interested in popular culture, gender, print and visual culture, architecture, consumption and many other types of subject matter. Modern libraries view zines in much the same way. Stoddart and Kiser assert that zines should be in libraries because they “provide insight into today’s modern popular culture” and zine collections will help “preserve an alternative point of view, celebrate individual expression, or provide a written document of our accelerated culture”.38 Nevertheless, the challenges of translating library devices for books—catalogues, index, bibliographies, access, preservation—into those for zines is a often an 37 Cubitt, Digital Aesthetics, 9. 38 Richard A Stoddart and Teresa Kiser, Zines and the Library, in Library Resources & Technical Services, 48(3), July 2004, 193.

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awkward and unwieldy task. Although some zines can be treated as a periodical itemized by ‘author’, ‘title’, ‘serial number’ and ‘subject matter’, such a catalogue will completely ignore the material and textured aspect of zine reading, turning them into objects of specific reading subjects. The catalogue design in libraries is usually organized based on the assumption that reading is a purely textual experience. Even if we accept for the moment that zines should be in public reading spaces, the consideration of how must avoid effacing the readability of the zine material under the sign of the Text. According to Cubitt, We read quite often for the purposes for which originality, authenticity, the formal properties of the text or quality of experience are unimportant … and in focusing on communication over medium, negates at once the specificities of the interface … evokes a social world in which neither text nor place of reading is specified, and potentially all places become the same. But rather than make a map the size of the world, we construct social places which can function as universal; the

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library foremost among them.39 Classifying and storing zines as printed ephemera, especially in the space of great libraries such as the Bodleian, may in fact result in a space in which no zine reading occurs at all, since the textures and materiality of the printed form will be subordinate to the usual meta markers of textual readability. Along with a reconfiguration of our notions of reading comes the necessity of recasting our notions of access, catalogue, preservation and crucially, our notion of archive. Acknowledging the fact that the Internet is changing the way reading environments are configured, libraries including the Bodleian and the British Library are digitizing large quantities of their print holdings, especially those printed ephemera whose degradation is inevitable due to paper quality, usage and storage conditions. Converting ink and paper to pixels and putting them online is seen as a way of overcoming material ephemerality; the underlying assumption in such digitization projects is: once we remove materiality and texture, the content is set free into the realm of immaterial, electronic permanence and reading can now take place anywhere and 39 Cubitt, Digital Aesthetics, 10.

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anytime outside the brick and mortar library spaces. On the one hand, this seems like an obvious solution for zines as well; not only are we able to preserve these valued evidences of culture and society for future study, reading zines— which are often short, mostly visual and only loosely linear—seems to bear some resemblance to Net surfing or browsing. On the other hand, some zines are already designed to be ‘natively’ digital. Triggs describes e-zines emerging from the late 1990s made by producers who applied the DIY principles to the Internet medium. 40 Alongside these digital zines emerged online discussion groups, newsgroups and cover page zine listings, taking full advantage of technology for interactivity, feedback and distribution. They “allow for a greater flexibility to move in between texts or through links to external sites” and thus producing “a different sort of connection between reader and producer”.41 E-zine makers who do not know how to program their own websites use blogs as handy interfaces with their readers and other zine makers. E-zines are so popular nowadays that its fans claim that printed zines are just paper blogs. This leads us to an interesting scenario: a quarrel has emerged between digital 40 Triggs, Fanzines, 171. 41 Triggs, Fanzines, 175.

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zines and print zines not unlike the quarrel between purveyors of books and online reading. There are “print purists”, to borrow Triggs’ phrase, among fans of paper zines who deride digital zines for their lack of material design and argue that the virtual interaction of zine readers is inferior to the ‘laboured’ experience of meeting and swapping zines face-to-face, reading them in zine fairs. Again, the divide between virtual reading and print reading is a false one because each medium’s specific materiality interacts with that of the zine. In other words, a printed zine becomes a wholly different zine when scanned and digitized and likewise, a natively digital zine is fundamentally transformed when converted into printed matter. Furthermore, the digitized-from-print zine is also different from the natively digital zine. Why? Because a new object is formed in each medium’s materiality. The dream of digitized and eternal ephemera, freed from the mortality of bodily decay and age is a reader’s textual fantasy. As Richard Rogers reminds us, web archives are in fact, fed and sustained by both hardware and software, the “fixed” ephemerality is a precarious material state, more “undead” than dead, more

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zombies than ghosts.42 The easy clicks, categorized hyperlinks and fast-scrolling through listings hide the material mechanical workings of the ‘fixed’ ephemera from view, privileging the virtual pages of print as a stable, separate and non-physical objects. For libraries attempting to archive and catalogue printed zines, there is a risk of taming the experience of reading by taming zines into objects separate from subjectivity. Therefore, if we indeed have a ‘reading crisis’, it should have more to do with the fact that ‘readability’ is often only recognized when it has a reading subject who perceives either the text or the material in arbitrary hierarchies; and the reliance on perception rather than reading as a specific practice instantiated by both material and textual properties, that our notion of reading should account for the textures and material we take in using, as Hayles points out, our “vision, tactility, smell and proprioception”.43 Just as paper and ink manuscripts and printed books expanded empires by creating, colonizing and organizing knowledge, the wholesome ubiquity of zines is so easy to love but if such printed matter are 42 Richard Rogers, The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 10. 43 Hayles, Writing Machines, 75.

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to be valued, rather than purified, we must ask ourselves, what mode of reading dominates our love?44

44 Indeed, the love of zines is also the love of the amateur, a person whose name is derived from the French word for love: amour.

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Obscenity, Ruin and the Metaphor of the Eye If language is beautiful, it must be because a master bathes it—a master who cleans shit holes, sweeps offal and expurgates city and speech to confer upon them order and beauty.1 It is to be noted that M. Bataille miuses adjectives with a passion: befouled, senile, rank, sordid, lewd, doddering, and that these words, far from serving him to disparage an unbearable state of affairs, are those through which his

1 Dominique Laporte. History of Shit. translated by Nadia Benabid & Rodolphe el-Khoury. (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000), 7.

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delight is most lyrically expressed.2 Having spent most of his early career opposing the idealism of Andre Breton and the surrealist group, Georges Bataille was certainly no master of beautiful language. In any case, being master of anything was antithetical to a thinker whose entire intellectual career was spent opposing dialectical thought in all its forms. If anything, Bataille abandoned himself to the obscene, though not, as Breton assumed, to delight in it, nor, in the words of the narrator of Story of the Eye, in pursuit of “pleasures of the flesh”: But as of then, no doubt existed for me: I did not care for what is known as ‘pleasures of the flesh’ because they really are insipid; I cared only for what is classified as ‘dirty’. On the other hand, I was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, while, in some way or other, anything sublime or perfectly pure is left intact by it. My kind of debauchery soils not only 2 Andre Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism. translated by Richard Seaver & Helen R. Lane. (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 184.

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my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop. I associate the moon with the vaginal blood of mothers, sisters, that is, the menstrua with their sickening stench... 3 Preferring the “hideous” and the “frighteningly ugly”4 to the marvellous and the beautiful offered by surrealism, Bataille’s language was nothing if not dirty (incidentally, the heroine of his first “dirty” short story, W.C., is named Dirty), and Story of the Eye (1928) is a dirty book, authored by the pseudonymous “Lord Auch”: “God relieving himself.”5 This reading of Story of the Eye will engage with the dirty and the debauched in Bataille’s writing, in excess of his pornographic imagination, to uncover obscenity in the novel’s

3 Bataille, Story of the Eye, 42 4 Georges Bataille. “The ‘Lugubrious’ Game.” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, translated by Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt & M. Leslie Jr., edited by Allan Stoekl. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 27. 5 Georges Bataille. Story of the Eye. translated by Joachim Neugroschal. (London: Penguin Books, 1982), 76.

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“metaphorical composition”6.

The Story of Bataille’s Eye Story of the Eye comprises two parts: “The Tale”, and “Coincidences”, the latter purportedly serving to explain Bataille’s fictional composition, specifically the relationship between eyes, eggs, urine and other apparently disparate objects that appear as the story unfolds. A singular image stands out in Bataille’s early writing:7 lifeless eyes in a state of abandon. In “Coincidences”, Bataille exposes the putative “origins” of his ocular obsession: A visual memory of his blind paralytic father relieving himself, his lifeless 6 Roland Barthes, “The Metaphor of the Eye.” Story of the Eye. translated by J.A. Underwood. (London: Penguin Books, 1982), 76. 7 Michel Surya, Bataille’s biographer, suggests that all the texts between 1927 and 1930 can be read as a group of texts, being part of “one and the same—albeit unfinished—book (in the Œuvres Complètes they have been gathered together under the title of Dossier de l’oeil Pinéal (‘The Pineal Eye’).” (Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography. translated by Krzysztof Fijalkowski & Michael Richardson. (London & New York: Verso, 2002), 107.

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eyes turned up, “with a completely stupefying expression of abandon and aberration in a world that he alone could see and that aroused his vaguely sardonic and absent laugh.”8 This “upset[ting]”9 image appears to have affected in Bataille a kind of terrific love for his father, and he admitted being “the very contrary of most male babies, who are in love with their mothers, I was in love with my father.”10 For Bataille, his father’s acts of relieving himself (pissing), and the state of abandon observable in the way he turned his empty gaze to the sky, are closely related as experiences of ekstasis; experiences of relieving himself of himself. More than the eye, the object of Bataille’s obsession was perhaps more accurately the experience of ekstasis itself. On May 7th 1922, Bataille had the opportunity to witness a bullfight in Spain, and saw the matador Manolo Granero’s eye being taken out by the bull, an event he would later describe in “The Tale”: “Granero was thrown back by the bull and wedged against the balustrade; the horns struck the balustrade three times at full speed; at the third blow, one horn plunged into the right eye and through the head. [...] men instantly rushed 8 Bataille. Story of the Eye, 72. 9 Bataille. Story of the Eye, 76. 10 Bataille. Story of the Eye, 72.

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over to haul away Granero’s body, the right eye dangling from the head.”11 In the novel, the climax of Granero’s freak accident is accompanied by a “shriek of unmeasured horror” that coincided with “a brief orgasm for Simone, who was lifted up from the stone seat only to be flung back with a bleeding nose, under a blinding sun.”12 For Bataille, the enucleation clearly had an affective, and communicative value, just as the image of his father’s upturned lifeless eyes did, one he would return to over and over again: in 1925, he was given a picture of a Chinese man being tortured, with whom he confessed to being in love, and whose state of abandon matched, coincidentally, the visual memory of his father relieving himself. In 1926, Bataille wrote a short story W.C. which had a cover decorated with the sketch of an eye: “the scaffold’s eye. Solitary, solar, bristling with lashes, it gazed from the lunette of a guillotine. The drawing was named Eternal Recurrence, and its horrible machine was the cross-beam, gymnastic gallows, portico. Coming from the horizon, the road to eternity passed through it.”13 I have recounted each of these descriptions to draw attention to the substitutive value of each 11 Bataille. Story of the Eye, 53, italics mine. 12 Bataille. Story of the Eye, 53. italics mine. 13 Bataille. Story of the Eye, 76.

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of them. Neither one appears as an explanation (a final thing signified) for the other; rather, each is at once similar (involving lifeless eyes in a state of abandon), but different (involving various individuals) at the same time. In other words, all of these descriptions exist in relation to each other as terms in a metaphorical chain, presenting themselves as substitutes for each other. Let us not forget that even “Coincidences”, while apparently biographical, is merely another narrative reproduction and thus substitutive, rather than explanative of “The Tale”. Even if we insist on preserving the hierarchical relation between the two, “The Tale” in fact informs “Coincidences”, since the latter narrative is a result of Bataille having been “struck by several coincidences,” 14 while writing “The Tale.” Placed after the main narrative, posthumously we might even say, “Coincidences” formally destroys its own originary status. But what did these lifeless eyes communicate to Bataille? To communicate is better understood as to be in commune with, hence involving a state of ekstasis, an experience of the outside-self. In 1925, Bataille’s psychoanalyst Adrien Borel, gave him a picture of a Chinese man, Fou14 Bataille. Story of the Eye, 69.

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Tchou-Li, undergoing slow death by Leng-Tch’e, otherwise known as The Torture of the Hundred Pieces. Bataille confides: “I have never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at once ecstatic(?) and intolerable.”15 Simultaneously drawn, and repelled by the picture, the object of his fascination alternated between the torturer: “The Chinese executioner of my photo haunts me: there he is busily cutting off his victim’s leg at the knee...”; and the victim: “The young and seductive Chinese man... left to the work of the executioner, I loved him—I loved him with a love in which the sadistic instinct played no part: he communicated his pain to me or perhaps the excessive nature of his pain, and it was precisely that which I was seeking, not so as to take pleasure in it, but in order to ruin in me that which is opposed to ruin.”16 Bataille’s description of his blind father relieving himself, and Granero being “thrown back” while having his eye gouged out by the bull (accompanied by Simone being “lifted up” and “flung back” down) might have substituted for the 15 Georges Bataille. The Tears of Eros. translated by Peter Connor. (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989), 206; italics mine. 16 Bataille. Inner Experience. translated by Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 20.

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picture of Fou-Tchou-Li—lifeless eyes upturned, in a state of abandon and “most anguishing”17 ecstasy, likely to have been caused by the opium administered in order to prolong the torture. More importantly, each of these described episodes of abandon and aberration are affective: to ruin in him, and us (to, and with whom Bataille communicates) all that is opposed to ruin, in an experience of ekstasis. Story of the Eye lays bare our relationship with obscenity that tears us away from ourselves: “Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with selfpossession, with the possession of a recognised and stable individuality.”18 Story of the Eye is an obscene text, least of all because of the transgressive nature of Bataille’s pornographic imagination; obscenity also communicates in Bataille’s metaphorical composition, itself driven by excess and transgression. More than a poem (Barthes’ preferred word for Bataille’s prose), one might better designate Story of the Eye a form of visual, or imagistic, fiction; perhaps a 17 Bataille. Tears of Eros, 205. 18 Georges Bataille. Erotism: Death and Sensuality. translated by Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), 17-18.

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poetic film, belonging to the same genre as the surrealist film and its use of unusual lighting, bizarre camera angles, strange confrontation of objects, alternative sequencing of events and slow motion.19 In fact, Un Chien Andalou (1929), the silent surrealist short film by Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí, opens with a scene reminiscent of Don Aminando’s enucleation in Story of the Eye, a scene at the centre of Bataille’s short essay “The Eye”, written probably in 1930. In it he describes the eye as being at once an object of extreme horror, and object of seduction, able to evoke both horror and attraction. The eye “could be related to the cutting edge, whose appearance provokes both bitter and contradictory reactions.”20 Describing the opening scene of Un Chien Andalou: “That a razor would cut open the dazzling eyes of a young and charming woman—this is precisely what a young man would have admired to the point of madness, a young man watched by a small cat, a 19 Bruce Morisette. Novel and Film: Essays in Two Genres (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 13. 20 Georges Bataille. “The Eye.” Visions of Excess Selected Writings, 1927-1939, translated by Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt & M. Leslie Jr., edited by Allan Stoekl. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 17.

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young man who by chance holding in his hand a coffee spoon, suddenly wanted to take an eye in that spoon.”21 The act of substitution is invoked in the young man’s desire to displace the eye, from its socket, into “that” spoon, and recalls precisely the way the metaphor of the eye works in Story of the Eye. In the opening chapter Simone lifts her pinafore and sits in a bowl of milk (since, according to her, “Milk is for the pussy”), and later inserts an egg into her vagina, followed by the testicles of the bull in Spain, and finally, the eye of the Spanish priest Don Aminando. In fact, it is only when Bataille’s story takes us to the church of Don Juan in Spain that we see the confluence of the substitutive terms milk/ egg/ testicle/ eye and cat/ pussy/ vagina, with the opening act (aptly entitled “The Cat’s Eye”) of Simone sitting in a bowl of milk. It is only at this climactic moment of the novel that the “eye” shows itself physically, and the object of the story is restored to its self (in so far as the word “eye” finally refers to the eye, the thing signified), but at the same time, remains displaced (into Simone’s vagina).

21 Bataille. “The Eye”, 17.

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The Story Is the Eye This double property of being at once itself, and not itself, lies at the centre of the eye’s metaphorical journey throughout the text. In 1963, Barthes published an essay “The Metaphor of the Eye”, in which he claims that “although Story of the Eye features a number of named characters with an account of their sex play, Bataille was by no means writing the story of Simone, Marcelle or the narrator (as Sade, for example, wrote the stories of Justine and Juliette). Story of the Eye really is the story of an object.”22 According to Barthes, as the eye makes its metaphorical journey through the text, it is varied through a series of substitutions, where the objects stand in strict relationship with each other based on similarity. However, being called something different (on the level of the signifier) they are dissimilar at the same time: saucer, milk, egg, sun, moon, testicles, urine, tears, sperm, and finally the eye of the Spanish priest Don Aminando. Each station of the ocular metaphor that the eye occupies speaks of a new usage, one following the next based on an 22 Barthes. “The Metaphor of the Eye”, 119.

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associative development. The eye is precisely torn from its self as it moves from one metaphorical station to the next. Bataille’s text, Barthes thus concludes, is “a kind of open literature out of reach of all interpretation, one that only formal criticism can—at a great distance—accompany.”23 Kristeva, perhaps, might have kept more faithful company. Story of the Eye really is the story of “an abject”, the abject being the object of obscenity par excellence: “radically excluded, [it] draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. [...] Thus it is not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”24 But what Story of the Eye really is, is the eye, rather than being a story of the eye. Bataille’s story contains no object, only an abject, “the violence of mourning for an “object” that has always already been lost.”25 There is no story of to speak of, only a transgressive copulation of the story (the signifier) and the eye (the signified; 23 Barthes. “The Metaphor of the Eye”, 123. 24 Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror. translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2, 4. It should be pointed out that Kristeva’s notion of the abject is derived from Bataille’s notion of transgression. 25 Kristeva. Powers of Horror, 15.

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what the story is supposedly of), since the abject destroys any hierarchical privileging in the relationship between the two. As metaphorical composition and obscene text, Story of the Eye necessarily ruins its self, precisely because metaphorical language is always in excess of its self. Always exceeding, transgressing and ruining its self, metaphorical language is ecstatic. If, for Bataille, the obscene is that which upsets self-possession, then metaphor, whose meaning is never merely its self, being simultaneously itself and not itself, is language at its most obscene. Metaphor ruins the self-assured logic of language, and being ruinous, metaphorical language is obscene even at its most sublime. In this, Bataille is perhaps indebted to Longinus (50 AD), for whom the sublime “does not convince the reason in the reader, but takes him out of himself.”26 The sublime, Breton would have been disappointed to discover, is obscenity at its most potent. The metaphor is thus not simply of the eye, it is the eye. The logic of metaphor afterall functions

26 Longinus. On the Sublime. translated by H. L. Havell. The Project Gutengurg e-book of On the Sublime. 10 March 2006.

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according to the copula is; 27 in Bataille’s text, the linguistic copula “is” links two (and more) disparate objects: eye, egg, milk, sun, testicles, urine etc. But the copula “to be” is also invoked here. Is, being, to be; similarity, but at the same time, a difference, and a slippage. Metaphor is the object-abject (the place where meaning collapses, the in-between, the ambiguous) of obscenity par excellence, and in Bataille’s metaphorical composition, the egg is the eye, both its self and not its self. The novel forces us to think about sexual, and textual, copulation in “unusual”28 ways: Simone asks the narrator to pee up her vagina; she copulates with eggs, testicles and eyes. Sharing the similar status of object-abject, the metaphor is the eye, as simple as Simone’s revelation at the novel’s climactic scene: “Do you see the eye?” she asked me. “Well?” “It’s an egg,” she concluded in all 27 Patrick ffrench first makes this observation: “it is the force of this transgressive copula ‘is’ which generates Histoire de l’oeil, which is not the sign of equivalence nor of difference, but both at the same time.” Patrick ffrench. The Cut/ Reading Bataille’s Histoire De L’Œil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 21. 28 Bataille. Story of the Eye, 11.

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simplicity.29

Coincidences As such, the novel is replete with coincidences; being a concurrence of events with no apparent connection. Perhaps the most significant of these in “The Tale” are the (co)incidents of death experienced by Granero, and Simone: The events that followed were without transition or connection, not because they weren’t actually related, but because my attention was so absent as to remain absolutely dissociated. In just a few seconds: first, Simone bit into one of the raw balls, to my dismay; then Granero advanced towards the bull, waving his scarlet cloth; finally, almost at once, Simone, with a blood-red face and a suffocating lewdness, uncovered her long white thighs up to her moist vulva, into which she slowly and surely fitted the second pale globule— Granero was thrown back by the bull 29 Bataille. Story of the Eye, 66.

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and wedged against the balustrade; the horns struck the balustrade three times at full speed; at the third blow, one horn plunged into the right eye and through the head. A shriek of unmeasured horror coincided with a brief orgasm for Simone, who was lifted up from the stone seat only to be flung back with a bleeding nose, under a blinding sun; men instantly rushed over to haul away Granero’s body, the right eye dangling from the head.30 The events of Granero’s death and Simone’s orgasm (little death) are interchangeable. In other words, these events are related not by causality (that Simone’s orgasm follows from having witnessed Granero’s fatal attack), but as substitutes, precisely in being both similar (at the level of signifier, both being “death”, and hence simultaneous) as well as different. What is crucial here is that the substitutive value, and hence similarity, lies entirely in a metaphorical substitution between orgasm (le petit mort) and death (mort). That the interchangeability of the two events is based entirely on a linguistic copulation (orgasm is death, and so Simone’s 30 Bataille. Story of the Eye, 53.

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orgasm is Granero’s death), accounts for what is an apparently unexplainable event: Simone being lifted out of her seat and flung back down again. There is no need to explain this bizarre occurrence precisely because its explanation is not to be sought in answering the question “how did it happen?” Rather, it is sought in the metaphorical substitution between the two terms, his death and her orgasm. Obscenity here is conveyed as a series of transgressions and displacements, both sexual, and textual: the horn plunges into Granero’s right eye, as she reaches orgasm copulating with the bull’s testicle, referred to as a “pale globule.” The displacement here, on the level of signifiers at least, of Granero’s eye into her vagina (the “pale globule” that she inserts), anticipates the final obscene act of Simone inserting Don Aminando’s eye into her vagina. What is interesting too is that although the experiences of ekstasis described here belong to Granero (in dying) and Simone (in her little death), there is in fact a third: the “I”’s dissolution in the presence of obscenity. We witness these (co)incidents from the perspective of the “I” precisely at a moment when his “attention was so absent as to remain absolutely dissociated,” that is, at a moment of self-loss. This dissolution is reflected in him occupying what I read to be

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contradictory states of being dissociated, while nonetheless able to remain (in a particular state), which assumes a presence of mind (or precisely “attention”). And even as he tells us that “the events that followed were without transition or connection,” the events that do follow, as they are being narrated, unfold themselves to us in a way that can only be described as transitional, and connectional. More than the dissolution of the “I” in the presence of obscenity, what we observe is specifically the dissolution of the narrative I, whose attempts to get across to us—precisely to connect with us—is marked by paradox. This is once more highlighted in the climactic scene of the novel, when narrative point of view becomes ambivalent: Simone gazed at the absurdity and finally took it in her hand, completely distraught; yet she had no qualms, and instantly amused herself by fondling the depth of her thighs and inserting this apparently fluid object. The caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has something of a rooster’s horrible crowing.

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Simone meanwhile amused herself by slipping the eye into the profound crevice of her arse ... 31 Simone’s experience of inserting the eye into her vagina is displaced to the narrator’s experience of handling the eye, specifically an experience that appears to be taking place in the present moment of re-collection, signalled by the change in tenses. Simone’s actions as described here are however by no means a disconnected memory, suggested by the phrase “Simone meanwhile,” which indicates that the two events, his present recollecting of the past, and Simone amusing herself in this particular past, are in fact taking place simultaneously. This illogical break in the temporal sequence in the narrative (incidentally, characteristic of surrealist films, as previously mentioned) alludes once more to the dissolution of the narrative I, again in the presence of obscenity. It seems then, that we are dealing not just with one eye, and I, nor with multiple eyes (the one Simone amuses herself with in the past, the other the narrator caresses in the present), and I’s (the past and the present); rather, we are dealing with the eye, and I, divided while paradoxically remaining whole: precisely fluid, dissolved, and abject. 31 Bataille. Story of the Eye, 66. italics mine

Obscenity, Ruin and the Metaphor of the Eye

In “Coincidences”, Bataille says that in writing his book, he had substituted one scene for another: “I was very astonished at having unknowingly substituted a perfectly obscene image for a vision apparently devoid of any sexual implication.”32 As already suggested at the start of this piece, “Coincidences”, like the various objects in “The Tale” (saucer, egg, testicles, urine etc.) is better read as another metaphorical station, one amongst many possible substitutions, and not the meaning of the story preceding it. More importantly, implicated in coincidence is the element of improbability. In any chance similarity, there lies the equal risk of difference; at the centre of any probable situation, lies infinite improbability. Implicit in “Coincidences” is thus self-ruin, precisely a reminder of the improbability of the “I” whose story this supposedly is. “I” is precisely both self and notself; in a state of ekstasis, “I” is always dissolved, always ruined and abject. We might want to recall at this point too that Story of the Eye is composed by the pseudonymous “Lord Auch”, being both Bataille, but also not Bataille. “I” cannot be the origins of this text, since no such stable “I” exists. If “Coincidences” (biographical and thus the supposed true story of “I”) cannot claim to be the 32 Bataille. Story of the Eye, 70.

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origins of the story, then perhaps an analysis of the first erotic encounter in the novel, between Simone and the narrator, might give us a hint as to the “beginnings” of the metaphorical chain that is the story. Alone in Simone’s villa, the narrator and Simone spy a saucer of milk for the cat in hallway. Simone lifts her pinafore and says, “Milk is for the pussy, isn’t it?” and proceeds to sit atop the saucer of milk. This first erotic act culminates in both reaching orgasm, without either touching the other at all. While sexual copulation is absent here, what we witness is the transgressive copulation of metaphor: Pussy (cat)/ pussy (cunt) in a saucer of milk (which later is the egg, and is the eye). Sexual copulation gives way to textual copulation, deliberately perhaps to dismiss any assumption of the sexual being at the origins of this chain. This is the first obscene act of the novel, based entirely on a copulative act of metaphorical substitution, and from here all other obscene acts that follow will be of a similar nature. Sealing the relationship between metaphor, and the obscene, Story of the Eye opens with a chapter entitled “The Cat’s Eye”, the cat being Simone’s pussy/ cunt, into which she later inserts an egg, the testicles and lastly the priest’s eye. Unsurprisingly, neither cat nor eye appear in this first chapter; at least we don’t see them, since being able to see at all (both physically,

Obscenity, Ruin and the Metaphor of the Eye

but also in the sense of gaining insight) assumes a language that is self-assured, contained and guaranteed by a thing signified, none of which the text’s metaphorical language is. So the point here is precisely that we do not see the eye at the start of the novel, and when we finally do see it at the novel’s climactic scene, it is an eye is gouged out, displaced: the lifeless, obscene and abject eye. Displaced into Simone’s vagina—the eye in the pussy at the end of the novel—we are thus brought back to the beginning of the novel: “The Cat’s Eye”. The metaphorical chain does not begin in the beginning, and in fact has no beginning to speak of. It takes us full circle; the displaced eye, the story itself, as Eternal Recurrence. Returning to itself, turned in on itself, nothing is concluded, and nothing revealed by either story or eye. The horror of Bataille’s eye, lies precisely in its own self-ruin, being both abject (object of horror and attraction) as well as that which enables an experience of the abject, at least a visual one, through the act of seeing. The reader’s encounter with the abject and the obscene in the text is based largely on acts of seeing. As already suggested, this composition is better read as a film, which then gives rise to another metaphorical substitution: the narrative eye/ I, of whose dissolution I have spoken at some length.

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Figured in terms of the “observing eye” of the camera, our sight, and insight, is based entirely on what the eye in the text sees. The journey of the eye through the story, I suggest, also details the progressive self-ruin of the seeing eye. The novel opens with the only possessive reference to the eye in the text: “The Cat’s Eye”. This is of course a cat that never appears in the text except, in the end, as Simone’s pussy/ vagina. So while the eye finally returns after its metaphorical journey to its self (in so far as the word finally refers to the thing signified), and returns to being possessed by the cat (the cat’s eye, and thus apparently restored to its function of seeing), it nevertheless remains displaced, by the metaphorical substitution of the terms cat and vagina. Like the abject eye in the text, the seeing (observing) eye/ I is likewise displaced, thus preventing the reader from gaining any (in)sight into the story even as the story reaches its conclusion. Of my own journey, I offer the following conclusion, with reference to an early episode in “The Tale”: A few days later, however, when Simone was doing gymnastics with me in the rafters of a garage, she pissed on her mother, who had the misfortune to stop

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underneath without seeing her. The sad widow got out of the way and gazed at us with such dismals eyes and such a desperate expression that she egged us on, that is to say, simply, with Simone bursting into laughter, crouching on all fours on the beams and exposing her cunt to my face, I uncovered that cunt completely and masturbated while looking at it.33 This particular image brought to my mind the etymological origins of the word sublime, which in its English, and I believe, French usage, has its origins in the Latin sublimis, possibly from sub (up to) and limen (lintel, a beam that forms the upper part of a window or door). Simone pissing from the rafters above, onto her mother below: is this Bataille taking the piss, as it were, out of idealism and the sublime? From not seeing, the widow then turns her dismal eyes on them. Her “eyes [...] egged” them on; a playful pun intended in the original French, or an addition on the part of the translator? The answers are not as relevant as what the playing here implies, which is precisely the ambiguity, and fluidity, my reading necessarily invokes. It matters little, therefore, 33 Bataille. Story of the Eye, 15.

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what I see in the text (which might not be there), or do not see (which might be there) by the time I come to the end of the story, since my journey has led me, and my (in)sight, towards blindness. Face to face finally with an eye in a cunt, I experience ruin precisely where my understanding loses itself—in my blind spot.

Jeremy Fernando 21 October, 2011 Singapore

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Afterword— With friends like these …. Plato teaches us that there are 3 kinds of friendships: agape, eros, and philia. And in each of these relationalities lies a certain condition: divinity, madness, and reason. It is not so much that the condition determines the friendship, but it certainly has an effect on the nature of the relationalities. So, as I receive responses to my calls to think reading—even as I am one of those responding to the said call—the question of why would one do so, the conditions of the responses, continues to haunt them. Even as the responses were kind, much like the people responding, there were surely not of the order of the divine. For, part of the deal, as it were, was for their responses to be published— and even though this is not the place to open that question, we should allow notions of

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exchangeability, returns, production, to resound with us. And even as one might desire a response to one’s call to be of the order of eros, a response in writing would hardly qualify. However, we also should never forget the teachings of von SacerMasoch and Roland Barthes: words are, language itself is, sensual. Thus, even as we are reading, we should allow our reading to engulf us, affect us: perhaps we don’t even have any control over this—even as we would like to believe that we are rational, scientific, clear-headed, our readings are having an effect on us, only—as Wolfgang Schirmacher would put it—behind our backs. It would be appropriate to call their responses to my call a moment of philia, friendship. For, there is no doubt that it is a measured, calculated, response: not in a mercenary sense of ‘I will respond as I want to be published’ (there was never any guarantee of that happening; in fact, with the current state of publishing, there was a greater chance of their work remaining in the proverbial side drawer), but in the sense of their response needing to match the call. And here, one must not forget the fact that they have no ability to respond to my reading of their responses: and for the violence of the appropriation, I must apologise. In this seizing though, there is an echo of a seizure as well: in every attempt to respond

Afterword

lies a moment that is beyond us—we can never quite be sure if the call was ever meant for us, if there was even a call to begin with. Perhaps the fact that we attempt to respond suggests that we are either grasped by the call or—since we can never be sure if there was even a call—arrested by the need to respond. In either case, by opening ourselves to responding, we run the risk of momentarily ceasing. But it is not as if there is no risk in friendship, of being friends. As Jacques Derrida reminds us: “to have a friend, to look at him, to follow him with your eyes, to admire him in friendship, is to know in a more intense way, already injured, always insistent, and more and more unforgettable, that one of the two of you will inevitably see the other die.”1 One can read this collection as an attempt to preserve these friendships, to capture them at a particular moment, lock them in time as it were. Which might have been one of the impetuses for sending out the call—one that might well have been unknown when it was issued. However, that opens yet another risk: in attempting to seize these friendships, there is no guarantee that we 1 Jacques Derrida. The Work of Mourning. edited by Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 107.

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might not just be grasping at straws. It is not as if Plato was unaware of this though. For, even as philia is the most reasoned of relationalities, true friendship still requires a touch of the divine. So, even as one might be able to say with certainty—and that itself could be called into question—that one treats another as a friend, the very reason for that friendship might remain unknown. Let alone whether the other is a friend to you. Who ever said that relationalities had to be twoway? Then again, can one ever know if the daemon actually whispered into one’s ear? Perhaps, at best, one can open oneself to the possibility of being a friend to another. Which might well be why with friends like these, who needs enemies? For, it is not that the enemy is necessarily the antonym of a friend—both are still states of relationalities. Sometimes one has to oppose a friend to be a true friend—perhaps even to the extent of having to cut, kill. Ask Brutus. Or Judas. After all, one can read their acts as attempts to stop Julius Caesar and Jesus of Nazareth from becoming a despot and a demagogue respectively. Performing caesurae in friendship. Perhaps this is a risk of

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having a friend: one day they might just turn out to be a true one. And here, it is not too difficult to hear an echo of Elie Wiesel who teaches us that “the opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.”2 In this sense, it matters little whether their individual pieces, responses, agree with me or not, whether they undercut my claims, or even cut me—what matters is that they picked up my call. Admitting to the fact that admission into this collection is an indication of friendship opens yet another risk. Foregrounding friendship opens the collector—me—to accusations of bias: charges that the academy desperately avoids by playing at objectivity, performing open calls, peer review, and so forth. All of these measures—and make no mistake they are calculated strategies—are aimed at distancing the collector from responsibility; from the fact that it is (s)he and no other than assembled the book. But it is not as if pointing out the usual strategies will exonerate me from these possible indictments: there is nothing that the Law dislikes more than its own exposure. This is, after all, the lesson of Han Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes—the little child was silenced not to protect the modesty of 2 US News & World Report (27 October 1986).

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the Emperor (everybody knew that he was naked) but to prevent the fact that he is only Emperor because the people willingly submitted themselves in the absence of any reason (or even sign; there is no mention of his crown nor sceptre) from being foregrounded. This means that anyone could have been Emperor: the power lay in the hands of the people, and not the sovereign. However, it is not as if shattering this illusion would bring about a democratically chosen ruler—most everyone, if not all, would have wanted to be Emperor, or at least wanted someone other than the one standing there to be sovereign, and no one person would never have been able to garnered universal consensus. And consensus is the very illusion that had to be protected: the illusion that it really mattered what the people thought, that they willingly bowed before the Emperor. If they actually exercised their will, not only will the Emperor not have his position, the entire empire would come crashing down. And this opens just one more question for us. In a hypothetical situation of the child managing to utter his statement—the Emperor is naked—the problem that the crowd would have faced is that of trust. Firstly, whether to believe the child—just because what he says is true doesn’t mean that others will agree. In fact, the converse is what

Afterword

most often occurs: people will go to boundless lengths to protect their beliefs, their illusions. Which brings us back to yet another notion of trust: that of believing in one self rather than another; sometimes in the face of all evidence. This suggests that trust has no referentiality—you either trust someone (whether that someone is your own self or another) or not. Which suggests that at the end, since we are almost at the end of this text, this book, you have to decide whether to trust me, us, or not. Regardless of what you have read. Based on nothing but the fact that you have read, that you were reading. For, it is not as if all of were, will ever, say the same thing about reading—not as if we have even attempted to provide a united front. All the same—no matter what your decision—I would like to thank you for opening yourself in reading, through reading. And offer my friendship. Whilst leaving you with the immortal words of Fidel Castro: “you shouldn’t trust someone just because he’s a friend …”

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Contributors

Setsuko Adachi is a member of the Critical Theory Center Japan, and an associate professor in the Department of Languages and Cultural Studies at Kogakuin University, Tokyo. She obtained her MA in Comparative Literature from Tokyo University; and teaches courses in critical and cultural theory. Her main research interests are identity formation and cultural systems analysis. Recent publications include: ‘Forging Global Hodological Maps for the MetaSymbolic Order’, ‘Globalization and Identity: A Case Study of Japanese Amae’ and ‘Undermining Coexistence: Japanese Discursive Formations Related to Empathy’. Mark Brantner is a Lecturer in the University Scholars Programme at the National University of Singapore. Before his current appointment, he was the Interim-Director of First-Year Writing and Visiting Assistant

Professor in the Writing Initiative at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He earned his BA and MA (American literature and critical theory) from West Virginia University and his PhD (Rhetoric and Composition) from the University of South Carolina. He has done additional graduate work in philosophy and communication at The European Graduate School. He has previously held faculty positions at Potomac State College of West Virginia University and Eastern West Virginia Community and Technical College. His scholarly interests include ancient rhetoric, psychoanalytic theory, and writing program administration. Yanyun Chen is a full time freelancer. Her clients include IDEO Singapore, Nexus Singapore, Shyalala, byFlo, Audi, Propellerfish, Proteus Technologies, Search Ventures and more to produce flash games, animations, trading card games, illustrations, UI for app and web layouts. She also contributes to the online magazine One Imperative, and does book layouts for wonderful writers, such as Peter Van De Kamp, Jeremy Fernando and Anila Angin. She works under the artist name Stick and Balloon, with her long time creature pal Sara Chong, and is establishing a dramatically illustrated ebook publishing named Delere Press, with writer-dictator Jeremy

Fernando, who has been said to “make philosophy sexy.” Jeremy Fernando is the Jean Baudrillard Fellow at The European Graduate School. He works in the intersections of literature, philosophy, and the media; and is the author of Reflections on (T)error, The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death, Reading Blindly, and Writing Death. Exploring other media has led him to film, music, and art; and his work has been exhibited in Seoul, Vienna, Singapore, and Hong Kong. He is the general editor of both Delere Press and the thematic magazine One Imperative; and a Fellow of Tembusu College at the National University of Singapore. Julia Hölzl is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the European Graduate School. Currently pursuing a second doctorate at the Centre for Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen, her present research project focuses on the notion of finitude in Blanchot and Heidegger. She is also a Visiting Professor at the Institute of International Studies at Ramkhamhaeng University, Bangkok. Book publications include Transience. A poiesis, of dis/appearance (Atropos Press, 2010).

Michael Kearney is an associate professor in the School of Architecture at Kogakuin University in Tokyo and a research associate professor at the SUNY Stony Brook Institute for Global Studies. He obtained his PhD in Critical Theory from the University of Limerick, Ireland. He has published numerous articles on identity formation as well as pieces on William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Lydia Lunch, and the Velvet Underground & Andy Warhol. Book chapters include ‘The Undermining of a West Briton: The Deconstruction of Joyce’s Gabriel Conroy’, ‘A Japanese Concept of the Self ’, and ‘Mapping Hybrid Identities: A Matrixing Model for Transculturality’. He is the editor of the book From Conflict to Recognition: Moving Multiculturalism Forward. Lim Lee Ching teaches interdisciplinary subjects in Singapore. His research interests include: poetry and poetics, Modernism and violence, literary aesthetics and South-East Asian literature. Robert Lumsden, B.A., M.A., University of Sussex, Ph.D., University of East Anglia, lectured in literature for several decades at the National University of Singapore and the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University,

in Singapore and currently lives in South Australia. He has published articles and chapters in books on critical theory, poetry, modernism and practical criticism, has co-edited, with Rajeev Patke, a collection of essays on the relation between critical theory and society: Institutions in Cultures: Theory and Practice (Rodopi, 1996), and more recently a book length study of the relation between reading and self-fashioning, Reading Literature after Deconstruction (Cambria, 2009). He has published poetry and short fiction, and is at work on his third novel. Shaoling Ma is a doctoral candidate in the Comparative Literature department at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include Marxism, continental philosophy, French theory, late nineteenth and early twentieth century American and Chinese literature, late Qing intellectual thought, and twentieth-century Chinese cinema. She is currently finishing her dissertation “The Social Life of Nations: A Comparative Study of American and Chinese Utopian Novels, 18881906.” Nicole Ong is a graduate student at the English Department of the School of Humanities & Social Sciences at the Nanyang Technological

University in Singapore. She is currently working on a project exploring reading, ethics, and literature. Cui Su is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. She has an MA and PhD both in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths, University of London. She taught textual and visual analysis on various BA courses in London Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths. Su is also a reviewer and writer at Zineswap, a Londonbased zine archive and blog that has exhibited and conducted workshops in Tate Britain, Orange Gallery, Somerset House and actively participates in zine fairs such as the London Zine Symposium and the International Alternative Press Fair. She has co-edited a book entitled Future: Content; which was published by the highly acclaimed creative magazine and design blog, It’s Nice That. W. Michelle Wang is a Ph.D student in the Department of English, at The Ohio State University who earned her B.A. (Communications) and M.A. (English) from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research interests are in aesthetic theory and narrative theory, philosophies of art as they relate to literature, and the relationship between

literature and the fine arts. Paoi Wilmer was a full-time assistant professor at National Taiwan University from 2003-2009. She currently resides in Durham and regularly publishes academic papers, reviews and creative stories. She also reviews for several journals in Taiwan and continues to serve on the advisory board of Encounters. Wernmei Yong Ade received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2006. Her thesis focused on the subject of communication in the philosophical writings of Georges Bataille and the fiction of Angela Carter. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, where she lectures in feminist studies and contemporary women’s writing. Her recent publications include “Writing Woman, Reading Woman: Re-vision in the poetry of Lee Tzu Pheng” (SARE, no. 50—Singapore and Malaysia Special Issue, 2011), “The Sacred: Of Violence, Intimacy and Love” (Special issue on the Sacred, Philosophy Today, 2011), and “Reader Responsibility in James Hogg’s The Confessions of A Justified Sinner” (Studies in Hogg and his World, 2010). Her current research interests lie in women’s writing, particularly in the subject of love as a discourse of alterity.

Think Media: EGS Media Philosophy Series Wolfgang Schirmacher, editor

A Postcognitive Negation: The Sadomasochistic Dialectic of American Psychology, Matthew Giobbi A World Without Reason, Jeff McGary All for Nothing, Rachel K. Ward Asking, for Telling, by Doing, as if Betraying, Stephen David Ross Memory and Catastrophe, Joan Grossman Can Computers Create Art?, James Morris Community without Identity: The Ontology and Politics of Heidegger, Tony See Deleuze and the Sign, Christopher M. Drohan Deleuze: History and Science, Manuel DeLanda DRUGS Rhetoric of Fantasy, Addiction to Truth, Dennis Schep Facticity, Poverty and Clones: On Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’, Brian Willems Fear and Laughter: A Politics of Not Selves ‘For’ Self, Jake Reeder Gratitude for Technology, Baruch Gottlieb Hospitality in the Age of Media Representation, Christian Hänggi Itself, Robert Craig Baum Jack Spicer: The Poet as Crystal Radio Set, Matthew Keenan Laughter and Mourning: point of rupture, Pamela Noensie Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational Practices for the Coming Community, Vincenzo Di Nicola Literature as Pure Mediality: Kafka and the Scene of Writing, Paul DeNicola Media Courage: Impossible Pedagogy in an Artificial Community, Fred Isseks Metastaesthetics, Nicholas Alexander Hayes Mirrors triptych technology: Remediation and Translation Figures, Diana Silberman Keller Necessity of Terrorism political evolution and assimilation, Sharif Abdunnur No Future Now, Denah Johnston Nomad X, Drew Minh On Becoming-Music: Between Boredom and Ecstasy, Peter Price Painting as Metaphor, Sarah Nind Performing the Archive: The Transformation of the Archive in Contemporary Art from Repository of Documents to Art Medium, Simone Osthoff Philosophy of Media Sounds, Michael Schmidt Polyrhythmic Ethics, Julia Tell Propaganda of the Dead: Terrorism and Revolution, Mark Reilly Repetition, Ambivalence and Inarticulateness: Mourning and Memory in Western Heroism, Serena Hashimoto Resonance: Philosophy for Sonic Art, Peter Price Schriftzeichen der Wahrheit: Zur Philosophie der Filmsprache, Alexander J. Klemm Scratch & Sniff, Peter van de Kamp Shamanism + Cyberspace, Mina Cheon

Sonic Soma: Sound, Body and the Origins of the Alphabet, Elise Kermani Sovereignty in Singularity: Aporias in Ethics and Aesthetics, Gregory Bray The Art of the Transpersonal Self: Transformation as Aesthetic and Energetic Practice, Norbert Koppensteiner The Ethics of Uncertainty: Aporetic Openings, Michael Anker The Image That Doesn’t Want to be Seen, Kenneth Feinstein The Infinite City: Politics of Speed, Asli Telli Aydemir The Media Poet, Michelle Cartier The Novel Imagery: Aesthetic Response as Feral Laboratory, Dawan Stanford The Organic Organisation: freedom, creativity and the search for fulfilment, Nicholas Ind The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death, Jeremy Fernando The Transreal Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities, Micha Cárdenas Theodore, Sofia Fasos Trans Desire/Affective Cyborgs, Micha Cárdenas Trans/actions: art, film and death, Bruce Barber Transience: A poiesis, of dis/appearance, Julia Hölzl Trauma, Hysteria, Philosophy, Hannes Charen Upward Crashes Fracture’s Topoi: Musil, Kiefer, Darger, Paola Piglia-Veronese

Other books available from Atropos Press 5 Milton Stories (For the Witty, Wise and Worldly Child), Sofia Fasos Korahais Che Guevara and the Economic Debate in Cuba, Luiz Bernardo Pericás Grey Ecology, Paul Virilio heart, speech, this, Gina Rae Foster Follow Us or Die, Vincent W.J., van Gerven Oei Just Living: Philosophy in Artificial Life. Collected Works Volume 1, Wolfgang Schirmacher Laughter, Henri Bergson Pessoa, The Metaphysical Courier, Judith Balso Philosophical Essays: from Ancient Creed to Technological Man, Hans Jonas Philosophy of Culture, Schopenhauer and Tradition, Wolfgang Schirmacher Talking Cheddo: Teaching Hard Kushitic Truths Liberating PanAfrikanism, Menkowra Manga Clem Marshall Teletheory, Gregory L. Ulmer The Tupperware Blitzkrieg, Anthony Metivier Vilém Flusser’s Brazilian Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, Vilém Flusser