A Constellation of the Self: The Body Productive

Elle était fort déshabillée
Et de grands arbres indiscrets
Aux vitres jetaient leur feuillée
Malinement, tout près, tout près.

_
Toutes les femmes qui l’avaient connu furent assassinées.
Quel saccage du jardin de la beauté!
– Rimbaud

_
I want to be a good woman
And
I want for you to be a good man;
That is why I am leaving.
– Cat Power

Everything is a body producing other bodies. We should begin by theorizing the body as a social and psychological construct within historical terms. Quite quickly we can notice the inquiry being transformed into one concerning reality and fictions, or perhaps more precisely a constellation of meta-realities which act in narrative terms. There has always been a fictionalized corpus of literature surrounding the body, and indeed one can soon agree with many feminist critics who position the body as a site of performance for various socio-political narratives. As a sociological construction, a distinction between body as physical entity and body as image or construction should be made, and thus the capitalized Body will be used throughout this paper in reference to the latter. (I wish to view the body as a performance of power within the discourse of a dislocalized power in Foucauldian terms) I also wish to further confuse my epistemological aim by incorporating a particular notion of the Real, which is required for any discussion of aesthetic expression, and indeed representation in a more broad sense. What I wish to posit as the Real is the narrative constructed by the Self in order to provide an ontological basis for conceptions of time and space by which the Self may operate in pragmatic terms. The Real is a fiction necessary for the localization of the Self within subjective terms, or rather to negotiate subjective experience of everything which is ‘not-I’ in relation to that which is understood as the Self. By definition (within Derridian terms), identity is created specifically by the intersection of Self and Other, and in this regard the Body can be seen to be a product of and an existence within the public sphere. More precisely, the Real provides a means for self-actualization, for the application and understanding of meaning and purpose to the Body and consciousness. Fundamentally the Real is related to the ego within Freudian and Lacanian conceptualizations, and consequently is dependent on the intersection of nature and culture. For the latter, the ego functions akin to what I am positing as the Body, namely the projection of an imagined corporeality into public discourse.

It is here that I wish to make the rather bold statement that for the purpose of cultural aesthetics and production, there was no Real for female subjects until the feminist struggle for agency and self-determination in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of course this is intended only as a broad generalization limited to the histories of Europe and the Americas. Individual examples of female subjects who could transcend the limitations of a patriarchal construction of their identity are numerous, yet pale in comparison to the influence of male circumscription of female agency and identity. The Real was defined within an essentially masculine ontology. Woman was the categorical Other, a difference from an essential normative (male) Body; in this capacity, woman is the first foreign body. As such, the female Body functions as the locus for the Real for both sexes, and more precisely in the sense of negation for the male psyche. This is true in spite of the fact that the female body, in particular during pregnancy, itself represents the intersection of nature and culture. My desire to confound (or perhaps even misunderstand) the theoretical tangents associated with the discourse on the body is an (enfeebled?) attempt to understand the body as a field of heteroglossiac readings and misreadings which when performed reify identity within public space. The corpus of imagery that I wish to invoke is intended to act as a collected structure in the vein of Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau project (see below), and consequently should not reflect any gestural attempt to totalize and unify into a cohesive and monolithic theorization concerning the body. There are innumerable bodies and, to borrow a phrase from Julia Kristeva, innumerable body-Selves, and consequently there can never be a generalization of the Body as a single conceptual entity. The Body is a function of social and cultural discourse and is fundamentally a historical and geographic construction, and as such is privy to structural and ontological transmutation just as other socio-historical constructs. Most importantly for the aims of this paper, the Body should be regarded as a site for the production of knowledge, and therefore relates to a larger structural concern as to the exercise and performance of knowledge / power in the Foucauldian sense. It is within these terms that I wish to examine the work of several female modern artists, in particular Frida Kahlo and Mina Loy.

I

The history of western philosophy and social discourse (a generalized term, to be sure, and yet one whose tendencies and commonalities admit some degree of utility in this context) demonstrates a rather clear differentiation between the mind and the body, reflecting an ancient Platonic instinct for the transcendence of consciousness. The body was conceived as the least important aspect of human existence, a distant echo of an eternal and authentic whole usually associated with the divine. The body is the locus for disorder, destruction, irrationality, and bondage, and serves in many respects to hinder the capacity of the mind to develop. The mind, lacking a physical manifestation and yet able to alter physicality (within certain parameters, of course) to adhere to its will, is by virtue of its rather ephemeral nature posited as more authentically human. And yet even Plato could properly situate the mind, despite its transcendent nature, as having some germinal root in the body. The Symposium, for example, outlines a healthy consciousness emerging from the cultivation of the senses; love in Plato becomes the reification of subjective experience. (In the discourse of contemporary neural science, the fact that sense-information processed by the mind is mediated and given a certain immateriality (becoming neural information) through bodily experience is demonstrative of the filter which is consciousness; the conscious mind can be seen as an aperture limiting information passed to it from the body.) The change that came with the medieval period was a moralizing of this binary construction, with the mind given a sort of preternatural existence within the realm of goodness (godliness), and the body became associated with the degradation and transience of temporal existence. There can be no legitimate attempt to map the Real in the terms which I have outlined above, for all of temporal existence was fictionalized against the (hyper) reality of divinity and the afterlife. (In this sense the Real and the fictive unite, mirroring the unification of body and mind.) Key to this construction is the understanding that all materiality is a priori in a state of suffering, as all material and corporeal forms seek a kind of divine annihilation (a gesture to merge with the godhead). I will return to the annihilation of the Real as a historical concept with a discussion of modernity proper below, and in particular with a discussion of several of the works of Frida Kahlo.

It is important for the progression of modernity to chart the influence of certain artefacts of Christian dogmaticism concerning the body. Christian ideology had – through many of the Church ‘fathers’ such as Ambrose, Tertullian, and Augustine – associated the body, and in particular the female body, twice removed from the divine as it was created from Adam’s own body, as the site of evil and corruption. The feminine form was more thoroughly theorized as the entry for evil into the world in both philosophical and pragmatic discourse; as the fifth-century bishop of Constantinople John Chrysostom wrote, “the whole of her body is nothing less than phlegm, blood, bile, rheum and the fluid of digested food ... If you consider what is stored up behind those lovely eyes, the angle of the nose, the mouth and the cheeks you will agree that the well-proportioned body is only a whitened sepulchre." It should be viewed as one of the great ironies of history that irrationality was inscribed upon women’s bodies in such an obviously irrational manner, reflecting contemporary superstition rather than the triumph of the rational(ly male) mind.

Perhaps the most damning castigation of female bodies emerged with a (deliberate?) misreading of one of the books of Genesis. Tradition posits that original sin was a bodily experience precipitated by the inability of a woman to curb her instincts against a sensory pleasure leading to transcendent knowledge. In this capacity, the Fall serves as a metaphor for the importance and conscripted bondage of the male body to pre-industrial society, which in turn figures as the locus for economic production. There were no bodies as such in Eden, or more precisely there were no Real bodies, but rather humans existed in a form of divine pre-cognate beatitude in a non-civilized state of existence. It was the body of woman who tied man to a fate of suffering as it was she who introduced not temptation, but the succumbing to temptation, and consequently the pleasures associated with the female body were themselves transformed into a form of suffering. The female body is figured as the means by which evil and suffering are given materiality. Yet there was a degree of a unified binary in the medieval period concerning the body, as both body and consciousness remained within the conceptual realm of nature as the living soul. It is the non-living soul, or the essence of identity stripped of corporeality, which is transcendent. Achieving the Real requires the annihilation of the body and consciousness through sacrifice (love, in the Christian sense): “the obliteration of the body and of the Body’s image are nevertheless hypostatized in Christ, and this leads to the abolition of the Self (of the body-Self)” (Kristeva 1987: 145). In the sense the Real is associated with a proper moral existence; in other words, the Real becomes the performance of morality through the body itself. Morality is, of course, a social construction, which consequently reflects a certain engendering of the performance of power. (I would not agree with some critics who posit the reproductive process as constitutive of gender, with social structures revolving around this biological function; performance is more fundamental to gender than function, biological or otherwise. This construction of gender seems to remain in line with a patriarchal socio-historical depiction of femininity as essentially a biological trope, and thus the female is limited against the more transcendent and adaptable masculinity. Frida Kahlo was to struggle with such notions of biological determinism in her art; see below.) As such, one must mediate temporal (bodily) experience by a strict and dogmatic morality in order to keep the mind, and hence the soul, pure. The female body was made a priori immoral as the site of desire, temptation, and corruption.

Any such notions of subjectivity were put aside, however, as the binary of mind and body entered its most absolutist phase with the Enlightenment period. Descartes’s cogito posits the conscious subject as transcendent to, and thus autonomous from, nature, and thus the split between mind and body reaches its most logical extreme. The Self is itself made transcendent as the I of Descartes’s most famous formulation. The mind becomes a preternatural construction, hierarchized above nature and the body. In this capacity the mind-body split is extended to the origin of knowledge, or (as I will later elaborate in a rather subtextual and implied manner,) Foucault’s sense of knowledge/power. After Descartes the mind became an operation for reflection upon space, bodies, and time, and thus the locus for the Real. Cogito ergo sum was the monolithic phallus reflecting a cultural sense of masculine identity as self-contained, sovereign, and transcendent. (The path has been opened for Nietzsche to deny the legitimacy of a ‘godhead’ and for the twentieth century to emerge as a particularly important historical distinction, as the Will to Power was the first salvo fired against the decadence of non-subjective or autonomous experience, and served as the key to opening the portal for the modern subject to emerge.)

So what might this rather lengthy exposition have to do with the project of modernism? It is my belief that the modern period inaugurated an aesthetic of absolute subjectivity in which the Bodies involved in art production and reception are brought to the fore, frequently to the point of displacing the importance of the given subject represented by an art piece. The subject may indeed be the Bodies of the artist and/or audience, functioning as the logical extreme of self-reflexivity. Kurt Schwitter’s Merzbau (The Cathedral of Erotic Misery) project (1920?-36), for example, is highly evocative of the subjective space between the art-object and the participants: using a massive archive of cultural detritus that Schwitters had collected, a new living space was created which questioned the lives and spaces of art producers – Mondrian and Hoch had grottoes dedicated to them, or more precisely using them: hair, urine, sketches, house keys, etc – in relation to other ‘cultural’ producers – murderers, sex criminals, businessmen, etc. It also served to question the new ‘space’ created by the relationship between the consumption and production of art and cultural information. Fundamentally, Schwitters’s life project demonstrated that the intersection of Self and Other (culture, other people, etc) can be localized as the internalization of desire, memory, violence, and regret within the realm of the Real. (There is no outside of the Self in this sense.) Merzbau is Schwitters’s own house, and yet perhaps more accurately it is a exterior manifestation of his own subjective experience.

Like memory, Merzbau functions by heteroglossia, with older works obscured or even obliterated by new ones. Most importantly, older schools of art production such as the dadaist works of the teens and twenties were glossed over by newer (post-1925) sculptures and architecture which diverged or even critiqued the older aesthetics. Seen in this light, the Merzbau stands as a physical manifestation of the organization of consciousness as mediated by bodily experience: space is consciousness in terms of subjective experience. The project’s most totalizing conceptual gesture is the removal of the viewing subject from conventional space in order to place them into a construction formed by their own cultural impact. Artefacts of the ‘real’ world are given new conceptualizations, thus a bus ticket or a soup advertisement can be used to obscure a jar of faecal matter or one of van der Rohe’s drawings, for example. The medieval cathedral was a unification of all the arts of the period, and likewise Schwitters attempted to refigure all of his contemporary culture into one localized space. This space flows and connects like the interior of a body, and yet it is clear that the ‘lifeblood’ of the building is composed of dead cultural artefacts given a life separate from their original function. The dislocation of Schwitters’s own body into the work – hair in a corner, nail cuttings along a wall, urine scattered throughout – suggests an organic being stretched beyond its capacity for self-containment. And yet this is precisely what the work is: a body, with passages and limbs and processes, and an almost organic predilection toward continual internal restructuring. The work is thoroughly modern in terms of a gesture to transcendence, namely the imposition of inorganic over organic space as a means to impose an order onto chaos (and thus it is in an ontological sense an echo of Cartesianism). Simultaneous to this gesture is the reification of a life (and its consequent body) into a physical space, reflecting Walter Benjamin’s thoughts in One Way Street: “autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and with what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities”. The modern Body represents itself by means of these discontinuities and fractures, and indeed the many fractured aesthetic forms that emerged in the period – Expressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism in painting; Serialism and Musique Concrète in music; Imagism and Expressionism in literature; Montage in cinema – can all be related with the Freud’s conception of the projection of the ego into public space, which Lacan, Kristeva, and others have redefined in terms of the ego being constructed in the public sphere. Hence the Real in terms of Modernism can be seen as the Body fractured and reconstructed within a specifically localized context: one body entering into the public sphere.

Interlude: an excuse to purge

There can be no real (Real) escape from immanence. It is a degree of tangentiality to the intersection of body and consciousness which has no parallel. There can only be a destruction of time and space at this instant, for they are merely narrative categories.

The body has a memory while the Body does not. Memory is a trace, a mark, a jouissance produced by an archon performing its function. In individual terms the archon is the unconscious process; in structural (social) terms the archon is a socio-economic construction, and thus deeply historical. Scar tissue is the manifestation of the pleasure of inscription. Inscription cannot occur within the public sphere without acknowledging that there is nothing other than inscription and re-inscription. There is no true memory within a culture as there are no scars.

Pregnancy – or more precisely the female form during pregnancy, as pregnancy can carry a wide symbolic association that can elude gender positions – becomes the manifestation of this ontological gesture. It is a roundness which bridges culture and nature, indeed it is the chasm or rupture between the two, a suture. No other possibility can occur at the moment of birth other than a complete and wholesale subordination to the subjective moment between mother and child.

Technology is itself the birthing of a tabula rasa; technology is frequently depicted as clean and antiseptic by the Moderns. Simultaneously, technology represents a rupture, a means by which humanity faces its ontological nature by losing a sense of itself to an Other which initially seems antithetical to the Self. The centrality of the body in representation stands in opposition to the displacement of the subject by technological means or aesthetics (Cubism as relative to cinema). Homo sapiens has become homo technica by exteriorizing technology from the Self; not a wise move.

Bodies matter and produce and subsume and burn up; there is only intensity.

II

One area which presents itself as an obvious construction of the Body as public space is the smaller locus of the domestic. The field of the home is eroticized by many modern writers, for the same reason that all parts of the body itself have been eroticised over the centuries. It is a narcissistic gesture required for the proper creation of the Self; bodies of the Other are fetishized in order to affirm the importance of the Self. Perhaps the most (in)famous text to represent the eroticisation of the domestic is Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1911-14). (Standing as a Barthesian punctum for my reading of her text is ‘A New Cup and Saucer’, with a degree of immanence caught in language, reflecting de Sade’s eroticised self-reflexive violence of subject positions in Justine and 120 days of Sodom: “Enthusiastically hurting a clouded yellow bud and saucer, enthusiastically so is the bite in the ribbon”. The reader is pained by a relocation within this immanent subjectivity.) Yet I do not wish to spend a great deal of time on this particular well-travelled text. That women have traditionally been tied to the domestic sphere allows a rather obvious language and Body to emerge. As Mina Loy stated: “My conceptions of life evolved while ... stirring baby food on spirit lamps – and my best drawings behind a stove to the accompaniment of a line of children’s cloths hanging round it to dry” (Last Lunar Baedeker, lxvi). This is reflected in the blatant eroticism of several of her visual works, such as Snails (1903) and Moons I and II (both 1902), which are ostensibly tentative relocations of the Body as anthropomorphized objects. I have chosen Loy’s work as emblematic for literature in the context of this paper precisely because she began her career as a visual artist, becoming the star protege of Angelo Jank in Munich during her late adolescence. In addition to the prominence of the Body within her work, the autobiographical detail of the altering of her name from Lowy to Loy, as well as the continual use of pseudonyms within her poetry itself, represents a unique conflation of Kristeva’s conception of the semiotic, in particular the position of marginalised literature, as located within the subversion of the Law of the Father elaborated in Desire in Language, as feminine writing (again, in this context it is the performance of gender which is more important than the substance of sex). This gesture itself figures as a means by which an incorrect Real as applied to the female Body by a patriarchal heritage is cast away in order to recreate the Self in a self-sufficient manner.

Throughout many of her poems, Loy seems enraptured by membranes and transmission. It is possible to interpret this fascination as a recognition of the interplay between Body and society. Frequently this liminal space is allegorized as skin, as in ‘The Dead’:

We have flowed out of ourselves
Beginning on the outside
That shrivable skin
Where you leave off
...
In one impalpable
Omniprevalent Dimension
We are turned inside out

Skin marks the passage between culture (Body) and body, between Self and Other, and functions as the most delicate and eroticised organ of the body (it serves tangentially as a vaginal membrane between Self and Other in terms of Kristeva’s birth process; see Tales of Love, bold text, pp. 253-6). Similarly in ‘Parturition’:

I am the centre
Of a circle of pain
Exceeding its boundaries in every direction
...
Locate an irritation without
It is within
Within
It is without.

This passage is also playing with the notion of a lack within the female Body, such being a cultural production of femininity which obviates a denial of female essence within the Real. It is a form of question answering itself a few lines later: “Why? / The irresponsibility of the male / Leaves woman her superior Inferiority”. This poem seems to be interrogating the particular historicity which has circumscribed the feminine Real as a heritage of Christian (patriarchal) indoctrination. Woman is made to deny her body in order to replicate the most transcendent of denials, the sacrifice enacted by Mary (her sexuality) in order to give corporeal form to the divine: “Mother I am / Identical / With infinite Maternity”. In this context, by metonymic inversion, Loy is describing man as positioning himself as the saviour for civilization, as indeed the universalized saviour figured in Christ, by positing all women as Madonnas “Wearing a halo / A ludicrous little halo / Of which she is sublimely unaware”.

It is precisely at this moment that Loy wishes to insert the eroticised female body into culture; a proper construction of Body acknowledges that only through the flesh is the ‘spirit’ (the transcendent gesture) legitimated. This gesture is reified by the eroticisation of objects touched by the Body, as in ‘Love Songs to Joannes’:

Licking the Arno
The little rosy
Tongue of Dawn
Interferes with our eyelashes

We twiddle to it
Round and round
Faster
And turn into machines

Till the sun
Subsides in shining
Melts some of us
Into abysmal pigeon-holes
Passion has bored
In warmth

The erotic body (and indeed orgasm, or jouissance to invoke a Derridean association) is here linking natural generative processes, signified by the sun (the primal source of organic life), and technology, with the Body serving as the suture between such ostensibly disparate domains. The erotic has conditioned and constitutes the Real in this capacity, and as such it serves as a transmissive medium, or perhaps more appropriately a translational medium, between object and subject, between perception and understanding. This generative capacity allegorized through the erotic can also be observed in ‘Brancusi’s Golden Bird’, itself a reflection on another modern art piece:

As if
some patient peasant God
had rubbed and rubbed
the Alpha and Omega
of Form
into a lump of metal

The procreative act has relocated the Real within the realm of materiality in the form of a body, further elaborated as ostensibly female by a later line describing the act of art production as “this breast of revelation”. The breast is allegorized as the locus for the Real, which functions – again to use Kristeva’s diction – as an intersection “turning nature into culture and the ‘speaking subject’ into biology”. Furthermore, “even though orality – threshold of infantile regression – is displayed in the area of the breast, while the spasm at the slipping away of eroticism is translated into tears, this should not conceal what milk and tears have in common: they are the metaphors of nonspeech, of a “semiotics” that linguistic communication does not account for” (Kristeva 1987: 249). The conception of the female breast as a source of knowledge production and transmission has a parallel in Frida Kahlo’s Nana (1937) (see below). In ‘Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots’, Loy is critical of a social creation of the Real along patriarchal lines:

Men’s eyes look into things
Our eyes look out

A great deal of ourselves
We offer to the mirror

Here she is implicitly citing the female gaze as both an interior and an exterior, with the construction of the Body performed as both a social and personal exercise. The theme of the poem as a whole is the consumerism of female bodies, and in particular the repression of female sexuality (virginity as a sacrifice to be revealed to its one true God, a self-reflexive worship of the phallus).

Some questions emerge: Can the Self be located outside of subjective experience? Can the Self be realized outside of social experience? Can there be a localization of a body without reference to the social construct Body? Painting by its very nature differs from literature in terms of its entrance into public space. While literature is indeed a product within the public sphere, its exhibition falls under the visual rubric of book-object, which necessarily differs from its linguistic content. The visual arts on the other hand integrate the physical and the semiotic – body and expression – into one ontological gesture. (Seen in this light, painting is a more immediate expression of the Real.) In this regard, painting is the simultaneous exhibition of the Self and subjectivity.

Through many of her works, Frida Kahlo can be seen to be interrogating the essential characteristics, and indeed the ontology, of the female body and its position within social discourse. Almost universally throughout her paintings, Kahlo places herself as the subject in question, usually within the guise of an autobiographical sketch that questions the role of technology, social practise, and gender performance within patriarchal society. While her body does not enter into the art pieces themselves in the manner in which Schwitters reifies his own autobiographical sketch – the blood of many of her ‘hospital’ pieces is not actually hers but a representation, for example – the totality of her art is a transfiguration of her body into public space in a similar manner as the Merzbau. I will not go into too much biographical detail, yet the accident which forced Kahlo into continually submitting to the medical system in order to alleviate her suffering and continue to allow her a degree of mobility figures as an essential historical trace within her art. Masculine and feminine identity come to the fore in her oeuvre, the former usually representing an operation of patriarchal control over the latter. This frequently manifests itself as an association between masculinity and technological processes, and femininity with transcendent generative processes. In all of her self depictions, Kahlo gazes in an intense yet simultaneously detached manner at the viewers of her work. This gesture invites the viewing subject to relocate themselves into her own subject position within the thematic topography of the painting. Her body is made to figure for the social creation of Body, and the viewer is meant to position themselves simultaneously as a body (Kahlo’s female body) and as the creator of Body in a larger cultural sense. Somewhat hesitatingly, I interpret her self-portraits with monkeys, from 1938 and 1940, as an ironic gesture to the origin of bodies within an evolutionary context, and thus consequently Body enters into scientific discourse and becomes satirized as such. Simultaneous to this is the rather pessimistic irony involved in Kahlo’s usually blatant self-deprecation, as she did not find herself to be representational of female beauty. In this sense, these portraits act to doubly question patriarchal forms of knowledge and understanding.

The Body presented as Kahlo’s is transfigured into a figure of divine reproductive capability in Nana (1937) (although one has to figure Kahlo herself as inheriting this position from the masked woman who is suckling her; that the woman’s right breast is ‘heteroglossed’ as a tree emerging from the infant Kahlo’s mouth suggests this), Roots (1943), and most prominently in The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Me, and Senor Xolotl (1949). Roots posits the female form as inhabiting the only generative space in an otherwise desolate landscape, and indeed in this guise Kahlo figures herself as the landscape itself. Metonymically it traces all of mankind to the female form, in an obvious gesture to transcend racial categorization. Her mid-section, from which the titular roots and leaf structures (found in many of her paintings) spring, is left bare, as though Kahlo is suggesting that viewed solely as a generative essence woman is without substance. Such would be a reductionist and problematic interpretation however, as the very existence of the painting suggests a re-mediation of the generative process into artistic production (and by extension language itself, avant la lettre in Kristeva’s formulation). Woman is indeed the entry point for life into materiality, and as stated above pregnancy in particular can be seen as the suture between nature and consciousness. Another biographical note must be made here, as Kahlo’s accident in her youth prevented her from having any children, despite a profound desire to procreate. Consequently, the traditional form of feminine identity was not available to her, and thus her conceptualization of Self and Body required a negotiation of the Real within these terms. That Kahlo positioned herself so prominently within her paintings to a degree denies the pessimism which she felt concerning her own reproductive capacity. Art provided Kahlo with a means to negotiate her identity within a society (or language itself in Lacanian terms) requiring the female Other to be bound by pregnancy.

The Love Embrace of the Universe is even less evasive about its gesture to the transcendence of female sexuality. While the universe itself remains an asexual ghost enveloping the remaining subjects, (light/dark) the Earth which represents material life is clearly female. The male (Diego Rivera) figures for the search for knowledge and truth, as signified by the mark of knowledge on his forehead – the third eye, of ancient cultural origin – and the flaming object which he holds in his hands. With this painting, Kahlo has located knowledge as springing from the female generative power, and thus she implies that truths can only reveal itself as such if the Real is distanced from the uniquely masculine perspective in which it is currently located. In order to understand this particular formulation, I wish to invoke the artist’s Self-Portrait Between the Borderline of Mexico and the United States (1932) in order to examine another view of the engendering of technological process and the production of knowledge. In this painting, the artist stands at the suture between an ancient symbolic topology of her native country and the modern technologies of the United States. The former is associated with the natural powers of the elements (the sun, moon, and lightning in the sky) and the productive capacity of the earth (the flowers at the bottom left), while the latter is associated with destructive or otherwise lifeless powers (the smoke billowing into the sky from a Ford plant, the chemical processing plant in the middle foreground) and the production of (existentially useless) technical devices. In both paintings, the allegorized woman stands at the borderline between nature and civilization, and between the production and destruction of knowledge.

By positioning herself as this suture, Kahlo is envisioning her function as artist (as body and as Body) as in a sense an oracle or shaman of the Real for the viewing subject. While Loy sees “a comic dissonance between machine and self” (Armstrong 1998: 116), in several of her paintings Kahlo seems to suggest that the machine is the self, although in a work such as Broken Column (1944) this is certainly not a joyful realization or a celebration of technology in the vein of the earlier Futurists. Human technology might indeed function as contrary to nature, yet it is still ontologically in the realm of the human body (and Body). There is no difference between technological civilization and motherhood when medical science is required to bring life into the world. That technology is fundamentally a natural element of human existence is evident by the importance of the use of medical equipment to situate the subject Technology incorporated into the Self anticipates both the pain and pleasure of existence. Technology is consequential for the Real in this sense. When read through the rubric of a Real engendered as masculine, both Henry Ford Hospital (1932) and Tree of Hope (1946) suggest the brutal dictatorship of scientific practise – and masculine interrogation through reason and cultural discourse – which inherently must destroy in order to understand. ****** Several of her paintings such as A Few Small Nips (1935) and Self-portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill (1951) depict the female subject as regulated and circumscribed by the male gaze; The Little Deer (1946) acts in a related manner, positioning Kahlo as the symbolic target for the gaze of the viewing subject, with a subject position relocated within the realm (or more precisely for this particular piece, the arc) of the phallus. The male actor in this first painting seems to be emotionally detached from his subject, and one is led to question whether the woman is a victim in a narrative as well as thematic sense. Self-Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill is particularly potent in terms of its interrogation of the extent to which the female body is made a disempowered Other by a patriarchal system which essentializes the Real within masculine terms. The portrait of the doctor, in the genre of traditional ‘respectable’ portraiture (in other words, the subject is depicted with an aura of authority and dignity suitable to his social position and function), is aligned in such a manner that he stares dispassionately towards Kahlo’s own face, and she in turn stares directly at the viewer of the painting. By this triangulation of subjectivities, Kahlo is allowing the viewer to subject the original male gaze itself to a discourse of power relations: one questions where authority might be located, for the doctor has not fulfilled his intended function as Kahlo has not been healed despite her repeated surgeries. The doctor’s patient, which should be the locus and legitimizing function for his performance of power, is denied any sense of Self by the rationalized quantification of her body as the object of his performance of authority. It is for this reason that he has been denied a sense of the Real within the topography of the painting. Kahlo has rescued herself from the subjection to his false domination by relocating the doctor to the hyper-reality of the portrait within the portrait. As disembodied Other, the doctor is made to be an end product of Kahlo’s re-mediated generative capacity. She uses his own objectifying gaze to achieve these ends; this appropriation is made literal by the depiction of a heart as the paint on the palette used to create his portrait. In a very real sense, the medium of transmission and understanding, in artistic or broader terms, is blood.

The appeal to a somewhat dated trajectory of philosophical discourse which began this present examination is an intended problematic, for while the theories, derived from Nietzsche through Foucault, which I wish to utilize concerning the performance of identity (which by extension is a performance of a certain discourse of power, relative to the subject in question) gesture toward a rejection of antiquated philosophical percepts such as binaries and transcendence, at the same time the past and the present are ontologically unified as mutual disruptions which reflect each other. This problematic is intended to reflect a rupture necessary in modernism, which Jameson has in numerous instances posited as the period of the post-modern and which anticipates a true high modernism that signals a renouncement of ties to a formal school descended from antiquity. Arguably modernism is itself an incomplete project, and the continued bondage of the body to detrimental social constructs is one of the artefacts of this failure (or more precisely, its incompleteness, which suggests a lack of time rather than of motivation or direction). That the female form continues to be the locus of sexual (and consequently political, economic, and cultural) identity and for the feminine to remain a degree of categorizational rather than subjective discourse presents the modern individual with a creation of the body which remains tied to essentialist philosophical principles. The body brought to its most extreme subjectivity is the Body of the modern. It is the fractured body meant to ontologically unite the aesthetic with the transient, with the art piece’s own deconstruction through criticism.



Bibliography

Armstrong, Tim. Modernism, technology and the body. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge, 1990.

Connell, R.W. ‘Gender as a Structure of Social Practice’. Space, Gender, Knowledge. Ed.
McDowell and Sharp. London: Arnold, 1997. 44-52.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. Trans. J. Strachey. New York: Norton, 1962.

Gambrell, Alice. Women intellectuals, modernism, and difference. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1997.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1994.

Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. L. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.

––– Tales of Love. Trans. L. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.

Loy, Mina. The Last Lunar Baedeker. Charlotte, North Carolina: The Jargon Society, 1982.

New, Caroline. ‘Man Bad, Woman Good? Essentialisms and Ecofeminisms’. Space, Gender,
Knowledge. Ed. McDowell and Sharp. London: Arnold, 1997. 177-92.

Stein, Gertrude. ‘Tender Buttons.’ Writings and Lectures 1911-1945. Ed. Meyerowitz. London: Peter Owen, 1967. 158-99.

Warner, Marina. Alone of all her Sex. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976.

generative processes: the creation of a new subjectivity, for inscription only -- by the way, this paper sucks for many MANY reasons

There is a nervous condition felt by many under the aegis of advanced capitalist economic practise. It is no longer enough to call it an alienation felt by the distance between workers and the means of production. The interpellative gestures of social and productive discourse under advanced capitalism are misread by many as being a sense of advanced temporality, a quickened pace. It is becoming increasingly difficult for people to cope, each as an individual, to the social and productive demands made on them. Indeed, the very notion of individuality which is fundamental to philosophic and legal discourse in nations which have developed capitalist economies is itself becoming ever more problematised. I wish to take as fundamental to this present examination the notion, elaborated in Hardt and Negri’s Empire, of a hybrid existence between humanity and the machines that are employed in production. There has never been an ontological distinction between humanity and its technological practises and devices. Primitive humans were as fully hybridized with their tools and technologies, in the ontological sense, as their modern counterparts. There has always been a hybridized discourse between what is organic and what is technological. The public sphere is always-already the medium in which the hybrid subject is formed. Through a process of interpellating subjects, the productive agents of society reproduce themselves: “the behaviours of social integration and exclusion proper to rule are thus increasingly interiorized within the subjects themselves” (Hardt & Negri 2000: 23). As a subject always-already interpellated under the panopticon of control which constitutes and reifies such institutions, there is no true exteriority to the system. (If we view resistence against an authority a product of that authority, as Foucault himself does in Discipline and Punish, then what marks the rupture necessary for the creation of an alternate system of production and interpellation: violent interruption of the system, characterised by the two World Wars which led to a relatively peaceful Europe at the expense of many of its former colonies, or the aggressively pacifist resistence which led to Indian independence from Britain?).

Presently, the principle concern that I wish to explore is the degree to which technological hybridization has changed two concepts for philosophical discourse: subjectivity (or even more precisely, the degree to which ‘immanence’ can be understood) and the sublime. Both of these concepts have been tied (historically speaking) to a sense of ‘organic’ transcendence. Alternately phrased, notions of the beautiful and of truth cannot be defined in the same manner as they once had. There is no hieratic (divine) subject to which the gesture of transcendence is given function, as I will further elaborate below. Postmodernity has transformed the beautiful to achieve an aesthetic balance between technological application and natural (human) generation. Technologies which have increased the circulation of goods in order to maximize market development have also allowed increased population flows which simultaneously disrupt and constitute productive capacities. The current developments in the hybridization of human subjects and mechanical processes signal a metonymical exodus, as subjects are continually attempting to dislocate themselves from the limitations of their productive capacity. This occurs in “not only spatial but also mechanical [means] in the sense that the subject is transformed ... toward (or with) the machine – a machine exodus” (Hardt & Negri: 367). Moreover, this exodus “is no longer defined by the linear path it followed throughout the modern period”, as linearity has ceased to function as it once had (see below). It is fitting that the linear technologies of the industrialization would induce linear aesthetic responses (and ruptures, in the sense of Cubist or Expressionist aesthetics), and likewise digital technologies of the post-industrial era, which invoke the referential patterns of the rhizome, will induce non-linear responses (and ruptures). It is my intention to widen the scope of the non-linearity of postmodern subjectivities somewhat, in particular in relation to the conception of aesthetic as relating to temporal continuity.

As advanced capitalist economics, and specifically market capitalism, are continually creating wealth from non-material means not directly tied to labour (such as land and stock market speculations), time itself has become the “exchange value”. In a very reductive sense, time has been erased from the interpellative mechanism of productive social structures which function by (and in order to) creating subjects. It is a form of a vicious cycle, with productive motivation standing as Adam Smith’s infamous ‘invisible hand’. As Hardt and Negri point out, there is alongside ‘material’ labour an ‘affective’ form of production which relates to material labour in a complex manner. Indeed, such production informs the entire landscape of production. Worker alienation is the desire for production to lend meaning to the subject’s existence; desire becomes nothing when it lacks a substantial Other to which it applies itself. Desire for an Other to the present is that which creates time as a concept. This Other has disappeared in modern capitalism to become merely a quantized element of the Self, a temporality wholly dependent on the annihilation of past and present for a marketable future. This is in counter distinction to Marx’s determination that capital always requires an ‘outside’ to itself in order to actualize surplus value. Yet it is within this ‘anomaly’ that a creative space can be located, negotiating the demands of both subject and time, which create themselves in the same expressive gesture (time is, in the sense of creation, a restoration of an infinite present). Furthermore, this motivation, or affective production, is tied to ideology and not material value itself; in Sartre’s formulation, there is no thing-in-itself for the otherwise empty signifier ‘money’ in its most absolute sense. Jameson argues that a good deal of postmodern architecture is emblematic for the empty signification of modern signs. It is interesting in this regard to note the continual use of building design, typically the most capital-intensive medium for aesthetic expression, to metaphorically stand for the deterioration of capital itself. (Is this the ghost of Marx’s ‘general intellect’ in a new form?) The glass skins which form the structures of many contemporary skyscrapers reflects “the difference between a brick and a balloon”, serving to “dematerializ[e spirituality itself] without signifying in any traditional way” (Jameson 1999: 186). Religious doctrine has been shifted from the transcendent gesture of its spiritual forms to become the empty ritualistic faith associated with consumer culture.

New temporalities and subjectivities are formed by technological developments, and these altered senses of time inform conceptions of the ‘present’ in a complex and heteroglossiac manner. The sense of rupture required for Jameson’s notion of periodization has folded in upon itself somewhat. It is becoming increasingly difficult to assuage past and present in the digital archive of culture, as the two are purposefully conflated as a means to further a certain nostalgia for the present. To use Derrida’s conception of the archive as a site of violence, it is my belief that the current exultation of financial gain over the rights of the citizen body is itself a reflection of the violence done to the present by capitalism. This violence cannot be exclusively figured in a national framework. We cannot blame America, for example, for the domination of other countries on moral grounds alone for the simple reason that as morality is situationally relative, there can be universal sense of justice imposed from without. It is not incomprehensible therefore that many who actively seek America’s dominance over other countries see themselves as acting in a morally just manner, and consequently will not relinquish their positions by moral appeals against productive systems. Not only will it be made clear that there is no longer a ‘without’ to which an enlightened individual can retreat, but also the irrationalities and problematics of the system of production and culture which is represented by the semantic figure ‘America’ can be appropriated to perpetuate the disruption of the system as a whole. For the expression of hate only feeds back in upon violent repression and consequently the system is never metamorphosed. The sense of jouissance which constitute the strategies used to legitimate corruption is the same jouissance which constitute the struggle in opposition, and thus mutual destruction is resultantly to be expected. Instead the process must itself be harnessed, (not necessarily under the guise of a conscious control), and restored from internal means. At this point authoritative agents interpret the populace in a manner suggesting a violent reaction in order to further the legitimacy and jurisdiction of Empire. Subjects are themselves interpellated within this violent act: it is their mutual destruction as individuals in the absolute sense which guarantees their formation as subjects in the sense predicating (productive) citizenship. Is it possible to suggest that money, as an otherwise empty signifier, is itself the mark of archival violence? Certainly time is sacrificed for this particular form of impression, as it is excised out of the equation in real financial terms. So is subjectivity in its historical sense, as a newly reinscribed subjectivity, which prefigures the termination of the older productive mechanisms, is fabricated in subjects who are themselves made ‘timeless’ locked into an eternal present of desire and expectation. And yet, lacking the sense of time results in a dislocation of the sublime, at least in regard to Adorno’s reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Gestures made invoking transcendence lead to ideological categories (such as politics or aesthetic judgement), and consequently there can be no possibility for the conceptualization of a universalized entity, or in other words, a transcendent one.

And yet the financial market is itself seeking a certain transcendence, at least in terms of temporal and geographic space. This is a gesture enacted with the recognition that the current system of production is not self-sufficient in relation to profits. The internal stages of the cycle of its decomposition follow Marx’s formulation in Capital, in which money is concentrated in order to be realized as capitalization, usually along production lines which have distinguishable limitations. Every material construct is limited and circumscribed by its creation. In terms of production, growth will be continually diminished by necessary expenditures, and consequently the profit margin diminishes to virtual non-existence. At its most reductive figuration, one only has to refer to the definition of a recession in contemporary economic parlance: not as a loss of money, but a zero growth in profit revenues. It is not enough for capitalism to plateaux, making the same amount of money year after year (even after inflation is accounted for), but rather profits must continually rise, otherwise the company is perceived to flounder under ‘market pressure’. (It is interesting to note that all elements of the rhizome of the various heteroglossiac finanscapes seek to monopolize power, conglomerating like pooled mercury and demonstrating the true nature of market pressure.) As a consequence, capital must itself be dislocated from geographic localization, and indeed ultimately from production itself. It is my belief that with the digital quantization of cultural production, and the emergence of digital technologies of control over manufacturing production, as more and more fragments become autonomous wholes, they network together, functioning as an ever-increasingly omnipresent rhizome of productive interpellation.

Within finance capital itself, the sole value given to the present is in anticipation of future earnings; there is no present without a future-reflection which adds value over the present. Accordingly, it is possible to recognize the non-existence of the future in economic terms, and what we name and quantize as such is merely a certain nostalgia for the present. In reality the present serves as a defence against the future, and the continually diminishing units of time which serve to define the present in economic discourse can be seen to function as the division of the present into nothingness, as more and more instances of the future giving meaning to the present (nostalgia for the present). In this sense the present can never be truly itself in any capacity. Expectation has itself become a consumable product, to the point where the future exists and is reified solely in the financial terms of its present capitalisation. This mechanism can be seen to operate most distinctly in finance capital, yet can be located in other realms of culture and production as well. (It should be noted however that simple reactionary approaches will not serve to ‘fix’ the problems of the postmodern subject, and indeed such nostalgic flights from technology are themselves transformed into commodities, the current zeal for organic farming practices perhaps most emblematic of the ‘back to the Earth’ movement defining itself for the 21st century.) Pastiche is one of the aesthetic figurations for this cross-contamination of the past and the present in terms of content or form, and by its nature as object of interest serves to anticipate the future (itself a form of nostalgia for the present, an anticipated future looking back on the present with a positive judgement). It is possible then to view society itself conglomerating not as a monolithic structure of productive capacity, which is indeed where, in a rather ominous manner, market capital seems to be heading, but rather as a rhizome of micro-productive spheres.

Technological advancement under late capitalism signals the push through capitalism that is required to overcome it. The technologies which Empire requires for its continuation are the same which can be used to overcome the centralization of power which is the principle condition for its existence. This is true even of ‘Empire’ itself as a concept. To use a rather harmless example, the transfer of representational media into the digital realm allows for a greater amount of such cultural products to be more readily consumed. It is far more efficient (and by extension less costly) to produce and distribute texts in their digital form than has been allowed before by any other technology. More importantly, productive capacity has itself begun the process of digital conception, as an ever broadening array of software tools are becoming available for general use. While these developments certainly do not overcome the requirement under modern economic doctrine for the outlay of capital in order to realize productive capacity – one still needs to purchase the computer hardware in addition to having the knowledge of its use, which itself reflects a certain socio-economic elitism – they certainly begin to foreshadow the prognostications Hardt and Negri elaborate in the latter part of Empire.

Within this framework, it is interesting to note the changes that have occurred in representational media over the past few decades. Increasing flows (in Appadurai’s sense) of culture allow older conventions and aesthetics to be recontextualized as individual instances of artistic expression, and not as being representative of the artform itself in any ontological manner. Time is significant in this respect, for the continual accretion of cultural production depends very highly on this continual circulation of textual elements. In this capacity, it is possible to analyse cultural production in a quantified form. Individual artworks do not retain the Benjaminian aura they once had, not only because of mass production but also because of sheer volume of cultural artefacts. Every consumer product has been associated with a variety of representational media – commercials for Coca-Cola can use references to classic cinema as well as top-40 music, and each becomes subsumed to the product itself – and this may lead to sensory anaesthesia in the sense of being able to discern what is substantively original from copies or appropriations. In a very real sense there is nothing which cannot be assigned a monetary value, and one of the crises felt by modern consciousness is the reduction of all the dreams, desires, and histories of individual subjects into a quantized element. It was a very small step from the Anglo-centric media representations of the 1950s to the current panoply of cultural voices which all speak the same language, namely commercial discourse. Literature was perhaps the first to do so, as the reading audience was meant to enter into a fictive state of immanence with the author. Simultaneous to this fact must remain the elitism inherent in the medium; until as late as the 18th century, there were very few participants in the discourse, for both educational and economic reasons.

One of the more prominent tangents that modern musical composition (in the avantgarde, in any respect) has taken involves the transference of determinate control away from the composer. This compositional technique is not entirely a new one – wind chimes and other ‘sound sculptures’ are centuries old – yet by employing them within digital media there is an interesting juxtaposition of temporalities. The ‘aggressive present’ which defines a great deal of modern production has in the computer created a tool for the dissolution of time within the subjective framework of a human lifetime. This has interesting repercussions on the aesthetics and forms of music, itself an expression of a present made absolute in its most truth sense. Music is ephemeral, qualifying each moment with meaning by involving time as a fundamental element. The moment signals both itself and a nostalgic glance away from itself, to its own termination [Death drive?]. One of the responses music has had to digital technologies is to remove the composer from the creative process to a degree not normally associated with aesthetic techniques. Hegel provides a means by which determinacy can be negotiated, as he links it with verbal language and not musical ones. Generative music operates in the vein of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the rhizome, as each musical element is informed by and in turn informs every single other element in the system. Any figuration of determinate conceptuality must be cast aside in order to let the piece speak for itself. The composer uses software which generates music based on the rules that the composer wishes to establish, however arbitrary they may be, and themselves made to evolve and create new rules. This process ostensibly is to direct the musical output to as limited a degree as possible while still retaining aesthetic value. Furthermore, generative compositional forms signal the discourse of hybridization between humans and machines. As the system can use adaptive strategies, typically founded on the principles of fractal and biological (population growth and adaptation) mathematics, it can frequently prove to be an interesting juxtaposition and negotiation of compositional and improvisational strategies involving both human subject and machine (can the current state of artificial intelligence research allow us to call it a subject?).

Generative systems seek to hypostatize the present as a fundamental element standing outside of the experiencing subject’s temporality. In other words, the present only exists in relation to an expected future and has no transcendent signification in and of itself. Certainly, this refers back to Kantian transcendence, yet Kant’s notion of the sublime has lost some of its applicability, as the composing subject and the listening subject do not share the same frame of reference. In its most brief and reductive terms, the conditions for judgement by the subject are wholly different, and thus the composer cannot gesture toward the same aesthetics of form used by ‘linear’ composers. In a very real sense, generative music dispels the illusion many feel concerning the aesthetic experience of music, namely that it is a medium invoking a sense of transcendency in the subject. Quite on the contrary, music is forever tied to the present in a manner that other forms of cultural expression are not. The past and future of music do not have any solidity save in a subject’s reflective consciousness, and thus within the ‘past’ of consciousness Kantian judgement enters into the relation between subject and object. In linear musical forms, the present is given meaning by the past (crescendos, harmonies, melodic phrasing, “themes”, etc) and yet with generative music there is no relation of signification other than simple origination. Seen in this context, it is possible to liken such forms of composition to the life process itself, as each moment of music serves not only to signal itself as such but to provide the generative base for future “generations” of notes. By removing the individual from the system of composition (production) to as much a degree as possible, any appeals to the sublime or the beautiful must also be distinguished from their Hegelian traditions, usually used in the discourse of aesthetics. Such composers do not establish parameters in which the compositional output is controlled in a direct manner, but rather the composer determines the course which the music will follow by means of a system of compositional rules.

Jem Finer’s Longplayer project, in which a generative algorithm based on the mathematical dynamics of life processes and other fractal and logarithmic systems continually produces one composition which is intended to remain operational for one entire millennium, is the logical extension of this principle. The piece is intended to be available to anyone with an internet connection, and as well has several physical locations around the planet. Each of these nodes serves to inform the others, and accordingly the system as a whole functions as a rhizome. The process used by Finer invokes contemporary genetic research and refigures that knowledge as an aesthetic principle. In doing so, the work aggressively defies both consumption (in the traditional mode of its operation) and the interpellative practises of modern cultural institutions. There is no single moment of signification in any sense in the ‘present’ of Longplayer. And yet fundamentally the piece serves to heighten the listening subject’s awareness of their own subjectivity, as the machine creating the piece interpellates the listener as a subject identical to all others despite temporal or geographic distance. Principally this is accomplished by removing the conceptual totality of the piece from the boundaries of a single subject position. In other words, all subjectivities are as one to the interpellative capacity of the piece. In actuality there is no ontological distinction between machine, composer, and composition in terms of the listening subject. Consequently, it is possible to determine the essential concern of the piece is human subjectivity to time itself.


APPENDIX????? WTF??!??

At the end of the representational spectrum (at least in terms of its valuation by mainstream society) is digital entertainment, more precisely understood in its more colloquial usage as “video game” or “computer game”. While such terminology refers to the fact that such games take place on video screens, the coincidence of its origin should be noted with the development of the home video revolution (which itself, in a rather melodramatic sense brought people in from the harsh elements of the public exhibition of films). In a very real sense, the new must be described in terms of the old, or what is most easily recognized in conventional terms. When the first mass produced arcade machine entered North American culture in 1972, there was a great deal of confusion as to the relationship between what was on screen and what the user performed: it was felt that the user should do “something”, and then watch the results, thus remaining within the linearity of subjective relation ascribed by the video medium. Other than a few exceptions – being the laserdisc-based games of the early 1980s such as Dragon’s Lair, which were extremely linear and did not involve the participating subject in any meaningful manner by allowing judgement or strategic adaptation – digital gaming is fundamentally antithetical to the process involved in ‘video’, consequently the term should be recognized as a rather appropriate misreading. There is no precise linear equation of medium and its relation to the viewing subject. This lack occurs not only in the ontology of the ‘interface’ – one reads books or watches films or theatrical performances from start to finish, for example – but also in terms of the form of subjectivity interpellated by the medium itself.

Gaming is a user-defined medium which deviates significantly from the traditional figuration of production author/text. The narrative does not exist as a prior object, but rather like generative music unfolds under the guise of a few generative rules, and is given shape as the participating subject progresses through the game itself. In this sense, the subject is author of its own experience; the narrative is reified by the subjectivity imposed on the participating subject. The narrative can be as simple as that which results from a game like Pac-Man and its contemporary equivalent of the first-person ‘shooter’ genre, or as complex as the narratives developed in ‘toy sand-boxes’ such as SimCity and the persistent online playfield of games such as Everquest. The authors of such programs are not placing the participating subject into a totality of narrative and experience such as those of other mediums. Just as has occurred in music by the use of a variety of generative processes in composition, game producers provide the rules by which the system operates but in no manner do they control the ‘final product’ or the experience the subject will have with their creations. There is no conductor who leads the viewing subject to a specific point, but rather the subject itself makes decisions involving (and creating) the outcome. The question remains as to what forms of subjectivities might come to exist in virtual worlds, and perhaps more importantly what happens to time during that process. Such is, by virtue of its diverting nature, wholly beyond the scope of this present examination.




Bibliography

Adorno, Theodore. Problems of Moral Philosophy. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2001.

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.

Deleuze, Gilles, & Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1996.

Hardt, Michael & Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000.

Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn. New York: Verso, 1998.

(Mattelart, Armand. Networking the World: 1794-2000. Trans. Liz Carey-Libbrecht.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000.)

(Therborn, Goran. The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1980.)

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poems once purged the ghettos of old europe

The Bitch

this poem is not correct
no, wrong, right?
this poem will never speak sideways
which opens giving birth
this poem never fucks spits curses
it has never had a glass of water
this poem is not a way in
for outside is always sunny

we all learn best at play

this poem is not an architect
piled to the ceilings
this poem is not a banana
for it tastes bitter
this poem will not sit outside
waiting to play tag
this poem will not be quiet
loud soft sexy it stings

and breathes like i do

this poem is not my Self or Anyone
for words are not birthdays
this poem is not a way out
looking for meaning
this poem is not words or sex or violence
all i have is time to spare
this poem will never arrive
late early never always

it came before i did

The Identity archive, or A Hunter-Gatherer Mines Everything in the Kitchen Sink(A Trace of Personality Caused by Acute Stress)

There was a certain truth about the medieval and early modern conception of the body politic that finds a literary corollary in a few examples of postmodern literature. Certainly we can come to understand identity as functioning as a network of social relations and a panoply of interpellations and responses creating a sense of the collective political space of a population in a heteroglossiac manner in order to allow legitimate readings of collective negotiations of identity, such as occur within national or ethnic definitions. While the general trajectory for the development of the modern state traces the supremacy of the individual subject over the agency of the social collective, it should be understood that the autonomy (the “rights”) of the modern subject is ontologically dependent on the increasingly complex interconnection of mutual social dependencies. This concept of individual agency, as functioning within an interconnected network of multiplicities, informs the identity of the subject in a complex manner. What is frequently described as ‘personality’ (genetic potential, etc) does not exist hermetically sealed from political elements of existence. Individuals can only realize their personalities according to the means available to them – the ability to adequately perform (as) a locus for power in social discourse, in turn affecting the abilities of other individuals to act – and consequently identity involves a history, a means of charting Will to Power (as such it is...) within the pragmatic terms of socio-economic discourse. This complex relation of essentialist discourse and the temporal concerns of political existence (life in a society) is only jovially referred to here in order to disavow its legitimacy, as it is otherwise beyond the aims of this paper. It should be taken a priori that identity will not function in essentialist terms for the simple reason that such a position returns the subject back to the one word of creation, the divine performative that inaugurated with its utterance all of existence from the veil of darkness. Such will not be adequate, for identity is realized in a much more playful manner. Adaptation, which is fundamental to life itself, requires a degree of subjectivity, exclusion, and most importantly judgement. More importantly in the context of this present examination, the body metonymically stands as a figure symbolizing the reification of national identification. The body is where ideology is inscribed upon a subject; it is the space where materiality and ideology intersect. The psyche vests a nostalgic interest in a specific location: body = identity = rhizome of social relations. We can link this sense of nostalgia by means of Freud’s death drive to adaptation itself, and thus by extension to the performance of identity. In a rather melodramatic sense, every time we perform a given social relation, we return to the womb, to a state in which there is only immanence and no Other.

I

The history of colonialism belies such power relations, as overt distinctions were made concerning those who could and those who could not wield authority (or even citizenship). In order to authorize the dominant culture, a gesture is made to a transcendent moral obligation (the Law, religious or otherwise; education; “civilization” itself, etc), which subsequently becomes a justification for the imposition of justice (the epitome of Self in the discourse of ethics) onto another population. Spivak refers to this gesture as the “truth of culture”, operating as a “battle for the production of legitimizing cultural explanations” (Spivak 1999: 340). Psychological defences are created by the dominant culture in order to deal with the loss of identity inscribed onto subjugated peoples by virtue of their subjugation. Most prominently this process figures as repeated attempts to deny the legitimate identity of the oppressed, of categorizing them as ‘subhuman’ and denying citizenship (or even what can be termed basic human rights). There exists an erasure of bodies within cultural discourse simultaneous to an emphasis on the distinguishing elements of bodies in racist politics. While such ideological positions can be categorized as false and rejected accordingly, an imbalance of power ensues, which must be categorized as an injustice, when there is a certain degree of institutional authority acting to legitimate such discourse . The dominant Self negates the existence of the feared Other. At the same time, differences among Self-identification and recognition of the Other are aggrandised to irrational extremes in order to demonstrate their alien-ness.

I have focussed my present discussion largely on one novel by Tom King in order to demonstrate such cultural politics within a (dis)functioning society. One of the principle elements of the text is the fundamental fluidity of culture that is expressed in otherwise circumscribed manners. As King stated concerning his Native heritage during an interview with Jeffrey Canton, “for Native people, identity comes from community, and it varies from community to community. I wouldn’t define myself as an Indian in the same way that someone lying on a reserve would. The whole idea of ‘Indian’ becomes, in part, a construct. It’s fluid. We make it up as we go along”. Identity can be seen to be the playful adaptation to environmental criteria which are themselves functioning in a heteroglossaic manner. Seen in this light, identity must always-already be a hybridized construction. It is possible to locate this within Bakhtin’s notion of discourse, as a socially hybrid construct in which speech never entirely and exclusively originates with the speaking subject, but instead it is always heteroglossic and polyvocal, formed always in relation to the discourse of the Other. It is my belief that in this capacity Derrida’s archontic function, as elaborated in Archive Fever, operates in a slightly inverted fashion as the playful negotiation of multiplicity of identities which informs the performance of a singular identity by individual actors. Briefly stated, Derrida elaborates a conception of the archive as being the site of violence between affirmation and censorship, and it is this site where ritualized discourse allows a trace of the archon itself to enter the archive as the jouissance of its excising function. This function of the archons circumscribes identity to the point where the desire to exclude becomes the ontological priority of the act of archiving. In the case of Archive Fever itself, this function is allegorized as the ritualized act of circumcision. Consequently, the creation of a site of knowledge is a project more concerned with negation rather than a creative gesture. In terms of the performance of identity, it seems evident that a particular identity is chosen by a process of social interpellation. The individual actor cannot be categorized as an archon – an agent who negotiates the performance of individual identities – for their own behaviour. And yet, the enacting of an identity is itself an instance of jouissance, a pained creation signalling the termination of the subject from the infinitude of possibility. As such, the individual can be located in terms of the mark of violence, their bodies representing the Derridian gesture of circumcision. Thus individual identities can be observed as the negotiated compromise between the violence of absolute interpellation from external forces and personal agency.

National identity is a united and organically produced entity which traces its roots to the psychology of the individual. This functions in terms of a collective narration or an imagined group consciousness signified by ‘nationality’, and also in terms of conceptualizing the Self – an extension of the Lacanian not-I projected to its most logical extension. In a sense there is no individual without a collective; it is obvious that the inverse is true as well. In order to more adequately describe the sense of identity to which this paper refers, I wish to here invoke the conception of rhyzome as elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari in Mille Plateaux as the theoretical locus for the distribution of power within social relations. Power and identity function not in linear, hieratic terms, but rather in the mode of an infinite number of distributed centres, which represents a continuity of dislocalizations and multiplicities each acting independently and in relation to every other simultaneously. It is evident that identity is the performance of a meta-narrative gesturing towards an idealized conception as inscribed upon individuals by social structures. At the same time, these structures are themselves informed by the body; the Law, for example, can be construed as the means by which bodily impulses are controlled and consequently more precisely located and traced. Yet I do not wish to posit the body as the original site of power within civil discourse, as such would be a gesture towards a sense of universalism that I do not wish to make. It is more likely that there are as many “sites” of power as there are bodies, and consequently the performance of power has more to do with the relation of bodies than bodies themselves as such. And yet certain bodies are made as exemplary for the system as a whole. In particular, the asexualized representation of the white male body signifies its normalizing tendencies: this form becomes the ritual, both legitimating the archon in his own eyes and inscribing itself into the archive as a negation akin to the Freudian castration complex. Citizenship can itself be viewed as the mark of jouissance inscribed on individuals who ascribe to a certain performative ideology. While it has the capacity to enable an individual to express itself, simultaneously it is a circumscription of available options for actualizing identity. The citizen carries the letter of the Law (and is indeed therein inscribed avant la lettre) with them, and consequently is contaminated, in the Freudian sense, with its structural concepts, be they limitations of gender or ethnicity.

Every single instance of the performance of identity refers to (every) other performances, and consequently identity is constructed in an unconscious manner using appropriated cultural symbols and means for discourse. While there is a degree of variance among the interpellative responses elicited in various subjects, a common sense of belonging does emerge from such a multiplicity. Each citizen to a greater or lesser degree shares in a discourse of “home”-ness, of locating identity within geographical boundaries by means of a nostalgic positioning of origins. For Freud, the realm of the uncanny is the locus of a sense of “home” in the psyche. This is undertaken by hiding from the psyche what is most familiar, which is an act to rationalize and normalize a subject’s environment. Thus, the normative social and cultural forms are taken for granted while that which deviates from the norm is emphasized for precisely this deviation. Following certain interpretations of marginalised ethnicities within the rhetoric of Marxist discourse, it is possible to locate the schizophrenic Self, a conjunction of fractured “desiring Others” as interpellated by advanced capitalist ideological structures, aligned with absolutist principles of representation; signifier and signified are conflated in a form of semantic fundamentalism. Social relations manifest as relations of immanence: “The [Body without Organs] is the field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire (with desire defined as a process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it or a pleasure that fills it)” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 154). In relations involving the intersection of cultures – itself a rhizome of inclusion and exclusion of symbols – marginalised cultural voices are frequently erased from the perceived purity of the ethnic archive, a subject position imposed in order to sanctify the Self of the subjects of the dominant culture. While individuals themselves function from origins, power itself does not. As mentioned above, this present examination will operate on the assumption that identity is created by a shared performance of power operating as a rhizome. If identity functions within the boundaries of discourse, then one cannot essentialize that discourse: “there is no mother tongue, only power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity” (Deleuze & Guattari: 7). Identity is wholly dependent on the fictions which negotiate difference among a multiplicity of Others. And indeed, psychoanalysis since Freud has demonstrated that the fractured, multivalent Self is itself a fiction which is utilised by the unconscious mind as the vehicle for consciousness. Thus with national identification we are dealing with a heteroglossia of fictive constructions each informing a conception of the Self. I wish to use Kristeva’s development of Freudian discourse as a means for negotiating concepts such a Self and Other in relation to identity. It is my belief that for a legitimate formulation of justice – itself dependent on the transcendent authority given the rights of humanity – to emerge, a national identity lacking the violent repression of a clear Other requires an expression of Will to Power not usually found at the level of public discourse. The schizophrenic Self requires that perceived oppositions be overcome in terms of agency, for “hatred makes him [sic] real, authentic” (Kristeva 1991: 13). Citizenship requires a excising of the non-Citizen, the foreigner: “in order to found the rights that are specific to the men [sic] of a civilization or a nation – even the most reasonable and the most consciously democratic – one has to withdraw such rights from those that are not citizens, that is, ither men [sic]” (Kristeva: 97). In other words, there has yet to emerge a self-legitimating central authority, functioning as a transcendent archon for the creation and inscription of the Law (avant la lettre, in Derridian terms), that performs its function without resorting to the violent exclusion of those interpellated outside of citizenship.

Certainly a colonial heritage remains an inherited present for many populations at the beginning of the 21st century, and indeed this legacy can be seen to be ritualistically inscribed in the social relations of advanced capitalism, representing a desire for socially unified interpellations of citizenship, nationalism, and engendering. Ritual provides a means of negotiating difference by levelling the interest of parties involved, as bodies are interpellated in a specific and mutually understood manner. All parties involved reify their own authority by involving themselves as legitimate actors in the ritual. In this capacity ritualized behaviour serves to ground all the actors on a level topography of power relations, while at the same time demonstrating the arbitrariness of all ritualization. The ritual functions as a means by which the power of the performative utterance, of the break of speech into silence, is given its transcendent origin by means of consecrating an immanent subjectivity between a subject and a concept. As Deleuze states, there is infinite variation in the repetition of sameness: “difference becomes an object of representation always in relation to a conceived identity, a judged analogy, an imagined opposition or a perceived similitude” (Deleuze 1994: 138). It is important that ritualized behaviour be enacted in an explicit manner, however, as only then will the arbitrariness of the nostalgic feelings that it evokes be properly contextualized. It is upon these principles that citizenship functions as an interpellative gesture. It is the ritualized invocation of an archive, or more precisely a reading of that archive, in a specifically delineated manner. Identification involves the assumption of masks; as Deleuze comments on Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “the disguises and the variations, the masks or costumes ... [are] the internal genetic elements of repetition itself, its integral and constituent parts” (17). Ritual is tied to death drive as a repetition of the archival function, of jouissance: all of the pleasures and acts of violence inherent in the project are inscribed as the archon’s act of inscription, the generative mark which reifies both archon and archive. This should not suggest, however, that there is no way out of the system produced by such processes. Identification involves both a conscious and unconscious accedence to certain societal obligations, certain of which are fundamental to citizenship, for example. Yet individual actors may find themselves in a position to renounce the ritual invoking the full mark of the archive into presence. As I will describe below, King’s text is remarkably exemplary for demonstrating the arbitrary nature of all masks, inscribed consciously or not.

National identification requires a rejection of the Other. The Self is reified by a realization of what it is not, and in a very real sense a hiding within the Self – returning to the Freudian heimlich – is the fundamental gesture of all consciousness. At the same time as being a constructive act, however, it is a defensive one, and as such is easily misinterpreted as there is little other than a subject’s pleasure response to distinguish a rejection of the Other as a Not-I and the desire to cause pain and suffering in the Other. I mean to involve pleasure in this formula as a means to negotiate the complex moral dimensions involved in negating the Other. No properly functioning organism will seek to affect the suffering of another without beneficial consequences to the Self. When this principle is disregarded, the subject has transferred his pleasure drive to that experience of violence actuated toward the Other. And yet negation is fundamental to the protection of the Self. The psyche hides what is most familiar in order that it only sees what is new: “protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli. The protective shield is supplied with its own store of energy and must above all endeavour to preserve the special modes of transformation of energy operating in it” (Freud 1989: 30). It is this transformation of energy which is key to my present formulation of identity. For it is my belief that identity is that liminal space between performance (adaptation to stimuli) and interpellation (inscription of particular stimuli onto a body). It is fundamentally a hostile gesture which finds an origin in the negation of the parents by the child as fundamental to identity construction. In order to realize the Self, the infant must make a hostile signal to its parents, a sign marking the “no” that exists as the liminal space between Self and Other. When logical discourse has been cast aside, it is with this negating gesture that xenophobia and intolerance emerge as a defence mechanism for the psyche. This negation allows the erasure of a culture under the guise of Self-defence, for it is a gesture projecting the irrational into the Other in order to dominate and inscribe order upon it.

Identity involves both the differences and similarities of a given subject. To identify – within language, to recognize the singular usefulness of a concept among the near-infinite variations of meaning within symbolic play – is to give quantity to a otherwise ephemeral cultural construction. In this capacity, identification has more to do with judgment (in Kantian terms) than with any notions of essentialist characteristics of a given subject. Principally, the process of identification requires an interpellative gesture originating with a materially real authority. Identification along national lines functions by inscribing upon a population “their demands in advance in a sense of belonging in the double sense of the term – both what it is that makes one belong to oneself and also what makes one belong to other fellow human beings” (Balibar 2002: 224).

Of course, it should be understood that individual subjects will react to interpellation into the discourse of nationalism in an individualistic manner. And yet they will do so within the boundaries that their historical localization will allow; their discourse cannot exceed the limits imposed by “a field of social values, norms of behaviour, and collective symbols” (Balibar: 221). There is no singular construction of national identity with which one can ascribe, but rather nationalism emerges as a group function always-already in the process of negotiating shared differences. There can be no national identity which does not involve the submission of the subjects to a centralized agent. There can, however, exist a national body lacking whose individual members lack (the function of) citizenship, an area of interest to which I will return momentarily. It is this juncture which marks the entrance of the body into national discourse. The streams of nationalist narratives emerging from the citizenry combine as a river of national identity both more powerful and more easily controlled: “The nation as a series of differences consequently demands that particular rights be highlighted while they are being absorbed into the lay aggregate of the nation where such differences, which are acknowledged, nevertheless give way before the ‘general interest’” (Kristeva 1993: 41). The body is the region where narration finds a material entrance into social discourse. To continue the metaphor cited earlier, if the population can be seen as the body politic, then body language emerges with the structures locating power within the state. More precisely, the language of this body is one of exclusionary gestures, of negatory conceptions of Otherness. That which is included in the legitimate jurisdiction of the state is that which accedes to its exclusions, for this is the most facile mode of negotiating difference among individuals.

It is important to note that I do not wish to imply with this line of reasoning that cultural differences can be fully negotiated when power is equitably distributed. Inter-ethnic conflict will remain a part of pluralist societies so long as exclusionary defences are associated with nostalgia toward the heimlich. Certainly difference itself represents a transference of power between actors. Perhaps it is impossible for humans to overcome this imbalance of power within difference itself. Appeals to racial essentialism do not serve this purpose as they seek a transcendent universal functioning outside of power structures, and consequently must only be regarded as an aporia. Difference needs to be negotiated in a playful, and not in a hostile, manner for subjectivity to be a positive [sic] experience.


Tangent

The first poem in Dionne Brand’s collection No Language is Neutral examines the relationship between identity and geographic space. A form of ode (love is usually the bridge between signifiers), ‘Hard Against the Soul’ likens the sublime intensity elicited by a lover to the organic beauty of a landscape:

this is you girl, this cut of road up
to Blanchicheuse...

this is you girl, this is you all sides of me
hill road and dip through the coconut at Manzanilla
this sea breeze shaped forest of sand and lanky palm
this wanting to fall, hanging, greening
quenching the road

Indeed, there is much in which demonstrates a desire to collapse all subjectivities into themselves. Most prominent and relevant to this present examination, however, is the equation of desire for immanence in subjective experience with a nostalgic localisation for a proximal geographic locale. Potential, desire, and longing are all brought into the realm of the heimlich, informing the sense of “home”-ness necessary for identity construction. Brand has with this poem captured the moment of desire, and transfigured it into a metaphor for the creation of the Self-as-realization-of-Otherness. This moment of immanence, found within relational experience, is identity reifies itself, in performative terms, as a Self by recognizing the power in Otherness. There is no net imbalance of power in this figurative system and no irrelevant subject-positions, and thus it can be seen to operate on non-linear, rhyzomatic principles. It is this subjective relation between bodies which lies at the heart of all political activity and social relation.


II

Fundamentally, Tom King’s Truth & Bright Water is an examination of a Native heritage and culture which is continually under erasure. Identity, formed partially as the process of a subject’s continual interpellation by an archival authority, is measured within a topography which encourages sameness. Success must always be equated with likeness, and any traces of disruption are ignored. Whiteness is consequently a normative characterization, functioning as a symbol to be appropriated with the right performative gesture: “no one gives a damn about Indians but everybody likes blonds. Even Indians. ... being white was the same as being blond” (King 1999: 23). It is the art community which rescues Native identity from cultural appropriation by re-appropriating white constructions of Native identity. This is seen for example when Lucy performs her Marilyn Monroe (gone Native) and when Lum paints his face and cuts his hair reproducing “the Indians you see at the Saturday matinee” (King: 238). But King in no way makes such identifications absolute in any sense except to parody the absurdity of their claims to absolute legitimacy. Officially sanctioned marks of status are juxtaposed to the status assumed by a sign. Scenes such as the conversation concerning Marilyn Monroe’s ‘Native heritage’, and the nostalgic historic detail in chapter twenty-three in which Tecumseh’s dog Soldier is legitimized with “status papers”, imply certain ontological connotations which elevate the sequences beyond mere ironic juxtaposition. King continually examines the manner in which characters negotiate their marginalised societal positions and affirm some degree of authenticity for themselves. Throughout the text, characters perform a given identity in relation to societal expectations, particularly when economic transactions are involved. This can be evidenced in the inability of Tecumseh’s father to fulfil his parental obligations to his son during, in particular when Elvin is ‘on the job’, which is, as with the ‘careers’ of many opportunistic personalities such as himself, sporadic and unpredictable. It appears as though identity is not so concretized as some would imagine it to be elaborating the point made by Kertzer that “the object of theoretical inquiry in Canadian literary studies – Canada – no longer functions as it once did” (Kertzer 1998: 3).

The towns Truth and Bright Water themselves occupy a liminal space, and thus signifies a certain foreign-ness to itself in terms of the subjectivities interpellated among its population. There are both clear divisions between them – evidenced by the anger of the firemen from Truth towards the adventurous children of Bright Water – and similarities – Tecumseh’s father fails to distinguish the two countries in chapter eleven – between the two cross-border towns. In the mutually dependent and semantically problematic cities of Truth and Bright Water there are no national identifications in absolute terms. With no character occupying a single national or ideological space, there are no concrete identifications that can be made in the topography of this post-modern, genre-crossing text.

The protagonists Tecumseh and Lum are both themselves searching for origins throughout the novel – reasons for the disunity of their family, the importance of traditional native culture on present experiences, among others. Indeed the search for origins is invoked in a humorous manner with the conversation about the scientists who are searching for the root of Native existence by genetic means in chapter twenty-one. And yet Tecumseh himself does not fall prey to the naive idealism which leads Lum to a young death. Lum seeks a masculinity which he cannot perform in light of the abuse he must endure from his father. Perhaps it is somewhat reductive, but it seems likely that general economic depression leads to increased instances of domestic violence. Regardless, it is clear that the failed masculinity – individual strength and agency, determinism, bodily purity – which Lum seems desperate to properly invoke signals the violence of Native exclusion from the dominant cultural archive. Agency had been removed from the realm of possibility for the Native subject by colonialism, and yet a certain form of ‘Native’ is continually inscribed onto Native subjects, forcing them to act (as I will further elaborate below) in a manner contrary to their self-interest. Lum’s self-destructive behaviour is simply the performance of the initial mark of negation always-already inscribed on his existence, and more broadly it is impressed on the Native population as a whole. His manic antisocial behaviour reflects a broken negotiation of the heteroglossia of interpellative discourse. This process is for Lum a catachresis – “one mouth too many, incomprehensible speech, inappropriate behaviour” (Kristeva 1991: 6) – and his death signals the mistaken interpellative uptake inherent in his lack of performative ability in the sense of being a citizen. In the ironic melodrama of the text as a whole, his schizophrenia is in a small manner a triumph of Lum’s will.

The concept of cultural erasure and restoration is best represented, however, by the character-cum-deux-ex-machina Monroe Swimmer, a self-proclaimed “famous Indian artist” who throughout the text remains the most lucid and socially autonomous of the novel’s inhabitants. Monroe can be interpreted as a locus for the rhizome of various threads that run through both the narrative and the towns of Truth and Bright Water themselves. His most important function within the narrative is to challenge authoritative forms of social interpellation. Monroe is a play on the trickster character, the Coyote crucial to King’s previous works, and as such occupies a hybridized position in the text. Robin Ridington has pointed out that his very name reflects a conflation of disparate identities (Ridington 2000, 2001). Additionally, in this context his involvement in the transformation of Natives “from the subjects of removal into agents of their own recreation” (Ridington 2001: 227) is key to understanding the central importance of his character to one of the novel’s main thematic traces. Native culture (and literature) had been categorized as “myth or folklore and relegated to anthropology departments” (Hulan / Warley 1999: 71). King seems to himself be operating much like Monroe, rescuing culture from certain forms of archivization – specifically from certain archons, or more precisely in reference to Archive Fever, to the archontic function. The depiction of the ‘Native’ Snow White is fraught with ambiguous politics: not only is the Disneyfied, and hence ‘whitewashed’ in the pejorative sense of the term, setting inverted by making the characters Native, Aunt Cassie implies a gendering of power relations in the play when she suggests that she should take the role of the evil prince (see King pp. 172-3). These “mythologies” are returned to their proper function, as living narratives. Monroe’s performance of “famous” artistry is a hybrid between object and gesture, between the ephemerality of immanence and the alienating constancy of inscription. Of course, the permanence of the recorded mark does not deny it a degree of plasticity in terms of representation of that mark, evidenced by the austere humour of his “platform” ‘Teaching the Grass Green’ and the project involving the specifically aesthetic placement of numerous metal buffalo sculptures (itself an ironic homage to the erasure of a species, a culture, and a language all intimately interconnected with one another.

Once Monroe was like Tecumseh’s father – they dressed alike in school and, indeed (in a rather playful moment on King’s part) Tecumseh’s mother and Monroe used to date – they were akin in many respects, and now it is he who stands outside of the legitimating authority (of citizenship) in order to challenge cultural and social practices which serve to ritualistically interpellate subjects as always-already inscribed into normative ideologies. Monroe’s resistence, his desire not to adhere to traditional cultural and social expectations, is a challenge against the lifestyle and politics which led to the current social conditions of his particular locale, itself a creation of an interpellative gesture of identification (a citizenship) reflecting a sublimation of identity through colonization. He seeks to re-appropriate agency for himself and his function as artist, and by extension perform as an ostensible voice for a people who lack the means to be heard. It is for this reason that he paints the church invisible: this is a re-appropriation of a culture which he has inherited against the wishes of his ancestors, a means of creating a new space for identity. The church represents the mark of colonialism upon both a geographical landscape and a marginalised people.

Over the course of the novel, Monroe paints this cultural artefact invisible, making it blend with the landscape until it is no longer seen. The nature of this act of resistence can be understood in terms of the interpellative gestures the church itself signifies. Native subjects were expected to assimilate into white Canadian culture, and initially this was realized with openly violent means. In a very real sense the Native subject had to be reborn, to completely cast off his identity, in order to assume the mantle of citizenship (or what in a rather limited manner amounted to an approach toward such a position). After Monroe’s manipulation the church occupies a volumetric space but not a visible one, and in this sense the gesture of the structure’s interpellative power has been translated from signifying a hostility to the Native Other to itself becoming an agent of Native empowerment. It has been transformed from church to church, and in the process Monroe has reified himself as artist and interlocutor for King himself (an ironic telescoping of the arbitrary positioning of various archons for the text). This is prefaced by the description in the text of Monroe’s prior occupation with various museums and galleries all over the world. In the service of such official archival authorities, Monroe was required to restore paintings to allow them to be more authentically represented, ostensibly in the best interest of those institutionalised archons. His idiosyncratic resistence to the suppression of Native culture signals the triumph of a subject achieving a great deal of individual agency. In a more pragmatic sense, that Monroe is a gifted artist is demonstrated by the sheer pleasure and confusion Tecumseh experiences in his presence. Every moment seems to be for Tecumseh an instance of expectation, or (to steal a phrase from Jameson) a future-nostalgia for grace and redemption: witness Monroe’s attempt to ‘interpellate’ Tecumseh as a shark in chapter sixteen. Monroe wishes Tecumseh to act as archon sense for the ‘art’ which is his life as “the greatest artist who has embodied the greatest number of the greatest ideas” (134): “I’m the hero, and you have to make up songs and stories about me so no one forgets who I am” (203). As an ironic gesture to an interpellation as a ‘Native’ subject, it is interesting to note that this occurs without inscribed documentation; so “the oral tradition it is” (204). In a very real sense of his own identity construction, Tecumseh expects Monroe to provide him a future, and accordingly he venerates the artist almost as a messiah.

Monroe acts as a point of intersection for several of the narrative paths that run through the novel. In a sense he can be seen to be the reification of a rhizomatic system, his self-empowerment serves as the unintentional locus of a decentralized power. “Between the man and the citizen there is a scar: the foreigner” (Kristeva 1991: 98). Within the bounds of the text, Monroe Swimmer serves as the foreigner, an exile from both his own people and the dominant white culture which requires his services. King playfully examines national affiliation as an expression of nostalgia transferred to a geographic space – a sense of the hemlich functioning on the interpellative dictates of nationalist discourse. The home is given materiality through Tecumseh’s mother. Throughout the text, she is making a quilt, itself a topography locating historical occurrences, articles of personal affiliation such as earrings, and cultural symbols – “she’s linked safety pins ... around a yellow diamond so that they look like an old-time headdress” (King: 218). It is clear that an self-defining individual subject is delineated within the cultural-continuity-as-textile of quilt-making. In a very real sense, domestic production represents a secondary pregnancy for the female, and thus like her primary (biological) period of gestation her female body becomes a fold between culture and biology, between existence and language. Indeed, the importance of Tecumseh’s mother and grandmother to the continuation of traditional forms of their culture should not be ignored. Simultaneous to this must be a recognition that Tecumseh himself feels most secure by the fact that this quilt is covered with needles, and he sensually enjoys his porcupine defences.

Perhaps this can best be explained in terms of King’s playfully post-modern depiction of the moral ambiguities of his characters, as conversations are continually being differed and questions passed over. Throughout the text, there are instances where two characters are talking to each other but having two distinctly separate dialogues that neither are able or motivated to respond during their interactions. Tecumseh has discovered, for example, that indirection is the best conversational tactic to employ with his mother as “it starts her mind moving in a different direction, and after a while, she may forget about what she didn’t want to tell me” (216). Tecumseh’s questions to his father, in particular about his family situation, are repeatedly ignored or delayed. And yet for King delay seems to be at the heart of the drive for playfulness. There is a kind of sexual libidinousness associated with the postponement of the expected. Perhaps this element of the text can best be described by an instance of sexual awkwardness between Tecumseh and his Aunt that ends in the differal of sexual tension over the course of several interruptions describing other temporalities (see pp. 57-61). While the mother figure for Tecumseh is clearly delineated in the novel, Aunt Cassie in many respects acts as a surrogate for the transfer of maternal signification. Early in the text she enables a situation with Tecumseh in which she, Tecumseh, and another woman are sexually flirtatious. It is she who later gets pregnant, and her body thereafter is rather enigmatically observed by Tecumseh. This immanence is an experience of absolute Otherness-as-feminine, which serves to bring origins to light as Tecumseh nostalgically invokes the feminine as a site for the heimlich. As Lum tells Tecumseh, those who return to a place they once left (or at the least in terms of the novel, this particular “centre of the universe”) are not authentic subjects: “nobody comes back to Truth and Bright Water unless they’re crazy or dying” (70).

Interestingly enough, the tourists are not themselves unwelcome in this fashion, but are instead greeted enthusiastically by the local merchants (who, during Indian Days seem to be notably indistinguishable from the general citizenry). Monroe’s gestures of cultural resistence seem wholly enfeebled by the almost predatory consumptive faculties of the non-Native visitors. “The tourists who show up for Indian Days can get almost anything they want.... All of it, according to the signs that everyone puts up, is ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’” (221). Power distinctions between Native and Other are resolved by appropriation of the tools of capitalist (colonial) discourse, as white stereotypes of Native culture are sold to tourists as artefacts of consumption. The taboo of this form of cultural representation – its absolute banality in moral terms – is itself provides energy for consumption, as demonstrated by the acute interest of the Ontario couple who do not know a vocal Native subject: “All the ones we hear about ... are in the penitentiary” (247). Thus it is not surprising to note that new performances are enacted to inhabit the space of the consumable product. Edna performs “Indian face” (223) in order to convince some fetishistic German tourists of the validity of her claims to Native citizenship (or more precisely citizenship in the form of the topography of their stereotyped views of Native existence), which would add value to the commodity that she had produced. Additionally, Tecumseh’s father has taken the metonymic inscription of a mask to its most logical extreme by dressing himself as Elvis, gyrating in a rather apathetic performance to make the sales at his stall more brisk.

Another of the societal fictions, as operating tangentially to Monroe, which the text examines is the border and distinction between Canada and the United States. That this border is an imagined space is initially signified by the almost symbiotic connection of Truth and Bright Water to each other. People and goods move back and forth with little distinction in terms of political geography or national affiliation. Simultaneously however, the border has real material implications, as evidenced by the fact that by smuggling goods Tecumseh’s father can benefit from this difference. The border itself seems to be the marker for a historical occurrence, a scar from an old would which is not currently affective in its truest sense. It signifies European conquest and the consequent politics of white North Americans. Despite the fact that the inscription of this line – the forty-ninth parallel – invokes the violent removal of previous Native cultures inherent in the idealization of the New World as a tabula rasa, there is a subtext to its depiction in the novel which elaborates the temporality, the ephemerality, of this line. This notion is best signified by the river ‘Shield’ dividing the two countries, which has, as Tecumseh’s mother says “been here since the beginning of time” (54). The name of the river is a double invocation. of the border between Self and Other, hostile and friendly, and ultimately between life and death. Simultaneously, the name invokes the Plains Indian tradition of painting shields with medicinal symbols “that realize the owner’s empowering visionary experiences” (Ridington 2001: 227).

The river is also the spot where Monroe Swimmer performs an ad hoc ritual for the ceremonial re-burial of the Native bones which he has rescued from various anthropological archives. At the same time, it is at the river where Lum performs his suicide (in a sense, a Quixotic act). That the river serves as a locus for so many elements of the text demonstrates its ritualistic importance. It is a altar upon which characters focus a great deal of their energies. Monroe himself performs a burial ceremony for the Native bones that he has rescued from various museums. It is important that he perform a new ceremony and not try to return the bones to the earth in a more traditional manner, for it signifies the fact that the legitimacy of the old customs has passed with their silencing by the dominant (invading) culture. The old ways are no longer authentically tied to the people as they no longer represent an unbroken history necessary for their continuation as cultural signifiers. The break, the rupture here reified by the double theft of the ancestral bones, requires the establishment of a new tradition in order to return the cones to the degree of cultural immanence required for consecration. By invoking new traditions and not parodying older customs, Monroe maintains the sanctity of the silence that was itself inscribed into the archive of Native existence after colonization with his own re-inscription. King’s laissez-faire depiction of the ritual itself demonstrates ambiguity to itself be a potent stylistic device of the post-modern writer. As during many of the “famous artist’s” endeavours, Tecumseh and Monroe engage in a rather casual conversation; the sacred finds a counterbalance in the profane in a rather whimsical manner:

Monroe climbs into the back of the truck and sits down at the piano.

“Classical or traditional?” And he plays a piece that sounds particularly gloomy. Soldier and I wait around to see if it gets any better, but it doesn’t....

“Why do you throw them in the river?”

“No good reason”

“So it’s not traditional”

“Don’t think so”

(King: 266)


It seems that in this instance both the classical (Western heritage) and the traditional (Native heritage) are equally bankrupt of significance. In this capacity Monroe is performing under the guise of several identifications: shaman, thief, artist, (re)appropriator of culture. His actions signal both the Bakhtinian rhyzomic operation of language – of cultural signs functioning as distinct entities apart from their signifieds – and the political gesture of reclaiming agency against a dominant culture that has historically illegitimately removed that power from Native peoples. By stealing the bones from a variety of museums, his actions reflect upon the original theft of the bones from their original cultural locales. That the objects in question are not simple cultural artefacts but rather the remains of actual people reifies the historical indenture of the Native peoples. The trace in the archive is one of suffering and oppression that frequently manifests as the jouissance of the involvement in anthropological discourse. It is almost if though the motto held by the dominant culture for negotiations with the Other is ‘we have agency only not only your present body, but your past as well as your future’.

Monroe himself recognizes that with this gesture he is not only returning the past (here in material form) to its proper location, but also introducing a new future in which the rituals of culture can be performed. It is not solely for the presumed age of the bodies that he calls these bones “the children” while returning them to their ascribed home: “This is the centre of the universe. Where else would I bring them? Where else would they want to be?” (265). This gesture is the act by which immanence is returned to the subject. The brutal subjugation which informs Native culture is folded upon the present as a mark, an inscription in an archive which cannot interpellate those who do not wish to participate in its invocation. This ritual burial is, within the narrative of the text, the culmination of Monroe’s reclamation of agency from the dominant culture back onto the Native subject by removing its interpellative gesture of Native cultural erasure. With this absurdly post-modern ceremony, history is absolved by the present and all are forgiven.


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