(Thamyris_Intersecting_ Place, Sex and Race) Mieke Bal, Miguel Hern Ndez-Navarro, Miguel A. Hernandez-Navarro - Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture_ Conflict, Resistance, and Agency-Rodopi (2012)

Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture
Thamyris/
Intersecting: Place, Sex, and Race
Series Editor
Ernst van Alphen
Editorial Team
Murat Aydemir, Maaike Bleeker, Yasco Horsman,
Isabel Hoving, Esther Peeren
Art and Visibility
in Migratory Culture
Conflict, Resistance, and Agency
Editors
Mieke Bal
Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro
Colophon
Original Design
Mart. Warmerdam, Haarlem, The Netherlands
www.warmerdamdesign.nl
Design
Inge Baeten
Printing
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994,
Information and documentation – Paper for documents – Requirements for permanence”.
ISSN: 1570-7253
E-Book ISSN: 1879-5846
ISBN: 978-90-420-3263-7
E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3264-4
© Editions Rodopi B.V.,Amsterdam – New York, NY 2011

Printed in The Netherlands
Mission Statement
Intersecting: Place, Sex, and Race
Intersecting is a new series of edited volumes with a critical, interdisciplinary focus.

Intersecting’s mission is to rigorously bring into encounter the crucial insights of
black and ethnic studies, gender studies, and queer studies, and facilitate dialogue
and confrontations between them. Intersecting shares this focus with Thamyris, the
socially committed international journal which was established by Jan Best en Nanny
de Vries, in 1994, out of which Intersecting has evolved. The sharpness and urgency
of these issues is our point of departure, and our title reflects our decision to work
on the cutting edge.
We envision these confrontations and dialogues through three recurring cate-
gories: place, sex, and race. To us they are three of the most decisive categories that
order society, locate power, and inflict pain and/or pleasure. Gender and class will
necessarily figure prominently in our engagement with the above. Race, for we will
keep analysing this ugly, much-debated concept, instead of turning to more civil con-
cepts (ethnicity, culture) that do not address the full disgrace of racism. Sex, for sex-
uality has to be addressed as an always active social strategy of locating, controlling,
and mobilizing people, and as an all-important, not necessarily obvious, cultural prac-
tice. And place, for we agree with other cultural analysts that this is a most produc-
tive framework for the analysis of situated identities and acts that allow us to move
beyond narrow identitarian theories.
The title of the new book series points at what we, its editors, want to do: think
together. Our series will not satisfy itself with merely demonstrating the complexity of
our times, or with analyzing the shaping factors of that complexity. We know how
to theorize the intertwining of, for example, sexuality and race, but pushing these
intersections one step further is what we aim for: How can this complexity be under-
stood in practice? That is, in concrete forms of political agency, and the efforts of self-
reflexive, contextualized interpretation. How can different socially and theoretically
relevant issues be thought together? And: how can scholars (of different backgrounds)
and activists think together, and realize productive alliances in a radical, transnational
community?
We invite proposals for edited volumes that take the issues that Intersecting
addresses seriously. These contributions should combine an activist-oriented per-
spective with intellectual rigor and theoretical insights, interdisciplinary and trans-
national perspectives. The editors seek cultural criticism that is daring, invigorating
and self-reflexive; that shares our commitment to thinking together. Contact us at
intersecting@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Contents
9 Introduction Mieke Bal and Miguel Á.

Hernández-Navarro
21 I. Art Matters: Metaphor, Materiality, and Knowledge
23 Migrants: Workers of Metaphors Néstor García Canclini
37 The Place of Metaphor in a Metonymic World: Paulina Aroch Fugellie

On Homi Bhabha’s “Democracy De-Realized”
53 Immigrants and Castaways: Smuggling Genres in Cornelia Gräbner

Manuel Rivas’s La mano del emigrante
69 Staging Transition: The Oresteia in Post-Apartheid South Africa Astrid van Weyenberg
91 The Aesthetics of Displacement and the Performance of Sudeep Dasgupta

Migration
107 II. Becoming Visible: Display as Tactics
109 Migratory Aesthetics: Art and Politics beyond Identity Jill Bennett
127 The Seventh Man: Migration, Politics, and Aesthetics Begüm Özden Firat
143 Limited Visibility Maaike Bleeker
161 Transgressing Time: Imagining an Exhibition of Works by Niamh Ann Kelly

Alanna O’Kelly and Phil Collins
175 The Mosaic Film: Nomadic Style and Politics in Patricia Pisters
Transnational Media Culture
191 Out of Synch: Visualizing Migratory Times through Video Art Miguel Á.
Hernández-Navarro
209 III. Tension: Intention, Contention
211 Heterochrony in the Act: The Migratory Politics of Time Mieke Bal
239 Molding Resistance: Aesthetics and Politics in the Noa Roei

Struggle of Bil’in against the Wall
257 Ismaël Ferroukhi’s Babelized Road Movie Mireille Rosello
277 Interstellar Hospitality: Missions of Star House Enterprise Sonja Neef

297 Opacity and Openness: Creating New Senses of Dutchness Isabel Hoving
313 Global Art and the Politics of Mobility: (Trans)Cultural Shifts Joaquín Barriendos
in the International Contemporary Art-System Rodríguez
335 The Contributors
339 Index
8 | Contents
Thamyris/Intersecting No. 23 (2011) 9–20
Introduction
Mieke Bal and Miguel Á.

Hernández-Navarro
This book explores the idea that, in the social domain, art can enact small-scale
resistances against the status quo. These acts, which we call “little resistances,”
determine the limited yet potentially powerful political impact of art. By “political,” we
mean something other than what is equated with “politics,” in the usual sense of the
word. Both art and the political are domains of agency: realms where action is pos-
sible and can have effects. In the case of the political effect of art, that agency is one
and the same; art “works” as art because it works politically. In exploring what
makes art political and what constitutes the political in art, we will explore where
art’s political efficacy can be located; how it performs, how it achieves agency, and
the ramifications of art’s political agency in the larger domain of culture—in the case
of this book, migratory culture.
In a clear and concise book that addresses the distinction between politics and
the political, Belgian political scientist Chantal Mouffe defines the two terms as
follows:
. . . by “the political” I mean the dimension of antagonism which I take to be consti-
tutive of human societies, while by “politics” I mean the set of practices and institutions
through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence in the context of
conflictuality provided by the political. (2005, 9)
By this distinction, politics is the ensemble of organizational entities that resolve con-
flict; the political is where conflict “happens.” The political is an inherent qualitative
aspect of the actions that comprise social life. Politics constantly attempts to
repress or defuse the political. The political resists this by creating political spaces
where conflict can exist. This view of conflict as a desirable, if not essential, dimen-
sion of social organization might seem counterintuitive to the extent that, in our own,
Introduction | 9
personal, social environments, we generally tend to eschew conflict. Yet, the culture
of consensus that is generated by politics is in fact highly exclusivist and is only
perpetuated through “the negation of the ineradicable character of antagonism”
(10). The current culture that we call “migratory” is an ideal lens through which we
can perceive the exclusive nature of this consensus.
We argue in favor of a conflictual nature of social life; the need, to put it politely,
to “disagree,” to live in tension with one another. The French philosopher Jacques
Rancière calls this kind of social tension “mésentente,” an untranslatable word that
combines misunderstanding with not getting along, and which is unilaterally trans-
lated as “disagreement” (1999). The misunderstanding component is, however, just
as crucial. Working with or through conflicts is necessary, not to eradicate them at
the cost of plurality, but to turn enemies into adversaries, and to transform lethal
struggle into vivid antagonism and negotiable critical tension. The former approach
draws sharp us/them distinctions that cast the “them” into the role of an enemy to
be fiercely combated; the latter accepts such distinctions while still acknowledging
the legitimacy of the “them”—the adversary, to be engaged with in debate. In migra-
tory culture, where not only newly arrived people but the entire society live in what we
call productive tension, this step is still to be taken, and art can help to make this
possibility visible, and thus make it happen.
The American political scientist Wendy Brown, who takes a similar position, men-
tions the need, in democratic practice, for “political spaces” (1995). We take this
phrase rather literally, and consider the spaces where art events occur to be such
spaces. For, what Brown describes so tersely, yet is so hard to achieve—“images
that evoke, suggest, and connote rather than transmit meanings”—is, according to
the authors of this book, the mission of art (1995, 50). Once we succeed in under-
standing how meaning can “work” without being transmitted, we have created a
vision of a political space. Nothing makes this clearer than the settings of art.
The other key term here, “migratory,” is meant to indicate not a particular popula-
tion but a state of the culture we share. This culture is replete with movement: peo-
ple on the move, leaving traces and projecting new, provisional destinations. In the
context of art and the question of its political agency, “migratory” refers to the sen-
sate traces of the movements of migration that characterize contemporary culture.
In other words, movement, once we notice its pervasiveness, is not an exceptional
occurrence in an otherwise stable world, but a normal, generalized process in a world
that cannot be grasped in terms of any given notion of stability.
In critical discussions, the current status quo is dominated by the paradigm of
travel, the key figure of modernity. This paradigm is still firmly in place. The idea of
travel, however, implies a directional notion of movement and a hidden ideology
of control. An aspect of the kind of control that is implicated in contemporary models
of mobility becomes apparent when we consider that even mobile phones are linked
10 | Mieke Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro

to satellite technologies of localization. The paradigm that is looming but not yet
established, and which we consider crucial to an understanding of the contemporary
world, is, in contrast, “migratory.” It is characterized by a more contradictory and non-
linear, perpetual movement that multiplies temporal and spatial coordinates beyond
the possibility of fixation. Migratory movement begins before departure, in the imag-
ination, and, conversely, never ends, because no arrival is adequate to the imagined
return that is part of the movement’s motivation. The resulting delocalization can be
politically productive because the gaps in time and space the process leaves are
“uncertain territories” (Boer 2006) that through their very uncertainty make little
resistances possible by offering, as we argue in the book, ways of escaping technolo-
gies of control. Art is the tool that makes the political spaces, the platforms for such
resistances, visible and hence, enables the spectator to experience and participate
in the tensions of a nonconsensual society.
Art can do this because of certain of its characteristics that the essays herein
explore. The most obvious of these is its materiality. This materiality makes art tan-
gible, and thus brings it closer to the social agents that interact with it. The resulting
proximity encourages participation; no art can exist without its audience; therefore,
art is by definition performative. In this volume, the migratory dimension of culture
is connected to a fundamental metaphoricity that evokes a permanent state of
movement. By virtue of these features of materiality, proximity, performativity and
metaphoricity, art offers the systemic opposite of the hegemonic use of media,
which promotes an illusion of immateriality and distance, an attitude of passive
consumption, and a literal, affirmative assumption of reality.
In view of this contribution of art, promoting the migratory as the paradigm of our
time thinks migration beyond either tragedy or glorification, the two most common
ways of thinking about the movement of people. Instead, the authors of this volume
think critically about migration not as a topic but as an aesthetic. This term we use
in the original, eighteenth-century, premodern sense of binding through the senses;
hence, the emphasis on materiality and proximity. Rather than taking migration as a
thematic center and speaking “about” it, we let the works speak in, through and from
migration. Thus, migration becomes a double movement, a double metaphor: of
transport, hence of instability—the first movement; and subsequent productive
tensions—the second movement. Every culture has the aesthetics it deserves;
contemporary culture, we contend, has therefore a “migratory aesthetics.”
This project began as a double endeavor. On the one hand, we organized a series
of “encounters”—workshops for reflection and discussion. On the other hand, we felt
the need to practice what we preached, and organized a traveling exhibition, under
the title of 2MOVE (Bal and Hernández-Navarro 2008). This exhibition, devoted to
video art, was held, respectively, in Murcia, Spain; Enkhuizen, the Netherlands;
Oslo, Norway and ended in a dual location in the two Irelands, Navan and Belfast.
Introduction | 11
The exhibition transformed our way of thinking to the extent that in this book we
reflect from the works instead of bringing an a priori bias of reality into play to “trans-
late” the works. We experienced that art performs and embodies knowledge that is
not a preconceived given. That knowledge is new or becomes newly visible because
the works create the world along with the work; they do not represent it. Moreover,
the ever-changing combinations and juxtapositions among the works made clear how
much of art’s agency is embedded in its display and in its audience’s participation.
Many details of those works we thought we knew so well kept changing in front of our
very eyes. Thus, they demonstrated what we call in this volume “becoming visible.”
In short, that appearance is being and being is becoming.
This volume consists of three parts, all interconnected but each focusing on one
key aspect of migratory aesthetics. The subject matter ranges from film, video, and
music to literature, theater, sculpture, activist acts, and modes of display and circu-
lation of art. Authored by an international group of scholars who worked together over
an extended period of time, the essays were originally written for the encounters,
since which they have been thoroughly revised in response to ongoing and extensive
discussion. Implicitly and explicitly, they address one another and thus constitute a
network, rather than a series. Together, the three parts articulate key aspects of what
we consider crucial to an understanding of migratory culture: the possibility for art to
know and, subsequently, contribute to transforming, the world—a transformation that
is conditional on the visible manifestation of what could hitherto not be perceived—
and, equally essential, the receptive attitude that makes this process possible,
comprising the acceptance, experience, and extending to the endorsement and
management, and, potentially, the enjoyment of the tensions that consensus culture
has obliterated from our collective vision.
Art Matters: Metaphor, Materiality, and Knowledge

In the pursuit of knowledge about the world, art, as permeably distinct from other
forms of discourse, is capable of reducing distance. The materiality of the work of art
sustains the communication between the object and the viewer, reader, consumer, or
otherwise engaged person. Thus, art works do not simply “think,” but facilitate and
even embody thought. In the reflections presented here, these thoughts concern the
world of migratory culture. Our world, which comprises the current but also past
states of the globe, is on the move. Theoretical and critical discourse cannot quite
grasp this movement. They can describe it, but always at a distance; they are always
engaged with the other part, on one part of the two or more that continue to intersect
and interact. Art, in contrast, can reduce that distance, that divide, and demonstrate
how artificially constructed it is.
The messiness of embodied reality is more adequately conveyed through the
equally messy, often multimedia materiality of the art work. Whereas discourse is

desynchronized from reality, art, in its reception, its performance, is synchronized

with the world to which it relates. This dechronization results from the single tempo-
rality of discourse. Metaphor exists in two realms at the same time; realms that are
each enfolded in their own temporality. Hence, metaphor is able to bridge the gap
between temporalities as well as spaces or semantic units. Accordingly, metaphor is
multidimensional and, specifically, multitemporal. One of the key tools by means of
which the synchronization of which art is capable is accomplished is metaphor, the
figure of moving meaning.
Néstor García Canclini opens this section with a probing analysis of the centrality
of metaphor in migratory culture. This usefulness of metaphor resides in the con-
cept’s own materiality: its refusal to let go of its etymological past where it stood for
transport: and its persistent association with uncertainty, mobility, and, we insist,
multitemporality. García Canclini therefore associates metaphor with migration
through their shared element of the journey, thus setting up the volume’s central
focus. In a migratory culture the people we call migrants are always translators,
García Canclini argues. The constant borrowing and creating of new words, ideas,
and things becomes the normal mode of existence for everyone.
In the next chapter, Paulina Aroch Fugellie performs what García Canclini expli-
cates. She takes on an oral intervention, a recorded videoconference, by postcolonial
theorist Homi Bhabha held during documenta XI in 2001, and enacts a hetero-
temporal dialogue with “it” or “him.” She examines the materiality of metaphor in her
search to grasp metaphor’s ability to make leaps across borders. According to Aroch
Fugellie, metaphor acquires a specific political potential in its distinction from
metonymy. The latter trope is trapped in its own constant movement, but that move-
ment remains linear. Thus it tends to separate language from that which is beyond it.
Metaphor, in contrast, is entangled in a constant circularity that never reaches an
endpoint. Hence, the distinction between literal and metaphorical does not hold.
Cornelia Gräbner brings the value of metaphor as a key to migratory culture to
bear on the domain from which it derives in the first place, literature. The hand of the
immigrant of the novel she discusses is the materializing metaphor of access to
knowledge. She demonstrates the crucial import of material experience—the experi-
ence the hand has—for insight into migratory life. This pertains particularly to the
North of Spain, a longstanding area of migration. But beyond the specific case,
Gräbner persuasively argues for the specific production of knowledge by literature—
rather than in literature—of experiential domains for which even a specialized field
such as postcolonial theory is less than adequate. In line with Aroch Fugellie’s posi-
tion, the “smuggling” of her title leads to the acknowledgment of the benefits of
metaphor over metonymy.
The next chapter is devoted to a widely acknowledged issue, the relevance of clas-
sics for the contemporary world. Astrid van Weyenberg establishes a metaphoric link
Introduction | 13
between past and present, and thereby demonstrates the ongoing relevance of clas-
sic works of art. Her analysis boldly claims political relevance for the Greek tragedies
of the Oresteia today, in the post-apartheid, conflicted culture of modern South Africa.
The key to her analysis is the simple fact that narratives have, or lead to, an ending.
Merging the fabric of the ancient text with contemporary concerns, including the
ambiguities of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this feature of narrative
enables a creative engagement with the changeability of ending. The theatrical
nature of the plays—both ancient and contemporary—facilitates an engaged imagi-
nation in a situation where a future is difficult to imagine. This analysis foregrounds
the way metaphor stimulates the imagination, which is, in turn, indispensable for
political agency.
In the concluding essay of the first section, Sudeep Dasgupta discusses the mate-
riality of art within the framework of aesthetic experience. Bringing together migratory
aesthetics and aesthetic migration, Dasgupta analyzes Indian films impossible to
locate in any single place. Moving between theater and cinema, between sound and
image, and between different locations, the films incarnate the metaphor-driven state
of constant becoming, moving, and migrating that this book examines. Art is particu-
larly well constituted to harbor this movement of experiences into ideas through a
productive displacement that also calls into question the “re” of representation.
Dasgupta makes the most of the concept of performance as a counterpoint to the
stability implicit in that of representation. Aesthetics, bringing together sounds and
images and the movement of both, becomes reconfigured as a network of multiple
experiences of migration.
Becoming Visible: Display as Tactic

We can now extend the metaphorical quality of art to include a move that impacts our
modes of being in the world. Art is engaged in making the move from (absolute) non-
visibility to (provisional) invisibility. What we are unable to perceive because it does
not fit any of our frameworks must be made to become potentially visible, available
for perception. The second section is devoted to tactics, small operational moves
that facilitate that transformation. Without dictating its politics, as propaganda
would, art opens up the possible visibility of situations, issues, events, and people
and leaves it to its viewers or readers to enact that visibility; to answer its call by
seeing. Art is neither didactic nor apodictic but only proposes possibilities. In other
words, art proposes, the audience disposes. Thus, art exercises its agency on a level
that is itself invisible.
The essays here discuss the disruption of non-visibility, the insertion or insinua-
tion of (in)visibility. They demonstrate how the art works make the observer aware of
what, before, seemed non-existing because it was too “normal,” too self-evident,
and thereby in fact non-visible. Covering many different art forms and strategies of

display, they examine the tactics—small acts of resistance in contemporary art

events. Becoming visible is a way of materializing “aesthetics”—in ways that involve
experience, movement, and social change, as brought about by the current culture of
migration.
In the first chapter of this section, Jill Bennett dives into the murky problem of
identity—a notion that has become problematic in concert with the acknowledge-
ment of “becoming” rather than “being” as a generalized contemporary way of life.
Analyzing a number of transnational exhibitions, such as Les magiciens de la terre,
documenta XII, and above all, Contemporary Commonwealth 2006, she contends
that migratoriness is the now-common form of aesthetics. Connecting her argument
to that of Aroch Fugellie, she shows the distancing effect of art about migration as
opposed to migratory art. For her, migratory aesthetics is a strategy—we would say,
a tactic—that serves as a transitional politics. This tactic can be observed in exhibi-
tionary practice because, in exhibitions, art works are put together, provisionally and
outside of their context of making, to form transitional or provisional “communities.”
The stage as the temporally unstable common ground facilitates the establishment
of productive connections where things can, so to speak, be-in-common. Those con-
nections did not exist before—and will all dissolve again after, forming new links else-
where. Here lies the special political relevance of the temporally ephemeral arts of
the stage, performance, and exhibition.
Continuing the discussion of bringing to visibility, Begüm Özden Firat moves the
discussion of display to include image/texts and then literature, while remaining
firmly committed to the issue of (in)visibility. The (non)identity of the “sans-
papiers”—“illegal immigrants”—occasions reflections on how people can be per-
ceived as doubly invisible: “nonvisible” to the extent that they lack recognized status
in the public sphere, and invisible to the extent that they are neglected as full partic-
ipants. The image/text she discusses adopts the tactic of morphing non-visibility into
invisibility, so that visibility becomes possible. It establishes the conditions of visibil-
ity. The people who hitherto remained unrepresentable, Firat argues, create a polem-
ical space within which they are able to appear. The space is polemical to the extent
that it allows for disagreement, antagonism, and ensuing political struggle. In such a
sphere, for which the stage or the exhibition space could be a model, the possibility
of becoming visible entails participatory agency—to speak and be heard. Firat makes
this argument through three different art works or “art events”—an image/text, an
exhibition, and a novel.
A specialist in performance studies, Maaike Bleeker employs the concept of
theatricality to characterize the potential of the theater as public sphere and, con-
versely, the public sphere as theater, to offer a “critical vision machine.” This
machine generates visions ordinarily invisible and perhaps, over time, in danger of
becoming nonvisible, and facilitates a critical engagement with such visions. Bleeker
Introduction | 15
starts with a billboard that was staged in the space of advertisement but that func-
tioned differently. As a result, the space itself was disrupted, made unfamiliar, and
increased the public awareness of visibility. For Bleeker, this awareness of visibility
produced by critical distancing becomes the key to theatricality. She then moves on
to discuss opera, specifically Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, in a Turkish
performance, as another such disruptive deployment of space. This performance of
an ironic displacement of what initially was a displaced “Turkishness” puts a new
spin on orientalism and makes visible the complexity of such projections. The per-
formance, Bleeker claims, complicates the relationship between appearance and the
reality that representations “mirror.”
As Bleeker’s analysis suggests, the imagination has a lot to contribute to the pos-
sibility of becoming visible. Niamh Ann Kelly engages the issue of how curatorial prac-
tice, in a concrete case comprising two artists, can enable this capacity. She probes
in detail how putting works together can produce new meanings and engage new
contexts. The art works she analyzes bring characters or figures face-to-face with
alterity, and the viewer is solicited to do the same. These figures are defined not by
who or what they are but by their movements of displacement, in the way that a ballet
is defined through the dance from which the dancers cannot be distinguished. Their
ephemeral identities allow the artists to interweave these identities so that the
“visibilization” of moments of change, not stability, can literally reveal cultural alter-
ity. In this way, the works enact aesthetic practices that indicate the boundary
between visible and invisible, thus making the invisible visible. This unsettling of a
culturally firm boundary unsettles the viewer in a productive way.
This unsettling is also possible in media destined for larger audiences. Patricia
Pisters discusses films that defamiliarize narrative structure, replacing it with spatial
spreads and incongruous simultaneities. She focuses on three recent films repre-
sentative of the new genre “mosaic film”—a transnational genre—related to migra-
tory movements and contemporary globalized media culture. These films deploy
intensity in their engagement with the external, extradiegetic world, an intensity that
enhances visibility. According to Pisters’s Deleuzian reading, the nomadic aesthetic
of the films makes a difficult fit with representational logic, in both meanings of
representation—speaking as, and speaking for. The tactic of “becoming minoritarian”
as a form of resistance, in particular in the films’ affective encounters with viewers,
is not normative or apodictic, but descriptive in the sense of making visible. They are
nonjudgmental and non-normative, and through that openness they produce the
“critical vision machine” of which Bleeker writes.
In a transition from the conditions of visibility to the tensions that seem to
hamper them, Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro’s analysis explores the ways in which
tensions and conflicts can become visible, and thus prepares us for the final section.
His special focus is the issue of time and technology, with the contradictions and

collisions that occur between communication regimes, especially in relation to the

experience of migration. He examines how migrants introduce themselves to
Western technology while avoiding the indoctrination process that is usually required
for their “integration.” An appreciation of this innovative use of older technologies, or
use of new technologies from an “older” point of view, can provide us with new, more
affective and proximate ways of relating to technology across temporal divides. He
looks to the potentiality of works of video art to deploy the tactic of demonstrating,
on the one hand, the artificiality of the medium’s own ideology, which they disrupt,
and, on the other hand, the advantages of unlearning and the benefits of a certain
technological illiteracy in experiencing reality.
Tension: Intention, Contention

The political arena of the world is constituted by tensions between each individual’s
intentions and the arguments, disagreements, and antagonisms with which they
must contend to get those intentions across. Those tensions occur in time and
place. As a consequence, they affect the ways we live in time and place. This makes
for a fabric of tensions, with the proviso that this fabric has no stability. In migratory
culture, the instability of political tensions is not only primary, but actually productive;
it helps us to recognize the livability of instability. Movement happens in time and
place; it takes one from one situation and place to another, and this occurs over
time. Thus, movement embodies tension. Art, in turn, makes tension visible, because
it stages it.
Thanks to the reduction of distance, art is capable of bringing forth; at the
moment in which art makes tension visible, the viewer can experience tension
differently. Because art makes tension visible, it becomes inhabitable, providing a
sense of welcome instead of repulsion. In this section, we focus on the art’s poten-
tial for providing a kind of “hospitality” that is not fixed but in constant movement.
Returning to the material conception of metaphor as transit, art can provide a plat-
form with which we can situate ourselves in that transit from one place and time to
another, as a permanent state of impermanence.
Mieke Bal opens the section in close relation to Hernández-Navarro’s argument.
She probes these tensions specifically in relation to time. Here, again, the migratory
situation exemplifies a more general state of which we are usually not aware: that
time experience is by definition, not coincidentally, heterochronic. She seeks to put
the finger on a few instances where this becomes visible concretely and in detail in
selected works of video art. This art of moving images sometimes multiplies its own
moving quality by not just showing but embodying heterochronic movement.
Conflicted temporalities are especially, but by no means exclusively, palpable in
migratory situations. Art can mobilize that potential and make it visible for all. She
addresses the relations of memory, narrative, and performance to temporality, so as
Introduction | 17
to better understand how the art works manage that mobilizing. Through these expe-
riments with time, they contribute to a becoming-visible of the dense and complex
temporal texture of the contemporary world.
Noa Roei moves from time to space in her close analysis of the popular resistance
movement in the Palestinian village of Bil’in. Deploying Jacques Rancière’s theory of
the “distribution of the sensible,” she examines two versions of the movement’s
“work”: an event and an exhibition; an activist, political moment of confrontation and
resistance at the site of the Wall, on the one hand, and the exhibition in an art gallery
of the sculptures produced for and during that event, on the other. Thus she explores
the different roles that art plays in different spaces. One is activist, the other memo-
rial. But there is also continuity between the two manifestations. They each engage
different audiences, and this modifies their agency. The fact that the objects were
exhibited as sculpture, Roei argues, testifies to the successful redistribution of the
sensible. The objects and the situation had both become visible.
In film, conflict seems to have a “natural” home, due to narrative traditions. In a
detailed analysis of a narrative film, Mireille Rosello addresses conflict in situations
that are in time and space together, such as religious belief, language, and experi-
ence, in a transgenerational setting. The film Le grand voyage by Ismaël Ferroukhi
depicts a father and son on a journey. This offers the author the ideal opportunity to
explore the often unspoken ways through which a first-generation migrant and his son
negotiate their tensions. Resonating with Pisters’s mosaic genre, her analysis makes
visible the postcolonial logic that ineluctably remains in place along the France-
Maghreb axis. Conflict is a tool for improving relations that is not hobbled by the need
for resolution. And, although in the film the differences are played out in language,
among other modes, Rosello argues that this does not mean that conversing in one
language precludes conflicts, misunderstandings, and silences. This conclusion pro-
poses a new way of dealing with the contemporary multilingual world.
In the next chapter, Sonja Neef looks to the unlikely universe of Star Trek to argue
that hospitality is based on an irresolvable tension. This is the case because the
relationship between host and guest is always in movement; host can become guest
and vice versa. She calls on philosophers such as Derrida, Benjamin, and Heidegger
to lay out this argument. Hospitality entails the imposition of a particular position:
the host expects the guest to side with him. This is a conditional, relative hospitality.
Absolute hospitality, in fact the only kind, does not pose conditions. The translation
machine in Star Trek, called a Universal Translator, embodies this conditional
essence of hospitality. Translating “alien” language into the universal, meaning
English, human language, the machine eliminates, adapts, and, hence, modifies the
language of the other and consequently represses a host of meanings.
Contributing an example of one national culture, Isabel Hoving takes on another
aspect of hospitality, the allegedly “typically Dutch” tolerance. This somewhat

mythical feature of Dutch society assumes openness and directness as the straight
road to visibility. The author reads a number of novels by migrant authors living in the
Netherlands to learn how the feature of national pride in fact obscures a sense
of superiority, in turn occluding visibility, for it makes the non-superior people non-
visible; they do not belong to the visible category. In short, tolerance is an avoidance
of tension. Her alternative is a subtle unpacking of the ins and outs of representa-
tion. She binds representation in the political sense, according to which migrants
should have adequate representation, to representation in the aesthetic and semi-
otic sense, according to which they can create that polemical space within which they
can represent themselves. At the same time, she argues for an anti-representational
aesthetic because it can be anti-identitarian.
In conclusion, Joaquín Barriendos Rodríguez takes issue with the current interna-
tional art system. He discusses the relevance that the politics of mobility can have
for that system. He emphasizes the tensions emerging in transcultural art practices.
Moreover, the validating usages of such terms as hybridization and periphery, margin-
alization and subalternity, confuse and obscure the inequalities they harbor. To make
matters even more problematic, between these two attempts to open up the world,
new tensions arise. Not only is there a gap between the discourse and the “official”
international practice embodied in biennales and other large-scale circuits of art,
but the practice is modified by the discourse. On the other hand, there remains an
international practice unaffected by this discourse-infested one. Thus, Barriendos
Rodríguez sums up the consequences of the becoming official (rather than visible) of
a particular, apologetic translationalism against which much of the art discussed in
this book offers “little resistances.”
Introduction | 19
Works Cited
Bal, Mieke and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro The Identity in Question. Ed. John Rajchman.
(eds.) 2MOVE: Video, Art, Migration. Murcia, New York and London: Routledge, 1995.
Spain: Cendeac, 2008. 199–227.
Boer, Inge E. Uncertain Territories. Eds. Mieke Mouffe, Chantal. On the Political. London and
Bal, Bregje van Eekelen and Patricia Spyer. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006.
Rancière, Jacques. La mésentente: Politique et
Brown, Wendy. “Wounded Attachments: Late philosophie. Paris: Galilée, 1995.
Modern Oppositional Political Formations.”

I. Art Matters: Metaphor,
Materiality, and Knowledge
Migrants: Workers of
Metaphors
Néstor García Canclini
ABSTRACT
Migration implies a radical experience of uncertainty, and the passage from one way
of naming and speaking to another. This discontinuity is greater if, when moving from
one country to another, the language changes. But it also occurs when moving to
another society that speaks the same language, but with different modulations. It is
necessary to pay attention to what is lost and gained in these symbolic transfers,
abandonments and recreations of meaning. This text proposes that it can be useful
to examine the aesthetics of migrants as operations analogous to those that philosophy
of language classifies as metaphors. In many societies, the visual arts remains the
source of what is left of the nationalist imagination; artworks still constitute the
stages for the consecration and communication of signs of local identity. The aes-
thetic event erupts when, instead of affirming a meaning, uncertainty and strange-
ness are allowed to emerge.
We know that the word metaphor means transport in Greek. It has, therefore,
a “natural” association with travel, migration, and other modes of displacement. This
text stems from the following question: how much can be said about migration
through scientific discourse—formed with univocal concepts, figures, and hard facts;
and how much can be conveyed by artistic languages, whose polysemy is plotted with
metaphors?
Migrants: Workers of Metaphors | 23

Concepts versus Metaphors
The idea that there is an opposition between concepts and metaphors persists in
debates of recent years, but it is not very sustainable nor can it be seen as
equivalent to the schematic confrontation set up in the past between scientists and
artists. Their current practices often do not seem far from one another. Scientists
also use metaphors, work with approximations, and compete by means of different
theories to prove which has the most explanatory capacity. For their part, artists work
with concepts and intellectually organize their representations of the real; they con-
vert their intuitions into language, communicate them, and contrast them with social
experiences. There is, therefore, a problem shared by epistemology and aesthetics:
how does the movement through which language gains dynamism and meaning from
metaphors intersect with the movement which aims to specify and fix meaning in
concepts. Science, philosophy, and aesthetics all appear to be preoccupied with the
reconception of “models for connecting the presentation of facts and forms of intel-
ligibility that blurred the border between the logic of facts and the logic of fiction”
(Rancière 2004, 38).
Perhaps the differences between scientists and artists reside, rather, in the eval-
uation criteria and legitimacy demands of their work: the scientist is interested in
building knowledge in relation to empirically observable referents, whereas the artist
is attracted by, more than the production of knowledge, the administration of the
uncertainty inherent in the experiences of sensibility and the imagination.
Migrations and Metaphors

Why are migratory aesthetics relevant to the discussion of conceptual and metaphor-
ical languages? First, migration implies a radical way of experiencing uncertainty and
the passage from one way of naming and speaking to another; this discontinuity is
greater if, when moving from one country to another, the language changes, but it
also occurs when moving to another society that speaks the same language with
different modulations.
To achieve an understanding of the importance of the millions of migrants in a
society, whether they are emigrating or immigrating, it is not enough to register the
number of migrants and the remittance figures to their places of origin. It is neces-
sary to pay attention to what is lost and gained in symbolic transfers, the abandon-
ments and the recreations of meaning. Fantasized scenes, oblique ways of naming
metaphors, allow access to that hidden plot of meanings, to another density of expe-
rience. These displacements of meaning are habitual in the language of the foreigner
because he or she lives among facts that have other names, and names which have
lost their facts.
I will use as an example one of the most extensively studied migratory processes,
that of Mexicans who go to the United States, analysis of which has changed in
24 | Néstor García Canclini

recent years to include culture as a key dimension. Official statistics reflect approxi-
mately twelve million Mexicans living in the United States, although the instability of
temporary migrations, the number of people without identity papers, and the addition
of Americans of Mexican origin who remain connected to Mexico, push some esti-
mates up to twenty-three million. For decades, studies concentrated on socioeco-
nomic reasons for leaving Mexico (unemployment, discrepancies of one to seven
times the salary paid for work in agriculture, industry, and the service sector), social
insecurity and the migrants’ fight for their rights in the United States, as well as the
repressive measures of the U.S., which range from border walls to violent discrimina-
tion. The recent spectacular increase in fund transfers sent to Mexico by migrants,
which have tripled in recent years to reach twenty-five billion dollars, and which are
directed almost entirely toward sustaining households in the country of origin, has
made it evident that migration is not an individual decision but a family strategy: by
sending various members of the family abroad, almost always the youngest, families
diversify their sources of income and make it possible for part of the family to remain
in Mexico. But migrants send not only money, but information; they exchange
experiences in both directions and establish “transnational communities” that are in
constant communication (Besserer and Kearney 2006). The idea of “cultural remit-
tances” enters the discussion: migrants send not only money from the United States
to Mexico, but also musical and video equipment, televisions, electrical appliances,
and fashionable clothes; conversely, food, taped music, and videos of parties and
family ceremonies are sent to California, Texas, Chicago, and New York from Mexico.
As Lourdes Arizpe notes, “assets of prestige and signs of success” emblematic of
the height of modernity are conveyed from the United States to Mexico, whereas
objects and messages, representing traditional affections, solidarity, and reaffirma-
tion of the community are sent from Mexico to the north (Arizpe 2006). Through this
exchange, bicultural practices are formed that bring about the coexistence and, to an
extent, hybridization of diverse aesthetics.
We know that hybridization does not amount to conciliation; it can imply tense
combinations, and conflicts between cultures and aesthetics that intertwine from
unequal positions. This means, at least, problems of translatability. However, it could
also be useful to examine the aesthetics of migrants as operations analogous
to those that the philosophies of language classify as metaphors. Displacements
of meaning that generate the interaction of two ways of naming within a single
transnational community allow us to conjecture that, as well as translation problems,
intersections of significant links and metaphorical associations occur within migra-
tory aesthetics in order to remedy a division in the ways of life, sensibility, and
thought between the communities of origin and the society of adoption.
On another level, I am interested in investigating why the metaphor of the journey
has become so attractive in philosophy and the arts, toward understanding its

fecundity and its limits. It is possible to suppose that the “metaphorical” character
of the experience of travelling or migrating that I have just mentioned is a clue: above
all, I see in the shifts in meaning of migratory experiences an illustrative clue to
the attraction that it holds over artists. One might say that the passage from the
modern to the postmodern is, among other things, a change from the aesthetics of
deep-rootedness to nomadic aesthetics. In modernity, the aesthetics of localization
and deep-rootedness predominated. Folklore celebrated territory, took pleasure in
immediate natural and cultural landscapes. The formation of states and national cul-
tures broadened the scale of this environment as a container for experiences. It is
notable that even the ruptures with the known and the search for unprecedented
forms in the arts were identified with national labels: Russian constructivism,
Mexican muralism, or American pop.
Later, postmodernism declared that nations were exhausted and imagined that
deterritorialization and the blurring of boundaries were the ordinary state of human-
ity. The world came to be regarded as a transit lounge. Many museums went from
registering the art and cultures of a single country to celebrating the criss-crossing of
distant images and people. Critics and curators requested works that could be
seen “as something which has travelled,” according to Guy Brett’s treatment of the
“airmail paintings” of Eugenio Dittborn, those “foldable and compartmentalized
rafts” that one received only to forward on: they were to be “seen between two jour-
neys” (Brett and Cubitt 1991). This poetics of the transitory served to get around the
obligation of representing embalmed identities and gave resonance to new dramas.
The questions central to art and anthropology changed. James Clifford wrote that “it
would no longer be normal to ask “Where are you from?” but rather “Where have you
come from and where are you going?” (Clifford 1992, 109).
This new perspective developed into a kind of abstract cosmopolitanism that
idealized the liberating power of any delocalization. Looking at the world as if moving
or relocating were the norm is exaggerated in light of reports such as that of the U.N.
Commission on Population and Development in 2006, which registered 191 million
immigrants worldwide, reflecting only 3% of the global population. “[T]he nomadic
planet,” affirms the demographer Gildas Simon, “in which one moves around and cir-
culates increasingly faster, with a globally decreasing cost, is populated with seden-
tary people, and the image of a world covered with uncontrollable waves of migration
is destined for the great shop of clichés” (Simon 1999, 43).
The exaltation of nomadism as an ideology that nourishes artistic thought also
derives from the growth of tourism and other types of travel, and of course it has to
do with the increased global interdependence of the artistic markets, the prolifera-
tion of biennials, work-related travel, and the transnational itinerance of works and
exhibitions. However, we must analyze this nomadic model in relation to the scale on
which experiences of travel involve the global population and artists.

In 2006, tourism-related travel involved 842 million people, a higher percentage

than that of migrants who travel for work or political reasons, but a small minority
in relation to the world population (El País 2007). As for the reordering of the art
market according to the logic of globalization, it must be remembered that—while
artists who sell their works for over thirty thousand dollars constitute a transnational
system of competitors—the majority of art producers and disseminators continue to
work within the framework of iconographic national traditions and in dialogue with the
public in their own countries. In many societies, the plastic arts remain as sources of
what is left of the nationalist imagination; they still constitute stages for the conse-
cration and communication of the signs of local identity.
Why then, have migration and travel erupted with such force, as key figures, in the
arts? There are motives that could be called “realistic,” namely, that artists “repre-
sent” the multiplication of migrations, exiles, and tourist displacements. I would also
like to suggest that journeys metaphorize the condition of artists today. The journey
represents the three-fold uprooting experienced by artists in the twentieth century.
Art lost its space when it left the home of its language, which was the painting; when
it questioned the institution that contained it, which was the museum; and when it
shared with globalized cultures the experience that the national model is insufficient
to encompass social imaginaries.
These starting points are useful in understanding the aesthetic dilemmas with
which the artists face the issue of migration. Tragedy and melodrama prevail as
genres. The artistic account of migration, as well as that of the media, continues
largely to offer the most dramatic images: wars and repression, illegal border cross-
ings and death. It is not by sheer coincidence that photography and video are the
preferred modes of representation, often subsuming the crafting of the experience in
the documentary record.
The mega-exhibition, Exodus, by Sebastião Salgado, which has been touring the
world for the last decade, aligning, with a single visual discourse, refugees from
Vietnam, candidates for migration in Tijuana, Palestinians in Lebanon, Rwandans in
Tanzania, street children in São Paulo, and multitudes of Indonesians who leave the
countryside to work in construction in Jakarta, persists as a canonical example of
migratory aesthetics. One of its problems is that the standardized treatment of
economic migrants, political or war refugees, disabled people, families, and solitary
individuals, from forty countries, renders them interchangeable if we do not read
the clarifying text at the bottom of the picture or infer the differences from the most
literal characteristics of the faces or the clothing.
Other ways of speaking artistically about travel and migration have developed in
recent years, beyond the documentary record and its epic or dramatic dimensions.
They also deal with what these experiences of displacement can detonate in the
recreation of the artistic work and in the relationship of the work—metaphorical or

conceptual—with social processes (globalization and borders, differences and asym-
metries). I offer two examples, both from the same artist, Francis Alÿs, that are
indicative of other roads. The first work was produced for the exhibition inSite, which
is periodically held in Tijuana and San Diego, on the border between Mexico and the
United States, with artists, invited from many countries, who often deal with the ques-
tion of migration. Alÿs, who took part in 1997, used the money with which inSite
financed his work to make a journey from Tijuana to San Diego without crossing the
U.S.-Mexico border: he took a route perpendicular to the dividing line, following a
detour that took him to Santiago, Chile; Tahiti; Sydney; Singapore; Bangkok; and
Vancouver. The work that he submitted was his travel journal, entitled The Loop.
Neither tourism nor exile, but simply a journey, which the notes reveal as a not very
enthralling one: “I am still unable to get interested in the city,” he records after vari-
ous days in Santiago; “Very pleasant but uninteresting,” he writes in Sydney; he sees
Singapore as “a gigantic shopping center.” “I do not have expectations” (Alÿs 1998,
37–43).
The second experience was an exhibition entitled Ten Blocks Around the Studio,
situated in the historic center of Mexico City. After wandering through this delimited
territory and collecting stories from the people who cross it in their intraurban jour-
neys, a key part of existence in a megalopolis, Alÿs carried out a series of experi-
ments there: a) he made collectors, small toy-sized devices in which he implanted a
small magnet, with which he walked through the streets accumulating heterogeneous
metallic samples; b) he photographed all kinds of carts, circulating objects and con-
tainers used by loaders and vendors; c) with the aim of collaborating in the formation
of urban myths and legends, he documented the life of a three-legged stray dog in the
historic center, a symbol of the precarious strategies required for survival in the city;
d) he pushed a block of ice for nine hours through the streets of the center until
it had completely melted and videotaped the action, metaphorically enacting the
disproportionate relationship between effort and result: this minimalistic sculptural
process, in decomposition, reflects on the precariousness of subsistence work and
provides, according to Cuauhtémoc Medina, “a criticism of sculpture as the produc-
tion of objects of permanent prestige, instead understanding it as a means of inter-
vention in the imaginary of a certain local time and social situation” (Alÿs, Medina,
and Diserens 2006, 63).
There is one difference between the two journeys. The quick trip around the world
only to arrive at the neighboring city, from Tijuana to San Diego, is nomadism for
nomadism’s sake, complete indifference to what is being seen in Santiago, Tahiti,
Singapore, etc. His journeys around Mexico City’s historic center, where he has lived
for years, find within everyday experiences the support for a reflection on the collec-
tion of waste, the coexistence with street vendors, and the discovery of the
metaphorical dimension in the solitude of a stray dog or an object.

New Foreigners
In recent years, although border walls, passports, and migratory dramas have contin-
ued to be represented in the arts, other separations between natives and migrants
are emerging that do not merely owe to geographical boundaries. New differences—
not territorial, or mainly territorial ones—produce new disagreements, asymmetries,
and inequalities. A foreigner is not necessarily someone who comes from elsewhere
and speaks another language; it is also someone who does not have access to
strategic networks, who does not take part in controlling these networks and there-
fore depends on the decisions of others. I am going to synthesize some experiences
of this metaphorical foreignness, which I have proposed to work on during a pro-
grammed workshop with artists, curators, and social scientists in August 2007, with
the aim of designing a multimedia exhibition at Espacio Telefónica in Buenos Aires,
in 2008.
1. Within advanced communication technology studies, there is a discussion about

the migration of the analog to the digital. This transfer is seen as a shared narra-
tive of the passage from an economy based on material products to one that is
centered in knowledge. The dematerialization of the productive process is also
associated with partial indifference to geographical, economic, and political
demarcations, dematerialization and deterritorialization. However, in these delo-
calized scenes, a territorial language continues to be used: there is talk of digital
natives and print-literate immigrants (Winocur 2006). Youths who were born to
television, computer, and Internet—multimedia natives—tend to make those who
become disorientated by digitalization feel like foreigners; parents who need help
from their offspring to cope with their digital ignorance; teachers or writers who
take refuge in paper culture in the face of the challenges of culture.com. Those of
us who try to join the new world must learn a second language; we experience our
old skills as inferior, and seek to translate the familiar into the new: we read the
manual before using the program; we print out email in order to read it; and we
use the telephone to confirm that it has arrived.
2. A second group is that of the native foreigners. This includes those who must live
in exile from their countries, who have been persecuted not necessarily by dicta-
torship but also, often, by a society with which they live at odds; or those who for
similar reasons remain in their native countries as dissidents or internal exiles,
and are disenfranchized as citizens: in internal exile; or those who leave and feel
disorientated when they return, because the society to which they have returned
shows only scattered signs of the one they knew before.
The testimonials of exiles often document these experiences. In evoking the

deception which many exiles feel upon their return, and how, upon return to their
native country, they begin to miss the city where they lived as migrants, more than

one has recalled the words of James Baldwin: “It’s better not to go back, because if
you do you will no longer be able to maintain the illusion of having a homeland.”
In an interview with Graciela Speranza, who asked him why he no longer lived in
Great Britain, John Berger replied: “Ever since I left school at sixteen, I began to feel
that there was something in me that made the English uncomfortable. Without
intention or any type of provocation, simply trying to be myself—speaking, listening,
moving around and reacting—I felt that I provoked a kind of awkwardness all around
me. And of course, when one lives in a place in which they feel that they are always
violating some rule to the discomfort of others, one ceases to feel at home. This is
because “to feel at home” means precisely to know that one can be oneself and be
accepted by others” (Speranza 1999).
What is to be done about this awkwardness? One can move to another country or
remain in one’s own as a foreigner. There are aesthetic dilemmas, in a broad sense,
that have to do with one’s lifestyle, one’s sensibility, and one’s ways of thinking and
expressing what one feels. These dilemmas tend to express themselves in the ways
that the “foreigner” reorganizes his daily life, work, and family within his native coun-
try or in the country to which he decides to move. “Then why France?” Speranza asks
Berger. “First I thought about Italy, a country which I love deeply because Italians are
a people who understand pleasure . . . I lived in Italy for a while; I made friends there
and met some extraordinary people such as Moravia, Carlo Levi, Pasolini. But there
was also something there that did not quite work. Just as the Italians understand
pleasure, they do not understand silence, the need to be alone. It is an adorable
characteristic if you wish, but it creates a difficulty in sociability, because the need for
silence or solitude becomes a personal question.” Berger claims to have chosen
France because he spoke the language and because a number of writers and
thinkers who were important to him at the time were French—Merleau Ponty, Camus:
“so coming to France was like going into a building with whose corridors of thought
I was familiar.”
The next issue is what to do when, after a while, one has to live in two places: the
new destination and the place of origin. One solution is the disjunctive one; Berger
calls it this as he explains how he lives part of the year in the Alps and the other part
in Paris: “In reality I am quite practical. I commit myself totally to what is happening
and also to the local people. And this is the case in the city or in the countryside.”
This way of organizing one place and another separately corresponds for Berger to
the explanation he gives for what he believes makes the English uncomfortable with
him: “A certain intensity. But there is perhaps something else. In the typical logic of
English discourse one should speak of that and the other in order to finally arrive at
this. These mechanics of communication require great effort of me, and it was obvi-
ous that something in me seemed strange to others. One of my grandfathers was an
immigrant, an Italian from Trieste and, for some reason, the majority of my closest

friends were immigrants from Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. I felt at
home with them; I knew that they accepted me” (all these quotations from Speranza
1999, 129–131).
This experience of feeling at home among foreigners can be extended to consti-
tute the basis for a philosophy that exalts foreignness, even in one’s own country,
over any form of localism. In a round table on this subject, the anthropologist Roger
Bartra said: “The most difficult thing about Mexico is living as a foreigner being
Mexican.” Edward Said, who is of Palestinian origin, and who lived in Cairo, then
Lebanon and then critically assumed his longest residence in New York, quoted a
phrase from Hugo de Saint Victor to explain why he did not seek to reconcile these
experiences of belonging, now in tension: “Whoever finds his homeland sweet is still
a tender apprentice; whoever finds that all land is like their home is like the native, and
is now strong; but he who finds the whole world a strange place is he who is perfect”
(Said 1994, 335). I would say that the aspiration that robs the contemporaneity from
this formula is the term “perfect.”
3. The opposition “native/foreigner” can be metaphorically applied to other reorder-

ings of that which is one’s own and that which is foreign. Modernity made us
accustomed to think of belonging as framed by nations and their territories, and
in relation to a formal order guaranteed by institutions and citizen’s rights. Being
a citizen implied participating and having rights (to be educated, to work legally, to
vote) and obligations (to pay taxes and to comply with the law). However, informal-
ity has been growing within the labor and business markets for decades: a large
part of the population works without contracts, labor rights, or medical services
within the society in which they were born. This has also become a polemical axis
for migratory debates due to the increase in undocumented immigrants, those
who cross borders and participate in other societies under the worst conditions
of foreignness and who are subject to vulnerability without rules.
Lately, social and cultural studies are addressing other modes of the rising infor-
mality. Surveys of young people in various Latin American countries reveal that a
majority has access to unstable jobs without rights through informal routes such as
friends or relatives. Something similar takes place in consumerism: in Mexico, more
than 70% of young people look for music, clothes, and films on the black market.
In this unregulated business, outside of nation-state legality, youth find ways to be
connected with foreign cultures.
Wide sectors of Latin American societies feel foreign in relation to the formal
order; they see the speeches of politicians as disconnected from reality, and the
decisions that affect their survival as governed by outside powers and subject to few
long-lasting rules. For this reason, many act as foreigners with respect to national
institutions. They can do this through individual transgressive behavior, but collective

networks are also appearing that function in the same way as foreign minorities:
associations of unlicensed peddlers who do not pay taxes, of taxi drivers without
permits, of groups of ticket scalpers for shows and off-the-cuff car-minders, mafias
of waste collectors and drug-traffickers; a multiplicity of services organized in circuits
outside the scope of the legal order. These informal groups are expressed in their
aesthetics: for example, narcocorridos; do-it-yourself home construction that
transforms the urban landscape; cardboard collectors who exhibit their recycled
materials (and even have their own publishing house in Buenos Aires: Eloisa
Cartonera); and of course, the networks of young people who download, create, and
exchange music, texts, and videos on the Internet. These aesthetics are almost
always characterized by precariousness, improvisation, and recycling, in which the
objects and messages and their production, circulation, and use are all foreign to
“legitimate” culture.
Immigration as a Metaphor
Is it legitimate to extend the native/foreigner opposition to non-territorial interac-
tions? To use the word foreigner as a metaphor is not only to refer to immigration in
the figurative or imaginary sense. Even the geographic forms of migration, the most
visible and categorical, include displacements and strangenesses that go beyond a
change of landscape or language. The migrant also feels foreign to historical tradi-
tions, secret condensations of meaning that formed another way of living. For this
reason, the metaphor is not a secondary or derived scene whose truth resides in the
hard facts provided by demographic or socioeconomic studies about migrations.
In light of this interaction between scientific descriptions, conceptual definitions,
and metaphorical re-elaborations of migration, we can ask ourselves which are the
most appropriate formal, literary, digital, or visual resources with which to allude to
the less evident ways of being a foreigner in the face of natives, an undocumented
person amid citizens, a print-literate person confronted with digital internauts.
If what characterizes the condition of the foreigner is a series of disarrangements
between the stages and the performances, there is no one language or genre more
appropriate than another, but only problems of relationship between different lan-
guages and vacillations in translation. There can be an epic moment in the represen-
tation and the artistic imaginary conveyed by migrants when describing the escape,
or confrontations with those who are different. On the other hand, the setbacks in
reciprocal recognition push the choice for melodrama. But in a world where it is rare
for power to be an absolute monopoly, or suffering to exist without negotiation and
solidarity, ambivalent movements on one side and the other are opportune for test-
ing more complex, less polarized modes of illuminating interculturality.
A number of artists today speak, without denying the conflicts, of the fecundity
and the uncertainties of these transactions. Perhaps their principal decisions do not

lie in choosing a genre, but rather in assuming responsibility for the practice of trans-
lation. When it does not involve affirming a true culture, faced with another that also
pretends to be one, the question is how to communicate that what which some say
one way and others another.
This has nothing to do with the old aspiration to convert art into the language
of universal reconciliation, but, rather, with conceiving a place in which to experience
differences, the impossibility of complete translation, and the chance to know something
different. This is seen in the works from the series On Translation by Antoni Muntadas
(2002), which relates diverse modes of seeing and naming in indefinite cultures or
situations: information offices, waiting rooms, international press conferences.
Even in spaces with better profiled identity pretensions, the aesthetic event
erupts when, instead of affirming a meaning, uncertainty and strangeness are
allowed to emerge. In the arts and culture, the idea that there can be original and
definitive works must be suspended. As Borges said, “The concept of definitive text
only corresponds to religion or tiredness” (Borges 1996; I, 239). In secular societies,
in a plural world, it is possible to conceive of all cultural works, spaces, and circuits
as drafts or attempts to speak.
Epics, like much political art, tend to align foreign stories into a single one.
Melodrama acts out the discrepancies of affections and the difficulty in recognizing
the other (Martín Barbero 1992), but it seeks an ending in which strangers disappear
or change their minds and integrate. The experience of translation, however, sets in
relation the comparable and the incomparable, what can be communicated and the
unyielding silences.
The migrant, all migrants (even in the least educated sectors), is always a transla-
tor, someone who constantly lives, between his place of origin and his adoptive
culture, the experience of what can or can not be said in another language. However,
as Paul Ricoeur (2006) observes on the subject of translations, besides successful
translation and the experience of insuperable differences, there exists also the
search for how to say something equivalent, how to say it in another way. One of
the ways of doing this is to revert to metaphors. And with regard to concepts, even
philosophical and scientific ones, let us remember, as Mieke Bal does, that concepts
travel (between disciplines, periods, and scattered academic communities): concepts
resemble metaphors in that they do not condense meaning in a single way, once and
forever, because they are flexible points of coincidence, provisional strategies to
enable us to converse, collaborate, or argue with a certain coherence (Bal 2006).
We discover that we can be foreigners in our own society when we ask ourselves,
faced with a compatriot: “What did s/he mean?” By relativizing territorial and
transnational migrations, I do not propose to diminish either their dramatic impor-
tance or their interest for artistic work. Rather I mean to pinpoint other ways of being
a migrant and a foreigner generated by mechanisms of reordering what is one’s

own and what is foreign, mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, that occur in the
immediate environment or within globalized networks. As we have already seen,
going around the world or throughout one’s own city can be equally intense and
challenging ways of travelling. An art and a knowledge that render us sensitive to the
foreign within our own culture contribute to an understanding of how we migrate, and
how to deal with the untranslatable or that which, at times, we are able to say.

Works Cited
Alÿs, Francis. “Para viajar de Tijuana a San “El número de turistas creció un 4,5% en
Diego.” Luna Córnea 15 (1998): n.p. 2006, hasta alcanzar los 842 millones.” El
País, January 30, 2007.
Alÿs, Francis, Cuauhtémoc Medina, and Corinne
Diserens. Diez cuadras alrededor del estudio. Martín Barbero, Jesús. Televisión y melodrama.
Mexico City: Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Editores Muntadas,
Arizpe, Lourdes, 2006. Antoni, 1992.
———. “Mexicanidad, migración y global- Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics.

ización.” Los Retos de la Cultura en México Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London and New York:
en el contexto de la globalización. Mexico City: Continuum, 2004.
Cámara de Diputados/Porrúa, n.p.
Ricoeur, Paul. On Translation. Trans. Eileen
Bal, Mieke. “Conceptos viajeros en las Brennan. New York and London: Routledge,
humanidades.” Trans. Yaiza Hernández. 2006.
Estudios Visuales 3 (2006): 28–78.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London:
Besserer, Federico, and Michael Kearny. San Vintage, 1994.
Juan Mixtepec, una comunidad transnacional
ante el poder clasificador y filtrador de las Simon, Gildas. “Les mouvements de population
fronteras. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma aujourd’hui.” Immigration et intégration: L’etat
Metropolitana, 2006. des saviors. Ed. Philippe Dewitte. Paris: La
Découverte, 1999. 43–55.
Brett, Guy, and Sean Cubitt. Camino: Las
pinturas aeropostales de Eugenio Dittborn. Speranza, Graciela. “John Berger: Una cierta
Santiago de Chile: n.p., 1991. intensidad.” Razones intensas: Conversaciones
sobre arte y literatura, ed. Graciela Speranza.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “Las versiones homéricas.” Buenos Aires: Libros Perfil, 1999. N.p.
Obras Completas I. Buenos Aires: Emecé,
1996. Winocur, Rosalía. “Procesos de socialización
y formas de sociabilidad de los jóvenes
Clifford, James. “Traveling Cultures.” Cultural universitarios en la red.” El consumo cultural
Studies. Eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson en América Latina. Ed. Guillermo Sunkel.
and Paula Treichler. New York and London: Bogotá: Convenio Andrés Bello, 2006.
Routledge, 1992. 96–116. 504–31.

The Place of Metaphor

in a Metonymic World:
On Homi Bhabha’s
“Democracy De-Realized”
Paulina Aroch Fugellie
ABSTRACT
In this article I present a cultural analysis of “Democracy De-Realized” by post-

colonial theorist Homi Bhabha. This lecture, running on RealPlayer software online,
deals with questions of globalization and democracy. It was originally transmitted
through live video from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Berlin, right after the events of
September 11, 2001. I explore the ways in which the author relates to his position
of enunciation and their effects in the context of the historical, technological, and
immediate socio-institutional circumstances that make the broadcast of his lecture
possible. I am particularly concerned with the contradictions between the performa-
tive and the discursive aspects of the lecture, and with the way the virtual environ-
ment of the transmission plays into that instability. I analyze how the modes of
resistance to power that Bhabha proposes involve a displacement from the realm of
the real to that of the virtual, and what his reiteratively deferred promise of connec-
tivity implies. In order to bring about such an exploration, I recast Lacan’s concepts
of metaphor and metonymy. In recurring to Lacan for an ideological critique of an
instance of postcolonial discourse, I seek to exploit a potential in his work that is
rarely considered of interest for political analyses.
House of World Cultures, Berlin, 2001

On October 9, 2001, Homi Bhabha delivered a lecture entitled “Democracy
De-Realized.” The postcolonial theorist’s audience was gathered in a Berlin audito-
rium for the inauguration of Documenta 11, Platform 1: “Democracy Unrealized.”1
The Place of Metaphor in a Metonymic World: On Homi Bhabha’s “Democracy De-Realized” | 37

However, Bhabha was unable to get there to meet his audience. Due to the complica-
tions following September 11, it was impossible for the lecturer to leave the United
States. To compensate for his absence, his talk was video-projected live from
Cambridge, Massachusetts; a follow up discussion was also facilitated by live
video. As a substitute for Bhabha’s physical presence, German philosopher Horst
Bredekamp was called in at the last minute—not to present a paper himself, but
merely to occupy a place on the rather empty stage that faced the audience. While
not exactly a panelist, neither was Bredekamp just another member of the audience.
He was expected to be the first to pose a question to Bhabha, and to do so in an
extended manner.
When his turn to speak arrived, Bredekamp was primarily critical of the metaphor
with which Bhabha had ended his talk. In constructing that metaphor, Bhabha used
the fallen twin towers of the World Trade Center as the image underlying the notion
of what he called “the Unbuilt.” In Bhabha’s words:
[T]he times and places in which we live confront our sense of Progress with the
image of the Unbuilt. The Unbuilt is not a place you can reach with a ladder . . . The rub-
ble and debris that survive carry the memories of other fallen towers, Babel for
instance, and lessons of endless ladders that suddenly collapse beneath our feet. We
have no choice but to place, in full view of our buildings, the vision of the Unbuilt—the
foundation of possible buildings . . . other alternative worlds. (2002, 363–364)2
Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and Karl Schmidt, Bredekamp accused
Bhabha of underestimating the psychological impact associated with the image of
the fallen towers, and predicted the inevitable failure of Bhabha’s utopian image
(as a viable concept). Furthermore, Bredekamp subtly suggested that Bhabha’s
metaphor reduced the towers to a symbol of democracy and, in so doing, ignored
both their historical context and the more complex and implicit meanings that, as
a symbol, the twin towers produce. Bredekamp’s argument centered on what he
described as the much more powerful image of the second tower falling. While the
falling of the first tower could be read as an accident, the collapse of the second
tower marked what was happening as a momentous historical event.
Bhabha, listening throughout from the other side of the screen, was notably
affected. In his defense, he put forth an extensive argument. Somewhere in the
middle of that speech, Bhabha interrupted himself and launched into a personal
narrative. Although thematically relevant, Bhabha’s story was intrusive and not dis-
cursively linked to the rest of his arguments. He was agitated, his voice pitched
higher than usual, his hand movements more frequent; and he stumbled over his own
words as he pronounced the following:
I rushed out of my house to have a key made, to have a key to my new home copied
in a shop. And there were these people standing there, and as I walked in they were
talking about this narrative. I thought they were discussing a film that they had just
38 | Paulina Aroch Fugellie

seen on the ever-present television in hardware stores. So I said “Sorry, what are you
talking about? Has something happened?” and they said “What do you mean ‘has
something happened?’!” At which point I’ve no memory of . . . except of the fact that
I ran all the way home and I turned on the television and I couldn’t believe . . . so
I don’t . . . I’ve no memory of how I came to. And then I saw the second tower come
down. (Bhabha and Bredekamp 2001, min.13:30)
Let me imagine, for a moment, Bhabha’s intrusive narrative as a symptom. That is to
say, let me read this short story Bhabha has told as a metaphor of the event taking
place in the Berlin auditorium and on its visual media screen.3
In Bhabha’s story, neither he nor the people at the hardware store ever discuss
what has happened; the important thing is that something has indeed happened: an
event has taken place. Phenomenological reality has been critically intervened with,
and the Bhabha of the narrative is overwhelmed by the fact. He rushes home at the
moment he hears that something, whatever that something may be, has occurred.
He arrives home in time to see the second tower fall, that same tower that
Bredekamp has just argued is the sign of the event as such, the image that inscribes
the attack on the towers as a major historical occurrence. The narrated Bhabha, as
a symptom irrupting in the theorist’s answer to Bredekamp, is responding on behalf
of his narrator: “I am not underestimating the real dimension of the event; I was pres-
ent at the moment of the second tower’s collapse; I was present at the moment of
the historical event.” Bhabha insists, twice, that he even lost his memory because of
it; that is to say, that his capacity to represent reality was cancelled out by the over-
whelming presence of the event. But the Bhabha in the story does not rush off to the
World Trade Center, he rushes home to his television set. The narrator is critical
of “the ever-present television in hardware stores” and contrasts his realization of
the fact that something had actually happened with his initial belief that the people
he met were “talking about some narrative.” Nonetheless, his lived experience is
still centrally determined through the mediation of his own television set. Thus,
Bhabha, the symptom, answers Bredekamp once more: “I am aware of the phenom-
enological dimension of the event, but that dimension is always already mediated by
the symbolic.”
Symptoms irrupt when something that requires expression finds no other outlet.
In the context of the conference, Bredekamp’s critique of Bhabha is completely unex-
pected. The chair and the conference’s director have treated the postcolonial critic
with great deference. Bhabha’s way of speaking, here and elsewhere, is meticulous
in its politeness, and seeks to avoid confrontation to the degree that he begins his
response by agreeing with Bredekamp and only then adds the phrase “on the other
hand.” But he immediately corrects himself by saying “no, there is no ‘other hand,’
I applaud you with both hands” (Bhabha and Bredekamp 2001, min.11:30).
Furthermore, the criticism with which Bredekamp has confronted Bhabha is emblematic

of the major and most persistent accusation directed at the postcolonial critic in writ-
ten form: that he privileges the sign over lived reality to an unsustainable extent.
But something else is going on in that auditorium. In the context of the Berlin con-
ference room, Bhabha himself is reduced to a sign on the screen. The mild laughter
of the people at the auditorium, whenever technical hiccups create a lapse in coordi-
nation between Bhabha and Bredekamp or between Bhabha and the chair, underline
this fact. It is no longer just that Bhabha is being accused of privileging the sign,
but that he has been himself turned into one. He is functioning as the metaphor of
himself as a sign. The bodily Bhabha is literally displaced, and a sign of Bhabha, the
sign-man, stands in his place.
But the image on the screen is not the only thing standing in for Bhabha. Bhabha’s
physical substitute, Bredekamp, is literally occupying the place of the former. In this
way, Bredekamp is not only accusing Bhabha of disregarding the importance of the
phenomenological dimension of reality, he is also embodying Bhabha’s utter inability
to access that realm. Bredekamp becomes a metaphor of the dimension that Bhabha,
once and again, desires or is desired to access, but, once and again, fails to access.
Sixteenth International Congress of Psychoanalysis, Zurich, 1949

On July 17, 1949, one of the participants at the International Congress of
Psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan, delivered a paper that was to become a classic: “The
Mirror Stage as Formative of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” In it, the
French theorist proposed that the subject is constituted in terms of his desire.4 This
desire marks his own impossibility, because fulfilling that desire would require him to
occupy the place of the other, which is, by the laws of time and space, impossible.
The core metaphor around which the lecture is woven is that of a child seeing
himself in the mirror, for the first time. The child identifies with his own reflection.
Given that this identification involves a displacement, a projection of the self onto
the outward, spatial dimension, this encounter marks the subject’s subsequent and
lifelong identification of the self in terms of the Other.
The reflection that the child beholds in the mirror is a complete, autonomous
whole. This image clashes with the child’s proprioception in the present, because
he is not yet self-sufficient. His image also clashes with the child’s experience
of himself prior to the mirror encounter. Facing the mirror, the infant’s previously
undifferentiated, multi-sensory relation with otherness is now recalled as a threat of
fragmentation. Thus, identification is always already structured around the Other as
threat of self-disintegration and around desire for the Other. This desire is the desire
to become that autonomous whole that the image before him promises and, also,
a desire to return to a state of undifferentiated unity with otherness.
In this way, “The Mirror Stage” describes the infant’s entry into the realm of the
Imaginary. The realm of the Imaginary is where Lacan accounts for a primary sense of

self as distinct from otherness, the first step in the constitution of subjecthood. But,
for Lacan, the subject is only fully constituted in the realm of the Symbolic. The
Symbolic is the space of language in which the subject is inscribed. I will now turn to
the realm of the Symbolic, in order to account for the importance of occupying the
place of the Other, whenever symptom or its literary counterpart—metaphor—are con-
cerned.5 I will do so by revisiting another of Lacan’s lectures, which, as the psychoan-
alyst himself recalls, “took place on 9 May, 1957, in the Amphithéàtre Descartes of the
Sorbonne and the discussion was continued afterwards over drinks” (1977b, 738).6
Descartes Amphitheater, Paris-Sorbonne, 1957

Lacan’s renowned 1957 lecture, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or
Reason Since Freud” was, to a significant extent, determined by the particular nature
of the audience that gathered at the Descartes amphitheater on that May 9th, fifty
years ago: what all of the audience had in common was their literary training. In
appreciation of his audience’s professional expertise, Lacan’s central proposition
that day was that the unconscious is structured like a language. To develop on this
understanding, the lecturer translated Freud’s concept of “displacement” as
“metonymy,” while translating his concept of “condensation” as “metaphor.”
Making use of structuralist linguistics, Lacan’s stated aim was to debunk common
misreadings of Freud that assign fixed meanings to determined symptoms in isola-
tion. In opposition to this essentialist tendency in the interpretation of psychoanalytic
symptoms, Lacan emphasizes the importance of syntax; hence his proposition that
the unconscious is structured like a language (739).
In stating that the unconscious is structured like a language, Lacan is not saying
that it is necessarily expressed by using the same material support as does the
English or the Spanish language. The signifiers by which the unconscious is expressed
find their material support in physical symptoms, slips of the tongue, dreams, and
jokes. So, rather than referring to the material support of language, the statement
that the unconscious is structured like a language refers to the fact that it is based
around the same articulating principles as those on which English or Spanish are
based. As in other languages, the signifiers that correspond to the unconscious pro-
duce meaning by virtue of their combination along a signifying chain that is regulated
by the laws of a closed order.
Lacan’s heightened stress on the syntactic properties of language and, therefore,
on the centrality of “place” in the production of meaning has a major ontological
implication. Inscribed in the realm of the Symbolic, the subject is to be understood,
quite literally, as the place that it occupies in language. This is to say that the sub-
ject, in the ontological sense of the word, is none other than the subject in the gram-
matical sense of the term (745–746, 753–756). Therefore, in discussing metaphor
and metonymy, Lacan is also discussing the constitution of the subject as such.

In order to expand on this central question, let me briefly recall Lacan’s earlier
lecture, “The Mirror Stage.” There, the French theorist posited that the subject is con-
stituted in terms of his desire. This desire marks his own impossibility, given that his
full self-realization is situated at two equally impossible extremes. Firstly, desire is
anchored in the hope of a return to the state of undifferentiated unity with the Other.
But this possibility is lost forever by the very fact of the self’s awareness of his own
selfhood. Secondly, this desire is anchored in a displaced ideal image of himself,
initially as represented by the mirror and, subsequently, by other human beings.
This second site of magnetism is also unreachable by definition, as reaching it would
literally require the occupation of the same time-space as the other.
Returning to “The Agency of the Letter”: to account for metaphor and metonymy,
Lacan recurs to Ferdinand de Saussure’s diagram: “Signifier over signified,” visually
represented as capital S and small s, separated by a bar: S/s. Metonymy is the dis-
placement from signifier to signifier along the horizontal axis of language, an inces-
sant sliding of signifiers above the S/s bar (740, 744). In metonymy, the perpetual
deferral that characterizes desire is acted out. The subject seeks to become fully
satisfied, which is to become fully signified, which is to attain a perfect match
between signifier and signified: a crossing of the S/s bar. But, as indicated in Lacan’s
1949 lecture, this perfect match is an impossibility. Because the slippery chain of
unsatisfied desire can never be fulfilled, metonymy is the place of the subject’s lack
of being (1977b, 756).
Metaphor, however, offers a way out of this metonymical chain. Metaphor is the
place where a signifier, quite literally, occupies the place of another. In metaphor, the
displaced signifier transfers its meaning onto the signifier, which occupies its place
at the stated level of discourse. This is to say that the signifier that is absent from
the written level of the text becomes the signified of the signifier that replaces it at
the material level of language. The absent signifier thus crosses the “S/s” bar
(745–746). By crossing the bar, the displaced signifier becomes fully signified, which
is to become fully satisfied. Lacan proposes that metaphor, while rarely occurring, is
linked to the question of being (756).
“Democracy De-Realized,” RealPlayer, Any Given Day

Having revisited Lacan’s 1949 and 1957 lectures, I now return to Homi Bhabha’s
2001 lecture, “Democracy De-Realized.” However, while in the first section of this
article I have approached “Democracy De-Realized” as an event, as a time and space
specific occurrence, I will now focus on it as a record, which may be accessed ad libi-
tum in the present. The register of the event in question finds its place of residence
on the Internet. At first sight, “Democracy De-Realized” is only another hyperlink on
its hosting page.7 Once clicked, the hyperlink opens a new “window,” in the center of
which the recorded lecture starts running. Framing the center of this new window,

“user friendly” software enhances the contours of the box to emulate the three-
dimensional borders of a television set. Augmenting the effect, a series of control
buttons on the lower border serve their iconically stated purposes. In the top left cor-
ner, the software’s brand name states the effect that it seeks: RealPlayer. Left in
automatic mode, the RealPlayer window occupies only part of the computer screen,
and its frame cannot be hidden from view; the video appears to be superimposed,
playing against the background of the host page.
Throughout this section, I will take the video playing within these boundaries as
the cultural object of my concern.8 Before doing so, I would note that, outside of
cyberspace, frames are the wooden or metal borders delineating the place that
mirrors, paintings, or screens occupy in space. So, a frame not only marks the dis-
tinction between surrounding space and the material space occupied by the object,
it also distinguishes “real” space from the “virtual” space represented by the
object’s surface. The frame of a mirror or a painting calls attention to the fact that the
illusory reduplication or representation of space is an artifice, not coextensive with
reality. The RealPlayer frame benefits from this effect of frames in general, and thus
stages the screen it encloses as (ontologically) discontinuous from the surrounding
surface. By indicating that a screen lies within its boundaries, it simultaneously
denotes the rest of the computer’s screen as non-screen. Hence, the frame enclos-
ing Bhabha’s video-lecture authenticates the remainder of the virtual space as real.
The software frame competes with the material frame of the computer to deploy
my object’s—that is the video’s—context as constituted by the virtual space lying
beyond the video’s limits. It draws attention away from the computer frame, which
defines my object’s context at the juncture of socio-historical reality and virtuality. In
so doing, it also draws attention away from the cybernaut’s understanding of virtual
space as a technological effect. While RealPlayer benefits from the effects of the
frame to stage different levels of reality, the screen, the frame, and the context it
deploys are actually continuous. This is precisely the modus operandi of virtuality,
defined as that which is so “in essence or effect, although not formally or actually;
admitting of being called by the name so far as the result or effect is concerned”
(Oxford English Dictionary).
Following this definition, it could be said that a particular virtual object seeks to
appropriate the name of a corresponding real one by simulating its effects.
Consequently, virtuality can be understood as that which usurps the name of reality
by simulating its effects. Bhabha’s call to de-realize democracy is significant in the
context of the Internet’s virtuality, and of its concomitant exacerbation of “the real.”
This becomes evident if we follow the central line of argument of “Democracy
De-Realized.” Pointing to the teleological implications of the conference’s general
title—Democracy Unrealized—Bhabha proposes to substitute the second term with
“de-realized.” The lecturer explains he is using the word in two senses. First, in the

Brechtian sense of “distantiation” and, second, in the surrealist sense of déréalisa-
tion, that is, in the sense
of placing an object, idea, or image in a context not of its making, in order to defa-
miliarize it, to frustrate its naturalistic and normative ‘reference’ and see what potential
for translation that idea or insight has—a translation across genre and geopolitics,
territory and temporality. (2002, 349)
Bhabha conceives “de-realized” as an alternative that, by abstracting the concept of
democracy from its historical reality and ideological origins, may be creatively trans-
lated and strategically employed by minorities. Bhabha moves away from the term’s
historical origins and toward the possibilities opened up by democracy when it is
strategically employed in terms of its effects. Hence, in both the lecture and its virtual
environment, “effect” is prioritized over “cause,” whether it be the effect of reality
over the technological and social causes producing such an effect, or the strategic
effect of democracy’s translatability over the geo-historically specific causes for the
existence of “democracy.”
By “de-realizing” democracy, Bhabha is proposing a suspension of disbelief allow-
ing for a reimagination of preexisting concepts in order to creatively rearticulate
the socio-historical realities that they name. Thus, as has been mentioned, Bhabha
translates a historical site of destruction into a virtual place from which to rethink the
world. Bhabha defines “the Unbuilt”:
What you need once your towers have fallen is a perspicuous vision that reveals a
space, a way in the world . . . Neither destruction nor deconstruction, the Unbuilt is the
creation of a form whose virtual absence raises the question of what it would mean to
start again in the same place, as if it were elsewhere, adjacent to the site of a historic
disaster. (2002, 363–364)
Bhabha’s move away from ontological and teleological understandings of “the
Unbuilt” is phrased in negative terms (i.e., “it is neither this nor that”). The lecturer
further poses a logical contradiction: “virtual absence.” In logical terms, “the
Unbuilt” can only be a virtual category because it does not exist yet. It is a virtual
presence, and an actual absence. By inverting the terms, Bhabha cancels their logic
and opens up a paradox. Hence, his definition, relying upon negation and contradic-
tion, does not state what the concept at stake actually is, but seeks to produce the
effect of what it is in the audience. Furthermore, “virtual absence” does not describe
“the Unbuilt” directly, but describes “a form,” while “the Unbuilt” is described as the
“creation” of that “form.” Earlier, Bhabha has posed “the Unbuilt” as “a perspicuous
vision” that reveals a further “space, a way in the world” (363). In these ways,
Bhabha deploys different levels of reality within the virtual category of “the Unbuilt.”
While the lecturer’s emphasis on effect is parallel to the modus operandi of virtuality,
his layering of virtuality into different degrees of virtual/real is parallel to that of the
software with which it is played.

Let me recall that the role of the software frame is to position the virtual as real.
Its mode of operation is self-referential: by staging the effect of different levels of
reality within itself, it relativizes the concept of reality as such. By resituating object
and context within the boundaries of the monitor’s screen, it draws attention away
from the context extending beyond the computer screen. It attempts to disrupt
history’s hegemonic claim as the realm of “context” and “the real.” The lecturer’s call
for the need for “de-realization” is published in a context where socio-historical real-
ity is already displaced to the margins. Bhabha’s call for a suspension of disbelief
could be read as a momentary movement away from socio-historical reality, in
order to return to it from a different perspective. But, framed by RealPlayer, it also
translates as a normative condition of understanding the world in cyber-cultural
space.9
“Democracy De-Realized,” Cyberspace, Same Given Day

By definition, that which is virtual does not have an ontological dimension, while
metonymy, as stated by Lacan, is likewise linked to the question of non-being (1958,
756). Unlike metaphor, metonymy is not; it happens, it produces an effect. The mean-
ing produced by metonymy cannot be located, it can only be sensed as an aftereffect
of the comparison between two or more contiguous elements along the chain of sig-
nifiers. Furthermore, where metonymy is concerned, there is no way out of the chain
of signifiers (the S/s bar cannot be crossed), there is only perpetual displacement.
This produces a self-referential effect, whereby language (understood as the chain of
signifiers) appears as incapable of escaping its own tautological nature.
The “RealPlaying” of “Democracy De-Realized,” in its self-referentiality and, with
its substitution of actuality by effect, may be described as metonymic. But the aes-
thetics of metonymy are not limited to RealPlayer, they are characteristic of cyber-
space in more general terms. Take, for example, the hyperlinked topography of the
video’s hosting page. As discursive icons, hyperlinks emphasize the notions of con-
nectivity, multiplicity, and simultaneity. Yet, as operative mechanisms, hyperlinks
perpetually defer connectivity, multiplicity, and simultaneity.10 The formal aspects of
“Democracy De-Realized,” as a video recording, also share in the aesthetics of
metonymy. The video posted on the Documenta 11 Web site, showing Bhabha as he
speaks, is not exactly the same as the one that was projected in the Berlin audito-
rium on October 9, 2001. The video on the Web has one crucial difference:
superimposed on the lower left-hand corner of the original image there is a small
rectangle. Its four sides are equally proportionate to and aligned with the sides of
the overall rectangle that demarcates the image as a whole. Given that this smaller
rectangle is analogous to the whole while being constitutive of it, it may be said that,
in terms of composition, the small rectangle holds a synecdoche-like relationship to
the larger one.

While the larger image portrays Bhabha as he speaks, the smaller one projects
the synchronized recording of Bhabha’s audience in Berlin. In the smaller rectangle,
the cybernaut not only sees the audience but also the monitor screen on which the
audience is watching Bhabha. This third frame (i.e., the material screen in the Berlin
auditorium) functions, in turn, as a synecdoche of the widest image within which the
middle rectangle is inserted. Thus, the overall impression is that of the widest image
endlessly reproducing itself inwardly. In this movement, historical time becomes con-
founded: scaling leads the cybernaut to conceive the smaller, embedded images as
reproductions of the largest one. But the overall composition is only the result of the
event reproduced in the middle rectangle, which in turn is synchronic to the smallest
rectangle, of which the largest frame is a copy. Time enters a closed cycle. Because
of its substitution of the whole by a part, and because of the chain of deferral
it establishes along contiguous elements, the image of the online video may be
described as metonymic.
The aesthetics of metonymy are thus characteristic of diverse elements involved
in the publishing site and media of “Democracy De-Realized.” But most significant is
the fact that such aesthetics are shared by Homi Bhabha’s own use of language.
Bhabha constantly transfers semiotic or phonetic similarity along the horizontal axis
of language. This is firstly evident in the author’s frequent recourse to alliteration:
“genre and geopolitics, territory and temporality”; “a longer lineage of fraying and
fragility” (349, emphasis added). Through the transference of sound from one word
to the next, phonetics plays a considerable role in knitting the theorist’s text into
a coherent whole.
On a wider scale, the lecturer benefits from a parallel procedure, this time involv-
ing the translation of semantic charge from one concept to the next. The author
introduces the concept of “de-realization.” He then associates “de-realization” to
“translatability,” the semantic charge of which is then transferred onto the notion of
the “incubational.” The idea of betweenness posed by the notion of the “incuba-
tional” is then transferred onto the spatial dimension to reach the concept of an
“intermediate area,” the implications of which translate onto “intermediate life,” then
onto “double horizon,” onto “third space,” onto “minoritarian presence, as a sign of
‘intermediate living,’” and so on and so forth, along a long line of associated
concepts that are, nonetheless, treated as distinct, in varying degrees, by the
theorist (349–361).
While the transference of sounds and semantic charges from one element onto
the next is persistent, the transference of a given syntactic structure onto a parallel,
contiguous semantic unit is notably absent. Through both the phonetic and the
semantic infiltration of one word or term into the next, the lecturer’s employment
of translation along the horizontal axis of language emphasizes connectivity. Such
connectivity is present, first, at the level of the lecture’s phonetic texture. Second,

it bursts open the semantic fields of the author’s concern into a constellation of
stated and implied associations. But while connectivity is stressed at the level of lin-
guistic texture and in the reciprocal resonance of contiguous elements in the seman-
tic field, the teleological connections of the argument are constantly deferred. In the
context of the video’s formal composition and of its hyperlinked background, the
lecture’s phonetic and semantic textures are in tune, given that here, too, “connec-
tion” is endlessly announced and endlessly deferred.
But even my own framing of “Democracy De-Realized” as a cultural object on-line
has been closer to metonymy than to metaphor. That is to say that I have explored
the transfer taking place between elements whose only relation, at least on the
(computer) surface, is that of spatial contiguity. Because of this fact, “Democracy
De-Realized” in and of itself can not be held accountable for some of the meanings
implied when read against its technological support. Such meanings are an afteref-
fect of a coincidental contiguity. However, this contiguity, precisely by being coinciden-
tal, describes a coexistence, a shared historical moment between the object and its
surroundings. Affinity presents itself not because the object and its surroundings say
the same things about their shared historical reality, but because they have similar
ways of coding that shared reality. The elements contiguous to the live video-lecture,
in their virtuality, do not actually alter what “Democracy De-Realized” has to say. They
merely point to the place that it occupies in a culture that exceeds it.
The Place from Where I Speak to You Today

As I end, let me circle back to the beginning, to the place from where I speak
to you today. Fallen towers, falling idols: what has befallen the ideals and the
Ideas of global Progress now that the New World is bereft of its towers, its
towering ladder without rungs targeted as the symbol of our times?
Homi Bhabha (2002, 363)
Let me now return to the event that took place at the Berlin auditorium, six years ago;
this time keeping in mind the predominance of metonymy in Bhabha’s discourse and
its affinity to the aesthetics of the Internet. The question arises: given that Bhabha’s
lecture as a whole is characterized by deconstructive strategies (privileging of the
virtual and of the effect, self-referentiality and deferral), why does Horst Bredekamp
locate the entirety of his objection to Bhabha’s procedure in that single image of “the
Unbuilt”? Why is he so disturbed by it, to the degree of dedicating all of his participa-
tion to the undoing of that metaphor and the erection of a new one, in its place? Is
Bredekamp concerned with Bhabha’s incapacity to translate vertically, his incapacity
to translate across and beyond language; his inability to translate across the sign,
across the image, and into the realm of lived experience? Or is it, rather, that

Bredekamp is disturbed by the fact that Bhabha has, indeed, been able to get
across?
While all through his discourse Bhabha has been employing the deconstructive
strategy of metonymic transfer from signifier to signifier, in the metaphor of “the
Unbuilt,” deconstruction ceases to be a strategy and acquires ontological attributes.
As a metaphor, the image of “the Unbuilt” displaces the falling towers—as signifiers
of the lived historical event—and literally puts a deconstructed world in the place of
reality.
The metaphor of “the Unbuilt” is effective because it points to a deconstructed
scene in the physical world and, mostly, because further scenes of deconstruction
pervade reality beyond the limited sphere of the towers’ debris. As art critic Pedro
Cruz-Sánchez (2007) puts it, the postmodern world is one in which the image has
grown to the degree of becoming both invisible and meaningless. Cruz-Sánchez pro-
poses that the contemporary image, being enclosed upon itself, has lost its capacity
to mediate, to communicate, to make its meanings visible. Is not this all-engulfing,
all-disempowering image Cruz-Sánchez describes precisely what disturbs Bredekamp?
Is not the image of “the Unbuilt” a symptom of our times?
While throughout his speech (as, for example, in the epigraph to this section)
Bhabha has pointed to “the ladder” as a sign of progress and to “the tower” as the
paradigmatic site of progress accomplished, “the Unbuilt” is reiteratively positioned
as that which is beyond progress. Hence, “the Unbuilt” entails a paradox. On the one
hand, it is the place from which the ideology of progress may be dismantled. On the
other, it legitimizes its criticism precisely by virtue of being chronologically posterior
and teleologically superior to the obsolete ideals of enlightened progress. To celebrate
a victory over progress is to persist in its logic; as communications scholar Wayne
Hope has argued:
Now, however, progress is disconnected from linear historical narrative. Under global
capitalism the ruling myth of progress is synonymous with the ideology of real time. Thus,
finance culture and info-hype celebrate the drive towards instantaneity. (2006, 291)
In other words, contemporary ideology, as manifest in real-time rhetoric, does not seek
to establish a single progressive account of history, but rather seeks to do away with
history altogether. Real time is characterized by its drive toward instantaneity, and “the
very notion of full instantaneity means that the past cannot act upon the present”
(298). This obfuscation of historical responsibility has a specific political function:
the circular logic of real time is built into certain representations of the economy
and the market. As a linguistic abstraction within financial, corporate, and neo-liberal
discourses, the market appears self-operating, self-defining, and ahistorical. (298)
Benefiting from Karl Marx’s foundational theory of capital, Hope posits that, prior
to digitally driven finance capital, money could be used to facilitate commodity
exchange, as exemplified in the diagram: C-M-C; or to purchase commodities for

their exchange value: M-C-M. In the latter circuit, money becomes an end in itself.
Furthermore,
When money lending occurs, M-C-M is reduced to M-M. This is money exchanged for
money, a sequence which disrupts the circulation of commodities and the realization of
capital. Today, digitally driven finance capital perpetuates self-contained M-M circuits.
(Hope 2006, 282; emphasis added)
This self-contained circle of exchange may be viewed as a metonymic process, in that
it perpetually postpones the realization of capital as either production, commodity, or
commodity exchange. While in commodity fetishism the subject’s alienation is
anchored in money or commodities occupying the place of social relationships, in
circuits of digitally driven finance capital, the social relationship, beyond being
substituted, is eternally deferred. As in a metonymic chain, what one encounters
in this circuit is the substitute of the substitute of the substitute. The circuit profits
from a self-perpetuating chain of unrealized potential.
As Jean Baudrillard has pointed out, in contemporary capitalism exchange as a
source of value is hypertrophied not only in the field of economics, but also in that of
semiotics. Baudrillard states that in consumer society, “we see the abolition of the
signified and the tautology of the signifier” (1998, 124). This is because mass media
communications deliver a
certain kind of very imperative message: a message consumption message, a mes-
sage of . . . misrecognition of the world and foregrounding of information as commodity,
of glorification of content as sign. (123)
Furthermore,
instead of going out to the world via the mediation of the image, it is the image
which circles back on itself via the world (it is the signifier which designates itself under
the cover of the signified). (123)
Baudrillard’s tautological mass media image, which seeks to “neutralize the lived,
unique, eventual character of the world” by staging contact with it, proceeds
metonymically (123). In more general terms, metonymic discourses run parallel to,
are unaffected by, and have no effect on historical realities. And so, though they may
appear to contest hegemony, they may in fact be perpetuating the status quo while
staging resistance to it.
Because metonymy constantly enacts movement, it gives the sensation of change
or of active intervention. However, this movement is always already limited to the
horizontal axis of language. As a political strategy of power today, metonymy tends to
divorce language from that which is beyond language. In this ideological construction
of a rift between language and socio-historical worlds, the molding force of discourse
in the configuration of ontological and socio-historical realities tends to be forgotten.
However, as metaphor teaches, politics is not a world at an ontological remove away
from discourse, but a question of how we position ourselves within it.

As I end, let me circle back to the beginning, to the figure I left on stage:
Bredekamp, as he occupies the place of another, as he embodies the impossibility
of his absent signified—Bhabha, the sign-man—to access the material realm. As
I have argued, metaphor is a realization—the process by which suppressed dis-
course breaks into and disrupts the material dimension of existence. As he strives
to erase the metaphor of “the Unbuilt,” Bredekamp is not distressed by Bhabha’s
incapacity to get across, but by the tremendous efficiency of his conveyance. But pre-
cisely that which has managed to get across is the certainty that our attempts to
translate across language are endlessly deferred by an all-disempowering rhetoric.
As a function of language, this endless deferral is not connatural to power, but it has,
nonetheless, been co-opted by power.

Notes
1. Documenta, a series of contemporary art “symptom,” but the process of “condensation,”

exhibitions and associated conferences, held which may be physically expressed as
its eleventh series of openings and discussions “symptom” (1977b, 746–753). However, given
in 2001–2002; discussions were grouped into that, in the literary arena, “metaphor” is the
a series of different thematic platforms. name for both a process and the material
expression of that process, I presently use the
2. For the lectures quoted in this article, page term as parallel to “symptom” rather than to
references have been provided whenever “condensation.”
possible. When a section has been excerpted
from the published transcripts, time references 6. This text appears as an “Author’s Note” to
have been given. In this and in all of the the published version of the lecture, which
following quotations, emphases are in the Lacan had given the year before.
original, unless indicated otherwise.
7. The recorded lecture’s hosting page is
3. Metaphor, the rhetorical device on which ⬍http://www.documenta12.de/archiv/d11/
this article focuses, is frequently criticized for data/english/platform1/index.html. ⬎
its alleged tendency to freeze the flow of
signification in identity and resemblance. In 8. Due to its virtuality, the cultural “object” of
contrast, metonymy is celebrated as contingent, my concern may produce the effects of both
desire-inflicted, and open. More recently, “object” and “event.”
however, there has been an attempt to
rehabilitate and reconfigure the possibilities 9. This pun, involving the double sense of the
that “metaphor” may open up. Such is the case term “framing,” is systematically developed by
in Margaroni’s deployment of the concept of Mieke Bal (2002, 141–155).
“metaphoricity” (2006), and Bal’s development
of the concept “to metaphor” (2006). 10. The contrast between hyperlinks’ operative
and rhetorical functions has strong ideological
4. I reproduce Lacan’s use of the generic implications that cannot be dealt with here; see
masculine. Chesebro (2003), Ciolek (1999), and Hope
(2006).
5. Actually, according to Lacan the
psychoanalytic counterpart of metaphor is not
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University Press, 2002. 133–73. 11_Platform 1. ⬍http://www.documenta12.de/
archiv/d11/data/english/platform1/index.html⬎
———. “Metaphoring: Making a Niche of Web: November 2007.
Negative Space.” Metaphoricity and the Politics
of Mobility. Eds. Maria Margaroni and Effie ———. “Democracy De-Realized.” Democracy
Yiannopoulou. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. Unrealized. Documenta 11_Platform1. Eds.
159–79. Getri Fietzek et al. Berlin: Hatje Cantz
Publishers, 2002. 347–64.
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London: Sage Publications, 1998. 99–128. “Discussion.” (2001) Democracy Unrealized.

Documenta 11_Platform 1. ⬍http://www. Hope, Wayne. “Global Capitalism and the
documenta12.de/archiv/d11/data/english/ Critique of Real Time.” Time & Society 15.
platform1/index.html⬎ (November 2007). 2/3 (2006): 275–308.
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of the Function of the I as Revealed in
Exploring the Link between Communication
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as Symbolic Prototype of Digital Capitalism.”
Norton, 1977a. 734–38.
Lecture at the annual meeting of the Speech
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since Freud.” Ecrits: A Selection. Ed. and trans.
Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1977b.
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18–21, 1999. the Politics of Mobility. Eds. Maria Margaroni
and Effie Yiannopoulou. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
Cruz-Sánchez, Pedro A. “Ob-Scenes: The 2006. 9–23.
Political Re-definition of Art.” Paper presented
at the Second Encuentro Murcia-Amsterdam The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd. Edition
on Migratory Aesthetics, Enkhuizen and (2006). Oxford: Oxford University Press
Amsterdam, Netherlands, September 19–21, ⬍http://www.dictionary.oed.com/entrance.dtl⬎
2007. (July 2007).

Immigrants and Castaways:

Smuggling Genres in Manuel
Rivas’s La mano del emigrante
Cornelia Gräbner
ABSTRACT
This article explores the ways in which the Galician writer and journalist Manuel Rivas
employs a technique he calls “smuggling genres” in his book La mano del emigrante,
with the purpose of exploring the relationship between political oppression as the
reason for migration, and the personal dimension of migration. This relationship is
expressed in Rivas’s exploration of the intersection between literature and journal-
ism, and in the tension between the “truth” and the “real.” The analysis put forward
in this article addresses each of the four sections that make up the book, and ana-
lyzes how metaphors such as a tattoo on one of the character’s hands, shipwreck,
and certain landmarks within the Galician landscape are developed throughout each
of the sections. These metaphors emphasize the connection between political
events and political oppression on the one hand, and the emotional and psychologi-
cal consequences of migration on the other hand, and explore how one bears upon
the other. Based on this metaphorical connection, an argument is put forward that
cautions against readings of migratory identity predominantly as a positive overcom-
ing of national identity and the construction of transcultural identities. With reference
to T. Brenann’s critique of “cosmo-theory,” this article argues that such readings tend
to eclipse the memory of the political repression that forced people to emigrate from
European countries. Through the technique of smuggling genres and through the use
of metaphors, Rivas’s text emphasizes that emigration is integral to a dissident and
politicized European identity.
Immigrants and Castaways: Smuggling Genres in Manuel Rivas’s La mano del emigrante | 53
In “El apego y la pérdida” (Attachment and Loss)1, the first of four sections that make
up his book La mano del emigrante, the Galician writer and journalist Manuel Rivas
writes:
There is an intentionally searched for “hand-to-hand” between the fictional story and
the journalistic story in this book. I have a passion for the smuggling of genres . . . and
this meeting is the best answer I can think of to the recurring question about the place
of the real and of “truth” in journalism and in literature. (2002, 9)
Some of the questions that Rivas asks in “Attachment and Loss,” and particularly
some of the issues he raises in the above passage, are important to the theoretical
analysis of and writing on migration, especially in Europe. In the above passage Rivas
addresses the question of the relationship between literature and journalism, and
between the “truth,” and the real. He responds to popular conceptions of the two:
whereas journalism has a commitment to both the real and truth to such an extent
that truth is often considered contingent upon reality, literature does not have such a
clear commitment to either of the two. By acknowledging his passion for the “smug-
gling of genres,” Rivas makes a commitment to both the “truth” and to the real in his
writing, which therefore should be viewed as neither “literature” nor “journalism” in
the traditional sense. By placing “truth” in quotation marks he emphasizes that it is
constructed and that its validity might not be absolute. “The real” appears without
quotation marks, thus indicating that the status of the real is less equivocal and subjec-
tive than that of “truth.” Rivas’s writing as a practice of “smuggling genres” explores
the tension between the two. This tension is one element of any representation that
does not choose either the real or the “truth.” In La mano del emigrante, Rivas
connects his exploration of this tension with migration. He argues that the “truth”—
subjective, personal—about migration cannot be told without also addressing the
real of migration. The real of migration refers here to the reasons that led migrants
to leave their countries and that prevent them from permanently returning to them.
An analysis of La mano del emigrante can shed light on several aspects of migra-
tion that are often absent from the theoretical analysis of migratory identities, or that
figure in them only marginally. One of these aspects comprises the experiences of
coercion and oppression that are often the reasons behind migration; another
relates to contemporary European cultural identities. Cultural theory’s neglect of the
former has led to the development of theoretical discourses that Timothy Brennan
describes as “cosmo-theory.” One element of Brennan’s critique of “cosmo-theory”
that is particularly useful for my argument is:
that the culture of diasporic subjects is usually given a positive inflection in cultural
theory without remarking on its coercive nature—that people often do not want to be
diasporic. (2001, 674)
One result of this lack of sensitivity of cultural theory is that it becomes difficult to
conceptualize the agency of migrants and to formulate alternatives to the situations
54 | Cornelia Gräbner
that cause migrants to leave their countries. Brennan argues that the discourses of
cosmo-theory are characterized by:
the coupling of an overdeveloped sensitivity to significant cases of mixed forms of
cultural life . . . with a relatively weak understanding of processes of power, labor,
management, territorial control, or governance . . . It is not as though there were no role
for agency in such theories. . . . But agency is almost never seen in moments of civic
participation. It is primarily about subject formation. Agency, in fact, tends to be seen
as a gradual process of coming to accept a fait accompli. (2001, 677–678)
In La mano del emigrante, Rivas addresses the impact that processes of power, con-
trol, and government have on subject formation by using a literary strategy he refers
to as the smuggling of genres.
Another important issue raised by La mano del emigrante is that traditional
European societies rarely address the impact that migration has on their own cul-
tures and political imaginaries. The case of Galicia is particularly pertinent in this
regard because it calls into question the notion of homogeneity that public and
theoretical discourses foster when it comes to the analysis of traditional European
identities. La mano del emigrante allows me to make two important points: the first
is that European cultures themselves have been immigrant cultures. The second is
that European migration has often been the result of oppression; consequently, we
have to ask who is in power now in European societies: the former oppressors, or the
oppressed. Rivas’s writing brings out the depressing fact that those who have suf-
fered oppression and voiced dissent within Europe have been largely denied partici-
pation in the construction of the cultural, political, and social imaginaries that inform
our societies and, also, our politics. My analysis of Rivas’s approach to this issue
provides the basis for the concept of a “dissident Europe,” which I will propose as an
alternative framework with which to engage European theories on migration.
La mano del emigrante: Attachment and Loss

La mano del emigrante consists of four parts, each of them deploying a different style
of discourse. The first part of the book takes the place of a preface and is entitled
“Attachment and Loss.” The text, signed by “The Author,” lays out some of the central
concerns of the book, among them the experience of attachment and loss that is so
characteristic of migration, the memory of political repression, and the relationship
between writing and reality.
The second part, “La mano del emigrante,” is the longest of the four texts.
Because the plot and its presentation by Rivas are central to my analysis, I will sum-
marize them at this point. Rivas tells the story of two Galician friends, immigrants in
London. The story is recounted by one of them in the first-person, a narrator whose
name we never learn. The story revolves around the figure of Tito Castro, the narra-
tor’s friend, and Castro’s hand. Castro has three birds, paíños, tattooed on his
hand; from the start of the story, the narrator is fascinated by them and the move-
ments they make when Castro moves his hand. As the story continues, Castro dies
in a car accident en route to the airport with the narrator in an illegal taxi. The narra-
tor escapes death. While he is half-conscious in the hospital, the narrator fantasizes
about losing his hand and having it replaced by Castro’s; however, he has no feeling
in the hand that is supposedly his friend’s.2
After he is released from hospital, the narrator travels to Galicia to bring Castro’s
ashes to his mother, Chelo. The narrator asks Chelo why Castro had the paíños
tattooed on his hand. Instead of answering his question, Chelo tells him the story
of Castro’s childhood and indirectly, of the reason for his migration. Once the narra-
tor assimilates and accepts Castro’s story, his hand starts to function again. He
returns to London, and has the paíños tattooed on his own hand.
Crucial to Castro’s story is the character of the Caimán. The Caimán is a member
of the guardia civil, the part of the police force that most loyally backed Franco’s
regime and participated in the repression. The Caimán holds a long-standing grudge
against Castro’s father, Albino, because the latter behaves in an insubordinate man-
ner toward the Caimán. After the end of the Spanish Civil War (“esta carnicería,” (this
slaughter) as Castro’s mother calls it), the power of the Caimán knows no limits. As
a consequence, Albino has to go into hiding. Castro’s mother tells her son that his
father has emigrated to Argentina, and gets her brother—who lives in Argentina—to
write letters to him in the name of Albino. While Castro believes the story, his beloved
dog Karenina, a survivor of the shipwreck of a freighter by the same name, finds out
where Albino is hidden and barks when Albino comes to the house at night to see
Chelo. Hence, Castro’s mother has to take the dog away from her son. The loss of
Karenina is the first in a long chain of Tito Castro’s experiences of attachment and loss.
These experiences become progressively worse. When Castro’s mother gets
pregnant, she has to invent a lie to disguise Albino’s paternity from the Caimán. She
makes a deal with a cousin of her husband, who pretends to be the father of Castro’s
little sister Sira—but to pass the story off to the Caimán, Chelo has to invent Albino’s
death.
After all these losses, Castro withdraws deeper and deeper into himself, spending
all his days on the beach. He only connects with his little sister Sira, who follows him
around wherever he goes. The two become inseparable, until one day, on the beach,
the sea sweeps Sira away. Castro holds on to her with the hand that later on carries
the paíños, but is not strong enough. The little girl drowns. Her body is found days
later by Albino in the cave where he is hiding.
Castro’s mother sees her son’s travels and his migration as a flight from the
traumas he has suffered, and from his feelings of guilt for Sira’s death. However, her
story implies—though it does not reflect on—the intricate connection between
Castro’s traumatic experiences of loss and her own experience of being the one who
has to take everything he loves away from her son in order to save her husband’s life,
on the one hand; and the Caimán’s abuse of power, of poverty, and of impunity, on the
other. The situation of Castro and his mother is primarily psychological and emotional.
However, it cannot be separated from—because it is brought about by and is the flip
side of—a situation in which political violence and impunity create a situation that is
psychologically and emotionally so lethal that it finally drives Castro out of his country.
The third story, “El álbum furtivo,” consists of photos of the cities of A Coruña and
London. Some of the images, such as the sea at Orzán or the lighthouse of Hercules
in A Coruña, are important to the other stories collected in the book. “El álbum
furtivo” integrates these—literary—images into the seascapes and cityscapes of the
two cities. Thus, “El álbum furtivo” functions as a connector between places and sto-
ries. At the same time, the album highlights the tension in the relationship between
real places and imagined spaces, and between real people and fictionalized charac-
ters. As with the tension between the “truth” and the real that I outlined earlier, the
real and the imaginary are connected by a thin thread.
The fourth and final story is a journalistic piece on Galicians who have suffered
shipwreck. Rivas not only writes about people who have suffered and survived ship-
wreck themselves, but includes those who lost family members through shipwreck.
By doing so, he gives “shipwreck” a metaphorical dimension. Most of the shipwrecks
that Rivas writes about in the article occur through neglect or incompetence.
Consequently, many of those who died because of shipwreck might have survived,
had the authorities reacted in time, or differently. This links the story back to the first
two texts, in which authorities and order are connected with the abuse of power and
with violence.
Shipwreck and Migration

In this section I will focus on the first of the two issues that Rivas’s novel raises:
the failure of many theoretical discourses to address the reasons for migration.
Reading Castro’s migration through the metaphor of shipwreck leads me to argue
that migrants like Castro will remain “homeless” as long as theoretical, literary, and
other accounts of migration, and the political responses to it, do not take into
account the reasons that impel migrants to leave their countries.
Recalling his own reasons for leaving Galicia, Castro professes no regrets. Early
on in the story, he gets into a discussion with one of the other Galician customers of
the pub where he spends his free time. Challenged by the homesickness, the ideal-
ization of Spain, and the complaints about England of one of his compatriots in
London, Castro says:
Talk badly about the government, like everybody else, but don’t speak ill of the coun-
try that opened its door for you. Or do I have to explain to you why we arrived with a
suitcase made of cardboard? We got on a train like animals. It didn’t even have toilets.
You had to stick your bum out of the window to do your business. On the border of Irún
a guy gave a rousing speech on the glorious history of Spain. Spaniards! Always hold
your head up high! What a sucker, a speech! It would have been better to give us a
glass of Felipe II. When we said goodbye all of us cried. But do you remember who cried
most? Those who stayed behind. They were indeed homesick of not being able to leave.
Do you know something? I love my mother, who is all I have left there, I love my dead,
I love the house with the fig tree that doesn’t exist anymore, I love the sea of Orzán,
I love the memories, the good ones and the bad ones, but don’t tell me to love my
country. (2002, 21–23)
In his response to his compatriot, Castro positions himself in a no man’s land. What
once was “his country” is a place of abuse, and he has no desire to return to it. He
misses things and people that are no longer there, and otherwise embraces only very
intimate and personal connections to his mother and the sea. These attachments
reveal that Castro does not choose his allegiances in relation to where he was born,
but in relation to how he is being treated.
Some of his Galician compatriots abroad react with anger, aggression, and lack of
understanding to Castro’s point of view, which they see as a disturbance of their own,
traditionally nationalist, approach to identity construction. Interestingly, Castro’s
relation to his country of origin clashes not only with his compatriots’ concepts of
identity, but also with those articulated in theories of transnationality.
In her article “Migrancy, Memory and Transplantation in Manuel Rivas’s La mano
del emigrante,” Yeon-Soo Kim reads La mano del emigrante in terms of such an
approach. She argues that in the novel,
“Galicianness” is conceptualized as a productive cultural engine that can generate
civic values indispensable in an era of cultural and political transnationalism. This posi-
tion is possible because the author views Galician identity as founded on an emotional
disposition to adopt the experiences that accompany a long history of migration rather
than something that draws purely on cultural essentialism confined within a territorial
boundary . . . In other words, Galician identity is essentially global and “transcultural”
(a culture in transit), and capable of finding a ‘home’ in unfamiliar cultures and places.
(2006, 117)
In this passage, Kim argues that Rivas views Galician identity as “transcultural.”
While I agree to the extent that one of the models of Galician identity that we
encounter in La mano del emigrante has some of the characteristics that Kim
attributes to it, I part ways with this assessment beginning with Kim’s assertion that
Rivas characterizes “Galician identity” in any definitive way. In the novel, we encounter
many models of Galician identity. Among them are Castro’s embrace of migrancy; his
compatriots’ interpretation of Galician identity, which sees no contradiction between
Galician identity and the nationalist identity of Franquist Spain; and, though never
articulated explicitly, the Caimán’s version of Galician identity, which alludes to the
fact that some Galicians served as instruments of repression under Franco’s govern-
ment, and reminds the reader that even Francisco Franco himself was Galician, even
though he exclusively thought of himself as Spanish. Thus, Rivas frames Castro’s
Galicianness within a tension field of other notions of Galicianness. This framing
underscores my argument that, according to Rivas, Galician identity is not inherently
transcultural. Rather, some Galicians were forced to develop the capability of “finding
a ‘home’ in unfamiliar cultures and places” because other Galicians, some of whom
also claim Galicianness for themselves, made it impossible for them to live in their
own country.
Consequently, my reading of the paíños also differs significantly from Kim’s. She
argues that Castro’s decision to tattoo the paíños on his hand “can be construed as
his wish to transform guilt into hospitality” (2006, 116). In contrast, I argue that the
tattoo of the paíños reflects Castro’s insight that his past and his memories preclude
him from being able to have a home anywhere, and his awareness that nobody can
grant him the hospitality that he himself symbolically grants to the paíños; creatures
that, like him, cannot have any other home but the sea.
Crucial to my argument that Castro cannot have a home and is not looking for one
is the role that the past plays in Castro’s present. The narrator’s realization of its
importance comes when he realizes that many of Castro’s gestures, like calling all
dogs “Karenina,” which seem idiosyncratic to his London friends, were not expres-
sions of idiosyncrasy. Rather, they refer back to his past; they are manifestations of
a communication carried out between himself and his memories that none of his
friends can understand. Therefore, it is Castro’s past—not his migration—that make
him the “homeless” character we get to know through his mother’s story.
The fourth part of the book, “Los naúfragos,” supports my interpretation. I read
the story as an indication that Castro, the migrant, is a castaway—he has been cast
out by his country, or rather, by those who turned his country into what it was.
Phrased differently, and in keeping with the metaphors that Rivas develops through
his smuggling of genres, one could say that Castro is a migrant because those in
power shipwrecked his family. Castro makes it quite clear that living as a migrant is
easier than living as a castaway in one’s own country, and Rivas drives the point
home through the story of Castro’s father, Albino. Albino chooses to live as a cast-
away in his own country. He spends years hiding in a cave, watching his family slip
away from him, turning “white” because he never sees the sunlight, and going
blind because he lives in eternal darkness. His son Tito no longer has to suffer from
“morriña de no poder marcher” (the homesickness of being unable to leave). In the
case of Tito Castro, being a migrant adequately represents and even naturalizes his
status as a castaway of his country. In this light, I would argue that the “search for a
home” that underlies Kim’s analysis of La mano del emigrante does not adequately
describe Castro’s endeavor.
The U.K. is to Castro what his hand is to the paíños: a friendly place of rest in
which his memories will never be recognized as constituting part of its collective
identity. His friends’ inability to understand his invocation of Karenina demonstrates
this. However, London provides a rest from the painful memories that Castro can nei-
ther escape nor work through in Galicia, in the same way that Castro’s hand symbol-
ically provides a place of rest for the paíños on their eternal journey.
Smuggling Genres, Smuggling Discourses

With La mano del emigrante Rivas attempts to develop a language and a type of
literature that can capture migratory experiences like Castro’s without losing sight of
the structural and political violence that underpins them. Rivas’s choice to address
the “recurring question about the space of the ‘truth’ and the real” in the very begin-
ning of the book is crucial to this attempt. In “El apego y la pérdida,” Rivas argues for
“more reality” in literary texts. He writes:
Italo Calvino said that the writer’s most important moment is the one when he lifts
his nose up from the page. It’s a magnificent way of suggesting that the crux lies in the
way of looking. Looking comes before writing, but it also guides writing to the dark side
of reality. However, this has nothing to do with the function of magic. The category of
the magic, applied to literature, had its fortune, but it has turned into a misfortune. It is
a useless category, lazy, a new academicism. It confines us to a “division of tasks,” in
the mind and in the conception of the world, that un-utilizes the purpose of literature.
The literary look serves to wide all dimensions of the real. To create, to invent, more
reality. (2002, 9–10)
In this passage Rivas makes several important points. First of all, he argues that writ-
ing is related to the writer looking at what is around her. Looking at “the hidden side
of reality” subsequently guides writing. Rivas makes it clear, however, that this has
nothing to do with “magic,” a category that he fervently rejects as “a new academi-
cism.” He argues that the concept of magic in writing re-establishes a “division of
tasks” in our minds that goes against his proposal to “create, to invent, more reality.”
His treatment of the Caimán provides important clues as to what this proposal
entails.
The Caimán appears in two of the four texts that make up the book: “El apego y
la pérdida” and “La mano del emigrante.” In fact, we as readers meet the Caimán
before we meet any character in the book, with the exception of the author. The book
starts like this:
I knew the Caimán since I was a child without ever having seen him. Other children
were scared of the Man with the Sack, a terrible bearded creature that roamed the
roads and took the children that weren’t careful. I was scared of the Caimán and I knew
that he existed. My father had told me about this civil guard who, for him and the young
people of his age, embodied evil. Since he also embodied order, I developed the
worrisome idea that order and evil could be two faces of the same monstrous creature.
The Caimán enjoyed doing harm and one of his pleasures was to suspend the street
parties of the fiestas when they had only just started. When he left, the young men
sang with resentment: There goes the caiman, there goes the caiman, he goes to
Barranquilla!
The unexpected turns of life sometimes return me to the existence of the Caiman
and his disguises. And the chanting of this song as if it was a formula against evil.
It is one of the real, visible threads that weave together the material for this book.
(2002, 7–8)
In this short passage, the Caimán is the all-too-real figure who embodies both order
and the abuse of power, both order and evil. The Caimán scared Rivas when he was
a child much more than “the Man with the Sack” possibly could have, because Rivas
knows that the Caimán is real. Read in relation to the passage on magic quoted
above, Rivas’s experience of the Caimán entails a struggle with a mythologization of
reality. The figure of the Caimán could easily be interpreted as mythical and magical,
just like the man with the sack. In this interpretation, “the people” would have turned
the Caimán into a quasi-fictional figure in order to personalize and make tangible an
abstract abuse of power that can then be warded off. However, Rivas makes it clear
that the Caimán is real and that the abuse of power is not abstract, but concrete:
someone abuses power. Thus, if I as a cultural analyst read the figure of the Caimán
as a metaphor for oppression and violence, I would interpret the terror of the real
Caimán outside of lived reality, as an entity that exists only in the context of two texts:
the mythical one supposedly composed by “the people,” and my analytical one.
Consequently, I would stop looking at the Caimán and his activities in real life, and
he would continue his terror without my contesting it. As a tool for analysis in this
context, the concept of “magic” functions as an escape from the much more brutal
reality the writer sees when he lifts up his eyes from the page.
The “division of tasks” that Rivas mentions in the passage I quoted above is a
result of the division between “reality” and the “imaginary.” The “hard facts” of real-
ity that create the conditions for the production of imaginaries are often relegated
to representation in journalism, whereas the consequences they have for the
individual are reserved for literary, fictional genres. The interdependency of the two
remains unaddressed in such a division. Rivas uses the figure of the Caimán to
emphasize the fact that such a division is untenable for a writer who “lifts his eyes
up from the page” and wants to participate in the creation of new, more humane
realities.
Thus, I contend that Rivas’s technique of “smuggling genres” has wider, political
implications. One of them is what Timothy Brennan in an analysis of Salman
Rushdie’s novel Shame describes as the recovery of the Political in literature (76).
To bring out the efficacy of Rivas’s literary strategies and their and his affinity
with Rushdie, I will discuss some elements of Brennan’s analysis of Shame and
relate them to my own analysis of La mano del emigrante. Brennan writes about
Shame:
His [Rushdie’s] strategy is a bit like Julio Cortázar’s in Hopscotch—the author as
critic of his own work, standing outside the fictive, forcing us back into an everyday
history. The fairy tale self-destructs precisely because fictiveness is inappropriate to a
contemporary dictatorship . . . All of this is Rushdie’s point, moreover, which is why his
narrator is not a narrator at all but an author as confessor. “I can’t do this,” he keeps
saying. “I hate these people and I have to say so openly,” he continues, and “literature
is such a small club, after all, against so large a beast.” This is not the utilization of
genre but a comment on genre: a joke, if you will, an intentionally superficial gesture
calculated to display its own inadequacy. (2007, 75–76)
In “Attachment and Loss,” Rivas comments much more directly on genre than
Rushdie does in Shame. Yet, like Rushdie, he argues that genres no longer provide
useful tools for a literary engagement with reality. Neither author discards the prac-
tice of genres completely; it stands to reason that if an author mocks and under-
mines genres, this implies that genres and the function they fulfil in the production
of meaning are still in place.
Rivas’s smuggling of genres is therefore an act of resistance against the confines
of genre. Resistance always takes place against something or someone; resistance
would not be resistance without a clearly identified “other.” Rivas’s act of resistance
takes into account that, at least right now in the minds of his readers, the rules of
genre continue to establish the unfortunate “division of tasks” he writes about. The
literary discourses informed by genres cannot (yet) be replaced by a borderland
region where there are no genres. Before something new, like this borderland region,
can be inhabited, one has to contest the old ways of thinking. Rivas, like Rushdie,
does not think that this can be done purely through fiction or journalism. As Brennan
writes, “fictiveness is inappropriate for dealing with a contemporary dictatorship.”
At the same time, nonfiction does not productively engage the way in which people
experience the consequences of these dictatorships. Thus, Rushdie, according to
Brennan, questions the genre of fiction from within fiction because the relationship
between reality and story proposed by traditional narrative is no longer viable in the
face of contemporary dictatorships, and Rivas smuggles the journalistic into the
fictional and the fictional into the journalistic. Both writers share a concern for
the “space of the ‘truth’ and the real” in texts that are written about situations of
coercion. Both writers also coincide in the realization that the experience of coercion
has to be expressed to the same extent as the conditions and strategies of coercion.
Therefore, they try on genres and mix them up, “as if to express the multi-front
novelistic war required to capture a place and a politics that are too painful to deal
with in a single mode” (Brennan 2007, 75).
One can now focus on Castro’s existence as a migrant and interpret his migration
and the repercussions this has on the construction of his identity as an accom-
plished strategy of survival. Alternatively, one can argue that the complicity between
order and violence that Rivas writes about in the very beginning of La mano del emi-
grante has made it impossible for Castro to live his identity in his own country and
that, consequently, migration was the only means of psychological survival open to
him. From that perspective, people like Castro are indeed confronted with a Europe
that offers them a space where they can survive: almost invisible, without being
understood, and celebrated as transnational individuals, consigned to an eternal
migrancy, similar to the ghost ship, the Flying Dutchman, to stick with the seafaring
metaphor. Galicianness would be fundamentally redefined if Galicia as a nation or
autonomous community, and Spain as a state, would respond to the experience of
the Castro family by granting them “the right to lead in cultural matters” (Brennan
2001, 686). But this is not the case. Interestingly, it is also not the case in the coun-
try Castro migrates to, the U.K. Chelo’s bitterness after telling the story is significant
to this argument:
She seemed to be tired and regretful: I shouldn’t have told you all this.
Why? I protested.
Because it’s no use. Only to talk to myself. Only for this.
She took a sip and made a smiling gesture of bitterness.
I came up with one of the typical stupidities said to comfort: But in the end
both of you went ahead.
What I regret, said Castro’s mother, is that I didn’t leave. A while after my
husband died, Ramón wrote to me. He had emigrated to Alemania. He was among
the first to go there. To be a miner, in Aachen. He sent me the money for the journey.
He almost didn’t know how to write, but he put down something very loving: There’s
heating, Cheliño, and it’s for free.
But you didn’t leave.
Well no. (66)
As a reader of La mano del emigrante, one has to choose whether one wants to
celebrate the survival techniques of the castaways with a focus on the present
moment, or to read the migration of the castaways as one enforced reaction to the
impunity of the Caimán and the long-term consequences of his activities. In my
analysis of La mano del emigrante, I have chosen the latter option because I con-
sider it to be the appropriate response to the sense of bitterness and defeat that
Chelo articulates so clearly, and because I consider it to be an important step in the
development and theorizing of European identities that build upon the tradition of
dissident Europe.
Dissident Europe, Solidaric Reading
Crucial to this endeavor is the point I made earlier on the diversification of—in this
case, Galician—identity. The oppressors, the oppressed and the indifferent all
develop their own model of their cultural identity, and these different models are
often incompatible with each other. Therefore, the choice of allegiances is central
to Castro’s identity. The importance of allegiances is possibly even more central in
countries that have been subject to regimes of coercion. Under these regimes the
citizens have the choice of being part of the regime, of resisting it, or of taking the
middle path of steering clear of either side, which, almost always, leads to complicity.
This complicity manifests itself in very interesting ways once the regime is over. The
latter group and the regime begin to share a common interest: a return to a “normal-
ity” that, for those who resisted, is all the more abnormal because it leaves
unresolved, and therefore perpetuates, the traumas of the past, while pretending to
take the side of those who suffered the traumas. Chelo and the Caimán are a perfect
example of this process. Chelo is obliged to live side by side with the Caimán, who
has never had to answer for the crimes he committed.
Many of the castaways of recent European history, and of European politics, have
become migrants. In cultural theory and in politics, these migrants are hardly ever
seen to be victims of a politically or culturally generated shipwreck. Because the vio-
lence that is inherent in the actions that make it impossible for them to live in their
home countries has not been addressed as such, it has remained silently present in
the theoretical approaches to transnational theory and, interestingly, in the ideolo-
gies of most post-1945 states. The connection between order and violence that
Rivas so keenly articulates in the very beginning of his book is encrypted in the myth
of functioning democracies. Since these democratic states supposedly represent
and take into account what we as citizens think and feel, we are deprived of the right
to officially articulate and contest this connection between order and violence. The
political situation of Galicia, where Manuel Fraga was in power until very recently,
made this contradiction painfully obvious. In more covert terms, we encounter it in
most Western democracies.3
One of the few ways out of this predicament is to recognize that European cultures
are heterogeneous not only in terms of ethnicity, but also in terms of allegiances. It
is also important to recognize that the imaginaries upon which contemporary powers
found their legitimacy are developed on the basis of the imaginaries of those who
have been in power in the past. In this light, it seems logical enough that European
societies do not accommodate migrants, for they cannot possibly admit that their
own intellectual predecessors were responsible for, or actively tolerated, the ship-
wrecking and, consequently, the migration, of their own compatriots.
My analysis of La mano del emigrante has shown that a crucial part of the experi-
ences of European migrants like Castro now constitutes part of “[w]hat has become
politically inarticulate,” as Brennan terms it in Wars of Position:

What has become politically inarticulate in our own time weighs us down and
oppresses us because we too have experienced trauma. Important codes cannot be
deciphered because whole lifetimes have been silenced by Western ideological colo-
nizations after 1989. The story of the non-Western world, the meaning of the postcolo-
nial, makes no sense without the socialist East and its elaborate meaning, feeling, and
valuing. It is time to translate that experience into a language that has so far only
purported to understand the other. (64)
Even though Brennan refers to socialist and social-democratic intellectual thought
and practice, and even though he applies the notion of the politically inarticulate
mainly to postcolonial theory, I think that the concept of the “politically inarticulate”
is useful for the analysis of migration. When migrancy is analyzed in predominantly
cultural terms, the violence that has made people leave their countries and the polit-
ical elements of such violence are often left out of the equation. On the academic
level, such an analysis perpetuates a “division of tasks” between cultural analysis,
history, political science, and literary studies that engages with the “truth” but not
with reality. Furthermore, without reclaiming the (in many cases, socialist and social-
democratic) heritage that opposed this violence and the regimes that it formed as a
living part of the present, theorists find themselves without a point from which
they can develop and articulate a constructive analysis of migrancy or many other
elements of our social and political present. Thus, the existence of the “politically
inarticulate” confines us to a discourse that accepts the defeat of those who offered
an alternative vision of society. I summarize these alternative visions and their pro-
ponents under the concept of “dissident Europe.” Our states and our theories have
all too often celebrated the intellectual heritage of dissident Europe in its historical
context yet failed to include that heritage in our conceptions of our realities and our
politics in the present. Sadly, we must learn from experience that neglect and silence
are also a form of violence and of shipwreck; one that is equally effective as active
shipwrecking because it has more practitioners, seems less violent, and is therefore
less easily recognized and more widely accepted.
From this point of view, I contest Brennan’s reading of contemporary Europe
because he, too, homogenizes it. Dissident Europe figures in his analysis only as
defeated. While I agree with him in that dissident Europe has suffered many
defeats and few victories, dissident Europe will suffer its final defeat only when
those who position themselves according to its traditions accept defeat. I would
suggest that they have not yet done so. Rivas’s practice of smuggling genres in
order to find a formal approach that allows him to tell Castro’s story in all its
complexity proves that point. Brennan’s implicit acceptance of the defeat of
dissident Europe hampers his own argument, because he cannot follow through on
one of the more significant strategies that he sets forth in his book, a practice
that I for now call solidaric reading and that, I suggest, he himself practices in his
analysis of Shame.
In Brennan’s analysis of Shame, the political concerns he shares with Rushdie
outweigh his disagreement with some of Rushdie’s public performances. Similarly,
the political concerns that I share with Brennan outweigh my reservations about
some positions that he takes, and those I share with Rivas outweigh the difference
in our locations in terms of culture and geography. In all cases, the disagreements
are clearly expressed but can be accommodated in the space created by our shared
concerns.
The space created by these shared affiliations and through the recognition of
“traditional” European and North American cultures as heterogeneous might just be
the one that allows us to discover the new language we need to articulate the “polit-
ically inarticulate,” and for a theory and a cultural politics that grants migrants “the
right to lead in cultural matters” (Brennan 2001, 686–687). To create such a space,
writers need to lift their eyes up from the page and admit “more reality” into their
texts. As my reading of La mano del emigrante has demonstrated, the smuggling of
genres is one strategy that reinforces such a connection between reality and writing.
Notes
1. All translations are the author’s, from the government minister until 1976. While Fraga
Castilian edition of La mano del emigrante cited was considered to be one of the more
in the bibliography. For the reader’s convenience “progressive” politicians of Franco’s regime,
the titles of chapters and sections of the book the significance of the term “progressive” has
are referred to in English from now on. to be contextualized within an oppressive
fascist dictatorship: Fraga introduced a law
2. According to the epigraphs of the story, the that loosened the censorship of the press,
paíños are small birds that live for most of the but the same law also kept rigid censorship in
year in the open sea. They fly just above the place. Furthermore, Fraga has repeatedly and
water, almost touching its surface, so that it openly professed his admiration for Franco
seems as if they were walking on it. In Galicia and has never retracted his defense of the
there is a saying that the paíño is the last thing execution of political opponents under the
a seafarer sees when he goes out to sea. dictatorship. He is considered to be one of
Thus, the paíños symbolize Castro’s own those responsible for the repression of a strike
wanderings and restlessness. in Vitoria / Gastéiz, Basque Country, in 1976,
when five workers were killed and one
3. Manuel Fraga Iribarne was president of hundred-fifty were wounded by the armed
Galicia from 1990–2005. His political career police. In 2002, his government obscured the
started under the dictatorship of Francisco impact of the oil spill from the freighter
Franco. Fraga served as minister of tourism Prestige until environmental disaster was
and propaganda from 1962–1969. After inevitable.
Franco’s death he was vice-president and
Works Cited
Brennan, Timothy. “Cosmo-Theory.” South emigrante.” Hispanic Research Journal 7.2

Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (2001): 659–691. (2006): 113–126.
———. Wars of Position. New York: Columbia Rivas, Manuel. La mano del emigrante. Madrid:
University Press, 2007. Suma de Letras, 2002.
Kim, Yeon-Soo. “Migrancy, Memory and

Transplantation in Manuel Rivas’s La mano del
Staging Transition: The

Oresteia in Post-Apartheid
South Africa
Astrid van Weyenberg
ABSTRACT
Aeschylus’ Oresteia dramatizes the meaning and political deployment of justice, con-
cluding with the transformation of justice as vengeance into the legal justice of
Athens’s new democracy. In this essay, I examine two dramatic texts that draw on the
Oresteia within another context of transitional justice: post-apartheid South Africa.
In Mark Fleishman’s In the City of Paradise and Yael Farber’s Molora the distorted
family relations within the house of Atreus come to represent the distorted relations
within South Africa, a nation haunted by a similar cycle of vengeance. Drawing on
Aeschylus, both playwrights dramatize the challenges that South Africa faced after
the end of apartheid: how to get beyond vengeance, how to reconcile a nation torn
apart by decades of injustice, and how to change from a system of apartheid to a
non-racial democracy. They make explicit reference to the South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC), established in 1995 to forestall the bloodshed
that everybody expected after apartheid officially ended and to facilitate the transi-
tion to a new, democratic South Africa. In this chapter, I consider this political transi-
tion from apartheid to post-apartheid South Africa in relation to the cultural exchange
between antiquity and the present. This focus directs me to a number of interrelated
topics, ranging from memory to justice, from truth to forgiveness, from storytelling to
theater, from amnesty to reconciliation.
Introduction
Aeschylus based his Oresteia, the only complete trilogy of Greek tragedies known to
us today, on the ancient myth of the house of Atreus, and set it in the aftermath of
Staging Transition: The Oresteia in Post-Apartheid South Africa | 69

the Trojan War. Nonetheless, the trilogy held great contemporary relevance when it
was first performed at the Dionysia festival in 458 BC, as it marked the transition of
Athens from a tribal culture ruled by customs to a democratic society governed by
constitutional law (Ziolkowski 1977, 20).1 Throughout the Oresteia, Aeschylus drama-
tizes the meaning and political deployment of justice, concluding his trilogy positively,
with the transformation of justice as vengeance into the legal justice of Athens’s new
democracy. In this paper, I discuss two dramatic texts that draw on the Oresteia
within another context of transitional justice: that of post-apartheid South Africa. The
first is Mark Fleishman’s In the City of Paradise, which premiered at the University of
Cape Town in 1998 as a collaborative production with his drama students, who also
formed the cast. The second is Yael Farber’s Molora (Sesotho for “ash”), first
performed in Germany in 2004.2 In both plays, the distorted family relations within
the house of Atreus come to represent the distorted relations within South Africa,
a nation that has been haunted by a similar cycle of vengeance. Because, as Farber
states, the Oresteia “unflinchingly articulates the spirals of violence unleashed in the
pursuit of righteous bloodshed” (Director’s note, personal communication).
Like the other contributions to this volume, my analysis concentrates on the rela-
tion between art and politics. While Joaquín Barriendos Rodríguez’s essay on global
art and the politics of mobility describes a general condition, I employ a more case-
specific approach, viewing the political transition from apartheid to post-apartheid
South Africa in relation to the cultural exchange between antiquity and the present.
My focus, then, is on the politics involved in cross-temporal migration, a focus that
directs me to a number of interrelated topics, ranging from memory to justice, from
truth to forgiveness, from storytelling to theater, from amnesty to reconciliation.
Narrating the Past

Both Fleishman and Farber draw on Aeschylus’ Oresteia to dramatize the challenges
that South Africa faced after the end of apartheid: how to get beyond vengeance, how
to reconcile a nation torn apart by decades of injustice, and how to change from a sys-
tem of apartheid to a non-racial democracy. They make explicit reference to the South
African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), established in 1995 to forestall
the bloodshed that everybody expected after apartheid officially ended and to
facilitate the transition to a new, democratic South Africa. The TRC was the product of
negotiations between Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) and F.W. de
Klerk’s National Party (NP). Its work was divided among three committees: the Human
Rights Violations Committee investigated the human rights violations that occurred
between 1960 and 1994 and organized hearings in which victims and perpetrators
publicly told their stories; the Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee was charged
with formulating proposals with regards to victims’ rehabilitation and restoration;
and, finally, the Amnesty Committee considered applications for amnesty.
70 | Astrid van Weyenberg

As its name implies, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was intended to
achieve reconciliation by uncovering the truths about the past and providing the basis
for developing a shared memory. Rosemary Jane Jolly suggests that, in the context
of the TRC, this appeal to a “shared memory” and to “truth” should not be under-
stood as an attempt to legitimize a master narrative and impose an official history;
rather, the terms refer to a heterogeneous construction that remains open to debate,
primarily because the TRC composed its narrative from the testimonies of a variety
of people, who were allowed to recount their stories in their own words, rather than
being interrogated by committee members (2001, 701). Michael Jackson discusses
how storytelling thus re-empowers victims because it enables them to actively
rework, rather than passively relive, past experiences of suffering (2002, 15). In this
respect, storytelling implies agency, the very agency victims have previously been
denied. It is also a means to relegate traumatic experiences to the realm of memory,
because, as Mieke Bal asserts, only by being made “narratable” can traumatic
events enter memory (Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer 1999, x).
Storytelling is important in both Fleishman’s and Farber’s plays. Their characters
repeatedly insist on telling their stories, in conveying their subjective truths. A good
example from Fleishman is Clytemnestra’s use of the form of a fairy tale to tell
Orestes about Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia, starting with “Once upon a time,
in a land far, far away, there lived a weak and wicked king” (28). Clytemnestra can talk
about her suffering only in the form of the fairy tale, a distanced, third-person
account. In Farber’s Molora, the entirety of the action is enclosed within the frame-
work of a TRC hearing, where Elektra has come to hear the testimony of her mother
Klytemnestra—the only white character in the play—whom she witnessed brutally
murdering her father, Agamemnon, when she was a child. The conflict between
Elektra and Klytemnestra, victim and perpetrator, illustrates an essential difficulty
with the TRC hearings, namely that testimonies describing the same experience
often did not correspond; more generally, that one event may generate a variety of
(possibly contradicting) stories and truths. Elektra confronts her mother with the
power of one who is free to speak, as one who can determine and control what is
told: “With which of your evils shall I begin my recital?” she says, “With which shall
I end it?” (5). Because stories do end and, affirming her play’s relevance beyond the
particular context of South Africa, Farber explains how the “ash” of the title Molora
refers to this finitude:
Our story begins with Orestes returning home with a tin full of ash. It is the state from
which we all come, and—from the concentration camps of Europe; the ruins of Baghdad,
Palestine, Northern Ireland and Rwanda . . . to the ash around the fire after the
storytelling is done . . . it is a state to which we must all humbly return. (Director’s note)
Farber’s poetic transition from ash as a residue of the violence that victims experi-
ence privately, to the ash that remains after the subsequent recounting of this

violence, when the private experiences of victims are brought into the public realm,
demonstrates how storytelling allows victims to transform their inner monologue into
social discourse (Jackson 2002, 15). Though Farber emphasizes the shared com-
mon humanity that underlies historical and socio-political distinctions, I agree with
Dennis Walder that her indiscriminately yoking together of very different events, peo-
ples and experiences is sentimental and damagingly blurs history and difference.3
As a narrative form, storytelling inevitably remains distanced from the legal narra-
tive of the law court. It is remarkable, therefore, that the TRC privileged storytelling
in its quasi-judicial Human Rights Violations hearings. The commission did so for a
number of reasons: because it recognized the healing potential of telling stories,
because it understood that by telling their stories “both victims and perpetrators
gave meaning to the multi-layered experiences of the South African story,” and
because it considered “the process of storytelling [was] particularly important” in the
“(South) African context, where value continues to be attached to oral tradition”
(Final Report I 1998, 112). According to Mark Sanders, this latter statement is prob-
lematic, because the simultaneous joining and disjoining of “South” from “Africa”
suggests that “it is not simply stories of people who have suffered, but the stories of
Africans, African stories, for which the Truth Commission wishes to leave a domain of
telling of which it constantly risks dispossessing them” (2000, 20). In Sanders’s
opinion, the TRC’s characterization of storytelling as “subjective” implicitly sets it in
opposition to the “factual evidence” that will be brought to light:
The commission never attaches itself as agent, as the subject of utterance—not
even subjectively—to the ethnographic datum that “value continues to be attached to
oral tradition.” There is repression in its avowal. Africa, silenced in South Africa, speaks
in the form of “oral tradition,” to which the Truth Commission will accommodate, just as
legal modernity finds a place for “custom.” Yet, just as the Constitution maintains ulti-
mate authority by reserving the right to overrule, and even define, “customary law,”
the commission draws back from attaching “value,” in its own voice, to storytelling.
(2000, 21)
Sanders’s comment seems valid. Not only did the TRC link storytelling to the notion
of “personal or narrative truth,” it also distinguished this truth from three other
notions of truth: “factual or forensic truth,” which referred to empirical, objective
truth; “social or ‘dialogue’ truth,” established through interaction and debate; and
“healing and restorative truth,” related to the public acknowledgement of suffering
and its beneficial effect on the healing processes of both individuals and the nation
at large.4 By conceptually distancing the “personal, narrative truth” revealed through
victims’ testimonies from the “factual or forensic truth” of the modern law court,
the TRC ultimately consigned people’s experiences to a separate, pre-legal, and pre-
modern domain. Moreover, while victims were encouraged to tell their stories and
state their personal, narrative truth, the hearings of perpetrators were restricted to

legal, forensic truth, and offered little room for emotional displays or storytelling
(Shore and Klein 2006, 313; 317). It seems problematic that the notions of truth
that were employed in the various hearings were so different from one another, espe-
cially if victim and perpetrator accounts were supposed to together construct “the
South African story.” Still, the coexistence of different types of discourses on truth
does suggest that the commission intended to emphasize multiplicity and diversity,
that it was aware that the story it sought to construct would remain fractured, and
that the singular “Truth” of its title required a more nuanced definition.
Jolly finds that the TRC’s emphasis on storytelling suggests that the commission
ritualized “that which can be counted on to resist closure—narrative,” and that
the capacity of this ritual to resonate on many levels, “its surplus of meaning
beyond the mechanics of secular and legal concepts of violation, testimony, proof,
confession, judgment, punishment, financial compensation, even the truths the
commission itself seeks to verify” held great power, as it “serve[d] its mandate of
contributing substantially to the creation of South Africa’s new democracy” (2001,
709–710). Jolly thus establishes a close relation between storytelling and nation-
building. The TRC hearings created a space in which different, sometimes conflict-
ing, voices could be heard and, in this sense, demonstrated what apartheid had
oppressed: openness and debate, negotiation and contestation. In other words, the
hearings promoted and performed values that were to shape the new democratic
South Africa. Barbara Cassin addresses the specific role of storytelling, relating it
to ancient Greece:
Just as the discourses, deliberations, epideictic and judicial speeches performed in
the Ancient Greek city . . . the act of storytelling performs the as yet unheard history
of the South African community; and this community constitutes itself through this
process, with “history-history” being unraveled from the “story histories.” (2002, 27)
The stories that are told in the testimonies together construct the history of South
Africa, because testimony performs the transition from the personal to the public
domain and thereby, states Paul Ricoeur, “perform[s] the transition between personal
memory and history” (2004, 21). Through testimony, then, storytellers become active
agents of the performance of history; they become history’s subjects rather than its
passive objects.5
Nonetheless, the relation between the role and deployment of narrative within the
TRC and the project of nation-building and historiography is more complex than this,
because though the narrative constructed was indeed heterogeneous, this hetero-
geneity was inevitably highly arbitrated and mediated. First of all, the stories of
victims and perpetrators were automatically framed by and incorporated within the
new state discourse, which was concerned with creating a shared point of origin from
which a new nation could be constructed. The hearings were highly mediated events
in other ways as well, ranging from the initial statement-taking prior to the hearings

and the selection of testimonies that fitted the TRC mandate of politically motivated
human rights abuses, to transcription and translation of testimonies in English
(Driver 2006, 5). It was decided beforehand which stories would be narrated at the
hearings, and which testimonies would also be broadcast and so reach a wider
audience. Since only crimes with a “political objective” were investigated, the count-
less people who had been economically exploited and victimized on a daily basis
were not considered “victims” of the apartheid state. The emphasis was on the
political, but of course apartheid terror did not halt at people’s doorsteps. Moreover,
because the TRC restricted itself to the human rights violations committed between
March 1, 1960 and December 5, 1993, the long history of racism and violence
that preceded this period remained unchallenged, as well as the violence that
occurred in the transitional period after apartheid officially ended (Holiday 1998, 46).
It could be argued, as it has been by Benita Parry, that though the TRC did succeed
in recovering fragments from the past, it did not manage to deal with the structural
history of power relations and racism (2004, 120).
Not only was the arrangement and staging of the testimonies highly mediated,
but there was also mediation within the narratives themselves. Drawing on discourse
analysis, Jan Blommaert, Mary Bock, and Kay McCormick examine the TRC as what
they call an “exceptional discourse event” to demonstrate that offering people a
space to tell their stories does not necessarily do away with, and can actually accen-
tuate, past inequalities. Some people may, for example, lack the communicative
skills to make themselves heard beyond the immediate context of the hearings, or
the interlocution of commissioners may result in the misinterpretation of testimonies
(2006, 41–42; 66).6 While storytelling can confer agency on those who tell the story,
this agency is always conditional and mediated.
In its final report, the TRC acknowledges that the narrative it constructed would
inevitably remain fractured, stating that it “tells only a small part of a much larger
story of human rights abuse in South and southern Africa” (Final Report I 1998, 24).
Nonetheless, it remains important to recognize how mediation and fragmentation
influenced what was to become the narrative, the history, or the public memory of
South Africa, the point of departure from which a new democratic nation would be
constructed. As Moon states, in order to fulfill its intended role in the process of
nation-building, the TRC had to construct a linear narrative in which there was a past
of suffering and inequality; a present of confession, testimony, and mourning; and a
future of reconciliation and democracy (2006, 269). Farber’s Molora restores empha-
sis to the personal nature of suffering. Her Elektra and Klytemnestra appear on stage
at a TRC-like hearing, but unlike the testimonies of many people who spoke at the
TRC, their narratives are not pre-structured by a discourse of national reconciliation
or mediated by commissioners’ interruptions or reinterpretations. Moreover, unlike
many women who spoke at TRC hearings, the suffering they narrate is their own.7

Revealing and Healing

Through the confrontation between mother and daughter, perpetrator and victim,
Farber portrays the brutal human rights violations that the various TRC hearings have
brought to light, metaphorically representing how, as Farber says, “like Elektra, count-
less South Africans came to live as ‘servants in the Halls of their Father’s house’”
(Director’s note). Farber instructs that the action should be set in “a bare hall or
room—much like the drab and simple venues in which most of the testimonies were
heard during the course of South Africa’s ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’” (2).
Klytemnestra and Elektra sit behind two tables with microphones. In between the
tables stands a raised stage on which the story will be reenacted. The chorus of
women, Xhosa singers from the Nqoko Cultural Group, sit to the back of the perform-
ance area and the audience is located at the front; both are incorporated as wit-
nesses to the hearing. During their testimonies, Elektra and Klytemnestra step onto
the raised stage, into the performance space, to reenact fragments from the past.
Farber’s use of the metatheatrical device of the play-within-the-play points to the
theatrical nature of the TRC hearings, hearings that, as Catherine M. Cole observes,
were highly performative events in terms of their “theatrical and dramatic emotional
displays, improvisational storytelling, singing, weeping, and ritualistic lighting of
candles” (2007, 167; 174). They staged confrontations between victims and perpe-
trators in front of an audience that reached far beyond those present in the various
venues, since not only were transcripts of the proceedings published in the news-
papers, but many of the hearings could also be witnessed live on radio and televi-
sion. The TRC toured South Africa, in Cole’s words, “like a traveling road show,” and
held hearings on raised platforms in churches, town halls, and community centers
throughout the country (2007, 172).
Entering the various venues, victims, perpetrators, and audience members were
greeted by enormous banners that read “Revealing is Healing” and “The Truth Will
Set You Free.” These were powerful slogans that were intended to frame the entire
TRC project, since they legitimized the commission’s name by establishing a direct
connection between “truth” and the sought-after end point of “reconciliation” and
“healing.” The belief that people would be healed by publicly revealing their stories
and that this would in turn result in the healing of the entire nation was idealistically
but also ideologically inclined: without some preliminary sense of national healing
and reconciliation, it was difficult to imagine the transition to a new and democratic
South Africa. By thus referring to personal healing, national healing, and national
reconciliation as if they were exchangeable concepts, the TRC created a language
in which the relatively distinct discourses of psychotherapy and politics became
conflated.
Richard A. Wilson, in a book critical of the politics of truth and reconciliation in
South Africa, argues that, “for all their media coverage, TRC hearings were often

little more than a symbolic and ritualized performance with a weak impact on
vengeance in urban townships” (2001, 227). Benita Parry similarly questions
whether “the public staging of mourning can truly facilitate national catharsis and
psychotherapeutic healing” (2004, 187). While Wilson and Parry emphasize the the-
atrical framing of the hearings, Cole analyses the performative aspect within these
hearings and suggests that the “dramatic, unruly, ephemeral, embodied, and per-
formed aspects of live hearings potently expressed both the power of the TRC as well
as its severe limits in truly grappling with the magnitude of the violations of human
rights in South Africa’s past” and that it was largely because of their performative
nature that the live Human Rights Violations hearings were so “affective, and conse-
quently, [they were] effective in facilitating, however imperfectly, a transition from a
racist, totalitarian state to a non-racial democracy” (2007, 179). Cole’s argument is
compelling:
Whatever the victims’ intentions or expectations were of the commission, their
words, gestures, cadence, intonation, and embodied expressions are now in the public
domain, and this material deserves to be closely analyzed. The picture that emerges
from such analysis is complex and contradictory, full of details that both confirm and
resist the dominant narratives of the past and of the TRC’s own mission. We also see
how individuals performed within the commission the particular truths that they were
trying to achieve. In the disjunctions between participants’ performances of truth they
wished to perform and the commission’s public iteration of the truths it wished to per-
form, we come closest to perceiving the complexity of the knowledge the TRC brought
into being. (187)
Cole emphasizes, then, that the disjunctions between individual testimonies and the
larger narrative that enclosed them point to the performative power to challenge the
dominancy of this overarching narrative from within. However, even if victims suc-
ceeded (partly or wholly) in performing their truths, the question remains to what
extent this resulted in personal healing. As Grahame Hayes observes, in spite of
what the banners at the entrance of the TRC venues asserted, “just revealing is not
just healing,” because healing depends on “how we reveal, the context of the reveal-
ing, and what it is that we are revealing . . . what people have to reveal might not be
healable, or at least not healable by means of the one-off revelation before the TRC”
(1998, 43; emphasis in text).
That the relation between revealing and healing is not self-evident is clear through-
out Farber’s play. The audience is left to wonder whether Electra will ever be able to
heal from the violence she has been and is still subjected to. Elektra testifies about
the torture she has suffered at the hands of her mother, for example with the “Wet
Bag Method,” which was used by South African security police to torture political
activists.8 The audience also sees torture performed when Klytemnestra stuffs a
cloth into Elektra’s mouth and burns her with cigarettes. During the interrogation,

which (so the stage descriptions instruct) Electra endures “like a political resistance
fighter,” Klytemnestra quotes, from Genesis 9:25, the curse that Ham’s father Noah
places upon Ham’s son Canaan: “Cursed be your children. The servants of servants
shall they be unto their brethren” (11–12). Ellen van Wolde discusses how this
episode was often referred to as a biblical legitimization of apartheid theology, under-
standing the Africans as the descendents of Ham and, therefore, a people destined
to be servants (2003, 13–14).
Seeing the suffering Elektra had to endure, the audience is led to understand why
she feels that “if the guilty pay not with blood for blood—then we are nothing but a
history without a future” (6). For Fleishman’s Electra, the future similarly demands
revenge. She, too, is scarred by years of abuse and imprisonment; she, too, believes
that “only violence can save us” (19). Even Orestes, who desperately tries to con-
vince his sister of the need to break the cycle of revenge, is eventually driven to kill,
first Aegisthus, and then his mother Clytemnestra. Both playwrights show that vio-
lence begets violence and both dramatize Nietzsche’s warning that “Whoever fights
monsters should take care that in the process he does not become a monster”
(1966, 98). Farber’s Klytemnestra understands that danger from her own experience
and warns her children that “Nothing—nothing is written./ Do not choose to be me.
The hounds that avenge all murder will forever hunt you down” (55). But her warning
seems in vain. In what is arguably the most tragic moment of the play, Orestes faces
his mother, ready to strike her, crying in rage and pain: “YOU HAVE MADE ME WHAT
I AM!” (56).
Orestes’ desperation over having turned into a perpetrator articulates one of the
difficulties that arose in the confrontations that the TRC hearings staged, namely that
the distinction between perpetrator and victim was often blurred, and that some
people were both perpetrator and victim at the same time (Sarkin 2004, 82). Claire
Moon discusses how the subject categories of “victim” and “perpetrator” were
central to the TRC’s public performances of national reconciliation (2006, 12). She
explains that the categories of “victim” and “perpetrator” were institutionalized by
means of the discrete committees for which people appeared to give their testi-
monies, to the extent that those testifying first had to decide whether their submis-
sion would be a “victim” or a “perpetrator” submission (2006, 267). In their plays,
Fleishman and Farber most effectively underline the possible conflation of these
two positions in their portrayals of Clytemnestra/Klytemnestra as both abuser and
victim. In Fleishman, Clytemnestra talks about the loss of her daughter Iphigenia and
about the shame she felt when Agamemnon, portrayed here not as a noble king who
is torn, but as a brutish tyrant, brought his concubine Cassandra into her house. In
Farber, she tells Elektra how she first met Agamemnon, “the day he opened up my
first husband and ripped out his guts. He tore this—my first born from my breast.
Then holding the child by its new ankles—he smashed its tiny head against a rock.

Then took me for his wife” (22). Clytemnestra/Klytemnestra has her own stories of
injustice to tell.
Not only do Fleishman and Farber challenge the binary of perpetrator and victim,
they also de-racialize it by showing that these subject positions cannot be distin-
guished along racial lines. It is nonetheless important to emphasize that violence in
South Africa was racialized to an extreme extent. Though many white South Africans
suffered from the violence apartheid engendered, non-whites (ethnically categorized
as “blacks,” “coloureds,” and “Indians”) were the objects of systematic oppression.9
Different from Farber, Fleishman gives no instructions with regards to the racial
make-up of his cast, and race remains wholly absent from his text.10
Another important consequence of Fleishman’s and Farber’s focus on
Clytemnestra/Klytemnestra’s history of suffering, a suffering that is absent from
Aeschylus, is that it challenges her traditional representation in Western tradition.
While Clytemnestra could as easily be depicted as a trauma survivor, argues Kathleen
L. Komar, the literature of antiquity usually figures her as the root cause of violence,
“representing several major roles traditionally assigned to women,” namely “the
demonic and vengeful woman, the adulterous wife and the avenging mother” (2003,
1–2; 6). In undermining the traditional representation of Clytemnestra, Fleishman
and Farber address the gender politics this representation embodies. By so doing,
they achieve something else as well. Rather than essentializing tragedy as an
a-temporal, universal myth, they demonstrate that the migration of antiquity to the
present is a complex process that involves change and the raising of new perspec-
tives. In the specific case of Clytemnestra, Fleishman’s and Farber’s representations
of her underscore her relevance to the present, while simultaneously undermining
the notion of any discreet universal denotation. In other words, through their “varia-
tions on Clytemnestra,” they establish a cross-temporal relation between antiquity
and the present, a relation that both illuminates and challenges Clytemnestra’s
traditional representation.
In Fleishman’s tragedy, like Aeschylus’, Orestes and Electra murder Aegisthus and
Clytemnestra, but Farber’s story has a different outcome. This is another way to show
that the migration of antiquity to the present extends beyond the mere resituating
of universal myths. Early in the play, despite the many accusations and shouts of
hatred, some hope for reconciliation is expressed when Elektra and Klytemnestra
attempt to acknowledge each other’s humanity. Despite her passionate feelings of
revenge, Elektra acknowledges her mother’s hurt: “I see your heart mama/ I know it
hurts” (19). Klytemnestra, though hesitantly and euphemistically, expresses a
murmur of remorse: “I am not so exceedingly glad at the deeds I have done . . .” (20).
Aegisthus (here Ayesthus, represented by a large worker’s uniform hanging on a
washing line) is killed, but when Orestes is ready to murder Klytemnestra, the chorus’
singing makes him change his mind, after which he urges Elektra to “walk away.

Rewrite this ancient end!” (57). When Elektra, not yet ready to relinquish her
vengeance, grabs the axe and runs towards Klytemnestra, the chorus overpowers her
and comforts her as she weeps. The ancient end has been rewritten: Farber’s
Klytemnestra lives.
Not only is Aeschylus’ trilogy rewritten, but also South Africa’s (his)story of
violence, though residues of revenge remain:
It falls softly the residue of revenge . . . like rain.

And we who made the sons and daughters of this
Land . . . Servants in the halls of their forefathers . . .
We know.
We are still only here by grace alone.
Look now—dawn is coming.
Great chains on the home are falling off.
This house rises up.
For too long it has lain in ash on the ground. (59)
No family resolve, no love can be regained here; no forgiveness can be articulated.

But the fact that the children help their mother to her feet and let her walk away
signals the beginning of a process of forgiveness, a difficult process because, as
Farber writes, “notions of a Rainbow Nation gliding effortlessly into forgiveness are
absurd” (Director’s note). Farber has her reasons for making the chorus the main
agent in breaking the cycle of revenge, because according to her: “it was not the
gods or deus ex machina that delivered us from ourselves in the years following
democracy, but the common everyman and woman . . . who lit the way for us all”
(Director’s note).
Though both Fleishman and Farber end their plays on an optimistic note, with
revenge giving way to new beginnings and possibilities, none of their characters
explicitly articulate forgiveness. This is especially striking since forgiveness came to
occupy a prominent position in the TRC’s political narrative of reconciliation. Indeed,
as Wilson states, the TRC hearings were structured in such a way that any expression
of a desire for revenge would seem out of place, so that it is questionable to what
extent victims were given the choice to not forgive (2001, 17).11 The emphasis on a
Christian understanding of forgiveness had much to do with the influence of Church
leaders, in particular the chairman of the commission, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Still, the TRC was never intended to be a religious institution, so that there is some-
thing unsettling about the way in which the narrative of the TRC, a secular governmen-
tal institution, displayed tensions between a legal-political and a religious-redemptive
understanding of truth and reconciliation (Shore and Kline 2006, 312).12 Though the
Christian message appealed to Christian South Africans, it excluded people of other

religious persuasions, and the absence of a Christian message in Farber’s and
Fleishman’s plays may be seen as a comment on this shortcoming.13
To refer to forgiveness in the context of political reconciliation seems essentially
flawed, as it relocates a moral and personal discourse into the political realm. The
essence of forgiveness, after all, is that one can only forgive on behalf of oneself, not
somebody else, let alone groups of people. Still, there may be a place for forgiveness
in politics, perhaps because it is located at the threshold between the private and the
public. For Hannah Arendt, although some things are unforgivable, forgiveness is a
necessity of (political) life, because without being forgiven, “our capacity to act would,
as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we
would remain the victims of its consequences forever” (1958, 237). Arendt seems to
view forgiveness in a rather pragmatic way, as an act that frees us from the past.
Jacques Derrida also deals with the relation between forgiveness and politics.
His essay “On Forgiveness” centers on the dual nature of forgiveness, the tension
between what he describes as an “unconditional forgiveness” and a “conditional
forgiveness proportionate to the recognition of the fault” (2001, 34–35). In his view,
forgiveness “is not, it should not be, normal, normative, normalizing. It should remain
exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible: as if it interrupted the
ordinary course of historical temporality”; consequently, forgiveness “does not, it
should never amount to a therapy of reconciliation,” because this implies the inter-
vention of a third party within what should essentially be a one-to-one relationship
between victim and perpetrator (2001, 31–32; 41). Michael Janover finds Derrida’s
idea of a pure forgiveness “charming and persuasive” in a world in which “forgive-
ness can be traded and reduced to a mechanism for winning votes or allies in a world
in which amnesty for former mass murderers and tyrants can be decided by political
ideals” (2007, 228). However, Janover does not take into account that even when
forgiveness is subsumed within the personal and moral realm, it remains difficult
to conceive of its unconditional form. Even in the most private context, forgiveness is
never delimited to the confines of a one-to-one relationship between perpetrator and
victim, as it is always informed by a complex mixture of personal, social, and political
factors. In Farber, the important role of the community in putting an end to the cycle
of vengeance illustrates this well.
Perhaps the problem with the TRC was not so much that the commission drew on
a personal and moral concept of forgiveness within a political sphere, but rather that
forgiveness was given such a dominant position that it left victims little room to avoid
or renounce it. Moreover, there appears to have been little awareness of the fact that
to state forgiveness, because one wishes or because one feels forced to, does not
automatically mean that the act of forgiveness actually takes place. For there is
always that other mediating institution that Derrida mentions in passing: language
(2001, 42).

The Politics of Reconciliation

While forgiveness occupied a prominent position within the TRC, amnesty, often
understood as the institutionalization and collectivization of forgiveness, was never
directly linked to forgiveness, but instead to truth. Truth (“full disclosure”) would
pave the way towards reconciliation.14 The TRC was the first truth commission that
linked amnesty to the uncovering of the truth and the first to be given the mandate
to free perpetrators from civil and criminal prosecution for the rest of their lives
(Cole 2007, 174). Traditionally, amnesty suggests a collective forgetting of past
wrongs and a wish to break clean from the past; indeed, in ancient Greek, amnesty
and amnesia are two meanings of same word. The TRC, however, associated
amnesty with anamnesis rather than amnesia (Schaap 2005, 113). It emphasized
the importance of recollecting the past so that through “truth” it would become
possible to achieve reconciliation. In other words, it attempted to settle between
what Parry describes as the competing claims of reconciliation and remembrance
(2004, 183).
The emphasis on truth meant that applicants for amnesty were not asked to pub-
licly apologize and ask for forgiveness, but solely to state their crimes and to show
how these crimes were political in nature. As Willie Henderson explains, granting
freedom in exchange for truth involves the danger that truth may become a mere
commodity and, as such, be stripped of its ethical impact (2000, 459). Indeed,
it makes it impossible to separate applicants’ motivation to tell the truth from the
coercive lure of exoneration. For Wole Soyinka, the main problem with South Africa’s
choice for amnesty is its “implicit, a priori exclusion of criminality and, thus, respon-
sibility” (1999, 31). His concern is understandable, though probably the imperative
that they subscribe to the position of “perpetrator” in order to apply for amnesty, and
the requirement that they admit their crimes in public, did force many perpetrators to
take responsibility. But taking responsibility implies sincerity and sincerity is difficult
to judge. Moon discusses, for instance, how former security policeman Jeffrey
Benzien (referred to earlier as the inventor of the “Wet Bag” torture method) wittingly
manipulated the TRC narrative of reconciliation.15 Ingrid de Kok’s doubt as to whether
structures dedicated to reconciliation and unity might not still “unwittingly encourage
social and cultural amnesia” is certainly legitimate (qtd. in Parry 2004, 109).
Fleishman dramatizes part of the amnesty debate in the final scene of his In the
City of Paradise. The question is asked whether Orestes and Electra should be con-
victed for their matricide or granted amnesty instead. Among the furies in gas masks
that begin to hound them are Tyndareus and Leda, Clytemnestra’s parents, two char-
acters that do not figure in Aeschylus. Fleishman introduces another generation of
people who have been involved in and affected by the violence.16 Despite his grief
and anger about his daughter’s death, Tyndareus stops the mob from stoning Orestes
and Electra, persuading them that “we seek not private vengeance here, but public

retribution/ Justice will win out/ Our time will come” (37). He urges them to replace
vengeance with legal action, but his call is not answered. Instead, the court herald
announces, speaking lines that are almost identical to those of the 1995 Truth and
Reconciliation Act,
. . . we stand today upon an historic bridge

Between a past of deep division and discord,
And a brighter future of peace and prosperity for all.
There is a need for understanding, not for vengeance,
For forgiveness not retaliation,
For humanity not for victimization.
Our learned judges, seek to reconcile all differences,
To set aside all enmity and hatred,
To build anew our fragile lives in Argos.
They decree, therefore, that amnesty shall be granted
In respect of acts, omissions and offences
Committed in the cause of conflicts of the past,
Where a full disclosure of the facts are made,
Lest we forget our brutal heritage. (38)
Despite Tyndareus’ outrage at the decision to grant amnesty to his daughter’s

murderers, the final image presents the TRC’s amnesty arrangement as an imperfect
but necessary tool for democracy. This move away from Tyndareus’ personal pain
illustrates how, in the process of the TRC, the attention moved away from the personal
towards the national. But Tyndareus’ complaint that “this amnesty pollutes our law”
and that it is a “travesty of justice” remains important and echoes the opinion of
many victims of apartheid, who felt that the amnesty provisions denied them the right
to seek judicial redress (39).17 Indeed, victims were given no opportunity to opt for a
kind of closure other than the reconciliatory one promoted by the TRC.
The rhetoric of the TRC linked amnesty to an idea of transitional or restorative jus-
tice, a justice that did not imply vengeance or retribution. The opposition between a
restorative and a retributive justice came to be identified as the opposition between
Africa and the West.18 Wilson argues that the creation of a polarity between a roman-
ticized “African” idea of reconciliation (founded on the notion of ubuntu, the Nguni
word referring to “humaneness”) and a Western notion of retributive justice (implying
vengeance) closed down space for discussing legal punishment as a possible route
to reconciliation (2001, 11). According to him, ubuntu thus became an “ideological
concept with multiple meanings which conjoins human rights, restorative justice,
reconciliation and nation-building within the populist language of pan-Africanism,” the
“Africanist wrapping used to sell a reconciliatory version of human rights talk to black

South Africans. Ubuntu belies the claim that human rights would have no culturalist
or ethnic dimensions” (2001, 13). In other words, it was implied that if you were truly
African, there had to be forgiveness in your heart.19
The debate about the TRC’s amnesty arrangement points to the inevitable clash
in post-conflict societies between different understandings of and different demands
on justice. Aeschylus’ Oresteia dramatizes this. Throughout the trilogy, Agamemnon,
Clytemnestra, Apollo, Orestes, and the Erinyes (the Furies, spirits of wrath) all claim
justice on their side, but their different understandings and rhetorical appropriations
of justice differ and compete violently. At Orestes’ trial, a confrontation takes place
mainly between his defender Apollo, who has instructed Orestes to kill his mother to
avenge his father’s death because justice so demands, and the Erinyes, who want
Orestes to pay with his blood for the matricide he has committed. Aeschylus demon-
strates not only that justice lacks a fixed meaning but also that its possible mean-
ings depend on the political interests at stake. The Eumenides, the tragedy that
concludes the Oresteia, dramatizes a reconciliatory process between the different
demands of different ideas of justice, culminating in the celebration of Athena’s
judicial court that puts an end to vengeance and instead installs a judicial system
based on evidence and trial.
The reconciliation Athena achieves depends primarily on her power to convince
the Erinyes to take their place within the new Athens as the Eumenides, the Kindly
Ones. They are not banished, nor are their passions for vengeance denied. Rather,
in their new function, they will embody “that ultimate sanction of fear which underlies
the new order, as it dominated the old” (Vellacott, Aeschylus 1956, 20). By transform-
ing “murderous begetting into blessed fecundity,” to use Nicole Loraux’s words,
Athena attempts to compromise between the demands of the past and those of the
future (2006, 38). The Furies, once transformed into the Kindly Ones and officially
incorporated within the new order, will protect the city rather than endanger its inner
stability. Athena’s mediation signifies the inauguration of a new social and political
order; one in which the old is not simply discarded, but reconciled with the new. At
least, that would be the official story.
Traditionally, the Oresteia is seen as a celebration of democracy and the expres-
sion of a progressive movement from chaos to order. Christopher Rocco lists a num-
ber of such interpretations, among them the one by the renowned classicist John H.
Finley who, in Rocco’s words, saw the trilogy as “nothing less than a founding docu-
ment of Western civilization” (1997, 144).20 In Froma Zeitlin’s feminist reading of
the Oresteia, what is actually founded is a tradition of misogynistic exclusion, since the
“solution” or reconciliation of the Eumenides entails the hierarchization of values:
the subordination of the Furies to the Olympians, of barbarian to Greek and, most
important for Zeitlin, of female to male (Rocco 1997, 144). When the judges of her
court fail to cast a final vote, Athena’s mediation indeed displays a great amount of

gender politics. She votes in favor of Orestes because the murder of Clytemnestra
(woman/mother) is less important than that of Agamemnon (man/father):
No mother gave me birth. Therefore the father’s claim

And male supremacy in all things, save to give
Myself in marriage, wins my whole heart’s loyalty.
Therefore a woman’s death, who killed her husband, is,
I judge, outweighed in grievousness by his. (Aeschylus 1956, 172)21
Just before her vote, Apollo has similarly argued for the supremacy of fatherhood over
motherhood, stating that the mother is “not the true parent of the child” but only “the
nurse who tends the growth/ Of young seed planted by its true parent, the male”
(Aeschylus 1956, 169). Athena’s final judgment, then, is far from impartial and Zeitlin
is right that, as Rocco rephrases it, “through the democratic rhetoric of equality,
reason and consent legitimate the institutionalization of exclusionary polarities into
systematized hierarchies, rather than creating a truly democratic order” (1997, 144).
The problem of justice is not solved; rather, one version of justice is privileged over
other possible versions.22
In South Africa, a similar thing happened. Here, too, the new democracy that was
created did not, and still does not, correspond with the reality of the majority of the
people. Here, too, one understanding of justice, as reconciliation, was privileged, leav-
ing little room for a retributionist discourse. Maybe justice as reconciliation did best
serve the nation-building project; after all, in the new South Africa, people had to find
ways to live together and move beyond sentiments that might jeopardize their joint
future. At the same time, while the “re” in “reconciliation” assumes that there was
something in common that can be reconciled, as journalist Antjie Krog writes in her
book about the TRC, “in this country, there is nothing to go back to, no previous state
or relationship one would wish to restore. In these stark circumstances, ‘reconcilia-
tion’ does not even seem like the right word, but rather ‘conciliation’” (2000, 143).
Maybe Wilson is right that the TRC’s effort to “forge a new moral vision of the nation,”
centering on forgiveness and reconciliation, ultimately “destroys the most important
promise of human rights; that is, its possible contribution to a thoroughgoing trans-
formation of an authoritarian criminal justice system and the construction of real and
lasting democratic legitimacy” (2001, 230). At this time in history, it is difficult to
assess the advantages and disadvantages of the TRC’s project of reconciliation.
And so, just as Athena’s mediation is imperfect and ambiguous, so the TRC’s
mediation inevitably entailed sacrifice and loss. Just as the new order that Athena
establishes remains precarious, so post-apartheid, democratic South Africa finds
itself in a similarly precarious and fragile state. The Oresteia dramatizes this com-
plexity. In Rocco’s reading, the trilogy, despite its triumphant ending, “constructs the

meaning of the democratic founding, and so of democracy itself, as open to further

contest, struggle, and renegotiation” (1997, 169). Similarly, J.G. Finlayson states
that, rather than simply instructing how reconciliation can and should be achieved,
It is as if Aeschylus is telling us that justice, reason, and lawfulness are not estab-
lished facts that need merely be recognized for what they are by an act of theoretical
contemplation but ongoing practical tasks within the new social order, and reconcilia-
tion between the different ethical powers, between citizens and their new institutions
is not a state already attained but an ongoing process. (1999, 516)
Democracy will forever have to be critically reexamined and renegotiated. Reconciliation,
despite the finality that the word suggests, can never really achieve a point of clo-
sure. The TRC did realize this, which is evident from the recommendations it gave to
the new government on how to recompense victims (Final Report VI 1998, 726–732).
The commission was aware that its years of active practice were to be only the begin-
ning of a long and difficult process, and the failure of the government to adequately
proceed with this process greatly discredits its intention of instigating long-lasting
societal change.23
Epilogue
Importantly, the Furies not only represent the spirit of revenge, but also the impera-
tive to remember evil. As Booth states, in societies undergoing the transition to
democracy this “weight of the claims of the past and their clash with those of the
present and future, are most visible” (2001, 777–778). By accepting Athena’s offer
to be institutionalized within the new order, the Furies—now the Kindly Ones—not
only become the protectors of the city but of memory as well. If we understand
memory as a cultural phenomenon, as Bal suggests, the Kindly Ones could be seen
as agents of “cultural memorization,” an activity “occurring in the present, in which
the past is continuously modified and redescribed even as it continues to shape the
future” (Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer 1999, vii). As the embodiment of memory, then, they
have to fulfill the demands of both past and future within the present, a difficult and
dangerous task, because the line between keeping alive the past and paralyzing the
present is thin. It is on this thin line that the Kindly Ones perform their balancing act.
One may wonder what has happened to the Furies in post-apartheid South Africa.
Though the dominant discourse of forgiveness denied them an official place within
what was to be the new democratic “rainbow” nation of South Africa, they undoubt-
edly still roam beneath the surface, fighting their fight against forgetting. After all,
memories cannot simply be relegated to the past but, instead, must actively be
acknowledged and sustained within the present and, more specifically, within the
ongoing process of reconciliation.
Fleishman and Farber dramatize the start of what will be a long process and
emphasize the demands of the future, but their most important contribution is that

they restore focus to the personal, the private realm of personal suffering, by inviting
their audience to continue considering the individual stories that are involved. Both
playwrights seem intent on helping the Furies in their fight to remember. Farber brings
the TRC back to life, not the national narrative it helped to construct, but the speci-
ficity of the personal stories that it originally revealed; stories that now, almost a
decade after the TRC’s final report was published, have acquired an almost archival
status. By returning to the performative aspect of the hearings, she reverses the tran-
sition from oral testimony to written narrative, from performance to text. Fleishman’s
most important contribution is that he reactivates the debate about what transitional
justice actually entails, the advantages but also the losses. He too calls attention
to the individual people involved, inviting his audience to consider those for whom
forgiveness remains impossible and for whom the amnesty arrangement remains an
unacceptable sacrifice. Both playwrights demonstrate that, in post-apartheid South
Africa, theater is an important complementary practice. Because, as Fleishman says,
theater is able to make absences present again, to keep the past alive within the
present, and to connect the past to the yet unfulfilled future (2007b).
But in South Africa, this future is difficult to imagine, and Parry may be right in
stating that it has been jeopardized by an inadequate dealing with the past. The TRC’s
intention to create a shared point of origin in history from which the entire nation
could depart as one has not succeeded; how could it in a country where the former
apartheid government had done everything in its power to divide rather than unite?
In this light, it is both interesting and discouraging to view Tutu’s and Mandela’s
emphasis on reconciling the nation and on establishing a non-racial democracy in
relation to the racialized discourse that has become more and more predominant
under Thabo Mbeki’s and Jacob Zuma’s presidencies. The main challenge for South
African artists today is to create new sites where the battle over the past can be
fought free from the impediment of nationalist, racist, or nativist ideologies. A space
where people can really come to terms with history, not as the objects of historical
representation, but as the subjects of their histories. A space where the competing
claims of remembrance and reconciliation can be involved in a continuously productive
struggle.

Notes
1. The trilogy’s first two parts dramatize a to suffocate him. It was developed by former
Homeric understanding of justice as security policeman Jeffrey Benzien, who
vengeance: in Agamemnon, the king of Argos explained its workings at a TRC amnesty
returns from Troy and is murdered by his wife hearing (see Moon 2006, 271).
Clytemnestra in revenge for the sacrifice of
their daughter Iphigenia; in the Libation 9. Farber’s presentation of Klytemnestra as the
Bearers, their children Electra and Orestes only white character highlights this. When the
avenge Agamemnon’s death by killing audience members see her abuse Elektra,
Clytemnestra. In the final part, the Eumenides, they are invited to understand her as the
however, Athena establishes a judicial court so representative of apartheid ideology. The
that Orestes can be legally tried for matricide. portrayal of Klytemnestra as the object of
abuse herself may do more than complicate the
2. Both plays are unpublished. I thank Mark perpetrator/victim opposition; it brings up the
Fleishman and Yael Farber for making the danger of implying that mitigating circumstances
scripts available to me. reduce the extent to which Klytemnestra can be
held accountable for her acts.
3. Personal correspondence, 9 January 2008.
10. This does not automatically mean race
4. Final Report I (1998, 110); Mistry (2001, was absent from performances of this text.
3–4); Sanders (2001, 18). As Megan Shore and
Scott Kline note, it is remarkable that it was not 11. Some victims later complained they had
until the final report was published that the TRC felt expected to forgive their perpetrators. See
publicly acknowledged that it had been working the report on survivors’ perceptions of the TRC
with these four definitions of truth (2006, 313). by the Centre for the Study of Violence and
Reconciliation between August 7, 1997 and
5. Ricoeur further explains that this process February 1, 1998: www.csvr.org.za/papers/
is reciprocal, because only through their papkhul.htm
inscription into history do people’s testimonies
become accepted and validated (2004, 184). 12. “It is interesting,” Tutu himself admits in
his memoir No Future Without Forgiveness, “that
6. Brent Harris illustrates how the interruption the President appointed an Archbishop as
of commissioners sometimes restricted the Chairperson of the Commission and not, for
narrative of the past. He refers, for instance, to instance, a judge, since we were to some
a hearing in which a testifier recounted the extent a quasi-judicial body” (1999, 71).
sexual abuse of female recruits by ANC camp
commanders in Angola but was asked to 13. Fleishman’s title In the City of Paradise
“confine yourself to the things that have does contain a religious reference, but its effect
happened to you and what you did” (2000, seems mostly ironic: this city is far from
129). This shows that often little or no room paradise, nor is paradise presented as an
was given to unexpected and additional achievable goal.
narratives that exceeded the ones pre-set for
the particular hearings. 14. As discussed previously, the TRC defined
this truth pluralistically.
7. Fiona C. Ross explains that most women
who testified at the hearings mainly spoke of 15. For an analysis of Benzien’s testimony, see
men’s suffering and only addressed their own Moon (2006, 271–272) and Krog (2000,
experiences indirectly (2003, 5). 93–99).
8. The wet bag method consisted of tying a 16. Tyndareus does play a prominent role in
man down and placing a wet bag over his face Euripides’ Orestes.

17. Family members of the murdered anti- 20. For other such progressivist readings of
apartheid activist Steve Biko, for example, the Oresteia, see E.R. Dodds (1960) and
together with other survivors of murdered H.D.F. Kitto (1956).
activists, filed a lawsuit against the TRC,
claiming that the amnesty arrangement was 21. The first line refers to Athena’s birth from
unconstitutional, as it denied them the Zeus’s thigh.
individual right to judicial redress. The
Constitutional Court rejected the claim and 22. As Simon Goldhill states, the great variety
ruled that amnesty in exchange for truth neither of interpretations of the Oresteia in itself
violated the constitution nor the Geneva demonstrates that the problem of justice is not
Convention (Minow 1998, 56). solved: the language of justice (dike), “twisted
and turned by the rhetoric of appropriation in
18. Tutu argued, for example, that the notion of the Oresteia, can be read only by a further act
a retributive justice is largely Western and that of appropriation—the critic’s own rhetoric”
the African understanding is “far more (1986, 55–56).
restorative, not so much to punish as to
redress or restore a balance that has been 23. Thabo Mbeki (president from 1999–2008)
knocked askew” (qtd. in Minow 1998, 81). did not follow up on the TRC’s
recommendations to start a long-term
19. Wilson claims that this rhetoric of reparations program for victims of apartheid,
reconciliation forms a great discrepancy with and to install a corporate tax (directed at
the judicial practice in township courts, where corporations that benefited from apartheid)
people “look back at the past and still feel the to help fund this program. Nor have the
burden of a crime that has not been cancelled successive post-apartheid governments
by punishment,” an adherence to a continuity managed to instigate significant societal
with the past that is “dangerous to the new change and properly address South Africa’s
and fragile nation-building project: the new most pressing problems: poverty,
historicity of a reconciling political elite” unemployment, and AIDS.
(2001, 209).
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The Aesthetics of
Displacement and the
Performance of Migration 1
Sudeep Dasgupta
ABSTRACT
The essay takes migration as both the content of a film, and the mode through which
it is constructed. Aesthetics becomes the practice of constructing displacements
between forms (poem, theater, film, song) and the manipulation of their materiality,
in order to render the complexity of migration in all its specificity. Migration is thus
both of the form and of the content, and indeed undoes the distinction between
them. Framing the analysis of Ritwik Ghatak’s Komal Gandhar (1961) through Hegel’s
understanding of aesthetics, the essay insists that the aesthetic rendition of migra-
tion and the migrations of aesthetic forms cannot be separated. Rather, it is their
continual, often conflictual intertwining, which renders the politics of form crucial to
the politics of migration. The essay thus intervenes in cultural critique which often
takes the theme of migration and displacement while inadequately attending to form,
while at the same time insisting that a simple reflection model where form mirrors
content is inadequate. The critical (and political) stakes of the argument are predi-
cated on attending to aesthetic forms as social ciphers which intervene productively
in the growing literature on migration and its (re)presentation.
We are, so to speak, of the connections,

not outside and beyond them.
(Edward Said 1994, 65)
He almost never succeeds in corresponding with himself.
(Albert Memmi 1965, 140)
The Aesthetics of Displacement and the Performance of Migration | 91

Oh . . . there are so many attachments . . . !
(Bhrigu, in Komal Gandhar)
The relationship between aesthetics, as the making of art, and migration, as a modal-
ity of the experience of displacement, is not one of reflection (mirroring), or overlap
(one folding into the other). The materiality of the art work always intervenes in the
“theme” it is supposed to convey. This materiality of the art work becomes one of the
resources through which the cognitive and aesthetic experience of encountering a
theme, such as migration, is enriched. Closely attending to the operations which con-
struct an interplay between image and sound are therefore crucial to understanding
the crucial function of form in presenting/constructing an encounter between the
viewer and the theme of the artwork.2 In this essay, the complex relationship
between an art work (in this case, a film) and the “theme” of migration will be ana-
lyzed through a particular mode of displacement that structures both the form of the
art work and its reception. By “mode,” I mean the strategic deployment of the mate-
riality of film that produces a figuration of migration where the film becomes the site
of a construction. The film becomes the site for the staging of multiple displace-
ments through sound and image as it figures the experience of migration. Art as the
externalized concretion and embodiment of migration does two things at once: it is a
performative re-presentation and, simultaneously, a displacement. The term “perfor-
mative re-presentation” functions here to invoke at once an understanding of the
nonreferentiality of art’s productivity, while emphasizing that this performativity does
not function ex nihilo, but operates within a “scene of constraint” (Butler 2004, 1).3
The strategic deployment of displacement as the mode through which migration is
approached is concretized in Ritwik Ghatak’s Komal Gandhar (1961), entitled Soft
Note on a Sharp Scale in English. This essay will analyze how the various displace-
ments in the film are constructed on three levels: in the film itself, through the dis-
junctive deployment of sound and image; between the film and its historical context;
and through the complexly articulated displacement between poem, song, theater,
and film.
Migration is not just a theme, external to art, which the latter then embodies.
There is at least one influential formulation of aesthetics, where a “migration” of
sorts is central to understanding the relationship between an idea or theme, and its
concretion. Articulating a philosophy of art in his Aesthetics, Hegel highlights dis-
placement as a function of the failure of art’s attempt to adequately concretize the
Idea (1975; 1977). For Hegel, (Romantic) poetry comes closest to this synthesis (of
art work and Idea) at the end of a narrative wherein this concretion of the Idea
migrates from architecture and sculpture to music. Hegel’s discussion of the relation-
ship between the Idea and an art work is marked by the troublesome materiality
of the art work itself. His desire is to see a complete dissolution of the material
92 | Sudeep Dasgupta
substance of the art work so that it directly embodies the Idea. Hegel hopes for a
form of art which annuls its materiality by presenting the Idea without the cumber-
some weight of material forms. As he constructs the narrative, starting with architec-
ture, and ending in poetry, aesthetics keeps migrating from one form of materiality to
another. Thus, the relationship between the Idea and the art work is marked by a
migration toward the goal of the complete effacement of an art work’s materiality.
Komal Gandhar moves through different forms of art, and Ghatak deploys the mate-
riality of cinema to construct a process of displacement through which migration is
approached. Unlike the teleological desire that characterizes Hegel’s discussion of
aesthetics, however, in the film, the relation between the different arts highlights the
impossibility of effacing the materiality of art. Rather, through a series of displace-
ments between different forms of art, migration between the arts is related to the
experience of human migration. The impossibility of annulling materiality is turned
into a possibility: the potential that material forms harbor for producing aesthetic
encounters which render the experience of migration in all its complexity.
Migratory aesthetics can be read as the forms of aesthetics produced from the
perspective of migration as a phenomenon. Aesthetic migrations can be read as the
migration of aesthetics itself across the (arbitrary) borders that separate music, archi-
tecture, theater, and film, say. One such conjunction between a migratory aesthetic
and aesthetic migration occurs in the work of Ritwik Ghatak. Forced migration has
colored the content and the tonality of his work in literature, theater, and film. The link
between migratory aesthetics and aesthetic migration colors all his work, and
finds its sharpest articulation in the conjunction (already evident in the title, Komal
Gandhar) of a musical note that floats above the film’s thematic and aesthetic
production as a complimentary and undecidable “feeling tone” (Jameson 1979, 133).4
If we are “of connections” as Edward Said argues, our “being” is marked as non-
unitary because of the failure of a neat overlap between them. This disjunctive con-
junction shapes not just the film and the man (Ghatak’s biography) but an experience
of non-correspondence that marks both migration and aesthetics. Albert Memmi’s
subtle narrative of the changing relationship between colonizer and colonized is
translated in my argument to a postcolonial and post-imperial situation, producing
non-correspondence as the “structure of feeling” of both human subjectivity and aes-
thetic practice (Williams 1961, 48). The self-estrangement of human subjectivity, and
the (non)-correspondence of art and reality are both conjoined in Ghatak’s film as one
mode of thinking migratory aesthetics and aesthetic migration together. This essay
will first situate the film through a brief sketch of Ghatak’s own involvement in poli-
tics, which was structured by forced migration, before offering a close reading of the
film to underline the modalities of displacement among the three levels mentioned
above. In closing, the essay suggests the implication of such a conjunctural analysis
for a broader rethinking of aesthetics.

Rows and Rows of Fences
Ghatak (1925–1976) was born in Dhaka (then part of Bengal in British India), in a
part of the country that was split into two in 1947 (West Bengal: India; East Bengal:
Pakistan) and which, after a war of independence, became Bangladesh. The Bengal
famine of 1943–1944, World War II, and, finally, the partition of 1947 forced Ghatak,
along with millions of others, to migrate to Calcutta, where he became actively
involved in the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), the cultural front of the
Communist Party of India (CPI). From childhood, his cultural exposure was global.
Originating from the small, educated minority of an essentially feudal landed aristo-
cracy, his access to language included Bengali, English, Persian, and Sanskrit. He
was familiar with both Hindustani and Western classical music, as well as the literary
and philosophical writings of Europe, including Freud and Marx. During his involve-
ment with the IPTA, he acquired a familiarity with the writings of C.G. Jung, Erich
Neumann (particularly his Great Mother), and Joseph Campbell, as well as with the
language, music, and cultural practices of tribal India.5
Formed in 1943, the IPTA was the first organized national theater movement in
India that developed and staged plays addressing class injustice and British imperi-
alism. Ghatak’s IPTA involvement began in Calcutta in 1948, writing, directing, and
acting in his own and other plays, such as revivals of Dinabandhu Mitra’s Neeldarpan
(“Indigo Mirror,” 1860), and Bengali-language adaptations of Gogol’s The Government
Inspector and Gorky’s The Lower Depths. In the same year, Ghatak became involved
with other aspiring filmmakers, like Mrinal Sen, in discussing filmmaking as well as
unionizing film workers and technicians. One of Ghatak’s first intensive involvements
with cinema was as an actor in Nemai Ghosh’s groundbreaking 1950 film, Chinnamul
(“The Uprooted”), which charted the story of a group of farmers from East Bengal
who are forced to migrate to Calcutta because of the partition. Calcutta’s Sealdah
railway station was both the location for the film and the actual place of disembark-
ment for the forced migrants, who were played by actual refugees.
The above summary of Ghatak’s biography reveals some crucial aspects, which
will be thematized and developed in the discussion to follow. The lived experience of
forced migration translated for him (and many others) into a political and cultural
involvement that moved across a number of simultaneous cultural migrations.
At the primary level, his involvement in theater and film reveals what one calls “cross-
mediality” these days, where the specificities of each art form and their interrelations
become the modes through which the experiences and consequences of migration
are externalized. Komal Gandhar, the film, the title of which refers to a musical note,
is inspired by a poem of the same name by Rabindranath Tagore. In this case, music
and film find their inspiration in poetry. In understanding the film, the three cannot be
separated, and thus the material specificities of each form, in their displaced inter-
relationship, can be seen as contaminating the narrative of aesthetic migration that
Hegel’s Aesthetics constructs. The film underlines the impossibility of thinking of

poetry (Tagore) either in isolation or as the apotheosis of synthetic finality. The mate-
riality of the poem is displaced and externalized from sound (recitation) to sound
(music in the film) to film itself and its specific orchestration of sound and image.
Aesthetic migrations and migratory aesthetics continually overlap, disrupt, and
comment on each other. The form of these aesthetic migrations was a function of a
set of historical and aesthetic conjunctures. On the one hand, not just the experience
of migration, but the migration of aesthetic forms were retooled (not unlike Brecht’s
notion of Umfunktionierung6) through a disjunctive conjunction between a variety of
musical styles, mythological motifs, and theatrical stagings specific to that region of
India, and on the other, through the borrowing of themes (Gogol and Gorky) from
“Western” artists and their particular aesthetic styles (Stanislavski in theater, and,
most importantly, Brecht and Pudovkin in film).
Between Theater and Film

Why should I go?
Tell me . . . leaving my fertile land . . . the Padma river . . .
For food! This is your last chance to be a refugee
Refugee?
Landless refugee . . . named by media persons
Dasgupta 1 Ritwik Ghatak – Komal Gandhar

The personal experience of migration as forced displacement is represented in the

film, not through a simple representational strategy between sign and referent, but
through a double presentation of dialectical intertwining and displacement. The die-
gesis operates at two levels; at one level, the film tracks a theatrical troupe compris-
ing East Bengal refugees as it prepares for the staging of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala. The
staging of the play operates on the second level. The film, then, is not a representa-
tion of migration but approaches the topic through displacement—by making the
process of the staging of the play its focus. The two main protagonists (in the film)
are Bhrigu (Abanish Banerjee), who is the leader of the troupe, and Anasuya (Supriya
Chowdhury), who plays Shakuntala in the play, and who belongs to a rival troupe. The
experience of migration is approached through a presentation of the difficulties expe-
rienced by migrants as they struggle to produce a play. Ghatak’s choice displaces a
representation of migration by producing the phenomenon at one remove: through a
perspective of the difficulties of representing migration through the play.
Migration and aesthetics become dialectically linked—migration approachable
only through the problem of aesthetic presentation; aesthetic practice becoming a
function of the displacement of migrants (Ghatak and the involvement of other
refugees in the IPTA, as well as the two theater troupes that comprise refugees).
“The film examines,” in Ghatak’s words, the “agonizing saga of degeneration, alien-
ation and rootlessness” that marks the “perpetual homelessness” of the “ravaged
psyche” of Bengal after the partition (Ghatak 1985, 61; 62). This real-life saga is
captured in celluloid and opens with the first words of the film as “Act 2” on stage.
The displaced link between forced migration and aesthetic displacement, through
violence, is almost iconographically displayed by the close-up of an old man asking
“Why should I go?”—in response to which he is told he has been named a “landless
refugee”—a term the old man does not understand—by “media persons.” Ghatak’s
aesthetic intervention documents the political involvement of the refugees who exter-
nalize their experiences, at a remove from how they have been already named by
others, into a cultural form other than the mass-mediated representation of their sta-
tus in the press. The initial displacement, where the subjectivity of a person is named
by others (the media) is doubled by a film staging this initial displacement through a
secondary one—between film and theater.
This dialectic of internalization and externalization, in strikingly Hegelian form, is
marked by displacement. Every externalization (through the play, and, as we shall
see, the film) of migration displaces migration’s concrete embodiment in film and on
stage. The idea of the phenomenon of migrancy fails to coincide with its concrete
particularity (“landless refugee?”). The constitutive failure of a neat fit between
migratory aesthetics and aesthetic migration at the diegetic level results in displace-
ments that at a second level of theoretical discourse provide another vantage point
from which the relationship between the two can be perceived. This productivity at
the level of discursive analysis is triggered by visuality in the film and the play itself.
In numerous instances, the subject matter of the play performatively reproduces
and referentially displaces the experiences of the theater troupe. There is thus a two-
way traffic between the content of the play being staged and those who are involved
in its staging, and this relationship between the play and those who stage it is
constructed through unexpected deployments of images. An example: Bhrigu and
Anasuya are engaged in a conversation shown through a series of close-ups.
Suddenly, this back and forth of close-up images is interrupted by a close-up of an old
woman with tears in her eyes. In traditional film language, the use of a similar shot
would imply that the woman occupies the same space as the two interlocutors. Soon
though, we realize that this shot is not closing the sequence between the two prota-
gonists, or implying that the woman occupies the same space as they do. Rather, it
is a displacement. The shot is linked to a completely different space, that of an audi-
ence watching a play, in this case the theater where Shakuntala is being staged.
Ghatak does not provide any clue to this displacement, such as a medium or long
establishing shot denoting a change of scene. The sudden appearance of the
woman’s face, to which we have not been introduced before, gives one something of
a shock, and gives rise to the questions, “Who is she?” “Where is she?” Only after

the close-up of her face do we realize that we have been displaced into another
space—that of the theater where the play is being staged.
In a crucial section of the play, when a child has been killed, the mother says,
“They killed my son with their feet. Doesn’t your blood get heated . . .? You young are
sitting idle.” The extreme close-up of the old low-caste woman, we now realize,
records her response to watching the scene above (reminiscent of Eisenstein’s
famous close-up of the mother in Battleship Potemkin).
After the play ends, the old woman approaches Bhrigu, the head of the troupe, and
offers him the medal awarded to her son, also a performer, who was killed in the
upheavals during the Bengal famine, so that the medal can be sold to fund further
restagings of the play. The on-stage theatrical plot is mirrored, after the play, off-
stage, where death, injustice and art coincide and are displaced. The coincidence
takes place in the conjunction produced by the camera between the mother robbed
of her son on stage and the old woman in the audience. The displacement works on
two levels. The plot in the play (murder of the son) is displaced off-stage, where the
old woman’s loss of her son is brought up. The response to it is also a displacement—
whereas on stage, the response to the son’s murder is revenge, off-stage, the old
woman offers the posthumously awarded medal to Bhrigu to fund further stagings of
the play. This double displacement is formally represented in visual terms by the
way the play and its environs are presented. The extract from the play is shot
frontally, capturing the typical perspective of an audience member in front of a
proscenium stage. The camera then zooms out revealing that the protagonists on the
stage are being watched by the old woman. The sudden change of perspective dis-
places the shot-countershot movement of classical cinema through the extremity of
the close up of the woman, which eliminates any background. One’s initial puzzle-
ment (Who is this woman? What is she looking at? Bhrigu and Anasuya?) results
from her not having been introduced through a medium or long shot, as one might
expect, that would have revealed the object of her upturned eyes. The sequence
displaces the theatrical, frontal mode of visuality with that of a filmic close-up, the
latter itself displacing the rules of traditional filmmaking (long to medium to close to
extreme close-up). At the level of form and content, as well as between the elements
of migration and aesthetics, an overlap (close-up) is followed by a displacement
(spatial change from house to theater) that reconfigures each level and element.
The displacement within the film, and its relationship to the play, as analyzed
above, moves to another level of displacement in the reception of the film itself. In
the film, the play is sabotaged, partly by one of the sponsors, Shanta (Anasuya’s rich
aunt), who buys a large number of tickets that she promises to sell for the premiere,
which she then withholds from the public in a fit of egoistical rage. Rowdy audience

members then disrupt the performance. This episode in the film is related to the
reception of the film itself. Ghatak made the film after a rancorous split from the IPTA
and the Communist Party of India’s growing political orthodoxy, and the “cultural” line
of Soviet-inspired aesthetic policies. His experiences, not just of migration, but of the
stultifying effect of institutional Marxism on aesthetic experimentation, becomes the
subject of the film (the opening scene of the film is a staging of a play to which
Shanta snorts derisively, “Ha!! Drama . . .” to which a member of her troupe asks,
“Do you know the name . . .? ‘Experiment’?”), a derogatory comment that evokes
Brecht’s own notion of theater as an experiment, which resulted in his Lehrstücke.
The film was seen by party apparatchiks as a direct assault on them, and they
responded by buying up tickets and disrupting the performances. After a very suc-
cessful first week, the disruptions sabotaged further showings and the film closed as
a failure. Ironically, and predictably, it was only when Ghatak’s oeuvre was screened
in Paris in 1983, and uproariously welcomed by the critics of Cahiers du Cinema, that
interest in his work awakened in India. The fate of the film mirrors post facto that of
the play. At all three levels (diegesis of play, and film, and extra-diegetic reception of
film), the conjunction of performative effectivity and representational failure secure
the productivity of Ghatak’s art as an intervention in the social space distorted by
migration.
Displacements between Sound and Image

The French embrace of Ghatak was predicated on his juxtaposition of sound and
image, reminiscent (to the Cahiers critics, that is) of Robert Bresson, Jacques Tati,
and Jean-Marie Straub. This relationship between sound and image operates on at
least two levels in Ghatak’s entire corpus (theater, film, etc.) At the intravisual level,
Ghatak was the first Indian director whose visual aesthetic caused puzzlement in
India, to the extent that it broke with the static frontality that had dominated the influ-
ence of Parsi theater’s proscenium-stage visuality on early Indian film, and that it was
markedly different from the style of his influential contemporary Satyajit Ray, owing
predominantly (though not exclusively) to Italian neorealists like Vittorio de Sica.7 The
divergence from both frontality and the static absent-presence of the camera as
recording-instrument produced a dizzying displacement of the spectatorial position
through a range of strategic choices. Traditional medium-shot frontality is often
skewed through angular camera placement, while the frame/composition was often
off-center, partly excising objects that should have been centralized.
Geeta Kapur (2000) rightly rejects the Indian critique of Ghatak’s strategy as being
simply melodramatic, suggesting that the effect of such camera work was to contin-
ually displace a fixed spectatorial position. Displacement at the level of content,
I would argue (the refugee issue and political upheavals are the subject of a majority
of Ghatak’s films) is externalized into a mode of errant visuality. My claim here is not

that the content determines the form, however, for this externalization is a displace-
ment of the content too, motivated less by a naive mimetic desire than by a peda-
gogic one—Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt having exercised Ghatak’s visual strategies.
The visual strategies of displacing the spectator’s positions and undermining narra-
tive through visual non-sequentiality overlap with and displace the thematic concerns
of forced displacement—they link an aesthetics of migration to a migratory aesthet-
ics. This visual aesthetic is linked, as both Indian and French critics noticed, to the
audio track that accompanies the image. This relationship is again multiple—both
overlapping and estranging. For example, when Bhrigu and Anasuya are standing at
the end of the railway line on the bank of the Padma River that separates East from
West Bengal, they hear a song sung by a group of fishermen. The song reminds
Anasuya of her mother, who brought her up on the other side of the river, and impels
her to recount to Bhrigu her past across the river, and her mother’s death during the
bloody Noakhali riots now made famous by Gandhi’s visit. The song brings back mem-
ories of a past located on the other side of the river of what was a united region
(Bengal—in Bengali, “Bangladesh,” the land (“desh”) of Bengal, not the name of the
state of Bangladesh, which comes into existence two decades after this conversa-
tion). The song invokes in her a temporal and spatial displacement, but one to which
Bhrigu responds by bringing up another piece of music—the Komal Gandhar. This
raga metaphorizes Bengal for him, feminized as a sweet yet melancholy girl, which he
explicitly relates to Rabindranath Tagore’s poem and Bishnu Dey’s 1951 version of it.
Anasuya’s memory of her mother’s murder and her own childhood segues into
Bhrigu’s remembrance of a real mother and a metaphorical one (Bengal as a girl).
Sound (the fishermen’s song) triggers a series of different memories, and further
songs and poems; this displacement precludes any easy overlap between art and
theme (migration).
Visual displacement (on the wrong bank of a now dividing river that connected two
parts of one land) is interlaced with musical connections that work contrapuntally, the
memories of Bhrigu and Anasuya being interlaced in this segment of the film which
draws connections between them while marking the specific difference of each. The
contrapuntal simultaneity of sound and image captures the non-correspondence of
the connections which make the migrant human subject.8 Interestingly, Bhrigu’s femi-
nization of Bengal as a young girl is followed in the film by Anasuya elaborating on her
mother’s desperate observation that instead of men, it is now up to young women to
save Bengal. Anasuya then changes her mother’s gender-specific words by saying that
men like Bhrigu embody his mother’s hope for saving Bengal. Bhrigu’s feminization of
Bengal as a sweet, melancholy girl (Komal Gandhar) recurs with him being feminized
and put in position of avenger, a clear invocation here to the double modality of
Durga/Kali, as avenging and nurturing goddess of Bengal. The striking eye make-up of
Anasuya, compared to that of other women in the film, evokes Kali’s most common

visual representation. The chain of displacements triggered by the song move through
nation and gender, switching the meaning of both (Bengal as woman, Bhrigu as
woman, Anusuya as Kali), which makes any fixed typology of realist sound to iconic
image to referential meaning impossible. Geeta Kapur puts the point succinctly, argu-
ing that “mythologies, as also travesties of the divine, are so structurally embedded in
social practices that it needs a many-pronged narrative to loosen their hold. Short of
that, realism can become a reformist procedure for sifting the accumulated bad con-
science of society” (2000, 260; emphasis added). Further, the vast array of audio
accompaniments, and also the frequent use of music as a protagonist rather than
overlayed companion to the image, eschews any typology—including IPTA group
songs, Baul songs associated with that region of Bengal, tribal marriage songs, and
the pivotal refrain Dohai Ali (“Mercy, Ali!”), which also closes the film.
These series of displacements approach the question of migration through the
construction of a particular modality of art—in this case, the making of a film.
Movement and migration are not just the content of the film, which can be repre-
sented “realistically”; rather, the mode of presenting the experience of migration
operates through a series of displacements—between the play and the film, between
sound and image, and the film and its reception.
Conclusion
For sound, the last external material which poetry keeps,
is in poetry no longer the feeling of sonority itself, but . . .
a sign of the Idea which has become concrete in itself.
(G.W.F. Hegel 1975, 90)
In the Aesthetics, Hegel’s search for the most perfect embodiment of the Idea forces
him to construct a narrative. In a sense, it is a narrative of the migration of the Idea
(Geist) since its concrete embodiment moves through the different arts and ends in
poetry. Poetry then, for Hegel, transcends “the last external material,” which is
sound, since sound directly becomes a sign of the Idea itself. In Komal Gandhar, as
the preceding analysis demonstrates, the poem, however, is not the end point, the
culmination of the Idea of migration without any material remainder. Rather, the poem
itself becomes the starting point for a series of multiple displacements or migrations.
Tagore’s poem transformed into Bishnu Dey’s, reappears through sound and image,
as the soundtrack in the episode by the river, and also as the occasion for divergent
memories of loss and displacement. Sound here (as musical soundtrack and songs)
and its relation to image, concretizes, not some unified idea of migration, but instead
configures a network of specific, multiple and individual experiences of migration.
Sound and image in the film preclude the perfect synthesis of Idea (Migration) and
art form. Life’s alienation from Spirit is developed, in Hegel, through a narrative of

aesthetic migration. But what if a poem about alienation multiplies and displaces the
contradictions between Idea and Art it is supposed to reconcile? Poetry’s concretiza-
tion of the idea of migration (through Tagore’s melancholy metaphorics of the loss of
the homeland) is only graspable when it migrates into the materiality of film.
Appendix: Komal Gandhar

I have named her Komal Gandhar
in my mind.
She would sit stunned if she learnt about it,
would ask smilingly, “What does it mean?”
That the meaning is unfathomable is its most certain meaning.
The world is about work and vocation,
It’s about good and bad—
Things with which she has made acquaintances with others.
I watch, sitting by her side
how she has infused her surroundings with a peculiar melody.
She knows not her own self.
At the spot where her Beloved’s altar is placed
an agony-incense burns by His feet.
From there, a shadow of smoke engulfs the eyes,
like clouds masking the moon—
Covering the smile a little.
Her voice carries a fading strain of melancholy.
She is unaware that is the strain which
binds the strings of her life’s tanpura.
The notes of Bhairavi permeate all her
words and actions.
I cannot conclude why.
That’s the reason I call her Komal Gandhar—
It is hard to comprehend why
teardrops glide into the heart
when she lifts her eyes.
Rabindranath Tagore, circa 1893–1900.

My thanks to Bishwati Ghosh for her translation.

Notes
1. An earlier version of this essay was 6. The term is critically deployed in Walter
published in Grant Watson and Anshuman Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer,” in
Dasgupta (eds.), Santhal Family: Positions Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical
around an Indian Sculpture (Antwerp: Museum Writings, Peter Demetz, ed. (New York:
van Hedendaagse Kunst, 2008). Schocken Books, 1978), p. 228. Benjamin
suggests that “the concept of technique
2. Keya Ganguly’s Cinema, Emergence and the provides the dialectical starting point from
films of Satyajit Ray (Berkeley: University of which the unfruitful antithesis of form and
California Press, 2010) is exemplary of this content can be surpassed” (222). This twisting
close attention to form in addressing issues of of Hegel’s logic in the Aesthetics is significant.
modernity. Her book-length study of Satyajit Technical experimentation that violates the
Ray’s film also contributes a novel perspective propriety of specific art forms, which comprises
in film studies of not just Ray, but also Ritwik Benjamin’s understanding of “technique,”
Ghatak (the subject of this essay) by relates directly to Ghatak’s productive
interrogating and extending the temptation to displacement of the resources of sound and
slot different film-aesthetic techniques into image in film, as the next section will show.
art-historical paradigms such as “modernism.”
7. Keya Ganguly (2010) has considerably
3. See also J.L. Austin’s How To Do Things With widened the perspectives through which Ray’s
Words (1975) and Jacques Derrida’s Limited own work may be understood, linking it not just
Inc. (1988). to realism but also to modernism.
4. For Jameson, this “quasi-material ‘feeling 8. See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
tone’ which floats above the narrative which (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 59, for an
only intermittently realizes it” is literally apt for explanation of contrapuntal analysis. Said
a consideration of the music and songs in the convincingly argues that C.L.R. James’s The
film, though as it will be argued below, Black Jacobins orchestrates a contrapuntal
“realizing the theme” is also accompanied by a reading between Toussaint L’Ouverture and
failure to adequately represent it in the Napoleon. He then orchestrates such a musical
materiality of sound. relationship between James and Toussaint, on
the one hand, and Ranajit Guha and S.H. Alatas
5. The presence of these influences in his on the other. See especially pages 297–316. In
artistic work is discernible explicitly in Ritwik my argument, Ghatak’s film orchestrates such a
Ghatak, Rows and Rows of Fences (Calcutta: contrapuntal orchestration between and within
Seagull, 2000). For an excellent critical sound and image.
assessment of Ghatak’s film oeuvre, see
Haimanti Banerjee, Ritwik Kumar Ghatak: A
Monograph (Pune: National Film Archive, 1985).
Works Cited
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Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Peter Demetz,
1975. trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken
Books, 1978.
Banerjee, Haimanti. Ritwik Kumar Ghatak:
A Monograph. Pune: National Film Archive, Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. London and New
1985. York: Routledge, 2004.

Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Jameson, Fredric. “Reification and Utopia in
Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Chicago: Mass Culture.” Social Text 1 (1979):
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Ganguly, Keya. Cinema, Emergence and the Kapur, Geeta. When was Modernism? New
Films of Satyajit Ray. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000.
University of California Press, 2010.
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized.
Ghatak, Ritwik. Rows and Rows of Fences. Trans. Howard Greenfeld. New York: Orion
Calcutta: Seagull, 1978. Press, 1965.
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Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution.
———. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. London: Chatto and Windus, 1961.
Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Filmography
Ghatak, Ritwik. Komal Gandhar. Chitrakalpa,

1961.

II. Becoming Visible:
Display as Tactics
Migratory Aesthetics: Art and

Politics beyond Identity
Jill Bennett
ABSTRACT
This essay examines how “migratory aesthetics” expresses key dynamics in contem-
porary postcolonial culture and offers an alternative to identity politics. It demon-
strates how migratory aesthetics is embodied in key international art exhibitions,
from Kassel Documenta to the Contemporary Commonwealth show in Melbourne.
Within the terms of identity politics, exhibitions function to represent specific
groups, and also to constitute spaces in which disenfranchised or new “hybrid”
identities might flourish. But the exhibiting of identity does not, in and of itself,
enfranchise or facilitate participation. The institutional model of multiculturalism that
simply promotes the representation of diverse identities as add-ons to mainstream
culture is a static one, which does not address the issue of interaction; hence,
“migrant” cultures may be acknowledged on their own terms, without any change to
the “mainstream.” Migratory aesthetics, like other mobilisations of aesthetics that
focus on connectivity and relationality, may be understood as a response to the
limitations of identity politics in both institutional and aesthetic terms. An attempt to
shift “identities” out of a static space into a dynamic set of relationships, it promotes
new ways of understanding intercultural and transnational histories as well as new
ways of imagining the future.
In the very moment when finally Britain convinced itself it had to decolonize, it had
to get rid of them, we all came back home. As they hauled down the flag [in the
colonies], we got on the banana boat and sailed right into London . . . They had ruled
Migratory Aesthetics: Art and Politics beyond Identity | 109

the world for 300 years and, at last, when they had made up their minds to climb out
of the role, at least the others ought to have stayed out there in the rim, behaved
themselves, gone somewhere else, or found some other client state. But no, they had
always said that this [London] was really home, the streets were paved with gold,
and bloody hell, we just came to check out whether that was so or not.
Stuart Hall (Hall 1991, 24; Brown 1995, 271)
There would be a sign; dreams end . . . Then there would be paths and they would
get jumbled, and bones, and they all get jumbled, and all of them would combine and
then there would be a tall tree, that, according to the map was red.
Kathy Acker (Acker 1997, 271)
Identity
Bennett 1 Kathy Acker – Installation Overview
A galleon on the high seas, captained by the Exquisite Pirate, fashioned after Kathy
Acker’s Pussy, King of the Pirates, the quintessential outlaw living “free of authority.”
And the Reverend on Ice—a headless skater, fabricated—like the pirate—from cloth
fragments. The pirate and her ship—along with the skeletal figure draped across the
bow—are rendered as a vast felt collage, advancing across the walls surrounding
the Reverend’s frozen pond; his colonial dress is constructed from African printed
cloth (that turns out to be made in the Netherlands).1 “They would all get jumbled,”
as Acker puts it; this is why the pirate, adorned with booty from other ships, her
110 | Jill Bennett

authority not granted by the state but imposed by force, is a motif emblematic of
postmodern appropriation.
In a room in the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, 2006), these two action
figures come together in an exuberant and somewhat macabre dance in the midst of
what is, in essence, a show about migration (fig. 1). Specifically, the exhibition,
Contemporary Commonwealth, CC06 for short, focuses on the territories of the
British Commonwealth—a union with little local significance or purchase on its
notional membership, other than through association with the Commonwealth
Games that are the occasion for this cultural celebration. Given the uncomfortable
specter of Empire, however, the exhibition eschews the notion of a given or shared
Commonwealth identity, focusing instead on works that describe an array of journeys
within or between Commonwealth nations. Many of these works engage in the play-
ful debunking of postcolonial separation evoked by Stuart Hall in the above anec-
dote, which points to the fact that immigration presents a profound challenge to the
privileged sense of identity at the heart of the imperial nation.
In fact, in the terms of this exhibition, migration displaces identity. If postcolonial-
ist exhibitions have in recent history provided occasions for the articulation of new or
previously suppressed identities, CC06 aligns more readily with a post-identity poli-
tics that focuses on relations and connections—and hence, potentially, on the emer-
gence of contingent communities that are not grounded in any clearly defined sense
of identity. Rather than predefining the collective, CC06 implicitly locates the ties that
bind in the aesthetic process, so that relations emerge within the exhibition; politics
do not simply inform the exhibition, but are enacted through it at the level of material
and sensate processes, and community is posited as something fluid, not yet
named, potentially existing outside inscribed identity. In other words, community—as
a form of collective enunciation—is an event realized through aesthetics.
When conceived within the terms of identity politics, exhibitions function to repre-
sent specific groups, and also to constitute spaces or conditions in which disenfran-
chised or new “hybrid” identities might flourish. But the exhibiting of identity does
not, in and of itself, enfranchise or facilitate democratic participation. The institu-
tional model of multiculturalism that simply promotes the representation of diverse
identities as add-ons to mainstream culture is in fact a fairly static one, which does
not address the issue of interaction; hence, “migrant” cultures might be acknowl-
edged on their own terms, if not understood as affecting, participating within, and
radically changing the “mainstream.” In other words, the “migrant art” exhibition may
exist within the institution in relative separation. In this regard, the recent turn to the
dynamics of interconnection (an issue that is fundamental to both politics and aes-
thetics) might be understood as a response to the limitations of identity politics in
both institutional and aesthetic terms—an attempt to move beyond and around identity;
to literally shift “identities” out of a static space into a dynamic set of relationships,

whether through “relational aesthetics,” “dialogical aesthetics” or other mobilizations
of the concept of participation and democracy in art.
Curatorial practice is generally a barometer of cultural theory, which it assimilates
and turns over with the rapidity that new event design requires, but this trend should
not simply be dismissed as the translation of theory into practice. In an important
sense, the shift away from identity politics in art and exhibition practice allows a turn
toward aesthetics in politics and marks a decisive break with the conception of art
as representative of group identity. To some extent, the notion of national represen-
tation is no longer associated with discreet modes of aesthetic expression (work in
the national pavilions of the Venice Biennale, for example, rarely embodies national
identity in any straightforward sense). The issue here is not one of content, however.
Art may express a felt experience of community or belonging (even of a flag or
national symbol2), but aesthetic operations do not by nature proceed from preformed
identity categories, nor do they align with the boundaries of such categories. As Brian
Massumi argues, expression is not an attribute of groups of persons, but a process-
based inquiry that operates on its own terms (2002, 253).
It can be argued, of course, that the instrumental use of art—or its institutional
cooption—need not compromise its aesthetic ambition. Exhibition titles, after all, often
simply comprise generic descriptors of regions or countries, pointing to the diversity
within, and I am reading CC06 in this light. Giorgio Agamben, however, alerts us to
the slippery slope of identity politics, which he suggests colludes unwittingly with the
politics of state institutions. The state, he argues, is comfortable with an expression of
identity in as much as coherently defined identities can be annexed or contained:
[T]he State can recognize any claim for identity – even that of a State identity within
the State . . . What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singulari-
ties form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any
representable condition of belonging. (1993, 86)
In this way, multicultural policy is easily espoused by liberal democracies as a cele-
bration of diverse cultural, ethnic, and religious identities, united—and regulated—
under one umbrella. Yet the rejection of identity as an organizing trope makes for
interesting postcolonial politics. It stands in opposition to the notion that decoloniza-
tion occasions an expression of pre-existing—or previously suppressed—bonds.
Instead, as Jean-Luc Nancy has indicated, the emergence of decolonized communi-
ties necessitates a new way of thinking about community formation. Formation in this
sense is the operative term, emphasizing dynamic process (being-in-common at any
given moment) rather than foundation. And it is this process that contemporary aes-
thetic practice embodies—particularly in the curatorial domain where the nature of a
project is to work across and between art works.
My argument, then, is this: that the shift from identity to relationality, and toward
an exploration of communality as a process, is a key development in terms of political
112 | Jill Bennett

aesthetics. It is fundamentally a more aesthetic project than is identity politics, inso-

far as it allows that a politics may be derived directly from aesthetic process and
description—that aesthetics is a particular modality of the political rather than a
form of mediation. The aesthetic “entity” in question is the exhibition—the coming
together of multiple art works in a given event. To understand the politics of such an
event in its full aesthetic terms we must look beyond the naming of the collective (the
Commonwealth is a case in point) and start to conceive of connectivity in present
and forward-looking terms.
How, then, do exhibitions occasion new collective enunciations with their own
political effectivity? A show at the Witte de With (Rotterdam) in 2005 pursued this
question by focusing on the interstices between works on display, and by implicitly
proposing this space as one in which the coercive aspects of identity politics, fixed
terms, and injunctions might be circumvented. That exhibition’s aphoristic title, Be
What You Want But Stay Where You Are, gestures on the one hand to Agamben’s the-
ory of the state’s interest in identity (be what you want but stay within the boundaries
of the state) and, on the other hand, to Hall’s characterization of the colonial fantasy
of separation (be what you want but stay outside). It thereby renders explicit the tacit
understanding informing many other contemporary exhibitions: communities are nei-
ther structured nor contained by governmental process. To this end, the question of
what art emerges from any particular nation—or, for that matter, from a political
aggregation like the Commonwealth—is meaningless. Not just because art (that
might be social, cultural, political) is not an expression of nation, but because its
function within the relational space of an exhibition is greater than the representative
one implied in such a model. Art is as much about what Agamben calls the “coming
community” as one that pre-exists or can cohere within the boundaries of nation. It
does not offer up a representable condition of belonging so much as an account of
process and movement: new sets of conjunctions, a surprise event.
Hence, CC06 inevitably became a show grounded in the expression of processes
of migration, both as subjective experience and critical intervention—a far cry from the
traditional showcase of national cultures that a “Commonwealth exhibition” would
once have implied. There are works in adjacent rooms that describe—with greater
precision—particular journeys in their subjective, historical, or political dimensions
(Isaac Julien’s Paradise Omeros or Berni Searle’s Home and Away) or works that expli-
citly trace migratory routes (Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs’s Seeker tracks the
movement of people around the globe with animated data visuals), but no juxtaposi-
tion that is quite as exhilarating as that of Sally Smart’s pirate and Yinka Shonibare’s
reverend. Both figures are reflexively read as embodiments of postcoloniality, incor-
porating evidence of past encounters, yet they are not so much representations as
interventions. They burst incongruously into a contemporary space—witty fantasies of
postcolonial reappropriation; an instance of migratory aesthetics in action.

The pirate and the reverend embody aspects of migration as an animating force:
a dynamic that activates relationships, cuts a swathe across history and reorients
the works in the exhibition (energized by resonances at all levels: formal, material,
political, sexual, rhetorical . . .). Smart’s pirate constitutes a motif of seafaring explo-
ration (colonial or migratory) that in the local political context evokes the paranoia of
a settler culture obsessed with border control and the specter of boat people; the
threat is mockingly embodied in the exuberantly lawless pirate and the skeletal
bodies aboard her ship, playing off Shonibare’s elegant headless torso, as well as
eX de Medici’s resplendent watercolors of camouflaged weapons and skulls on the
opposite wall.
The capture and transformation of a pervasive contemporary political sentiment
within this dynamic conjunction of works generates a current of affect that runs
through the exhibition. Fear, anxiety, and suspicion—the negative affects, frequently
mobilized in contemporary politics, are actively toyed with in these works. Yet these
are not expressive works in any conventional sense; “characters” are suggested
purely by the animation of fabric, and affects are not sensations or emotions adher-
ing to them or describing a response to a past event. Both the pirate and the rev-
erend are transient figures, seeming to emerge in the present space from their
respective costume dramas; the skater gliding onto the ice, and the ship arriving at
the shoreline provide the quintessential “big entrance”—an overture to the specta-
cle. They both evince particular cultural histories and migratory routes, yet if their
function here were merely to represent those histories, this would have made CC06
a far less adventurous, overly museological endeavor. Instead, by the select inclusion
of these dramatic costume pieces, CC06 commences with a moment of pantomime
splendor, creating an event out of bizarre constructions, not really representative of
any particular place or people, summoned to this place from a divergent and fragmen-
tary Commonwealth.
The affect generated by and circulated through these works is not generated by
historical narrative in this sense. It is largely a function of the exhibition’s imbrication
with the contemporary. How can we think about migration, arrival by sea, here in the
Australia of 2006 (the Howard government in power) without confronting the reality of
the refugee situation, and a politics tempered by “terror”? Hence, the orchestration
of work by Shonibare, Smart, De Medici, constitutes vectors for emotions that are
generated around borders and migration. Rather than any claim to document the real,
it is this capacity to activate and channel affect that gives the exhibition its political
edge.
Collective Enunciation and Surprise

The question of how we deal with the fear, anxiety, and paranoia at large in contem-
porary politics is a pressing one for artists and theorists. It is not enough to mock
114 | Jill Bennett

and deride, or to substitute rationality for affect, since paranoia is an operative

politics—a way of reading with strategic implications, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has
demonstrated. It is marked, she notes, by “a distinctively rigid relation to temporality,
at once anticipatory and retroactive, averse to all surprise”; characterized by an
extreme faith in knowing as exposure, and hence, in rigid historiographic principles
(2003, 146). Insofar as it looks forward, it identifies only threat—the bad surprise.
Everything must be foreseen, traced to its antecedent causes, or predicted and pre-
vented (hence the political ascendency of the “precautionary” principle as a ration-
ale for the pre-emptive strike) (Bennett 2008). Hope, Sedgwick argues, emerges from
relinquishing the paranoid anxiety that no horror shall ever come “as new,” and from
the energies that constellate in organizing the fragments and part objects one
encounters and creates. These are the very energies that are engaged by the mate-
rial structure of an exhibition. Curatorial practice, in this sense, might be understood
as the organization of fragments into new assemblages—structures that create
space in which to realize not only that the future can be different from the present,
but that the past might have unfolded differently (2003, 146). Aesthetics—and par-
ticularly migratory aesthetics—thus has a more complex relationship to temporality
and to the impetus for truth. An expression of movement within the fault lines of
inhospitable territories, migratory aesthetics is not foreboding like the paranoid imag-
inary. By nature, it embodies a process of remaking, flux, and mutation that recog-
nizes the lineaments of other possibilities. Exhibitions like CC06 or 2Move exhibit
the knowledge that surprise may be either bad (traumatic) or good. As much as the
paranoid imagination is relentlessly bleak, migratory aesthetics seeks out the new,
even as it relates the darkest stories of colonization, division, and exclusion. In other
words, although “it” is not a singular movement, its inherent qualities of movement
and transition are at odds with the paranoid structural aversion to surprise—to a
future unknown.
I am discussing migratory aesthetics here as something that is realized as an
event—a collective enunciation—within a given exhibition. Hence, the curatorial
process entails orchestrating a formal dynamic that enables assemblages and
their multiple relationalities to cohere. Meaning emerges from aesthetic or formal
resonance operating across art works and in the interplay with the politics of the
moment. The works under discussion do not seek to “represent” the contemporary
political scene, but in a particular configuration absorb and channel a politics over-
shadowed by the refugee crisis, which then finds affective resonance in other pieces:
poetic allegories of migration and settlement, such as John Gillies’s Divide (a black-
and-white video evoking colonial Australia and the biblical journey into Canaan), oper-
ating in a more subdued register to describe the upheaval and turmoil, flowing
inexorably—and exponentially—from displacement. Such work grounds the exuber-
ant affect of the Shonibare/Smart room, so that the high point of theatricality does

not simply exhilarate but intensifies and subsides as it resonates with events staged
elsewhere.
Real migratory stories—real histories of invasion, trauma, and the violence of
separation—are invoked at different points in the exhibition. What place is there,
ultimately, for fantasy characters, or for the theatricality of Shonibare’s masked ball
in this scenario? When does the politics of aestheticization diminish by comparison
with the documentary style with its self-evident relation to the real? The answer might
be—paradoxically—when it masquerades as realism or lays claim to truthful repre-
sentation. More specifically, in this context, when it stands apart from the larger
collectivity as an end in itself. Here the pirate and the reverend are themselves part
objects in an assemblage that allows us to imagine that the colonial past might have
been otherwise. The fanfare they engender immediately debunks any claim to serious
history writing, displacing our engagement onto a more complex interplay of affect
that generates transversal links with other works. They are all about surprise.
The success of this curatorial juxtaposition is grounded in the fact that meaning
arises from aesthetic process, as opposed to simply content or form. Unifying work
at the level of content leads inevitably toward didacticism—an insistence on mean-
ing and a privileging of interpretation over aesthetic experience. On the other hand,
formalist curating is apt to void artwork of particular and operative meaning (politics),
promoting pan cultural visual resonance at the expense of cultural specificity. This
tension has been in play ever since the arena of contemporary art became “global”
rather than merely “western.” The landmark exhibition Magiciens de la terre (Paris,
1989) was a watershed in this regard, combining contemporary practice from diverse
cultural traditions. Yet its curator Jean Hubert Martin was widely criticized for certain
juxtapositions: the sand drawings performed by Yuendumu Aboriginal people in a
space dominated by Richard Long’s mud drawing, for example. Quite apart from the
implied hierarchy of the “hang,” such works were imbued with a monumental (and
representative) status, “talking to each other” across a cultural divide. Almost two
decades later, progressive curators readily play upon such material connections.
Documenta 12 (Kassel, 2007) works precisely in these terms: a Russian fountain
made from salt, installed alongside a Chinese wax waterfall or porcelain wave; a
video referencing Japanese bondage and binding practices juxtaposed with sculp-
tural installations featuring rope or cord—formal ensembles, each embedded with
multiple political and cultural significations, prompting different interpretative possi-
bilities as they are evoked in various constellations.3 Here, there is no longer any
suggestion of a universal symbolism—a pan-culturalism reduced to its formal com-
ponents so that it is voided of cultural meaning.
I would argue that, in an exhibition like Documenta 12, relationality is thought
through not just at the level of theme but in terms of a dynamic flow that works on
something immanent in the art work itself that is activated by connection. In describing
116 | Jill Bennett

this connection, we should avoid replacing form and content designations with an
account of relationality that simply privileges audience encounter at the level of
individual interactivity. The key issue is how works are activated in such a way as to
produce a collective enunciation—a politics of the contemporary. The difference
between Magiciens de la terre and—for example—either Documenta 12 or CC06 lies
in the extent to which relationality in aesthetics is understood as a political expres-
sion in the moment. By this I mean as a temporal unfolding or coextension of diverse
works that envelops and conducts a politics of the present.
There is a fine line here that reflects Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between
major and minor literature. “Living and writing, art and life, are opposed only from the
point of view of major literature,” because major work is, within the terms of its insti-
tutionalization, profoundly individuated (1986, 41). However social or personal, it is
configured as an exceptional expression and thereby removed from the sphere of the
collective. This is what happens when “great” works in their own right are juxtaposed;
they affirm their own authority and allow viewers to make only visual or interpretative
connections. A new mode of curatorial practice—of which Documenta 12 is a prime
example—might recast work as minoritarian by locating it in a less competitive envi-
ronment where it can function as part of a collective enunciation. The key dimension
to this process is not simply to allow “life” in, as either documentary represen-
tation or spectator interaction. It is to understand contemporary art as existing and
operating within the contemporary world—so that the exhibiting space is always an
extension of the outside: the local politics, the world. Politics arises out of the
configuration of art in this unbounded contemporary space, rather than from institu-
tional designation: making the exhibition contemporary, rather than institutionalizing
contemporary art.
In this sense, the politics of art is always contingent rather than predetermined or
foreclosed. In response to the question of how art propounds a politics, Rancière has
argued that, “It is necessary to reverse the way in which the problem is generally
formulated. It is up to the various forms of politics to appropriate for their proper use,
the modes of presentation or the means of establishing explanatory sequences pro-
duced by artistic practices rather than the other way around” (2004, 65). As I have
argued elsewhere, this entails that the event in art is constituted as a kind of virtual
event, amenable to different actualities (Bennett 2005). In other words, rather than
merely giving account of an event that has already happened (and which may have
informed the work’s production and form), it serves to generate a set of possibilities,
which may in turn inform political thinking with regard to particular circumstances.
This level of political operativity may be activated (or conversely, deadened) when
work is staged in different configurations in different locations.
Perhaps in some sense the “test” of contemporary art—of its contemporaneity—
is its capacity to be invested in this sense; to constitute vectors that link events in a

new configuration. “Migratory” art is exemplary in this regard insofar as it embodies
movement and transition, making aesthetics political, by shifting it—literally mobiliz-
ing it—into new sets of relations. This politics of possibility rests on a dynamic
conception of relationality in art as something more than the closed circuits of
interactivity: relationality as always contemporary, as enfolding “life,” in the sense
that minor literature is part of a collective fabric rather than a separable sphere of
art. Works in an exhibition are, in this way, not simply juxtaposed and rendered sub-
ject to comparative analysis, but simultaneously mobilized. CC06 encompasses the
history of global migration: movement across a vast area, spanning five continents,
and the decades since former colonies achieved independence. Within this, it com-
prises an orchestration of simultaneous movement, of a collective that has no exis-
tence, no visibility. The question is not what this is, what political entity gave rise to
this coming together, but what this does, collectively, in the present. Politics is not
written into these works but arises from their mutual aesthetic dynamics: from a
collective enunciation unbound to a collective. To this end, the theoretical analysis of
art needs to offer a precise account of the nature of aesthetic perception, of the
substance of connection and the flow of affect.
Aesthetics
Here, I am extending the title concept of Mieke Bal and Miguel Hernández-Navarro’s
exhibition Migratory Aesthetics to describe another show, CC06, reading that title
as indicative of a wider phenomenon in contemporary art. Migratory Aesthetics
announces itself as an operative concept rather than a generic descriptor—a value-
added concept that arises from the collected art works and the connections between
them. This tracing of a concept in aesthetic practice reprises one of Bal’s recurrent
quests to derive thought from art; to treat art, not as an object of cultural studies,
but as a mode of doing cultural studies, and, crucially, of setting the terms of a cul-
tural inquiry (Bal 2000). More than the sum of art works about migration, Migratory
Aesthetics invokes aesthetics in the strong sense, as an epistemic project, rather
than simply in the weaker sense, implying the aesthetic treatment of objects.
To qualify aesthetics as migratory is to evoke an aesthetics conditioned by migra-
tion. Yet within contemporary art discourse, there is a surprising reluctance to
conceive of aesthetics—the theory of aesthetic form, dynamics, behavior, and
perception—as tempered by cultural shifts. Art itself has a well-defined relationship
to contemporaneity (modernism, after all, implies its embodiment). Hence, the over-
lapping themes of migration, globalization, and postcoloniality are predominant in
many biennials and major international art exhibitions of the past decade and a half.
Yet aesthetics—the discourse that could/should make general claims (based on the
specifics of art’s engagement) for what the aesthetic contributes to an understand-
ing of contemporary culture—has been curtailed by an art theoretical tendency to
118 | Jill Bennett

entrench a form-content distinction that construes social and political issues as

content matters, antithetical to the formal concerns of aesthetics. To the extent that
this view prevails, art theory has failed to elaborate an aesthetics that would locate
politics in the very particularity of art’s mode of expression.
As Isobel Armstrong has shown, however, the purist conception of aesthetics that
underpins this distinction is the unfortunate legacy of a more widespread “anti-
aesthetic” turn in theoretical writing (2000). In art history, the so-called “anti-aesthetic”
period of postmodernism has prompted a “return” to aesthetics, often narrowly con-
ceived as a return to “beauty” in art and art discourse. There is reason to be suspi-
cious of the anti-aesthetic tag insofar as the diversity sanctioned by postmodernism
simply allowed for a proliferation of aesthetics. Judgments of taste became relative;
aesthetics, a crowded space that embraced the market, popular culture, diversity.
Hence, the idea that art theory might, after a period of social mixing, return to a puri-
fied aesthetics, itself somehow untouched by cultural change, is untenable. If aes-
thetics is to be more than a nostalgic refuge for conservative art theory, it has to
function with greater impurity and within what Deleuze and Guattari term the
“cramped space” of contemporary culture; that is, not the space made available
within the institution for major art, but the lived space, in which we encounter exclu-
sion, confinement, marginalization, difference, and change (1986). A project that
conceives of aesthetics as migratory—as adaptive and mutable—is an important
challenge, necessitating a turn to an expanded conception of aesthetics as an epis-
temic inquiry.
Aesthetics is, by definition, concerned with what Baumgarten terms “sensitive” or
“sensuous knowledge”—a faculty of perception and thus a means of apprehending
the world (1970 [1758]).4 As a primary encounter, unconstrained by the categories,
methods, and demarcations of other disciplines and practices, aesthetic perception
is a unique nonscientific basis for inquiry. It does not take up the terms of current
institutionalized analysis or align its expressions with pre-existing categories; it exca-
vates often underlying perceptions and affects—direct engagements with the world
in its uncategorized “whateverness,” to use Agamben’s term (1993, 86). At this level
of sensory encounter, ascriptions of national or group identity are apt to fall away,
even as they produce “wounded attachments” (in Wendy Brown’s phrase) and resid-
ual or unconscious emotional effects (1995). The point of pursuing the epistemic
possibilities of aesthetic perception is not, then, to illustrate the propositions of sci-
ence and sociology—to underwrite divisions of nations, people, or identities (positive
or negative)—but to establish another way of knowing, and hence another “distribu-
tion of the sensible” (Rancière 2004). It is at this level that aesthetics is political
intervention, reorganizing affects to redetermine a perceptual landscape.
If the art of identity politics was pursued as a self-legitimating practice, aesthetics
is at variance with this insofar as it cuts through identity in the process of tracing the

operations of perception. For this reason, migratory aesthetics cannot be synony-
mous with art about migration, or art by migrants (though it may of course encapsu-
late both). This is not to say that it disregards the latter in any sense; rather that
aesthetics must serve art more effectively by making the general case and configur-
ing the political through the aesthetic by describing the particularity of what art does.
What then, can migratory aesthetics—an exploration of sensory perception con-
ditioned by migration—deliver in addition to accounts of particular migrations or,
indeed, of identities? This is well exemplified by CC06, an exhibition that enacts
migratory aesthetics, but does not label itself as such nor even claim to “represent”
accounts of migration. In this instance, the cumulative effect of the aesthetic engage-
ment with migration is to engender a politics of contemporary culture as “migrant”;
that is, a culture transformed by migration but emphatically not a separable minority
culture. In this arena, pressing concerns (the refugee issue, “multicultural” politics, and
contemporary divisions, as well as fundamental issues of democratic participation)
emerge through the aesthetic analysis, as it were.
One of the interesting things about CC06 was how work that might be corralled
under the “topic” of war and terror—the politics of the moment—emerges readily
from “migratory” art as a natural outgrowth. By not naming art as “migrant” or as
“about war and terror,” the exhibition avoided the kind of thematization that over-
determines the content of work, instead allowing us to see how an aesthetic method
gives rise to a broad-based politics of the contemporary. This is an important way to
think about the epistemic possibilities of exhibition practice.
More specifically, if there is a paranoid style in contemporary global politics, we
might see the aesthetic as structurally suited to a systematic refusal of this strategy.
Can aesthetic experimentation generate models by which we can understand cultural
movements that do not allow themselves to be predicated on identity politics? This
is an urgent political project in a context where clashes sparked by ethnic and racial
divisions are often deemed as “unforeseen,” or as inexplicable irruptions—actually
blind-spots—in a “multicultural” state, which cannot adequately conceptualize con-
tingent relations. If “paranoid politics” reacts to the experience of the unforeseen in
ways that seek to reduce the event—and the behavior of those involved—to a pre-
dictable formula, a more aesthetically inclined politics might develop more complex
understandings of cultural movements and relations, based on a direct engagement
with unpredictability.
The “event” status of an exhibition very often militates against the notion of art
as “inquiry” or as a contribution to knowledge insofar as institutions like galleries
and biennials are driven always to look for the next new theme. Hence, there is a
rapid turnover of topics and tropes, none of which are subjected to the sustained and
cumulative development that characterizes academic research (although rapid filtra-
tion sometimes has its own advantages). But aesthetic inquiry properly conceived
120 | Jill Bennett

(and unconstrained by an imposed theme or topic) does enable the constitution of an

enduring thread of knowledge. Without needing to “claim” the subject of terror, migra-
tory aesthetics (as a concept grounded in critical art and exhibition practice) provides
something akin to a methodological foundation—a cultural genealogy that leads from
the analysis of past migrations into a present politics where the perceptual and affec-
tive relations surrounding migration flow directly into Realpolitik and lived experience.
This is how aesthetic resonance works (as I have argued elsewhere, regarding the
question of how work on conflict and trauma may translate into different contexts)—
not through similarities in semantic content or even form, but through a depth
engagement at the level of the political aesthetic as a true method of inquiry
(Bennett 2005). In this sense, it is important to acknowledge relational aesthetics as
more than a thematic interlude.
Shared Exposure: Being-in-Common

CC06—the appellation referencing a shared identity that is not one—serves as a
case study revealing what might remain once the notional bonds of shared identity
are discarded. The tagline of the 2006 Commonwealth Games was, as it happened,
“united by the moment”—an uplifting marketing slogan that unwittingly alluded
to the lack of any enduring Commonwealth community. This image of a fleeting
togetherness—“a relation without a relation” (Nancy)—is echoed in contemporary
theory where it emerges—in Nancy’s work, in particular—as a sign of ethical possi-
bility. The ineffability of a “being in common” that does not cohere as a representable
identity may, however, require aesthetics or art to realize it as an ethical or political
concept. Something banal and unnoticed in daily life becomes conceivable in the
domain of the aesthetic, which can modulate the tenor of an encounter to examine
affective relations. Nancy conjures the utterly mundane image of “passengers in the
same train compartment” who are simply seated next to each other: together but not
linked: “They are between the disintegration of the ‘crowd’ and the aggregation of the
group . . . exposed simultaneously to a relationship and an absence of relationship”
(1991, 7). This evocation of a communal experience beyond the realm of the named
community points to a quintessential modern, predominantly urban, condition,
constituted by stranger-encounters as much as by familiar relations; a dislocated
experience, rather than a sedentary one, where one is in transit as much as at home.
But unlike the conspicuous isolation of the modernist subject, embodied in the figure
of the flâneur, strolling alone within a crowd, here the emphasis is on the condition
of community that subsists within this state of affairs. In the train compartment there
is an unavoidable encounter with the strangeness and difference of others, however
temporary this encounter may be. The sense of “being with” entailed in this mass
transit experience is literally poised between, in that zone beyond the affiliations of
work, home, and various destinations, but it is nonetheless an interface: a place

in which we negotiate being with others in a physical, emotional, and ethical
sense.
Terror attacks in London and Madrid have recently invested the image of the mass
transit train as a site of shared or common exposure with more solidity than Nancy’s
metaphor originally contained. The extraordinary traumatic event is often the occa-
sion for community expression. But the train is, in a very real sense, the site where
a politics of migration—and of paranoia—play out, both in fleeting perceptions and in
the sense of retributory violence and violation. In the name of security and vigilance,
we are enjoined to regard the passengers in our train compartment with suspicion.
This has led Shilpa Gupta, a participant in CC06, to stage interactive performances
in trains (Blame, 2002–2003). She wanders through train carriages, selling to
passengers her Blame bottles, full of simulated blood, with a label reading “Blame®
BLAMING YOU MAKES ME FEEL SO GOOD.” This discursive engagement is neither didactic
not sentimental; it is not about inducing an idealized feeling of togetherness. Rather,
Gupta acknowledges the degree to which the politics of ressentiment—the extreme
of identity politics—urgently requires both analysis and intervention at the level of
affect. Ressentiment (vengefulness) is defined by Nietzsche in terms of a desire to
deaden pain by means of affect—through the production of a more violent emotion,
directed outward:
Every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering, more exactly, an agent;
still more specifically a guilty agent who is susceptible to suffering – in short, some
living thing upon which he can on some pretext or other, vent his affects, actually or in
effigy. (1989; Brown 1995, 214)
After the London Tube bombings, thousands of people posted “we’re not afraid”
messages (pictures—often of themselves in various public locations—with versions
of that slogan added) on the Web site www.werenotafraid.com. It was not that people
really were not afraid; they were, of course, more anxious than ever, but what is
significant is how they took recourse through an aesthetic strategy—aesthetic by
virtue of its operating directly on affect. The We’re Not Afraid site can be read as a
refusal of ressentiment, a means of countering not just the threat of terror but the
manipulation of affect that has characterized the PR component of the War on Terror.5
It elicits a defiance based not in retribution or negative affect, but in the spontaneous
generation of a community united simply in exposure.
This is, in Kosofsky Sedgwick’s terminology, a “reparative” rather than “paranoid”
aesthetics. “Paranoid knowing” insists on knowledge in the form of exposure. It is
based on a hermeneutics of suspicion that seeks always to reveal underlying truth,
placing its faith in the act of revelation and unveiling. This is where aesthetics and
the paranoid or documentary endeavor part company methodologically. Paranoid
politics is anti-theatrical, relentlessly documentary and narrative. As I have previously
argued, however, the documentary as exposé has limited aesthetic appeal and
122 | Jill Bennett

potency, since it relies (paradoxically) on the inherent drama of revelation and on the
ready identification of a lie (Bennett 2008). Evil is generally more complex than this;
it rarely reduces to the monumental lie, the singular deceitful act, amenable to sub-
sequent representation. Thus, exposure as a tactic—a way of reading—is to be used
sparingly. And then only when the pros and cons of its paranoid determination are
recognized. The politics of aesthetics redirects us away from an obsession with
access to the truth of what really happened (as the only basis for political action),
toward the imaginative development of other possibilities (past and future). Exposure,
in this regime, is not a truth condition but a collective shock. This is the essence of
werenotafraid.com—the being-in-common that is the result of a being-in-shock; not a
disavowal but a response to the experience of being caught out, surprised by the
unimaginable.
The mobilization of “effigies” (the venting of vengeful affects in Nietzsche’s terms)
rests on some imagined separation of home and beyond—and it is this bounded,
“secured” sense of community and of identity that a politicized migratory aesthetics
(as well as the spontaneous recognition of shared exposure in an aesthetic domain)
undermines on various flanks. The contemporary community described by Nancy
collapses any such division; risk and exposure attach to the very experience of being-
in-common, and there is no home away from all of this to which we can retreat. Kim
Beom’s witty Hometown (shown in the Korean pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale)
is a timely intervention in this regard. An installation, comprising artifacts from a
mythical town in a remote Korean mountain region, is accompanied by a handbook,
designed for those who feel the need for a hometown narrative for use in social
conversation. This comes complete with images and information on geography and
population, and useful tips for foreigners who might find it difficult to account for their
Korean background. Such work debunks the fetishization of the migrant story as
something that can be packaged and coveted from outside—and, in this context,
reminds us that we may need to face up to the challenge of talking about social
relations without the representable trappings of identity.
This is perhaps one of the principal challenges of contemporaneity—and of the
politics of the event, characterized by changing sets of relations (social, religious,
political allegiances that arise from particular political conditions, for example) rather
than fixed affiliations (Bennett 2005). And in the absence of identity attributes that
enable us to firmly locate affiliations, we are forced to consider how these are con-
stituted through affects and perceptions, some entrenched, some volatile, some
malleable. If the question of relations “beyond identity” is an important dimension
of political inquiry, it is an area in which aesthetics may prove itself indispensable.
This is not to say that migratory aesthetics is unconcerned with the texture of
migrant stories, nor that it is characterized by a singular approach. Clearly there is
immense diversity in what might collectively constitute migratory aesthetics—and

some of the most influential contemporary art of recent times has dealt with very
specific events of border control (Multiplicity’s work, for example), as much as with
imagined alternatives. At the same time, the metaphor of “traffic” has been widely
evoked to describe more fluid and tenuous forms of community engagement, as well
as a more free ranging approach to democratic participation the Asian Traffic exhibi-
tions that have toured the Asia-Pacific region exemplify this) (Bennett 2005–2006).6
Migratory aesthetics encompasses such an engagement with the texture of move-
ment at a micro (sensory) level and at a macro (transnational) level. It embodies
“exodus,” in Virno’s sense of a creative flight from the state toward alternative com-
munity formations, but combines the image of exit or departure with an elaboration
of movement across new territory—of an arrival, however provisional (Virno 2004).
Migratory Aesthetics is less a style than a strategy: a transitional politics. To this
end, it is essentially hybrid. The affective potency of CC06 (as with recent Documentas)
lay in the recasting of work with more apparent documentary components, alongside
other aesthetic practice, in a creative curatorial politics that functions as a “shock to
thought”—the surprise engendered through unexpected collision. To this end, works
like the pirate ship and Shonibare’s costume pieces vaunt their theatricality and their
capacity to upset and invert tradition. Yet they are effective in this context only to the
extent that they are part of a collective assemblage, extracting a new politics out of
the shards of an old defunct collectivity. This is what migratory aesthetics can do at
its best—what aesthetics can become under the impact of migration. When it can
open up new lines of inquiry into contemporary culture, and carve out a dynamic
alternative to the stultified, institutionalized forms of multiculturalism that seem
often to serve only institutional agendas, we have the essence of a genuinely practical,
radical aesthetics.
124 | Jill Bennett

Notes
1. This quintessentially “African” fabric was 5. The project is described as follows: “We’re
produced in the nineteenth century by the not afraid is an outlet for the global community
Dutch and English—often using Indonesian to speak out against the acts of terror that
batik traditions—and subsequently exported have struck London, Madrid, New York,
to West Africa, the region with which it is Baghdad, Basra, Tikrit, Gaza, Tel Aviv,
characteristically associated. Shonibare has Afghanistan, Bali, and against the atrocities
utilized this fabric precisely to undermine the occurring in cities around the world each and
concept of authenticity in cultural production. every day. It is a worldwide action for people
not willing to be cowed by terrorism and fear
2. For example, Jun Yang’s video HERO—this is mongering.” Internet, ⬍http://werenotafraid.
WE, exhibited in the 2005 Venice Biennale, draws com/about.html⬎, accessed January 19,
parallels between the biennale and the Olympics 2007.
as a show of national strength, tracing the appeal
of the flag in nations like China and the U.S. 6. Asian Traffic originated at the Asia
Australia Arts Centre in Sydney, an
3. For discussion of this juxtaposition see Jill organization with an explicit commitment
Bennett, “Havoc: Real and Unimaginable Events to the “representation” of migrant
in Post-9/11 Art” Unimaginable, Ostfildern: groups. Asian Traffic, and the subsequent
Hatje Cantz, 2008, 96–114, 109–10. Open Letter project, reconfigured
this agenda in more explicitly relational
4. Baumgarten gave the discipline its name, terms.
deriving it from the Greek aisthanomai, meaning
perception by means of the senses.
Works Cited
Acker, Kathy. Pussy, King of the Pirates. New ———. “Asian Traffic: National Identity: Global
York: Grove Press, 1997. Community.” Broadsheet 34.4 (2005–6): 226–9.
Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. ———. “A Feeling of Insincerity: Politics,

Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Ventriloquy and the Dialectics of Gesture.” The
Minnesota Press, 1993. Rhetoric of Sincerity. Eds. Ernst van Alphen,
Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith. Stanford: Stanford
Armstrong, Isobel. The Radical Aesthetic. Oxford: University Press, 2008. 195–213.
Blackwell, 2000.
Brown, Wendy. “Wounded Attachments: Late
Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Modern Oppositional Political Formations.”
Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University The Identity in Question. Ed. John Rajchman.
of Toronto Press, 2000. New York: Routledge, 1995. 199–227.
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Aesthetica. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward
1750. Hildesheim: Olms, 1970. a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Bennett, Jill. “The Dynamic of Resonance: Art,
Politics and the Event.” Australia and New Hall, Stuart. “The Local and the Global.”
Zealand Journal of Art 6.2 and 7.1 (2006): Culture, Globalization, and the World System:
67–81. Contemporary Conditions for the Representation

of Identity. Ed. Anthony King. Binghamton: Collective. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Dept. of Art and Art History, State University of Press, 1991. 1–12.
New York, 1991. 19–40.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Genealogy of Morals.
Kosofsky Sedgwick, E. Touching Feeling: Affect, 1887. Trans. W. Kauffman and R.J. Hollingdale.
Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham and London: New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Duke University Press, 2003.
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Trans. G. Rockhill. London: Continuum,
Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham and 2004.
London: Duke University Press, 2002.
Virno, Paolo. Grammar of the Multitude. Los
Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Of being-in-common.” Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e),
Community at Loose Ends. Ed. Miami Theory 2004.
126 | Jill Bennett

The Seventh Man: Migration,

Politics, and Aesthetics
Begüm Özden Firat
ABSTRACT
This article focuses on the experience (particularly speech) of the migrant as concep-
tualized in different texts. Its itinerary consists of an image/text (John Berger and
Jean Mohr’s A Seventh Man [1975]), a path-breaking essay in postcolonial studies
(Homi Bhabha’s “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern
Nation” [1990]) and an event (illegalized immigrants occupying St. Bernard Church in
Paris [1996]); as well as different figurations of the migrant-guest worker, illegalized
immigrant, clandestine, and sans-papiers. According to Bhabha, “speechless speech”
of the (Turkish) guest worker (in Germany) makes present the opacity of language
and its untranslatable residue, and by so doing it shatters the univocal spatial and
temporal articulations of the nation and brings about a new history of the German
language. While for Bhaba “the radical incommensurability of translation” is a com-
plex form of social/racist fantasy triggered by the failed speech of the migrant, I sug-
gest that such reading, in fact, is complicit with a form of political fantasy based on
the renunciation of the migrant as a political being possessing a language. Against
this backdrop, I discuss the movement of the sans-papiers in which the illegalized
immigrants raised a collective voice by occupying the urban space and made them-
selves visible. This collective act breaks the logic of consensus and brings about a
polemical space in which new forms of sensory experience can emerge. As an act of
disagreement it calls for a reconfiguration of the visible and the sayable and opens
the realm of politics.
The Seventh Man: Migration, Politics, and Aesthetics | 127

Istanbul in the 1960s. Hundreds of people line up in front of the liaison offices of the
German Federal Employment office in Istanbul and Ankara every day, waiting for a job
in a German company. The people who were applying for jobs first had to undergo a
medical examination and a test of their technical abilities. If they were successful,
they got on the train, and traveled for 50 hours all the way up to Germany. At the end
of their exhausting journey, they all arrived at Munich main station, track number 11,
where they were welcomed by a Turkish interpreter. After a short break and a meal
they were accompanied to their final destinations in different German cities. That is
how it started . . .1
One of the first books to narrate the experiences of these guest workers in
Europe, A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe (1975), is a collaborative project
between John Berger and Jean Mohr. Berger’s essay explains, in a poetic Marxist
tone, why and under which conditions these peasants from underdeveloped coun-
tries, such as the former Yugoslavia, Portugal, and Turkey, had to emigrate to another
country, and how they survived in Europe as “mere cogs” of the international division
of labor. Mohr’s photographs accompany the fragmented stories of the immigrants
and show how they turned their heads away from the camera while they were under-
going medical examinations with numbers written on their chests; the railway stations
they left from and arrived at; how they constructed roads, tunnels, or buildings, and
worked in the factories; where they slept and ate; how they stared and waited. In
“A Note for the Reader” Berger writes that the book describes a dream/nightmare.
He reflects:
By what right can we call the lived experience of others a dream/nightmare? Not
because the facts are so oppressive that they can weakly be termed nightmarish; nor
because hopes can weakly be termed dreams. In a dream the dreamer wills, acts,
reacts, speaks, and yet submits to the unfolding of a story which he scarcely influ-
ences. The dream happens to him . . . But sometimes a dreamer tries to break his
dream by deliberately waking himself up. This book represents such an intention within
a dream which the subject of the book and each of us is dreaming. (13)
The metaphor of a dream/nightmare constitutes the core of the narrative of the
book. The “seventh man” cannot escape from the dream because his migration is
like “an event in a dream dreamt by another,” everything he does “is determined by
the needs of the dreamer’s mind” (43). Even his final return is mythic. When he goes
back, he realizes that “an assured place for him no longer exists in his village” (221).
This is why “two or three years after his final return he or other members of his fam-
ily will be compelled to go abroad once more” legally or illegally (219). His is a per-
petual dream/nightmare.
As a figure in a dream, the “seventh man” is lonely; he cannot understand the
language, even though he utters words. Levent Soysal argues that the migrant in
A Seventh Man is “not heard and seen, remaining invisible beyond walls that separate
128 | Begüm Özden Firat

him from European imagination” (2003, 497). He is a figure devoid of speech and
gesture. He is utterly silent:
The written letters of the other language are jumbled together to make silent sounds.
SCHOKOLADE IST GUT!
The silence is his. Whatever they are saying, he, with the silent sounds in his head,
is going to nod. (Berger and Mohr 1975, 66)
Interestingly, the postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha returns to A Seventh Man in

“DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation” (1990). In
this seminal essay, Bhabha critiques the essentialist reading of nationhood and
argues that nation is a narrative written in “intermittent time, and intersticial space,
that emerges as a structure of undecidability at the frontiers of cultural hybridity”
(1990, 312). He argues that the uncanny moments of enunciation of cultural differ-
ence at the limits of the nation’s narrative disrupt the homogenous and horizontal
view of society based on unified national space and time. Through the “foreignness
of language,” a notion that Bhabha borrows from Walter Benjamin, it becomes
“possible to inscribe the specific locality of cultural systems—their incommensurable
differences—and through that apprehension of difference, to perform the act of
translation” (315).
In the beginning of the section “The Foreignness of Languages,” which deals with
the enigma of language through the figure of the migrant, Bhabha states that he
must give way to the vox populi:
A relatively unspoken tradition of the people of the pagus—colonials, postcolonials,
migrants, minorities—wandering peoples who will not be contained within the Heim of
the national culture and its unisonant discourse, but are themselves the marks of a
shifting boundary that alienates the frontiers of the modern nation. (315)
They are those who speak the “encrypted discourse of the melancholic and the
migrant” across the accumulation of the history of the West. They voice the lost
object—the national Heim—and this lost object is written across the bodies of the
people, as “it repeats in the silence that speaks the foreignness of language” (315).
The emblematic figure of this silent speech is none other than the Turkish worker in
Germany. Bhabha quotes Berger extensively but elliptically:
The migrant’s intentionality is permeated by historical necessities of which neither
he nor anybody he meets is aware. That is why it is as if his life were dreamt by
another . . . They watch the gestures made and learn to imitate them . . . The rate of
work allows no time to prepare for the gesture. The body loses its mind in the gesture.
How opaque the disguise of words . . . He treated the sounds of the unknown language
as if they were silence. To break through his silence. He learnt twenty words of the new
language. But to his amazement at first, their meaning changed as he spoke them. He
asked for coffee. What the words signified to the barman was that he was asking for

coffee in a bar where he should not be asking for coffee. He learnt girl. What the word
meant when he used it, was that he was a randy dog. Is it possible to see through the
opaqueness of the words? (315–316)
For Bhabha, this silent Other of gesture and failed speech, who is without the lan-
guage that bridges knowledge and act, “leads the life of a double, the automaton”
(316). The speech he utters thwarts understanding because it remains “eerily
untranslated in the racist site of its enunciation.” According to Bhabha, the “seventh
man” becomes what Sigmund Freud calls the “haphazard member of the herd,” the
Stranger, whose “languageless presence evokes an archaic anxiety and aggressivity
by impeding the search for narcissistic love-objects in which the subject can redis-
cover himself, and upon which the group’s amour propre is based” (316).
The immigrant’s desire to “imitate” language makes present the opacity of lan-
guage and its untranslatable residue, and by so doing it shatters the univocal spatial
and temporal articulations of the metropolis and, by proxy, the nation. The migrant’s
silence elicits “those racist fantasies of purity and persecution.” In the process, “by
which the paranoid position finally voids the place from where it speaks,” Bhabha
contends, we begin to see “another history of the German language” (317). For Bhabha,
the silent (Turkish) gastarbeiter (guest worker) vibrantly depicted in A Seventh Man
brings about what he calls “the radical incommensurability of translation,” in
contrast to the migrant experience described in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic
Verses, which “attempts to redefine the boundaries of the western nation, so that
the ‘foreignness of languages’ becomes the inescapable cultural condition for the
enunciation of the mother tongue” (317).
Some critics working on German-Turkish migrant literature or cinema responded
to Bhabha’s rendering of “the Turkish migrant worker in Germany as an incommen-
surable, alienated, speechless victim without any voice” (Göktürk 2002, 4). Leslie
Adelson argues that the figure of the incoherent Turk functions metaphorically
“as a generic postcolonial cipher for ‘the radical incommensurability of translation’”
rendering “Bhabha’s strategic figure of limited value in assessing Turkish con-
figurations of German culture in the historically disjunctive time of the 1990s”
(2005, 90).
My discomfort with Bhabha’s text, however, does not stem from his envisioning of
the Turkish migrant as a speechless victim when the migrant has already become
an articulated writer.2 What is problematic for me is Bhabha’s conceptualization of
the “radical incommensurability of translation” merely in psychoanalytical terms. For
him, the silent automaton gives rise to uncanny feelings, invokes archaic anxiety and
aggression, and brings about a paranoid position of “delusion of reference” upon
which the group’s amour propre is based. This, according to Bhabha, is a complex
form of social/racist fantasy that is triggered by the failed speech of the migrant. In
contrast to Bhabha, I will argue that the notion of “the radical incommensurability of

translation” should rather be conceived as a form of political “fantasy,” which, as

I will suggest, shoots down the realm of politics.
New Gatherings
While Bhabha flashes his reader back to the unspoken tradition of the pagus, politi-
cal philosopher Jacques Rancière reintroduces the reader of Disagreement: Politics
and Philosophy (1999) to the Roman plebeians’ secession to the Aventine Hill in
Ancient Rome. Basing his arguments on the French thinker Pierre-Simon Ballanche’s
rewriting of Livy, Rancière argues that the Roman patricians cannot envision a discus-
sion with the plebeians because the patricians believe that the latter are not able to
speak but only to make anguished noises.
In “Ten Theses on Politics,” Rancière asks:
How one can be sure that the human animal mouthing a noise in front of you is
actually voicing an utterance rather than merely expressing a state of being? If there is
someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing
them as the bearers of politicalness, by not understanding what they say, by not hear-
ing that it is an utterance coming out of their mouths. (2001, par. 23)
Rancière contends that, traditionally, it had been enough not to hear what came out
of the mouths of the majority of human beings—slaves, women, workers, colonized
peoples—as language and, instead, to hear only cries of hunger, rage, or hysteria in
order to deny them the quality of being political animals (2004a, 5). In this sense,
I contend that Bhabha’s notion of the radical incommensurability of translation, in
fact, relates to such a renunciation of the migrant as a political being possessing
a language. It is through such a denial that Berger’s migrant’s utterance of “girl” is
taken to mean that he is a randy dog. The opaqueness of words points to a political
“fantasy” that bestows the migrant with only a “sort of bellowing,” which is “a sign
of need and not a manifestation of intelligence” (2004c, 5). Such an understanding
reverses Bhabha’s argument: it is not that the migrant is deprived of language or ges-
ture (or, for that matter, of the capacity for translation), but that he is not recognized
as possessing speech, which, actually, constitutes the denial of the migrant as a
political figure.
This “fantasy” makes the speech of some people unheard, un-understandable
and untranslatable in relation to those who have power to speak or power over lan-
guage. Thus, Rancière argues, “in order to be audibly understood and visibly recog-
nized as legitimate speaking subjects, the plebeians must not only argue their
position but must also construct the scene of argumentation in such a manner
that the patricians might recognize it as a world in common” (2000, 116; emphasis
in text). For Rancière, politics proper emerges through the process of the inventing
of such a polemical scene by articulating a common wrong—regarding who is able
or unable to make enunciations and demonstrations. This situation concerns

disagreement, defined as “a determined kind of speech situation: one in which one
of the interlocutors at once understands and does not understand what the other is
saying (1999, x).3 Such conflict disrupts the logic of what Rancière calls the “police
order,” the general law determining “the distribution of parts and roles in a commu-
nity as well as its form of exclusion,” which is, first and foremost, an organization of
“bodies based on a communal distribution of the sensible” (2004a, 88). This system
distributes the “modes of being, doing, making, and communicating that establishes
the borders between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the
sayable and the unsayable” (88).
Politics disturbs this order when those who have no part, those who are
uncounted within the existing system, introduce either a supplement or a lack that is
not recognized by the “police order.” It opens a gap in the sensible through the
“emergence of a claim to enfranchisement by a group that has been so radically
excluded that its inclusion demands the transformation of the rules of inclusion”
(Martin 2005, 39).
The political “fantasy” I was referring to in relation to Bhabha’s term “the radical
incommensurability of translation” can be related to the logic of the “police order”
that distributes the lots giving each person his or her place in the order of things
according to a defined identity. The migrant, who is allegedly without the language,
belongs to those who remain invisible, inaudible—those who are uncounted and have
no part. However, this relegation of the migrant does not reflect “the obstinacy of the
dominant or their ideological blindness” but, rather, expresses “the sensory order
that organizes their domination” (Rancière 1999, 24). In spite of, or better, owing to
this sensory illusion, politics exists as those who “have no right to be counted as
speaking beings make themselves of some account, setting up a community by the
fact of placing in common a wrong that is nothing more than this very confrontation”
(1999, 27).
Following Rancière’s ideas, I would like to discuss whether, or the ways in which,
the figure of the “seventh man” would become the dissident who possesses and
voices his speech so as to bring about a disagreement that creates a common
polemical scene in our so-called post-political times. I argue that the figure of the
gastarbeiter portrayed by Berger and commented on by Bhabha has been replaced
(or has to be replaced) by that of the illegalized immigrant.4 My contention, firstly,
stems from the fact that the notion of the gastarbeiter as an empirical, juridical, and
social entity ceased to exist following the annulment of the formal guest worker pro-
grams following the oil crisis in 1973. Secondly, those who arrived as part of such
programs, as well as their descendents, have been incorporated in the (failed)
multicultural “order” as guests (paradoxically, and welcome or not) and assigned
their places, roles, and status. However, in contradiction to this supposedly stable
order, immigration still continues as people illegally cross the borders of Europe

every day. It is, now, the so-called illegal immigrant, through her multiple displace-
ments or internments in deportation camps, who reenacts the precarious everyday
experience of the previous gastarbeiter, albeit under different circumstances.5 They
are invisible—after all who can tell an illegalized from a legal immigrant—segregated,
and they wander around as supposedly speechless victims.
Bhabha starts “DissemiNation” by stating that as he has seen/experienced
migration himself; he has lived “the moment of scattering of the people that in other
times and other places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering” (291).
He continues:
Gatherings of exiles and émigrés and refugees; gathering on the edge of “foreign”
cultures; gathering at the frontiers; gatherings in the ghettos or cafés of city centers;
gathering in the half-life, half-light of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of
another’s language; gathering the signs of approval and acceptance, degrees, dis-
courses, disciplines; gathering the memories of underdevelopment, of other worlds
lived retroactively; gathering the past in a ritual of revival; gathering the present. Also
the gathering of people in the diaspora: indentured, migrant, interned; the gathering of
incriminatory statistics, educational performance, legal statutes, immigration status—
the genealogy of that lonely figure that John Berger named the seventh man. (1990,
291)
Let me introduce another form of gathering: In the summer of 1996, six years after
the publication of Bhahba’s essay, three hundred African illegalized immigrants occu-
pied the St. Bernard Church in Paris for several months. Some of them were asylum
seekers and some were long-term working residents of France whose status had
been rendered illegal by legislative changes.6 The event was considered a turning
point in the French national discussion about migration policies and the presence of
what traditionally has been called “clandestine migrants.” Those who occupied the
public space declared themselves sans-papiers (literally, without papers) and asked
for “papers for all.” Mireille Rosello argues that, even though the occupation ended
with a police eviction, the movement achieved, at least, a symbolic victory of replac-
ing the previously common name clandestin with sans-papiers (2001, 2). She states
that the sans-papiers struggle created “a space of sociological, legal, and philosoph-
ical debate in the very heart of the French capital” (2) and made the French citizens
question the relationship between “the city and the nation, between the refugee and
the law, between rights and equity” (5).
By replacing the xenophobic term “clandestine,” which addressed the illegalized
as the enemy and the criminal, with sans-papiers, the illegalized reoriented them-
selves as a response to a pejorative name given by those who can speak. In Excitable
Speech, Judith Butler writes that to be “addressed injuriously is not only to be open
to an unknown future, but not to know the time and the place of injury, and to suffer
disorientation of one’s situation as the effect of such speech” (1997, 4). Such

shattering exposes the volatility of one’s place within the community of speakers,
and she argues that “one can be ‘put in one’s place’ by such speech, but such a
place may be no place” (4). In this respect, the illegalizeds’ act of self-naming
renounces the non-place where one is put through the appropriation of a negative
identity. Obviously, the term sans-papiers points to a lack; it is an identity sans/
without. It is a negating identity that led Jacques Derrida to question the appropria-
tion of “the terrifying phrase,” sans-papiers, as it adds new, perverse implication to
their plight. He states, “Those we call, in a word, ‘undocumented’ supposedly lack
something. He is un—. She is un—. What is missing exactly?” (qtd. in Rosello 2001,
180–181, n. 5). This lack that troubles Derrida actually hints at an overlap with
Rancière’s understanding of “the poor” or “the people,” those who are not counted
or have no part. What the sans-papiers lack is not only the precious documents but
also their inclusion or their part in the whole.
Rancière calls this process, by which the clandestine immigrant becomes the
sans-papiers, “political subjectification.” It refers to an enunciative and demonstra-
tive capacity to reconfigure the relation between the visible and the sayable, as well
as the relation between words and bodies that is distributed by the “police order.” It
is, thus, not the recognition or embrace of an already-given identity, but the disruption
of it (1999, 36). It is the production of a space between the identity provided by the
“police order” and a new political subjectivity that does not exist prior to the dis-
agreement. He suggests that politics is “[a] mode of subjectification [that] does not
create subjects ex nihilo; it creates them by transforming identities defined in the
natural order of the allocation of functions and places into instances of experience
of a dispute” (1999, 36).
L’affaire des sans-papiers de Saint-Bernard transformed the given non-status of
the immigrants by declaring a membership in a collective so as to open up a space
for the uncounted to be counted as those who speak. However, this spatial claim
did not bring about a separate space from which one could speak from a minority
position. Instead, it collapsed two different worlds—of those who are excluded and
included, visible and invisible, and possessing and speaking a language—into a
polemical scene. Politics, Rancière writes, consists in transforming the “space of
‘moving along’ into a space for the appearance of a subject.”7 It is an act that recon-
figures the space “of what there is to do there, what is to be seen or named therein”
(2001, par. 22). The sans-papiers populated the French national public space, occu-
pied its streets, churches, theaters, and media so as to become visible and audible
as non-counted, as those who posses logos. This performative process of identifica-
tion of the non-part with the whole, in turn, transforms the partition of the whole.
Rancière reminds us that the process of political subjectification is contagious, as
it were. He suggests that the Algerian demonstration called by the FLN in Paris
in 1961, which was marked by savage police repression, was a turning point,

“a moment when the ethical aporia of the relationship between ‘mine’ and the other
was transformed into the political subjectivation of an inclusive relationship with
alterity” (1998, 28). This was a struggle for visibility within the public space that
made possible “a political subjectivation that did not take the form of external sup-
port for the other’s war, or of an identification of the other’s military cause with our
cause” (29). Rather, it relied on a disidentification with the state. In a similar vein,
the sans-papiers struggle initiated a process of political subjectivation on a transna-
tional level, triggering the formation of different national/transnational struggles,
organizations, networks, and campaigns on issues of migration, freedom of move-
ment, and the right to stay, against border policing, racism, deportation, and deten-
tion camps.8
This was possible because the sans-papiers movement phrased their demands
“through universalist discourse with expressions of cultural identity, bringing together
approaches often considered incommensurable in French political culture” (Dubois
2000, 15). They continuously used the language of Republican rights and “spoke of
universalism in foreign languages, presenting themselves as ‘foreign’ cultures at
home in France, and so articulated the issue not as one about the ‘assimilation’ of
outsiders but rather as the problem of a Republic which was violating the rights of
men and women who lived within it, who had constructed it and were a part of its
past, present and future” (2000, 29).
Rancière contends that the plebeians of the Aventine Hill conducted themselves
like beings with names, and through this transgression, they open up “a place in the
symbolic order of the community of speaking beings” and by so doing violate the
given “order of the city” of Rome (1999, 24–25). Similarly, the sans-papiers’ struggle
violated not only the order of the community and the “city,” but also the global
language and discourse on migration.
The Speech and the Space of the “Uncounted”

The transgressive struggle of the sans-papiers seems to provide an answer to Butler
when she asks what happens “when those who have been denied the social power to
claim ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’ appropriate those terms from the dominant discourse
and rework or resignify those highly cathected terms to rally a political movement?”
(1997, 157–158). She contends that “the expropriability of the dominant, ‘authorized’
discourse . . . constitutes one potential site of subversive resignification” by those
who “speak with authority without being authorized to speak” (157; emphasis in text).
Likewise, the sans-papiers constituted a collective “insurrectionary speech” that calls
for emancipation and equality precisely by those who have been “radically disenfran-
chised from making such a call” in order to “counter the effects of [their] marginaliza-
tion” (158; emphasis in text). This speech points at Butler’s reworking of the notion of
“foreclosure.” Butler uses the Lacanian term foreclosure in her elaboration of the

process of subjectification. Foreclosure sets the limits of the realm of the unspeak-
able through which the subject is borne and sustained. After citing the Oxford English
Dictionary definition of the term as “to bar, exclude, shut out completely,” she argues,
The condition for the subject’s survival is precisely the foreclosure of what threatens
the subject most fundamentally; thus, the ‘bar’ produces the threat and defends
against it at the same time. Such a primary foreclosure is approximated by those trau-
matic political occasions in which the subject who would speak is constrained precisely
by the power that seeks to protect the subject from its own dissolution. . . . Acting one’s
place in language continues the subject’s viability, where that viability is held in place
by a threat both produced and defended against, the threat of a certain dissolution of
the subject. If the subject speaks impossibly, speaks in ways that cannot be regarded
as speech or as the speech of a subject, then that speech is discounted and the viabil-
ity of the subject called into question . . . (1997, 135–136)
However, this constitutive foreclosure, as that which cannot be said and remains
unspoken—akin to Rancière’s “police order”—“does not take place once and for
all”; it can be countered by “a subject who speaks at the border of the speakable” by
taking “the risk of redrawing the distinction between what is and is not speakable”
(139). This political act of appropriating the “unspeakable” or “speaking impossibly”
can lead to the political inclusion of dispossessed or marginalized people.
Indeed, the “embodied speech” of the illegalized immigrants appears to be an
impossible one. Writing on the “political becoming” of what he calls “abject sub-
jects,” emerging in sites as diverse as the sanctuaries of the sans-papiers in France
or the detention camps of the rioting refugees in Australia, political scientist Peter
Nyers points out that the risk taken by the talking abject foreigner—i.e., becoming
a speaking agent—is an “impossible activism.” It is impossible “because the non-
status do not possess the ‘authentic’ identity (i.e. citizenship) that would allow them
to be political, to be an activist” (2003, 1080). The enactment of the improper polit-
ical subject coincides with Butler’s fleeting mention of Rosa Parks, who, according to
Butler, had no prior right to sit in front of the bus yet, by “laying claim to the right
for which she had no prior authorization, endowed a certain authority on the act,
and began the insurrectionary process of overthrowing those established codes of
legitimacy” (1997, 147).
Similarly, the sans-papiers, as “illegitimate” interlocutors, initiated another insur-
rectionary process that Rancière calls politics. This process of becoming political
subjectivities is quite different from the mimicry of the “seventh man,” his repetitive
imitative gestures and irritating silences of failing speech. But, it is also different
from the process of dissemination of meaning, time, peoples, cultural boundaries,
and historical traditions—as it seems to be suggested in The Satanic Verses—
through which the radical alterity of the national culture would create new forms of
living and writing. According to Bhabha, these new forms of living and writing open up

and simultaneously take place within the contentious internal liminality of the nation
space that “provides a place from which to speak both of, and as, the minority, the
exilic, the marginal, and the emergent” (Bhabha 1990, 300). This liminal space
between boundaries is where social differences are articulated through a process of
negotiation. This is the space in which those marginalized by the exclusionary forces
of nation time/space resist and become political agents.
In contradiction to Bhabha’s liminal site of resistance, the disagreement uttered
by the illegalized immigrants acts “in the places and with the words that are common
to both, even if it means reshaping those places and changing the status of those
words” (Rancière 1999, 33). The immigrants make the homogeneous and harmo-
nious everyday urban space litigious and heterogeneous by surfacing a negation
against the “police order” that “configures well-identifiable groups with specific inter-
ests, aspirations, values, and ‘culture’” (Rancière 2000, 125). In their attempts to
make themselves visible and audible, they make the space of the “other” a common
polemical space. They imitate the language to raise political dissensus by invoking
equality as a universal right with expressions of cultural identity. While the liminal
space operates through multiple negotiations, the space of the politics proceeds by
means of negations, conflicts and disagreement. Bhabha conceives the liminal as a
place from which to speak both of, and as, the minority, the exilic, and the emergent
that opens up the possibility of “other narratives of the people and their difference”
(1994, 300). The space of the political, conversely, narrates the enunciative and
demonstrative struggles of the uncounted for equality and emancipation in their
difference, as underscored by Rosa Parks’s act of civil disobedience.
In his essay, “In Good Faith,” Salman Rushdie writes, “Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit
of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that
mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is
for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves”
(1991, 394; emphasis in text). In the subsequent section I investigate other poten-
tial ways of bringing newness to the world, different than change-by-fusion and
change-by-conjoining.
Aesthetics of Migration
John Berger proposes that A Seventh Man intends to deliberately wake up the dreamer
from his dream in which the “seventh man” finds himself without being able to will, act,
react, or speak, as he is not the dreamer himself. If one can still “call the lived experi-
ence of others a dream/nightmare,” the struggles of the illegalized immigrants might
be seen as a wake-up call. A call for a time in which to “redistribute the sensible.”
The immigrant movements across and beyond European urban space and within
and outside of the deportation or detention centers create new subjects, spaces, and
objects of litigation with which to experience intervening with the “police order,” as

we know it. This political act of interrupting the given distribution of the sensible is,
for Rancière, inherently aesthetic, as the political disruption is a reconfiguration of
the order of what is visible or perceptible. That is to say, politics is the disruption of
an order that claims to be total, not only by assigning each of its constituent parts to
a particular place within it, but, in so doing, by establishing the conditions of visibil-
ity that enable a part to be a part. Consequently, a previously unacknowledged part’s
inclusion does not just demand that it is recognized as akin to other parts, but
demands a transformation of the fundamental terms by which parts are seen or
become visible—that is, a transformation of experience. In The Politics of Aesthetics,
Rancière defines aesthetics as that which presents itself to sense experience. It con-
cerns “a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech
and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a
form of experience” (2004a, 13).
In this capacity, aesthetics is not a matter of art and taste; it is, first of all, a mat-
ter of time and space. Aesthetic acts are “configurations of experience that create
new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity”
(2004a, 9). In this respect, aesthetics understands actions, silences, thoughts,
dreams, perceptions, or enunciations not in terms of a social content that may be
judged as relatively good or bad, but rather as the production of formal arrangements
and forms of sense distribution that are, at heart, simultaneously aesthetic and polit-
ical. Therefore, the political is always aesthetic because “politics is only efficacious
as a formal arrangement of social agents, institutions, and possibilities; aesthetic
forms are always political because they are never anything less than the arrangement
and distribution of forms of perception that are ultimately social and political”
(Highmore 2005, 455).
Herein lies the link between migratory movements and aesthetics. Yet, this knot
should not be understood as an uncomplicated manifestation of the global multitude
transforming every territory to which they go, as curator Hou Hanru writes in his state-
ment for the exhibition entitled Wherever We Go: Art, Identity, Cultures in Transit:
In fact, the migrants turn their “exile” into a process of engaging and negotiating
with the urban/suburban spaces. Culturally and physically, their presence and active
involvements strongly change the social and cultural structures of the city, to produce
new cities out of the old cities (often European traditional styles). The booming of China
Towns, Arabic quarters, etc. are the most visible signs while, internally, the structure of
the population, public behaviors, values, etc. are being diversified and transformed
towards a much more variable and wealthy climate.9
Hanru’s curatorial statement seems to operate within the discourse of the multi-
cultural art world, promoting what Hito Steyerl calls the “jargon of inauthenticity,”
which is as sentimental and essentialist as Adorno’s notion of a “jargon of authen-
ticity,” except for the fact that “what is being essentialized recently is not localist

rootedness, but the requirements of the global market: adaptability, innovation and
mobility” (2004, 165–166). According to Steyerl, this jargon fits in with the national
rhetorics of multiculturalism centered on “integration” and “enrichment” epitomized
in Hanru’s argument that the booming of ethnic quarters would accumulate in the
diversification and transformation of the structure of the population, public behav-
iors, and values “towards a much more variable and wealthy climate.”
The suggestion of a “wealthy climate” to come can be regarded as functioning
within what Rancière calls the “logic of consensus,” through which “the givens of any
collective situation are objectivized in such a way as they can no more lend them-
selves to a dispute, to the polemical framing of a controversial world into the given
world” (2006). It is the dismissal of the “aesthetics of politics” by “plugging the inter-
vals and patching over the possible gaps between appearance and reality” (2004b,
305). Politics, as Rancière understands it, does not emerge through mere movement
or mere appearance in a space. It occurs when unrepresented subjects create a
polemical space where they put into contention the objective status of what is
“given” and impose an examination and discussion of those things that were not
“visible,” that were not accounted for previously. It is the reconfiguration of one’s
body, of one’s lived world, of one’s space and time. And this process might be
another way in which newness enters the world. Perhaps not only by means of
“sly civility” but also by acts of disagreement, as the legacy of the sans-papiers
reminds us.

Notes
1. Text taken from the web site of DOMiT–Das between two nations (mother and host
Dokumentationszentrum und Museum über die countries), whereas the illegals are forced to
Migration in Deutschland (The Documentation move transnationally. The fundamental reason
Center and Museum of Migration in Germany) for this transnational movement is the
See: www.domit.de. regulation of the “safe third country”—
according to which a refugee who enters the
2. The most famous first-generation writers of EU by way of a safe third country (i.e. one in
the so-called gastarbeiterliterature are Aras which he or she is not subject to political
Ören and Yüksel Pazarkaya. The second- persecution) may be deported to that country.
generation writers of minority, migrant, or This has led to so-called “chain deportation”
intercultural literature are Emine Sevgi because the safe third countries that surround
Özdamar, Feridun Zaimoğlu, and Zafer Şenocak, Europe are increasingly declaring neighboring
to name but a few. The works of these writers countries to be safe third countries as well. In
not only translated the German language (the this sense, the neighboring countries of the EU,
most provocative example is Kanak Sprak such as Turkey, have become “transit
(1995) by Zaimoğlu) but also German national countries” populated with illegal immigrants.
memory (Şenocak’s novel Perilous Kinship), For an interview with Behzad Yaghamanian on
even though the Turks and the Germans are not illegal immigrants in Turkey see “Urban Space
historically bound by a colonial relationship as and Illegal Immigrants” http://tanpelin.blogspot.
in the case of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. com/2005_12_01_tanpelin_archive.html.
3. The French term mésentente, for which there 6. In 1993, the so-called Pasqua laws,
is no equivalent English word, means both “the reflecting the French government’s anti-
fact of not hearing, of not understanding” and immigration policies, were introduced.
“quarrel, disagreement.” For socio-cultural implications of the
sans-papiers movement in France see
Rosello (2001 and 1998). See also Peter
4. The term illegal(ized) migrant refers
Nyers (2003); Anne McNevin 2006,
to people who are anything but a homogeneous
“Political Belonging in a Neoliberal Era:
group. What unites them is the fact that they
The Struggle of the Sans-Papiers,” Citizenship
have falsified residency papers or possess
Studies 10 (2), 135–151; and Etienne Balibar
none at all. But the ways in which one can
et al. 1999, Sans-papiers: l’archaïsme fatal.
become illegal and its duration vary
Paris: Découverte.
enormously. We can, perhaps, identify certain
“categories,” such as rejected asylum seekers,
young migrants (those, for example, who had 7. In the eighth thesis of his “Ten Theses
been living or were born in a host country but on Politics” (2001) Rancière suggests that
become illegal due to a criminal act) and the police interventions in the public spaces
illegalized working migrants, those who either (during a demonstration, for instance) consist
enter the country illegally or violate their visas. primarily of confirming that “the space of
(See http://www.noborder.org/without/ circulating is nothing other than the space of
germany.html#six). circulation”; that there is nothing to do but
“move along.”
5. The fundamental difference, besides the
legal status, would be that the gastarbeiter 8. Some other influential organizations or
was the working figure of the Fordist system networks are, No One is Illegal (Global); Tavolo
while the illegal immigrant operates within a migranti dei social forum italiani (Italy), Act up
post-Fordist system, which requires her to (France), Barbed Wire Britain Network to End
be a flexible worker “without papers.” Also, Refugee and Migrant Detention (GB), Caravan
the gastarbeiter was a figure of mobility for the Rights of Refugees and Migrants

(Germany), The Voice Refugee Forum Hou Hanru and Gabi Scardi, took place at the
(Germany), Migreurop (France), Kanak Spazio Oberdan in Milan between October
Attak (Germany). 2006 and January 2007. See the website at
http://www.sfaiart.com/News/NewsDetail.
9. The exhibition Wherever We Go: Art, aspx?newsID⫽1178&navID⫽&sectionID⫽8.
Identity, Cultures in Transit, curated by
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Limited Visibility
Maaike Bleeker
ABSTRACT
Starting from two art projects (Tanja Ostojic’s o.T and Ibrahim Quraishi/Serdan
Yalcin’s Mozart alla Turca) this text argues for the potential of the theater and theatri-
cality to destabilize the binary opposition of self and other that is constitutive of what
Kaja Silverman (1992, 30) terms the “dominant fiction” that is our reality. These two
art projects, one taking place shortly after the other in Vienna (at that time the cul-
tural capital of Europe) were not planned in tandem. Yet, there appear to be some
uncanny points of connection. Both use a restaging of a classic work of European
culture to engage with the ways in which we legitimize behavior in global space. Both
deal with how culturally specific modes of looking mediate what is considered to be
“self” and what is “other.” Both use staging as a means to engage with the here and
now of their audience and to destabilize seemingly self-evident modes of looking.
Such destabilization, this text argues, results from the ways in which theatricality
undermines seemingly self-evident modes of looking by drawing attention to the point
of view implied within what otherwise might pass for “just looking” at what is simply
“there to be seen.”
Whereas modernization as a narrative placed national units on a temporal

continuum from “backward” to “advanced,” globalization does not presume the
historical time of Western progress. Global space entails simultaneity, overlap,
coherencies incoherently superimposed. Like a photograph in multiple exposure, it
makes sense only precariously, only by blocking out part of the visible field. We are
Limited Visibility | 143

Bleeker 1 Tanja Ostojic – o.T
capable of seeing further than is comprehended by our separate, sense-making

practices, and what we see limits the legitimacy of what we do.
(Buck-Morss 2003, 5)
On December 27, 2005, the city of Vienna was startled by the large billboards that
displayed the exhibition “venues” for EuroPART, Aktuelle Kunst in Europa. EuroPART,
which was announced as “the biggest exhibition of young European art ever in
Austria,” exhibited work by young artists from all twenty-five European Union member
countries. The show was described as a discussion of recent developments in
Europe and resulting new ways of constructing space; specifically, EuroPART was
conceived with the aim of contributing to the redefinition of space brought about by
the expansion of EU territory. The use of billboards was motivated by this engagement
with space and spatial organization, and the relationship between the organization of
public space and modes of perception that is typical of consumer society. Placed
directly in the life-world of the audience, the billboard art works were intended to func-
tion as “conversation pieces.”
“Conversation” is a modest way of describing the outrage caused by some of the
works, in particular the one by Carlos Aires (showing nude models, wearing masks of
144 | Maaike Bleeker

Bleeker 2 Tanja Ostojic – o.T “installation shot”
Jacques Chirac, George Bush, and Queen Elizabeth, involved in an erotic threesome)
and the piece shown above, o.T (2004) by Tanja Ostojic. In response to public pres-
sure to close the exhibition, Carlos Aires decided to withdraw his work, saying that
he did not want to monopolize the collaborative project at the expense of the other
participants. Ostojic resisted the removal of her work, calling it censorship, but was
overruled.
“The Austrian tabloid Die Krone labelled this work pornographic despite the fact
that there are no visible sexual organs on the picture nor has it been created to pro-
voke an excitement of such kind,” said Ostojic in a statement about the commotion
surrounding the exhibition. She observed that the same publication that denounced
her work for being pornographic publishes images of naked women with an explicit
erotic intent on a daily basis (examples can be found on her Web site). She also
pointed out that her image had already been shown in Vienna, and had been pub-
lished in art magazines, without ever being considered pornographic. Furthermore,
she observed that her image is actually much less revealing than the original by
Courbet, which hangs in the Paris Musée D’Orsay and is celebrated as a masterpiece
of modern art. Nevertheless, her work was rejected as a young and unknown artist’s
attempt to attract attention by vulgar means.1
Was it the size of the image? Was it the lack of patina and brushstroke? Or was it
the way this image was staged as part of the life-world of its viewers, thus lacking the

aesthetic distance provided by the respectable Musée? Exhibited on a billboard, the
slick hyperrealism of the image allowed it to blend seamlessly into the public space
of consumer society. It did not look like art at all. It did look, very convincingly, like an
advertisement.
Sex sells. This can hardly be shocking news for a tabloid which, as a matter of
course, utilizes female bodies in erotic poses to sell all kinds of products; this prac-
tice is indeed reason for serious concern. However, this was not what Die Krone and
others were concerned about. In addition, at least as surprising as their moral out-
cry over the supposedly pornographic nature of this image was their total lack of
indignation regarding much more complicated and confrontational aspects of the
work.
With her cunning visual pun on the title of the exhibition (EuroPART), Ostojic
alludes to the myth of Europe’s origin: Zeus’s abduction of the beautiful Phoenician
princess Europa. In Ostojic’s image, Europa, her body cropped to emphasize the part
that Zeus could not resist, is dressed in knickers bearing the EU trademark. The way
she (her body) is depicted evokes the old and problematic conflation of the female
body with nature and landscape, the “others” of civilization. Culture here is reduced
to branding; to be Europe(an) is to wear the trademark. The female body is the land-
scape on which the European flag is planted, its cultural identity defined only by the
panties that, like a fig-leaf on an antique statue, protect the viewer from seeing what
she (supposedly) does not care to hide. This must be civilization. The abstract brand
of Europe covers up what we do not want to see (of her, of Europe), a gesture ampli-
fied by the removal of the work from public space.
Read as advertisement, the image presents Europe as the promise of voluptuous-
ness, carnal pleasures, and possession, the target of desire marked in the image by
the circle of stars at the very center. Her attitude suggests an invitation, conflating
Zeus’s desire for Europa’s body with her (supposed) desire to be possessed by him.
She is available “to have” her attitude suggests; she is what you want, but she is
also the forbidden land, the shiny blue fabric of the EU underwear barring access.
Forbidden pleasure but nevertheless for sale, the “staging” of this image on a bill-
board surrounded by other billboards turns it into an advertisement. This “staging”
draws attention to uncanny similarities between the composition of Courbet’s paint-
ing and advertisements that exploit female bodies to sell consumer goods. More
than that, Ostojic’s image also highlights how not only advertising but also many
notable art works reduce the female body to the status of a consumer product.
Finally, Ostoijc’s image does so by means of an image that conflates playing into the
consumerist desire to have (that which is advertised) with playing into the male
heterosexual desire to enter (the female body depicted). When read as a personifica-
tion of Europe, the image acts as a visual depiction of Europe as an entity that needs
to be protected against “invaders” threatening to consume her.

L’Origine du Monde (The Origin of the World) is the title of the Courbet painting
(1866) on which Ostojic’s picture is modelled. The painting was commissioned by a
rich Turkish businessman. Ostojic’s image shows the object of Turkish desire wearing
European colors, thus presenting an ironic commentary on the controversies sur-
rounding Turkey’s potential membership in the European Union. Who the woman
depicted is, and whether she is Turkish or not, is unknown. Branding her as
“European,” and presenting this image in the form of a “promotional campaign” in
Vienna just as Austria was taking over the EU presidency may be read as commen-
tary on the way in which Europeans tend to understand Europe as the sole origin of
civilization, denying the ways in which European culture is intimately connected with
other cultures, or simply dressing up the fruits of other cultures in European clothes.
Ostojic’s “advertisement” shows European identity to be a trademark that can absorb
whatever it likes, turning anything into a possession, stamping on its own brand,
while at the same time establishing and reaffirming a border between self and other.
Who wants to remember the Turkish origins of the Viennese coffeehouses, those
famous icons of the cultural capital of old Europe? Who wants to be reminded of it,
now that Turkey demands to be recognized as part of Europe?
Nine months later, also in Vienna, Pakistani born and (at that time) New York
based director Ibrahim Quraishi, working with Turkish composer and conductor
Serdan Yalcin, presented a new version of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail
(The Abduction from the Seraglio) (1782) in the venerated Schauspielhaus. Mozart
alla Turca was the title of their show, Mozart Turkish style. Mozart’s music was
rearranged for a combination of traditional Turkish and traditional Western European
instruments, and sung partly in Turkish, partly in German, by a mixed cast. Supertitles
in both languages allowed both Turkish and German speaking audiences to understand
what was being said and sung.
Mozart’s opera tells the story of a young Spanish woman (Konstanze) who,
together with her English maid (Blonde) and a servant (Pedrillo), is abducted by
pirates and sold to a Turkish man (Pasha Selim). He adores her but she has already
promised her heart to Belmonte, her Spanish fiancé, and is determined to save her-
self for him. She realizes she will not be able to resist Pasha Selim much longer and,
asking for his compassion, begs him to give her one more day to mourn the loss of
her lover. After that, she promises, she will be his. The Pasha grants her what she
wishes. In the meantime, with the help of Pedrillo, Belmonte manages to enter Pasha
Selim’s house and designs a plan to take the captives back home. However, when the
four of them try to leave the house in the middle of the night, they are caught by
Pasha Selim’s servant, Osmin, who had distrusted them from the start and now finds
his distrust justified. Their fate appears to be sealed, even more so when Belmonte
appears to be the son of Pasha Selim’s archenemy. Belmonte’s father was the one
who drove Pasha Selim out of Spain, robbing him of his house, his possessions, and

his wife. Belmonte and Konstanze, when certain death is near, once more declare
their love to one another and bid each other farewell. But then, the unexpected hap-
pens: Pasha Selim repays deceit with compassion, and sets them free.
The title, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, evokes images of adventure and abduc-
tion and the promise of a happy ending. The references to Turks and Turkishness
played into the exotic fantasies about cultural otherness of Mozart’s contemporaries,
an otherness that was perceived as both threatening (a century earlier the Turks had
besieged Vienna) and exciting (the harem as a projection screen for sexual fan-
tasies). Many have pointed out how “Turks” and “Turkishness” in this opera, as well
as in other musical dramatic presentations of the same period, do not so much refer
to actual Turks or Turkishness as serve as triggers for fantasies set in or involving
characters from the exotic East, often reducing them to caricatures. Mozart’s
“Turkish” music has little to do with authentic Turkish music. Mozart, apparently
inspired by some elements associated with Turkish music, used these to his own
ends.2 His “Turkish” characters are typical examples of what Edward Said (1985)
famously defined as orientalism: a system of representations imposed upon the
East, inscribing it conceptually within Western ideological constructs. (Die Entführung
aus dem Serail is one of Said’s examples.)
The orientalist characters of (especially) Osmin (the barbarian) and, to a lesser
extent, Pasha Selim (the noble savage) has made many directors who are concerned
with political correctness rack their brains, with a variety of results. Some choose to
leave out all references to Turks or cultural difference altogether. Others, including
a recent staging by Muziektheater Transparant (Ghent), in an attempt to avoid any
misunderstanding, expose the construction of otherness by exaggerating it.3 Quraishi
and Yalcin opted for a third possibility, namely that of the deconstructive reversal. In
their version, Belmonte, Pedrillo, Konstanze, and her servant are young Turks, while
Osmin and Pasha Selim represent Old Europe. The story takes place not in Pasha
Selim’s harem but in an undefined place, possibly Vienna or another old European
city. The time is now.
These two art projects, Ostojic’s o.T and Quraishi/Yalcin’s Mozart alla Turca, one
taking place shortly after the other in the cultural capital of old Europe, were not
planned in tandem. Yet, there appear to be some uncanny points of connection. Both
use a restaging of a classic work of European culture to engage with the ways in
which we legitimize behavior in global space. Both deal with how culturally specific
modes of looking mediate what is considered to be “self” and what is “other.” Both
use staging as a means to engage with the here and now of their audience and to
destabilize seemingly self-evident modes of looking. The effect is similar in many
ways to what Noa Roei (in her contribution to this volume) describes as “the ability to
challenge the imposition of naturalized divisions and hierarchies, whether these
relate to national subjectivities or artistic categories” (p. 252). Ostojic does not

merely present a new version of L’Origine du Monde. Crucial to the destabilizing

effect of her work is how this image is staged in the city, as a billboard. This staging
of the work evoked a response very different from earlier presentations in, for exam-
ple, art magazines. Quraishi, it may be argued, more than merely putting Mozart’s
opera on stage, uses the theater as a means to draw attention to the construction of
the opera, how this construction invites modes of looking and listening, and how
these modes of looking and listening are intertwined with the ways in which we dis-
tinguish between self and other. Quraishi’s version of Die Entführung aus dem Serail
not only highlights how the construction of the opera builds on seemingly self-evident
(yet culturally and historically specific) ways of conceiving what is self and what is
other, but also suggests that Mozart’s opera itself may be more critically engaged on
this point than is often assumed.
In the following, I will expand on the critical potential of such staging, of which
Ostojic’s and Quraishi’s works present examples, and argue for the potential of the
theater and theatricality to destabilize the binary opposition of self and other that
are constitutive of what Kaja Silverman (1992, 30) terms the “dominant fiction” that
is our reality. Such destabilization, I will argue, results from the ways in which theatri-
cality undermines seemingly self-evident modes of looking by drawing attention to the
point of view implied within what otherwise might pass for “just looking” at what is
simply “there to be seen.” Useful here is the distinction between the term theatrical,
which refers to the staged character of a situation, its being theater, and theatrical-
ity, which is the communicative affect that emerges when we perceive something as
staged.
In common speech, the words theatrical and theatricality are often used synony-
mously and often in a pejorative way, as if the theatrical and theatricality were implic-
itly equated with falseness or make believe. The words theatrical and theatricality
can be, and are, used both to refer to a particular quality of something—its being “of
the theater” and therefore staged for a viewer—and to failure, the failure to convince
onlookers of authenticity or truth. Jonas Barish (1981) demonstrates how this rela-
tionship between theater and failure, falsity, or inauthenticity keeps recurring in
various guises throughout the history of Western culture, beginning with Plato. Yet, if
theatrical and theatricality mean the same thing, why then do we have two terms,
wonders Tracy Davis (2003). She traces the emergence of theatricality as a separate
term and locates this emergence in the eighteenth century, at about the same time
as Mozart was writing his Entführung. She demonstrates how at that time the notion
of theatricality was used to describe the affect that emanates from perceiving some-
thing as theater. This “perceiving as theater” can be the effect of inviting a viewer to
see something as theater, but it may also be the product of choice.
A similar notion of theatricality (as distinct from theatrical) can be found in
Michael Fried. He first uses the term theatricality in his early essay “Art and

Objecthood” (1968), in which he argues that art ends where theatricality begins,
precisely because theatricality infers the implication of a viewer. He then returns to
the notion of theatricality in his much later Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and
Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980), in which he historicizes his previous anti-
theatrical position and draws on Diderot to conceptualize a notion of theatricality that
is in many ways similar to the one proposed by Davis. What is also different, however,
in a very interesting way, is how Diderot provides a link between theatricality and
point of view.
The concept of point of view is central to Diderot’s epistemology. As he writes,
“[t]he universe, whether considered as real or as intelligible, has an infinity of points
of view from which it can be represented, and the number of possible systems of
human knowledge is as great as that of points of view” (Oeuvres Complètes, VIII, 211,
quoted in Fried 1980, 216). The claim to understand a given phenomenon, or recog-
nize its truth, involves accepting responsibility not only for the explanation, but also
for the point of view implicit in the explanation. In this respect, Diderot’s observation
links up remarkably well with postmodern, feminist, and postcolonial critiques of the
supposedly universal point of view assumed by the grand narratives. But Diderot also
makes another important observation with regard to intelligibility, vision, and point of
view; namely, that in order to appear as truthful, the points of view that are implied in
visions of “how it is” must not be too obvious. As soon as they become too promi-
nent, the effect will not be truthfulness but artificiality, theater.
The implication is that theatricality is not the result of whether something is or is
not “theater,” but that theatricality denotes an inability to be convincingly “truthful.”
In order for an event to appear truthful, the point of view implied within that event
must remain invisible, or at least not be too obvious. Address your audience in a
manner that acknowledges the subjective point of view from whence this audience
sees you (including the presuppositions, assumptions, expectations, and desires that
characterize this point of view). The better you are able to absorb this perspective,
i.e., the more you respond to the desires, assumptions, etc. implied within it, the more
convincing your audience will find you. On the other hand, exposing this perspective
can inspire critical thinking, but it may also evoke resistance and rejection.4
In Staging the Gaze (1991), Barbara Freedman points to the relationship between
the potential of theatricality to destabilize seemingly self-evident modes of looking
and the cultural context of Western modernity. More precisely, she argues that this
potential of theatricality is intimately intertwined with what Martin Heidegger
describes as the age of the world picture. “World picture” here does not refer to
a particular picture of the world but to the world conceived and grasped as picture.
This conceptual possibility, Freedman observes, “depends upon what we might term
a spectator consciousness, an epistemological model based upon an observer
who stands outside of what she sees in a definite position of mastery over it” (9).

The world becomes a picture in relation to a point of view from which it is grasped in
its totality. Theatricality comprises a destabilization of the relationship between such
an observer and what he or she sees precisely because theatricality highlights the
relationship between them, a relationship that has to go unnoticed in order to guar-
antee the sense of mastery over the visible world as objectively given.
Freedman points to the relationship between the theatrical practice of staging and
the historical reality to which this practice belongs, but without differentiating the
power of theater to convince as a “truthful” representation of an actual, historical, or
fictional reality from the mimetic similarity between the theater and what it repre-
sents. Instead, she draws attention to the theatrical apparatus as “vision machine”
and how this apparatus invites culturally and historically specific modes of looking.5
“Rather than define theater as an unchanging identifiable object in the real, we might
rethink it as a culturally conditioned mode of staging the construction of the real,”
she observes (50). The theatrical apparatus as vision machine presents the specta-
tor with a position outside of what he or she sees, while, at the same time, this posi-
tion depends upon a careful staging of the relationship between them; i.e., the
illusion of mastery results from the way in which the spectator is implicated within
the visual field, but in such a way that this being implicated goes unnoticed.
Presenting the spectator with such a position, the theatrical apparatus as vision
machine responds to culturally and historically specific modes of looking that are
constitutive of what passes for real outside the theater. The theater presents a stag-
ing that plays into or plays with the audiences shared assumptions, presuppositions,
desires, and anxieties, while at the same time it is different; it is a theatrical staging.
This ambiguous tension between similarity and difference brings Freedman to a
definition of theatricality as:
that fractured reciprocity whereby beholder and beheld reverse positions in a way
that renders a steady position of spectatorship impossible. Theatricality evokes an
uncanny sense that the given to be seen has the power both to position us and dis-
place us. (Freedman 1991, 1)
Theatricality, thus defined, comprises a destabilization of the relationship between
someone seeing and what is seen. Freedman writes about theatricality in the theater,
yet such destabilization may happen at other places and other times as well.
Theatricality does not even necessarily result from the fact that what is seen is
staged. Not every staging destabilizes the relationship between someone seeing and
what is seen and vice versa (many stagings do not); destabilization can also happen
in situations that are not staged but nevertheless evoke in the viewer a sense of
being implicated in a situation as a result of which one becomes aware of one’s posi-
tion in relation to what is seen, a situation in which one is confronted with one’s
seemingly de facto modes of looking. This can be the result of choice, the decision
of a viewer to look (at an image, an event, a situation) as if it were staged. It can also

Bleeker 3 Maurice Bogaert – street view
be the result of something being staged for us, literally on a stage or by means of
strategies that put things “on stage” for us, in this way inviting us to become aware
of how we are addressed by what we see, and how we are implicated in ways that
would otherwise go unnoticed. Like this scene at the corner of my street. Right under
my nose, that is. A scene I had not noticed until the photographer (Maurice Bogaert)
used his camera to frame this situation in a way that invites one to look at it as if it
were staged.
A man looks up to a billboard hanging above the window of a shop. The picture on
the billboard shows a woman in a pose reminiscent of historical paintings of Venus
by Giorgione, Titian, and Caban, among others. Like Ostojic’s version of L’Origine du
monde, this latter day Venus is not naked but “dressed” in a way that only highlights
the appeal of the naked bodies represented in the original art works. This appeal is
further revealed by the way in which the photograph relates the image to the man
passing by. This situation was not staged. Theatricality is not the effect of its being
theater, but a result of the way the photograph draws attention to the relationship
between the man, looking up toward the billboard with the image of the blonde
woman in white underwear (“For your eyes only”), and the marquee title “Turkish
Decorations,” which underlines the woman’s image like a caption.
Similarly, Quraishi’s staging of Die Entführung aus dem Serail directs the audi-
ence’s attention to the relationship between the world that Mozart’s opera presents
to the audience and the point of view implied within this world. Instrumental here is
the strategy of reversal, by means of which Quraishi highlights the ways in which the

opera “stages” the mechanisms of projection and rejection implicit in our ways of
looking, and raises questions about the implications of how we are invited to look in
particular ways.
The curtain opens on the arrival of Belmonte at the palace (Serail) of Pasha Selim,
where he is confronted with Osmin, Pasha’s servant and guard. The construction of
the scene immediately places us, the audience, in a position similar to Belmonte—
having to find out where he is, who the other person is, and how things work in this
place. Dressed up in an exotic costume, the other man appears to be not like “us.”
His unfriendly behavior, his distrust of Belmonte, and his refusal to help him or let
him in do not invite our sympathy. There seems to be no reason for his behavior,
which seems rather exaggerated and unnecessary. When, a little later, Osmin, seem-
ingly without reason, sings out it that would be better to hang Pedrillo and Belmonte
and the like right away and put their heads on stakes, we are invited to conclude that
this man is biased against Europeans.
Osmin is a one-dimensional character, reduced to his distrust and the violent
expressions that are motivated by it. Not a very charming image of Turks and
Turkishness, indeed. But if something is to be characterized as grotesque here, it is
not only the way in which Osmin presents an image of “Turkishness,” but also the
image of Europeans with which he confronts us. In his vision, Europeans are bad, no
question about it. One might argue that Osmin’s limited and negative image of
Europeans (as constellated in his lines) characterizes him as stupid and short-
sighted, especially from the point of view of Europeans not wishing to recognize them-
selves in this image. However, the libretto also does something else: it proves him to
be right. Die Entführung aus dem Serail shows Europeans to be treacherous, deceit-
ful, disrespectful, and untrustworthy. As the plot proceeds, Osmin’s prejudices are
shown to be justified to a large extent, and everything happens more or less as he
originally predicted.
Within the context of the story, the Europeans’ bad behavior is justified as long as
one accepts that Konstanze needs to be “saved” from seduction by the Turk and that
to this end all means are acceptable. But this precise point of view is also what is
questioned and undermined by the opera itself, and the characterization of Osmin is
instrumental in causing such destabilization. His aggressive antipathy at first makes
it easy to reject his way of looking at the Europeans as the product of a distorted
vision, in effect “othering” the image of European self articulated by him by present-
ing it as the vision of a stranger, someone who does not know. However, when this
image finally appears to be quite accurate, it is much harder to maintain the distinc-
tion between self and other.
This distinction is further problematized by the character of the other “Turk,”
Pasha Selim. Selim trusts Belmonte, Pedrillo, and Konstanze—he gives them what
they ask for, and in return they betray him. When he discovers how he has been

deceived, he is furious, and it appears that he will use his power to exact revenge,
confirming the image of the violent Turk earlier embodied by Osmin. The discovery
that Belmonte is the son of the man who drove him from his belongings in Spain,
threatened him, and took his possessions, provides further justification for violent
action. But then, not wanting to perpetuate such vindictive patterns of behavior,
Pasha Selim decides to let them go. It is therefore not the Europeans that “save”
Konstanze (as the title Die Entführung aus dem Serail might suggest) but rather
Pasha Selim’s contempt that sets them free, his refusal to be like them or even to
have them near him any longer. They are released because he despises them.
In their staging, Quraishi and Yalcin push the opera’s play on the reversal of self
and other one step further, reversing the situation in the original plot. In their version,
Belmonte, Pedrillo, Konstanze, and her servant are young Turks, while Osmin and
Pasha Selim represent Old Europe. The story takes place not in Pasha Selim’s harem
but in a theater in Vienna or another old European city. Through this strategy, they
offer a commentary not on how the opera depicts the other, but on what might be
called a blind spot in the vision of self with which the opera invites us, the audience,
to identify. The blind spot is centered in Konstanze’s role, which is constructed
around her honor, which it is her responsibility to guard under all circumstances,
although this “honor” is “owned” not by her but by Belmonte, her fiancé. In the orig-
inal libretto, right from the beginning, Konstanze’s honor, and not her well-being, is
Belmonte’s primary concern. Instead of expressing his happiness at seeing her
again, at knowing that she is still alive, the first and only focus of Belmonte’s concern
is to ascertain that he is not too late, that Pasha Selim has not taken her already,
as if he must assure himself that it still makes sense to rescue her. Furthermore,
the anger his doubts about her honor evoke is directed toward her, she who was
abducted against her will, and not against Pasha Selim.
By reversing the roles, Quraishi exposes the uncanny similarities between
Konstanze’s role in this celebrated masterpiece of European culture and ways of
dealing with women often criticized in others. This strategy of deconstructive reversal
was not limited to the plot but extended to include the music as well as the setting.
Instead of criticizing Mozart for writing Turkish music his own way, transforming it into
something that is only vaguely reminiscent of real Turkish music, Quraishi followed
Mozart’s example and took the liberty of performing Mozart’s music in a Turkish man-
ner. Composer Yalcin adapted Mozart’s opera for a combination of piano, traditional
Turkish instruments, and electronics. The result is recognizable as Mozart’s compo-
sition, yet sounds very different from what we are used to. This new sound confirms
that Mozart’s “Turkish” music has little to do with Turkish music. Performed on
Turkish instruments, Mozart’s “Turkish” music does not sound Turkish at all, but very
much like Mozart performed on unfamiliar instruments. Instead of absorbing the
audience in music that sounds comfortably familiar, this version defamiliarizes the

well-known score and invites the audience to listen in a different way, highlighting the
structural characteristics of the music instead of directing attention to the execution
of the melodies and arias.
In Quraishi’s staging, the time is now and we are here; this is the message com-
municated to the audience upon entering the theater. Here, too, the situation is
reversed. The audience enters the theater above the main stage, their first vision
being the reverse of their usual view from the auditorium. The entire space is hung
with black cloth, which covers the theater’s lavish baroque decorations. Instead of
being provided with a safe position in the dark from which to peer into an “other”
world through the finestra aperta of the proscenium arch, it is up to the members of
the audience to choose their own position somewhere around the stage. This stage
is built in the middle of the auditorium, which has the effect of turning the auditorium
into part of the setting. The space of the Schauspielhaus is the Serail, which, hung
in black, looks like a gigantic tomb in which Konstanze and her servants have
become stuck. Konstanze is placed on a raised stage in the middle; the entire piece
evolves around this stage, around the staging of Konstanze. In the center of it all, she
is trapped, just as the characters are trapped in historical Vienna, in a historic the-
ater with no exits. Above all, Konstanze is trapped in a gender role that stages her as
the object of desire, like Europa, destined to be abducted and abducted again, while
struggling to maintain her status as forbidden land, a status that is at once what
caused her to be abducted to the Serail and what motivates her abduction from it.
On “her” raised stage, the drama is presented in the form of a series of poses,
or tableaux vivants, rather than a continuous unfolding of dramatic action. This mise
en scène highlights the discontinuous time structure of the representation of the
story in this opera. Arias, duets, and choral sections extend individual moments well
beyond the boundaries of realistic representation and the action in between is often
reduced to the bare minimum. The result is a structure that jumps from one intensi-
fied moment to the next.6 Quraishi’s staging pushes this structure to the extreme by
reducing action to a series of poses. Many of these poses are staged in such a way
as to call attention to the relationship between these poses and a viewer and to high-
light how the poses are constructed to play into and satisfy the desires of the viewer.
At the same time, the explicitness with which this is manifest undermines any easy
position for the viewer, who is constantly confronted with her or his implication in
what is shown. Pasha Selim is staged as a body builder involved in a constant
attempt to acquire the ideal body through exercising. As he poses for the audience,
their gaze becomes the mirror to which he directs himself. Konstanze adopts the
image of La Grande Odalisque (1814), the painting by Ingres, famous for accommo-
dating the public’s taste for orientalist subjects. Famous as well for how it presents
a reiteration of an older model in which the object is not the orientalist other but
Venus, as painted by Giorgione, Titian, and Caban, among others. Ingres’s oriental

Bleeker 4 Serap Gögüs as Konstanze. Photography: Nick Mangafas
other mirrors this foundational image of a European aesthetic model, conflating self
and other in an ideal of female beauty and aesthetic composition. This oriental
self/other in its turn becomes the image in which Konstanze’s beauty is reflected.
With her sleek looks and stylized behavior, Konstanze takes on the image presented
in the mirror of these paintings, thus affirming a cultural gaze in which self and other
are conflated. Performed by the Turkish singer, Serap Gögüs, in Quraishi’s staging,
Konstanze’s casting reverses the function of Osmin and Pasha Selim as enacting
the oriental other in more conventional versions of Die Entführung aus dem Serail.
Mirrored at once in the viewer’s memory of the iconized postures of these paintings
and in the shiny surface of the stage, she presents the audience with a confusing
mirror/image in which self and other are inextricably intertwined.
Quraishi’s staging of Die Entführung aus dem Serail confronts its audiences with a
representation that complicates the assumptions on the basis of which we distin-
guish between self and other. Staging here may be understood in terms of techne or
technology, as a particular treatment of material. Theatricality here results from the
interaction between this treatment of material and culturally and historically specific
modes of perception. This is an interaction in which either the modes of perceiving
do not correspond to the telos implied in the technology, or where the technology
complicates the telos implied in modes of perception. At this point, the blatant inno-
cence of Belmonte concerning the (then) recent history of Europe and the role played
by his family in this history, reads as a commentary on the incapacity or unwillingness
of Mozart’s European contemporaries to take into account the history they share with

what is perceived as the other, as well as their own less than charming behavior
against others and how this may affect how they are perceived by those others. A
commentary that, unfortunately, has lost nothing of its relevance.
“Modernization as a narrative placed national units on a temporal continuum from
‘backward’ to ‘advanced,’” observes Susan Buck-Morss (in the article quoted at this
essay’s beginning). Yet, she observes, “globalization does not presume the historical
time of Western progress.” Could it be that the struggle with Mozart’s version of
“Turkishness,” which has become such an important issue in recent stagings of this
opera, actually reflects an attempt to make globalization to progression, thus reifying
our position at the leading edge of historical progression? At first glance, the
critiques of Mozart’s representation of Turkishness may seem to be motivated by
increased awareness of the otherness of the other, and therefore indicative of a
move beyond naiveté. Such a reading places Mozart (and his librettist) in the position
of being (relatively) backward and puts us in the position of having to find a solution
for a cultural relativism that, from the point of view of our more advanced perspec-
tive, is no longer acceptable. A close reading of the plot however, as I hope to have
demonstrated, raises the question of whether it might be something else, something
that “we” do not want to see. The confrontation provided by these “Turks” is not, or
not in the first place, how they embody otherness, or how they wrongly represent the
other, but how the way they are represented undermines the clear-cut distinctions on
which we base our conception of self, of who we are and of how we are different
from “them.” This does not make the representation of “Turks” and “Turkishness” in
Die Entführung aus dem Serail any less artificial. But it may invite the notion, as
Quraishi’s staging suggests, that, notwithstanding the ideology of progress underly-
ing modernity, it might actually be Western modernity that has become historically
stuck. Ironically, the response of newspaper critics was mainly concerned with the
question of whether the representations of Osmin and Pasha Selim as Europeans
ventilating politically correct rhetoric was acceptable or not, and with whether it was
acceptable to perform Mozart’s music the way Quraishi and Yalcin did. Konstanze’s
role remained largely unquestioned, again.

Notes
1. See http://www.kultur.at/howl/tanja/ot/ illuminated screen in front, and the light beam

index.htm. Ostojic’s statement can be found projected from behind the spectator’s head);
under: Documentation, first set: 04 Jan.05. 3) the film itself as a “text” (involving the
Although the link to the statement dates it to various devices employed to represent visual
2005, the statement itself is dated January 4, continuity, the illusion of real space, and the
2006. creation of an illusion of reality); 4) the
“mental machinery” of the spectator (including
2. See Taylor (1997, 65–81), Meyer (1974, conscious perceptual as well as unconscious
480), and Perl (2000, 219–235). and preconscious processes) that constitute
the viewer as a subject of desire. The notion of
3. Een Totale Entführung. Adaptation and the apparatus thus produces a definition of the
director: Ramsey Nasr. Musical adaptation and entire cinema-machine that goes beyond films
composition: Wim Hendrix. Muziektheater themselves and that places the spectator—as
Transparant and the orchestra of the Beethoven unconscious desiring subject—at the center of
Academy. Premiere: September 13, 2006, De the entire process. (See Robert Stam, Robert
Singel, Antwerpen. Borgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman Lewis (eds.)
New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics.
4. For a more elaborate discussion of Fried’s Structuralism, Poststructuralism and Beyond.
reading of Diderot and its use for the theater London and New York: Routledge, 1992). The
see Bleeker (2005). For a more elaborate seminal texts in the theory of the apparatus
discussion of both Davis and Fried’s notions of are Jean-Louis Baudry’s “The Ideological Effects
theatricality and their use for today, see Bleeker of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus” and “The
(2007). Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches
to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema.”
5. In film theory, the term apparatus refers to In: Philip Rosen (ed.) Narrative, Apparatus,
the totality of interdependent operations that Ideology. New York: Columbia University Press.
together make up the viewing situation. This 1986: 286–318.
includes: 1) the technical base (the effects
produced by the various components of the film 6. For an extensive discussion of the
equipment, including camera, lights, film, and implications of this structure, see Dahlhaus
projection); 2) the conditions of film projection (1983).
(dark theater, immobility of spectators, the
Works Cited
Barish, Jonas. The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice. Buck-Morss, Susan. Thinking Past Terror:
Berkeley, CA, and London: University of Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left. London
California Press, 1981. and New York: Verso, 2003.
Bleeker, Maaike. “Absorption and Focalisation: Dahlhaus, Carl. Vom Musikdrama zur
Performance and its Double.” Performance Literaturoper: Aufsätze zur neueren
Research 10.1 (2005): 48–60. Operngeschichte. Munich and Salzburg:
Musikverlag Emil Katzbichler, 1983.
———. “Theatre of/or Truth.” Performance
Paradigm 3: The End of Ethics? Performance, Davis, Tracy C., and Thomas Postlewait (eds.).
Politics and War. (2007) www.performance Theatricality. Cambridge, UK, and New York:
paradigm.net. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Freedman, Barbara. Staging the Gaze: Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Harmondsworth,

Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Middlesex: Penguin, 1985.
Shakespearean Comedy. Ithaca, NY, and
London: Cornell University Press, 1991. Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the
Margins. New York and London: Routledge,
Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Minimal 1992.
Art: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Gregory Battcock.
New York: E.P. Dutton & Co, 1968. 116–47. Stam, Robert, Robert Borgoyne, and Sandy
Flitterman Lewis (eds.). New Vocabularies in
———. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Poststructuralism
and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Berkeley, and Beyond. London and New York: Routledge,
CA, and London: University of California Press, 1992.
1980.
Taylor, Timothy D. “Peopling the Stage: Opera,
Meyer, Eva R. “Turquerie and Eighteenth- Otherness, and New Musical Representations
Century Music.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 7.4 in the Eighteenth Century.” Cultural Critique 36
(1974): 474–88. (1997): 55–88.
Perl, Benjamin. “Mozart in Turkey.” Cambridge

Opera Journal 12.3 (2000): 219–35.

Transgressing Time:
Imagining an Exhibition
of Works by Alanna O’Kelly
and Phil Collins
Niamh Ann Kelly
ABSTRACT
In this paper I propose an imaginary exhibition of two artworks: Omós (1994–1995),

a sound work by Alanna O’Kelly, and How to Make a Refugee (2000), a DVD work by
Phil Collins. Through a consideration of the works in relation to each other, I focus on
how the connections between social expectations of visibility and practices of repre-
sentation are in need of constant re-thinking. In O’Kelly’s work, she looks to the past
for her primary thematic focus, while Collins has overtly conveyed his topic through
recent socio-political events. Both works are, in my reading, linked by the common
sensitivity of the artists toward the cogency of codes of documentary practice in
defining what become the main subjects of representation. In each of these art
works, the artists challenge the viewer to question the mediation of collective history
and the media of present-day news. Highlighting instability of meaning, mobile sub-
jects and lack of temporal fixity in art transpire as core methods by which O’Kelly and
Collins provoke an unsettling experience of art for the viewer. In this, I argue, they
suggest a way to foster art practices as a key component of comprehending what it
means to speak, at any time, of others and of ourselves.
Introduction
In the memory of art, there exists the potential for all kinds of imaginary exhibitions.
Art works resist the static presentation of display in their sustained mobile presence
in the memory of the viewer. In this paper, I will explore such a potential in relation to
two art works that, to my knowledge, have not yet “met” each other in any gallery
Transgressing Time: Imagining an Exhibition of Works by Alanna O’Kelly and Phil Collins | 161
space. The two works I will describe embody an attitude toward the viewer that con-
nects them: a resistance to passive spectatorship. My readings of them are linked
by what I see as an interest in thwarting expectations of visualizing identity and are
specifically conceived with the aim of disrupting representations of so-called “other-
ness.” Attendant to these aspects of both the works is a context of mobility, which
arises on two levels. The artists’ own practices of travel have informed their works;
and, within each respective piece, the mobility of their subjects is central.
Omós (1994–95), by Alanna O’Kelly, is a sound work that is contemporary in its
presence, though its cue—widespread poverty experienced during the nineteenth
century in Ireland—is a result of looking back to Ireland’s past. O’Kelly’s central fig-
ure is a poverty-stricken indigenous girl of colonial Ireland. First developed as a per-
formance piece, Omós was later recorded as a sound installation following O’Kelly’s
return to live in Ireland after living in Britain and a period of travel. How to Make a
Refugee (2000), by Phil Collins, is a DVD work that intervenes with a press photogra-
phy shoot of a Kosovar-Albanian family at a refugee camp during the Kosovo conflict
in 1999. Though the location of Collins’s subjects in this work was not Northern
Ireland, I suggest that his practice is substantially informed by his having resided in
Belfast during the 1990s and his ongoing interest in travel.
Omós: The Invisible Subject

In 1992, Alanna O’Kelly created an exhibition called The Country Blooms . . . A
Garden and a Grave, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Ireland.1 This was
the first of a series of multi-media works on the theme of the Great Irish Famine, con-
sequences of mass emigration, and wider reflections on the relationship of Ireland’s
present to its past.2 As part of this expanding series, O’Kelly developed a number of
photo-text works, multi-media installations, and performances. At her 1992 IMMA
exhibition a poem was printed on a wall panel:
I am twelve years old

I run, barefoot, dressed in an old coat
I see two gentlemen, traveling in a coach
On the road from Leenane to Westport
I run beside their coach
I don’t ask for anything
I keep pace with them
They tell me over and over that they will
Give me nothing
I do not ask for anything
I keep my silence
They shake their heads, ignore me, debate
162 | Niamh Ann Kelly

And argue, wonder at my perseverance

I keep pace with their wheels
I do not speak
I do not look at them
They give me a fourpenny piece
I take it
I turn on my heels and run.3
This is derived from an Irish folk story and symbolizes a notion of national pride in a
colonized country. The girl represents an oppressed and poverty-stricken people who
feel compelled to encounter their oppressor, presented here in the form of a coach
and its occupants. Though she wants to make these wealthy travelers aware of her
presence and of her impoverished and famished condition, the child’s sense of self-
respect preempts her inclination to beg directly for alms.
Later, in 1995, O’Kelly created a sound work called Omós (the Irish Gaelic word
for respect). The central sound alludes to the young girl running alongside the coach.
She becomes increasingly breathless as she tries to keep up with the rolling coach
wheels. Eventually the listener can hear a coin thrown in her direction. Fragments of
a poem are whispered intermittently throughout the work by a female voice, perhaps
her mother, and other voices call out encouragement to her. Eventually, the sounds
speed up. The carriage moves faster, the running feet patter ever more quickly,
almost beyond physical capability. The child’s breathlessness becomes louder, the
whispering voices grow more urgent, and eventually build to a crescendo in the form
of a wordless call, a caoine, similar to keening, and the ending of the work’s presen-
tation.4 Jean Fisher describes O’Kelly’s use of the caoine:
[A] sonorous call, a rhythmic vocalization without words . . . O’Kelly’s lament for the
dead returns in Omós as a shout for life. It is, in a sense, an invocation of that earlier,
primary voice of the mother, calling upon its nurturing role to re-empower the subject.
In this way, the call breaks the spell of enforced muteness; it is an open-mouthed
sound that figures the moment when the repressive space is transformed into that
imaginative passage where what is infans may initiate its own narration. (O’Kelly and
Fisher 1996, 14)
The effect of Omós is that of a part-witnessed event, a partial glimpse of a tragic
situation that leaves questions unanswered: what happened to the girl? How did
the travelers in the coach feel when faced with her persistent silence?
Movement as Metaphor
Omós began its aural presence in the world as a performance. On a darkened stage,
O’Kelly acted out the role of the girl running, with, at first, only her feet visible in a
small pool of light. Gradually as her running and breathlessness gathered pace,
O’Kelly emerged out of the darkness.5 O’Kelly describes this action as “. . . the
magic rhythm of the whole body coming out of this darkness, out of our past”
(Deepwell 2005, 144). This performance was recorded and a layering of sounds
added, including voices of the girl’s family and ancestors calling to her, accompany-
ing her on her journey. The work followed a period during which O’Kelly had developed
a number of sound performances based on the caoine and wordless sounds from
other cultures, such as the Canadian Eskimos—sounds that she has described as
timeless (2005, 140). In this way, by choosing to develop a sound presentation,
O’Kelly avoids a direct visual representation of the story that might tie it unnecessar-
ily to a time, and to a place. Further, as Fisher indicates, the child’s own wordless-
ness in the face of inequality gives way to a more primal calling, thereby drawing upon
a shared cultural form of vocalization. This form of mourning is then reconstituted by
the figure of the girl in Omós as an active address to those who look down on her
from the coach, recreating the girl’s sense of difference on her terms. All this is con-
veyed through the evocation of overlapping movements: the breathless girl running,
the coach wheels rolling, the ancestors’ voices urging her through time all converge
to constitute a busy aural landscape. These sounds exist in stark contrast to the
stillness required for a listener standing in the gallery.
O’Kelly’s decision to develop a series of works derived from a consideration of
the Irish experience during the famine followed a period of traveling with her work. On
returning to live in Ireland, she was keen to address in her art ideas of contemporary
Irishness (2005, 140). Fionna Barber emphasizes that O’Kelly’s time studying art in
London enhanced her sensitivity toward Irish emigrant populations and the complex-
ities of British-Irish relations in particular (2004, 9–10). This context of being and
feeling removed from her homeland imbued her with a renewed interest in her
identity and a curiosity about the fracturing of Irish identity both at home and abroad.6
As Ireland experienced considerable emigration as a response to economic recession
and widespread unemployment throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s,
many young Irish went to work in the UK and elsewhere. So the huge diaspora of
Irish, in the U.S., for example, which had been augmented by the nineteenth-century
famine, seemed to have a partial echo in the emigration patterns of the 1980s.
Alongside her reflections on the Irish experience, O’Kelly cites watching the news
on television during this time as an influence on the direction of her work. The
images of contemporary famine and deprivation following civil unrest in various parts
of the world appearing in her living room evoked Ireland’s troubled past beyond its
connection to contemporary Ireland, comprising a more general awareness of
poverty, famine, and dispossession. By contrast, in Ireland by the mid-1990s, the
advent of economic well-being, known as the Celtic Tiger, was taking hold, with enact-
ments of identity addressed to a nation increasingly made up of immigrant groups.7
A nation of strangers had finally appeared in Ireland to redress the outward flow over

the last century and a half.8 And so, the layered movements in Omós are contingent
on a sense of shifting perceptions of identity in, and looking out from, Ireland.
Questions then arise for the listener in the gallery space: which sounds can they
identify with; which ones do they hear more clearly? The transition from past to pres-
ent is metaphorically realized in the representation of multiple movements, through
time as well as space.
Recalling History
O’Kelly’s specific interest in the Irish famine was informed by the reluctance to dis-
cuss it she had experienced among those around her. She characterizes collective
memory of the famine as “a very dark place” (Deepwell 2005, 141). One route to this
dark place was through the telling of a folk story of Irish poverty. The story of Omós
exists as a sort of historical anecdote: its veracity may not be minutely proven but
the tale is knowable. In her performance and sound piece, O’Kelly called forth and
reversed a historical device common in written accounts of nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century rural Ireland, typically provided by personal journals or travel diaries
of visitors to the country or those of the gentry class visiting their estates. Margaret
Kelleher’s research in this area reveals that such visitors were usually from Britain,
although some were from America (1997, 16).9 These diarists often struggled with
ideas of “otherness” and the differences between them and the people they encoun-
tered, while at the same time constructing this “native other” through their texts.
The writer Maria Edgeworth fictionalized her diary in the form of early regional novels
(Castle Rackrent [1800] and The Absentee [1812]), which provide valuable critiques
of the effects of social distinctions of the period made between the landowners
and their estate tenants. Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch discusses fluctuating attitudes
toward the Irish on the part of the visiting British, and gives the example of Charles
Kingsley, who wrote that it would be easier to accept the otherness of the Irish were
they less similar-looking to the British; if, for example, they were black (1997, 245).
A more recent and subtle approach to describing such an encounter was taken by
Colm Tóibín. He conveys a historical sense of Ireland and class difference through
a reference to a journey made by his protagonist, a fictionalized Henry James, in
his novel The Master (2004). In an early section of the novel, as Henry sets out in
February 1895 to travel from Dublin Castle to the Royal Hospital Kilmainham across
the city, the narrator recounts:
He [Henry] had seen Ireland before, having traveled once from Queenstown in Cork
to Dublin, and he had stayed also in Kingston briefly. He had liked Kingstown, the sea
light and the sense of calm and order. But this journey now reminded him of traveling
across the country, witnessing a squalor both abject and omnipresent. There were
times during that journey when he was not sure whether a cabin had been partly razed
to the ground or was fully inhabited. Everything seemed ruined or partly ruined. Smoke
appeared from half-rotten chimneys, and no one, emerging from these cabins, could
refrain from shouting after a carriage as it passed or moving malevolently towards one
if it slowed down. There was no moment when he felt free of their hostile stares and
dark accusing eyes. (2004, 25–26)
Reading it as a parallel text to Omós, Tóibín’s passage suggests that even sympa-
thetic gentry who journeyed through poor rural parts of post-famine Ireland were
often looked upon as intruders to those regions. O’Kelly has used this sense of
transition through unfamiliar territory in Omós, but has reversed the position of the
viewer and storyteller. Instead of an account from the vantage point of the privileged
diarist or traveler, she presents the silent recipient of that long-standing non-
comprehending socially and politically constructed gaze. The chosen form of medi-
ation is not through words, as a diarist might formulate them to conjure a visual
description, but rather through a series of sounds that coalesce to produce a sense
of immediacy.
In her use of a folk story, O’Kelly emphasizes the role of the narrator as that his-
torically much-narrated figure, an impoverished subject. The voice of an unnamed girl
is given direct priority in the printed panel, implying her centrality to the sound work.
In the sound elements, O’Kelly places the listener in a situation where they must
choose what sounds to identify with—the breathless girl, the coach wheels, the
whispering voices. This repositions the folk tale in the present, reconfiguring its
performed aspects through a jumble of interpretive cues. What begins as a reading
of Omós as a retrospective perspective on the history of Irish poverty becomes
equally susceptible to processes of personal identification. For the listener, assump-
tions relating to perceptions of historic class identities are transformed into their
present-day experience in the gallery. In this way, beyond the Irish folk context, more
universal contemplations on poverty and disempowerment can be drawn from the
work. Importantly, redressing the authority of voice, who is telling the stories of his-
tory and to whom, is core to the affect of Omós. The girl’s lack of speech is replaced
by wordless panting which gives way to a cry beyond crying. This actively disrupts any
potential for a listener to impose a conventional linear notion of history: the work
is not simply about the past, but through its form and insistent uneasiness forges
a circular sense of past and present. Ultimately, the invisible subject and final
wordlessness of Omós transcend the historic loss of a poor and female voice.
How to Make a Refugee—The Moving Image

Here we are now, in this instance, the media, discussing the media, disavowing that
we are the media. It is evidence of the tyranny of expression that we believe this
straight reporting—the controlled zoom on the injured child—despite the instability of
the document as a document. How irresistible the visual bleed into filmic discourse!
The bereaved tell their story to a piano accompaniment . . . These moments when you

feel: why are they filming? Why are they not doing something useful? These are proba-
bly, in fact, the best moments for you too to take up your camera.
Phil Collins (Robecchi and Gioni 2002, 86).
For How to Make a Refugee (2000), Phil Collins picked up his camera and pointed
it at a family, who in this moment of filming had also become someone else’s chosen
subjects. Collins joined a camera crew on a news photo shoot of a Kosovar-Albanian
family on the Kosovan border in May 1999. This was part of a series of works made
in Skopje, Macedonia, and in refugee camps at Stenkovec and Chegrane. Collins
positions his camera at a parallel vantage point to that of the news crew. However,
rather than simply echoing the actions of the crew, Collins reveals the elements of
construction in their taking a photo and the negotiations that lead to producing their
final images. The viewer can hear the debates among the crew: Will the boy look
better with or without his baseball cap? Should the boy remove his t-shirt and display
the scars from bullet wounds on his torso? Occasionally, a hand enters the frame to
take a light reading. The family is arranged in a cluttered configuration in the corner
of a room, against a window on one side. Those of the middle and older generations
sit on a corner sofa, while the younger ones stand or crouch on the floor and two
perch on the sofa back. Textures of a disintegrating blue wall, a net curtain, and a
creamy fur-like sofa cover are the only evidence of a domestic-style interior location.
Displaced Subjects
By positioning himself alongside the camera crew, Collins acknowledges his
participation in the voyeuristic manipulation of the family being photographed.
Nonetheless, he is in conflict with the conventional apparatus of popular media and
its preferred stories. In this instance, he seems intent on disrupting the reductive
severity of subjects associated with so-called portrait images. This imperative is in
keeping with much of Collins’s practice. His photo and video works self-consciously
iterate a broadly speculative account of contentious practices of contemporary
reportage.10 Collins, through his employment of strategies of mass media, seeks to
expose their inherent structures of relativities and, further, to question the means by
which they produce now ubiquitous subversive images of identities in particular. At a
time when the naive notion that there might be an innocent photograph has well and
truly been put to rest, Collins, as quoted above, is determined to provoke his viewers
into recognizing the political aesthetic of the lens by himself wielding the lens.
Furthermore, his work reflects an exigency to disclose the complexities of how and
where identity distinctions arise: namely, the struggle between comprehending and
distancing the other, as it occurs in and through the popular and news media’s
construction of subject and viewer. Even the titles of his projects and works reveal
this chronic philosophical (and ultimately aesthetic) dilemma: Becoming More Like Us
(2002), Bad Infinity (2002), How to Make a Refugee (2000), Holiday in Someone Else’s
Misery (2001), Young Serbs (2001), Real Society (2002), You’re Not The Man You
Never Were (2000).11
Born in England, Collins lived and worked in Belfast for many years during the
1990s, showing work in both Northern Ireland and Ireland. The influence of Northern
Ireland as a site of hyper-visualized identities—both fixed and transitory, and includ-
ing, literally, parades of identity—on Collins’s work is keenly evident in How to Make
a Refugee.12 At this time, he developed a series called The Marches, completed in
2000, in which he filmed Orange Marches in Belfast and Portadown. Contrary to the
images broadcast worldwide of the bowler-hatted marchers and whatever violent
interaction might take place at a march, Collins interviewed those watching the
marches. He subsequently layered low-level sound recordings of the parties the
marchers held around bonfires after the marches. In doing so, he muddied the con-
ventional perceptions of Northern Ireland that were propagated by the international
news media.
Currently based in Glasgow, he continues to regularly move out of where he lives
in order to make work. He is drawn toward zones of current or recent political discord
and civil unrest.13 His wider art practice reiterates his conviction that we, as readers
of the media, are not merely inactive spectators; far from it. In 2001, Collins devel-
oped work based first in Belfast, and later in Tirana, Albania, called Holiday in
Someone Else’s Misery. The first part of the project consisted of a line of T-shirts bear-
ing the images of shootings or pipe-bombings in Northern Ireland. He bartered these
garments for the opportunity to photograph the wearer, in an uneasy comment on the
fashion to visit recent conflict sites as a sort of radical chic tourism. Such tourism
takes the form of temporary migrations to places that have hit the world news head-
lines through stories of war, massacre, or civil unrest. The visits usually take place
after the violence has ended. Sinisa Mitrovic describes Collins as a “different kind of
visitor,” precisely because he “has engaged himself precisely in revealing and sub-
verting the systems of representation that Western broadcast and print media use
in dealing with so-called ‘danger zones,’ including their incomprehensible and often
horrifying otherness” (2002, 32).
Collins has suggested that, conventionally, damage as focus of photographic
representation is considered more important than violence as a preferred point of
entry for a set of critiques around national, cultural, and personal identity. This
implies that tangible and visible after-effects of violence or injustice are necessary
for a media representation to occur at all. A photograhic report literally needs some-
thing to point to. This he understands as contingent to the media’s fascination with
“the wound, the center, with action over inaction, the visible over the invisible”
(Robecchi and Gioni 2002, 84). As O’Kelly wanted to look at a “dark place,” Collins
too seems keen to reiterate Rancière’s conception of artistic practices as “‘ways of
doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and

making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms
of visibility” (2004, 13). Collins routinely dislocates himself in search of ways of
rethinking representations of identities of so-called “others.” In How to Make a
Refugee, he sustains this gesture of displacement by revealing to his viewers how
a particular set of identities are represented as a result of this photo shoot, and
brings a previously invisible process of imaging dispossessed people into public
view in the gallery space.
Remaking the Present

In analyzing the media construction of an image that might “move us” (in an emo-
tional sense), How to Make a Refugee insists that those who see it, or perhaps wit-
ness it by proxy via Collins, are made to reflect on the nature of news and magazine
representations. His interest is in what is not told in the presentation of news pho-
tography, as much as in whatever may later become apparent: the moment in which
a representation is constructed that will become part of the commonplace currency
of how this Kosovar-Albanian family is later visually identified as “refugee.” His par-
ticipation in that moment is distinguished by the fact that though his hand-held
camera is mostly static, Collins’s work is performed, both in its presentation and in
its active interpretation. In this way, it delineates art’s potential to step in where the
reporter’s, and later the historian’s, positivism can only fail; pointing to what Collins
has termed the “instability of the document as document.” Or, to appropriate
Rancière’s words from his thesis on the relation of art, politics—along with forms of
knowledge more generally—to fiction, Collins eloquently reveals that “‘the logic of
stories’ and the ability to act as historical agents go together” (2004, 39).
A complementary issue has been at the heart of discussions on new historicism
in art, where, increasingly, traditional distinctions between art history and art criti-
cism are overtly undermined by recognition of the presence and comparative impact
of the author in both disciplines. Michael Ann Holly undermines assumptions that
might support distinctions between history and criticism when she proposes a
“critical history,” wherein the object and viewer/interpreter are bound together in the
production of meaning.14 As she outlines: “. . . critical history does not arise sponta-
neously: it is coupled with the objects about which it speaks” (1995, 84). This sug-
gests that the complex interconnections between an event, the story that describes
it, and how it is remembered, are continuously reinvented and narrated through time.
Kevin Whelan draws a parallel conclusion in speaking about Irish history when he
implies that the teller and tale are sooner or later indistinguishable from each other
(2003, 98). In How to Make a Refugee, Collins clearly implicates not just himself as
an artist but also his viewer as implicit authors of the situation his work presents. By
providing an account of the making of an image of otherness, he forces us closer to
his viewpoint. It is a fraught observation of both the desire that news and popular
media feeds and the cathartic distancing it casually provides through visual repre-
sentations such as the ones produced at this refugee camp.
Uneasy with the camera’s persuasive power on representative practice, Collins
has referred in interviews to its historic role as a diagnostic tool and has also spo-
ken of the implicit violence in organizing a video production (Robecchi and Gioni
2002, 86). These acknowledgements clearly recall the legacy of the language com-
monly applied to lens-based activity and its endlessly evoked affinity to hunting. In
Collins’s hands the camera lens continues its acts of trangression: subtly invasive,
apparently deceptive. In producing and presenting How to Make a Refugee, as in his
wider oeuvre, he not only transgresses upon the subjects through representation, but
upon the systems of that representation. The formal concern of the moving and
changing image is played out in the gallery by the viewer as the necessary comple-
tion of Collins’s practice. This finally advocates a social vigilance over the real sub-
ject of his work, media practices. In How to Make a Refugee, as in other installations,
he focuses this vigilance by asking his viewers to reconsider how our comprehension
of ourselves and others is embedded in culturally prescribed systems of representa-
tion. In order to do this, we need to engage in an ongoing remaking of our sense of
the present and recent past.
Conclusion
Thinking through these works in an imaginary juxtaposition forces a number of con-
nections between them, as does any exhibition. The shared emphases that are most
apparent to me revolve around a heightened awareness of how the movement of peo-
ples routinely generates representations of identity in relation to difference. Coming
face-to-face with an “other” or “others” lies at the heart of both these works. Collins
and O’Kelly directly bring their viewer and listener to hidden places to actively expose
strategies and forms of cultural representation. In this way, these works function as
aesthetic practices pointing to a delimitation of the visible and invisible.15 In Omós,
by evoking metaphorical associations to reframe the position of storyteller, O’Kelly
also reiterates the status of individual art works as socially constructed experiences.
O’Kelly does not simply rehearse the language of history, and thereby risk repeating
its patterns of misrepresentation. She chooses a multilayered language that dis-
places time to reconstitute coevalness between past and present, subject and lis-
tener, art and its places of presentation.16 Omós offers a newer and more historically
differentiating form of imaginative truth that is created in and by the form of the work.
Any expectation of definitive representation or revelation of identities is defied as a
strategy in Omós, as it is in How to Make a Refugee. But whereas Omós focuses on
our perceptions of and through history, How to Make a Refugee brings the problem-
atic aspects of visualizing more recent moments of socio-political change and cultural
alterity into focus.

For both O’Kelly and Collins, their respective physical migrations as artists is
integral to the work they produce. Their travel has informed the identification of their
initial subjects (for want of a better term), their consequential choice of art forms,
and the means of dissemination of the ideas they present. The figures that inhabit
their works are similarly defined by their specific displacements, and are even left
unnamed in the process: O’Kelly’s girl and Collins’s family are known primarily in
terms of their locations and movements. An antagonism toward still images, other-
wise readily employed by both the artists in other works, is here bound up with ideas
of the ordinary or generalized subject. Collins insists that his audience sustains con-
centration for the duration of taking a photograph in a video presented after the
photo shoot. He implies that to understand even the news image, his viewers need
to see how it was made. O’Kelly asks her listener to actively imagine a scene of
history in the present: here again a single prescriptive image would hardly suffice.
In art’s history and art’s relationship to history, and in the wider media represen-
tation’s relationship to the present or recent past, the understanding of time and
timeframe are essential components. These works cogently raise uneasy questions
about experiencing and engaging with contemporary art. Concepts that history and
historical moments of the present are fixed conceptual entities, which art might only
reflect on, is blurred by the consideration of temporal distance in these two art
works. By presenting works that move beyond respectively, literally, and physically
specific representations, and upsetting chronological structures of time to embrace
the multiple potentialities of understanding, How to Make a Refugee and Omós make
Fisher’s “imaginative passage” a subjectively and collectively possible experience.
Furthermore, we, as listeners and viewers, are uncomfortably implicated in these
moving subjects; subjects that remain stored in memory to be recalled at any given
moment.
Notes
1. The title is taken from a poem, The Deserted Limites at the Pompidou Center (Deepwell
Village, by Oliver Goldsmith, an eighteenth- 2005, 143).
century Irish poet.
6. O’Kelly discusses this in her “Winter
2. The Great Irish Famine began in 1845 and Lecture” (2001). This was part of an annual
its direct effect was acutely felt for six years. public lecture series at Irish Museum of
The failure of the potato crops following Modern Art. Copy of unpublished recording:
repeated blight infestations compounded courtesy of Irish Museum of Modern Art.
widespread hunger, related diseases, and death
among the cottier classes in rural Ireland. 7. The term, Celtic Tiger, was first coined in
These land workers did not own land, were 1994 by Kevin Gardiner, a UK economist, who
largely living in severe poverty, and had dietary likened Ireland’s economic boom in the 1990s
dependence on the potato as an affordable to that of the so-called Asian Tiger economies
staple food. Following potato blights, there of Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South
were widespread forced evictions and Korea in the 1980s and 1990s. A similarly
emigration. The population in 1841 was rapid economic growth was fueled in Ireland by
estimated to be over eight million (Campbell large-scale foreign industrial investment, low
1994, 15). By 1851, the population was labor costs in comparison to other European
depleted by over 25 percent (Kinealy 2002, 2), countries, returning emigrants, and low
and it is estimated that over a million died, corporate taxes, among other factors. This
while one and a half million emigrated during coincided with, or resulted in, an increase of
this period. immigrant populations and an unprecedented
growth in property markets, consumer
3. This text appeared in printed form in her spending, and, consequently, rising inflation.
1992 exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern
Art and was published in O’Kelly and Fisher, 8. I am cautious with my use of the term
1996 (National Irish Visual Arts Library). “appeared,” as we have yet to witness in
Ireland whether or not Julia Kristeva’s
4. Keening, “caoine,” is an Irish traditional “paradoxical community” is reconciled to itself,
form of wailing in mourning practiced by women as discussed by Declan Kiberd. His text
at a funeral wake, which may last for up to elaborates on aspects and, particularly,
three days. It is similar in practice and sound to shortcomings of multiculturalism in specific
the ululation made by women in some African relation to Ireland’s rapidly changing ethnic
and Arab cultures as forms of mourning and and cultural demographic of recent years,
resistance. In Ireland, a small group of women and in the context of Kristeva’s ideas on
would perform keening at all of the wakes in a “strangers” and “nationalism” (2001, 45–75).
region. Caoine is also the Irish Gaelic word for
crying, but, as Jeff Kelley describes it, in the 9. Kelleher has discussed in detail how
context of keening or “caoineadh na marbh” eyewitness famine accounts are fictionalized in
(lament of the dead) is understood as “a crying William Carleton’s The Black Prophet (1846),
beyond crying” (1997, 8). Peter Murray writes and Anthony Trollope’s Castle Richmond (1860)
that keening women “were an important part of (1997, 16–63).
Irish funerals, providing perhaps the last living
cultural link to the pre-Classical Mycenaean 10. Some of my comments in this section are
origins of communities on the west coast of drawn from a profile I wrote on Collins (2003).
Ireland” (1995, 76).
11. In his work Real Society, 2002, created as
5. The description here relates to a sound part of a curated group exhibition, Frontline
piece made from a performance for Hors Compilations, in San Sebastian, Collins

extended an open invitation for people to response in the midst of a bruised, constantly
come to a hotel room, strip, and have their changing world” (2006, 41).
photograph taken. This was greeted with
popular response with many willing participants 13. Sinisa Mitrovic raises the point: “it would
turning up. The confessional mode within the seem that the undeniable appeal of his
structure of the work is typical of Collins’s distinctive artistic persona is at least partly
penchant for incorporating into his practice based on his itinerant lifestyle and the mystery,
strategies that seem at first to obviate wider even exoticism, of places like Belfast, Belgrade,
social and political accounts of his work and or Baghdad he prefers to work in” (2002, 31).
its aesthetic. The in-your-face personal and
site-specific aspects of this work belie its wider 14. Holly writes: “What the discussion about
shared implications—a strategy of confusion, the gaze in works of art has taught us is that
which, I argue, underlies much of his oeuvre to perception always involves a circulation of
date. Writing about Collins’s exhibition on positions, a process of movement back and
9/11, Enduring Freedom (2002), Caoimhín Mac forth that will forever undermine the fixity of
Giolla Léith puts it another way: “It is a the two poles, inside and outside. Herein lies
testament to the disarming but never the source of an historian’s critical artistry.
irresponsible charm of Collins’s work that The trick is making what forever will be a
something so outrageously manipulative [Hero, provisional metaphorical construction at least
2002] should also be so genuinely moving” partially consonant with that made visible in
(2002, 189). the reigning artistic metaphors of the period”
(1995, 83).
12. In Northern Ireland, notably in Belfast
and Derry, the painting of symbolic colors, 15. Rancière writes of aesthetic practices
flags, and motifs on pavements and gable as: “forms of visibility that disclose artistic
ends of houses demarcates various zones of practices, the place they occupy, what they
identity associations—for example nationalist ‘do’ or ‘make’ from the standpoint of what is
or unionist iconography during the Troubles. common to the community” (2004, 13). I am
Liam Kelly discusses art relating to such suggesting that O’Kelly and Collins formulate
visualizations (1996, 58–73). More recently, a disclosure of historical and media
the Northern Irish Arts Council has announced representations, respectively, in the
an initiative to paint over many of these art works discussed here.
gable-end murals, but in the meantime, in
Belfast at least, there is a taxi service for tours 16. My use of coevalness here refers to
to some of the remaining murals across the Johannes Fabian’s discussion connecting the
city. Brian McAvera presents another focus on construction of otherness in cultural practices
art in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1994, with the problematic situation of historical
emphasizing how many artists “bore witness”: distance from a subject, and his suggestions
“it was about the slow, dangerous process of of the possibilities of coevalness and
discovery; of opening oneself out, absorbing, the consequences of denying it to others
reflecting and trying to make a personal (1983, 38–52).
Works Cited
Barber, Fionna. “Alanna O’Kelly’s Sanctuary/ Bhreathnach-Lynch, Síghle. “Framing the Irish:
Wasteland: Location, Memory and Hunger in Victorian Paintings of the Irish Peasant.” Journal
Recent Irish Visual Culture.” Paper presented of Victorian Culture 2.2 (1997): 245–260.
at the Social History Society Annual Conference,
University of Rouen, Rouen, France, January 9, Campbell, Stephen J. The Great Irish Famine:
2004. Words and Images from the Famine Museum,
Strokestown Park, County Roscommon. Mac Giolla Léith, Caoimhín. “Phil Collins:
Roscommon, Ireland: Famine Museum, 1994. Temple Bar Gallery and Studios/Meeting
House Square/Kerlin Gallery.” Artforum
Cullen, Fintan (ed.) Sources in Irish Art: A 40.10 (2002): 188–189.
Reader. Cork: Cork University Press, 2000.
McAvera, Brian. Icons of the North: Collective
Deepwell, Katy. Dialogues: Women Artists Histories of Northern Irish Art. Belfast: Golden
from Ireland. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd., Thread Gallery, 2006.
2005.
Mitrovic, Sinisa. “Project: Phil Collins.” Artext
Edgeworth, Maria. Castle Rackrent and The 78 (Fall 2002): 30–35.
Absentee. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions
Ltd., 1994. Murray, Peter. “Alanna O’Kelly.” Irish Art
1770–1995: History and Society, compiled by
Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How City of Cork VEC, 76. Cork and Kinsale:
Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Crawford Municipal Art Gallery and Gandon
Columbia University Press, 1983. Editions, 1995.
Holly, Michael Ann. “Past Looking.” Vision and O’Kelly, Alanna. “Winter Lecture.” Lecture,
Textuality. Eds. Stephen Melville and Bill at Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin,
Readings. London: MacMillan Press, 1995. Ireland, December 4, 2001. Unpublished
67–89. recording.
Kelleher, Margaret. The Feminization of Famine: O’Kelly, Alanna, and Jean Fisher. Alanna
Expressions of the Inexpressible? Cork: Cork O’Kelly – 23rd São Paulo Bienal. Dublin: Arte
University Press, 1997. Irlandesa/The Cultural Relations Committee of
Ireland (File: Alanna O’Kelly. Dublin: National
Kelley, Jeff. “Lamentation at a Post-Colonial Irish Visual Arts Library), 1996.
Wake.” Deoraíocht: Displacement, Frances
Hegarty and Alanna O’Kelly, exhibition Rancière, Jacques. Politics of Aesthetics. Trans.
catalogue. San Francisco: San Francisco Gabriel Rockhill. London and New York:
Art Institute, Walter/Mc Bean Gallery, Continuum, 2004.
1997. 5–12.
Robecchi, Michele, and Massimiliano Gioni.
Kelly, Liam. Thinking Long: Contemporary “Phil Collins: Face Value, Interview.” Flash Art
Art in the North of Ireland. Kinsale, International 34.222 (2002): 84–86.
Ireland: Gandon Editions, 1996.
Tóibín, Colm. The Master. London: Picador,
Kelly, Niamh Ann. “Profile: Phil Collins.” Art 2004.
Monthly 265 (April 2003): 20–21.
Whelan, Kevin. “Between Filiation and
Kiberd, Declan. Multiculturalism: A View from Affiliation: The Politics of Postcolonial
the Two Irelands. Eds. Enda Longley and Memory.” Ireland and Postcolonial Theory.
Declan Kiberd. Cork: Cork University Press, Eds. Clare Carroll and Patricia King. Cork: Cork
2001. 45–75. University Press, 2003. 92–108.
Kinealy, Christine. The Great Irish Famine:

Impact, Ideology and Rebellion. Basingstoke
and New York: Palgrave, 2002.

The Mosaic Film: Nomadic

Style and Politics in
Transnational Media Culture
Patricia Pisters
ABSTRACT
In contemporary media culture the formal, narrative, and stylistic structures that are
most pervasive can be described as an aesthetics of the mosaic. Multiple main char-
acters, multiple interwoven story-lines, multiple or fragmented spaces, different time-
zones or paces seem to be specifically apt for engaging with the migratory nature and
politics of our times. In this essay, I will look at Babel (USA: González Iñárritu, 2006),
WWW. What a Wonderful World (Morocco/Germany/France: Bensaidi, 2006), and
Kicks (Netherlands: Ter Heerdt, 2007). In relation to these films I will discuss the
ways in which an aesthetics of the mosaic is related to migratory movements and
contemporary globalized media culture.1 This aesthetics, I will argue, is closely
related to transnationalism, which can assume different forms. Its style and politics
can be characterized as nomadic, a concept that should be understood in its
Nietzschean implications of mixing heterogeneous codes and referring to the Outside
world. By means of a nomadic style and nomadic politics these films assert a
Deleuzian “becoming-minoritarian” as everyone’s affair.
(New) Mosaic Aesthetics in Cinema

The mosaic film is not a new phenomenon. Although it has never explicitly been clas-
sified as a genre, from early on in the history of film there have been films with mul-
tiple stories. In Intolerance (USA, 1916), D.W. Griffith cross cuts between four stories
that are set in four different periods and places (a modern story set in America in
1914, a Judean story set in Christ’s Nazareth in A.D. 27, a story that relates the
The Mosaic Film: Nomadic Style and Politics in Transnational Media Culture | 175
circumstances of the St. Bartolomew’s massacre of 1572, and a story set in
Babylonia in 539 B.C.). Although each story is shot in a different tint (amber, blue,
sepia, grey-green) that makes them recognizable, it is already a complex, nonlinear
approach to epic storytelling, bound together by the themes of human intolerance,
hypocrisy, injustice, and discrimination. Nevertheless, this type of narrative structure
never became the primary form of classical Hollywood films, nor of other film schools
or movements. In classical Hollywood films, two plot-lines (action-plot and romance-
plot) usually unite perfectly to tell the story of a goal-oriented protagonist (Bordwell,
Staiger, and Thompson 1985). Epic stories that tell larger stories of a period or of a
nation are usually structured in a linear fashion.
Other examples of mosaic films are Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (USA, 1941) and
Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (Japan, 1950). Citizen Kane begins with the death of the
newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane and the last word he pronounces before
dying, “Rosebud.” A journalist then sets out to investigate the meaning of this word,
interviewing many people who knew Kane, who tell their stories of Kane in a mosaic-
like flashback structure that creates a colorful picture of Kane. In Rashomon, the
central point around which the film revolves is the murder of a samurai, which is
described from four different points of view. These examples of well-known mosaic
films are less epic than Griffith’s, describing, rather, multiple versions of the life of a
single person or a single event. In these films, there is a central point that ties
together the different pieces of the puzzle, and, in that sense, they present a differ-
ent type of mosaic structure than the multiple epic narratives of Intolerance. What all
of the early mosaic films have in common is the fact that they relate to the past,
either to collective history or to personal memories that are presented as different
moments or different versions of past events.
In contemporary media culture, it seems that the mosaic film has evolved, gaining
importance to the point that we could even speak of a new genre. The film that is
often described as the starting point of the contemporary mosaic film is Robert
Altman’s Short Cuts (USA, 1993).2 Most strikingly, the mosaic structure of this film
does not refer to a history, a person, or an event presented in recollection, but relates
to a shared time and place in the present. The film presents a cross section of Los
Angeles at the beginning of the 1990s. Twenty-two characters are presented in ten
interwoven stories (based on short stories by Raymond Carver). None of the stories,
or rather “occurrences,” as Altman himself calls them in the documentary Luck, Trust
and Ketchup (USA, John Dorr and Mike Kaplan, 1993), really ends or is fundamentally
connected to the others, except through the common event of a small earthquake at
the end of the film and by the news broadcasts that are televised in every household.
The characters sometimes meet in significant ways; at others, much more superfi-
cially. Compared with the earlier mosaic films, the frames of individual stories are
opened up and intertwined in much more complex, subtle, and sometimes even
176 | Patricia Pisters

random ways in the contemporary mosaic film.3 Television and other media seem to
play an important role in these random connections between otherwise often unre-
lated people.
Besides shared time and space in the present, another dimension of the contem-
porary world that is addressed in the new mosaic films (though not yet present in
Altman’s film) is an awareness of transnational connections that are made possible
not only by the media but also by the increasing migratory nature of today’s popula-
tions. In these films, the shared space potentially extends over the entire globe,
which has consequences for the experience of time and temporality, which becomes
more “out-of-synch” or “heterochronic.”4 Different time zones, differing cultural signi-
ficance and experiences of time, and different conceptualizations of time are now
sensible through the narratives and in the images of these films. I will return to
temporal aspects with respect to transnational migration in the new mosaic film later
in this essay. First, I would like to look more generally at types of transnationalism.
Types of Contemporary Mosaic Transnationalism

The transnational dimension in contemporary mosaic film can manifest itself in
different ways. Of course, by defining different categories of transnationalism in the
mosaic film, I do not wish to make absolute distinctions. The distinctions are fluid
and the categories are open. Nevertheless, the films that I am focusing on here,
Babel, What a Wonderful World, and Kicks take different positions with respect to con-
temporary transnational migration and its implications, which is why I think it useful
to make a rough categorization on this basis.
I will first address a group of recent mosaic films that literally move between coun-
tries and continents.5 Traffic (Steven Soderbergh, USA, 2000), for instance, gives a
multilayered picture of the drug war between Mexico and the U.S. through three alter-
nating stories that finally coincide. Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, USA, 2005) also moves
between continents to tell four intertwined stories related to the oil industry.6 In its
own particular way, Babel also belongs to this cross-continental type of mosaic film.
Babel tells four stories, divided over three continents, and includes five different
languages. The film starts in a small Berber village in the bare mountains of Northern
Morocco, where a shepherd sells a gun to a neighbor who wants to use it to chase
jackals that attack his herd of goats. His two young sons, Said and Yussef, are in
charge of using the gun to protect the goats. We then move to San Diego where a
Mexican nanny, Amelia, takes care of two blonde children, Debbie and Mike. Back in
Morocco, Australian Susan and American Richard, who are on a bus tour, clearly have
an argument to settle during their vacation. Then the film takes us to Japan, where
we witness a volley ball game played by deaf-and-dumb girls, among whom is Cheiko,
who is watched by her father from the tribunes. The stories will be connected by an
accidental bullet, fired by Yussef while playing with his brother, which hits a touring
car filled with American tourists. It is Susan who is hit by the bullet. While Susan and
Richard have to stay longer in Morocco than planned, Amelia takes their children,
Debbie and Mike, to her son’s wedding in Tijuana. In Tokyo, the police investigate
whether the gun that was used to shoot the American touring car formerly belonged
to Cheiko’s father.
In The Making of Babel on the DVD of the film, González Iñárritu states that he has
always been fascinated by the air that we all breathe and travel through, that invisi-
ble entity that we all share. With this film, he wants to show that although we are in
different spaces and different time zones there is a literal cross-continental connec-
tion. Not only that the same air that we breathe connects us, but also that a
Japanese gun, given as a present to a Berber shepherd in Morocco, can have enor-
mous consequences for people in Morocco, Mexico, and the U.S. On a less literal
level, the film expresses another transnational aspect that we share: a common way
of expressing through the body when words fail.
A second type of transnationality can be found in mosaic films, set in third world
countries, that address different iterations of migration. In this type of mosaic film, the
stories are always infused with a longing-for-elsewhere. In André Téchiné’s Loin for
instance, Serge, who is French, Sarah, who is Jewish, and Said, who is Arab, meet in
Tangiers, where the fate of those from the West who travel to Morocco intersects with
illegal immigrants who want to leave North Africa to find a better living in Europe.7 This
category of transnationalism would also pertain to WWW. What a Wonderful World,
which is set in Morocco, mainly Casablanca and Rabat, cities that are rendered as
hyper-modern urban spaces. Here too, multiple characters interconnect: the contract
killer, Kamel; the police officer, Kenza; the cleaning lady and occasional prostitute,
Souad; the hacker, Hicham; and his father and several other characters together cre-
ate a picture of contemporary Morocco. Here, it is neither cross-continental settings
nor a transnational cast that set up the transnational dimension, but, rather, an
emphasis on contradictions related to globalization and postcolonial conditions in
many former colonies. One such contradiction is embodied in the dilemma of the
hacker, Hicham, who accesses the digital murder assignments of Kamel. Although he
can communicate with the whole world (“Club Internet l’Univers” is the name of the
internet café he frequents), his dream of actually travelling to Europe is an impossi-
ble one. This aspect of transnational culture, called “fake-globalization” by the film-
maker Bensaidi, is clearly addressed in the film (Bensaidi 2007, 1). Morocco’s
history as a French colony is also alluded to when Kamel and Kenza speak in French
instead of Arabic. I will elaborate on other aspects of this film further on in this essay.
First, I want to touch on a third type of mosaic film related to transnationalism and
the migratory mobility of people: the multicultural-meeting-point film, usually set
in a Western city, where people of all colors and origins share a contemporary
urban space. Here, the crux is not so much a longing for an elsewhere as it is the

difficulties associated with a newly diverse population living together in close

juxtaposition. Ignorance of cultural differences, misunderstandings, racism, and (fear
of) terrorism are central elements of these stories. Crash (USA, Paul Haggis, 2004)
is an example of this type of mosaic film. Comparable to Short Cuts, the film pres-
ents a cross section of Los Angeles at the beginning of the second millennium. In
Crash, a transnational dimension is added because of the racial tensions that per-
vade the film, though never in a one-dimensional way. Perhaps the most touching
scene in this film is when a racist white cop (who takes care of his old father) saves
a black woman from a car accident, even though we just saw him humiliate this
woman a few moments before.8
In a different way, Kicks, set in the Netherlands in the new millennium, presents a
similar type of multicultural mosaic society. Dutch-Moroccans and indigenous Dutch
from different classes who live more or less segregated lives in the same city
(Amsterdam) are portrayed in several plot lines. The film deals with contemporary
society in several ways. A kick boxer, Said, has a Dutch girlfriend, Danielle, (“a
cheese head chick” as she is unappreciatively referred to by other Dutch-Moroccans)
and works with youngsters to keep them off the streets; his younger brother,
Redouan, is more of a rebel and loves rapping political texts with his friend Karim;
Kim is a well-to-do Dutch woman who, after she decides one day that she should get
to know some of her Moroccan fellow countrymen, enters a Moroccan snack bar to
talk to “real Turks,” as she says when she orders a drink, indicating that she cannot
tell the difference between Moroccan and Turkish immigrants. Here, she meets
Nordin, a funny, conservative Dutch-Moroccan who applies double standards to all of
his behavior; her husband, Wouter, is a frustrated filmmaker looking for a good story;
a trainee police officer, Aaliya, and Marouan, who works for the Dutch army, are about
to marry; and Lisette runs a shelter, has a husband and son but longs for a different
(more glamorous) life. Here again the connections between the characters are made
possible through an accident: the killing of Redouan by a Dutch police officer, Frank,
when he is caught in what seems to be a burglary attempt (in fact, he has been
inspired to write more rap texts and has called Karim to join him at the clubhouse).
Here again, the effects of migratory movements in the Western world in the form of
racism, as well as ignorance and misunderstanding, feed the underlying tensions
of the film. As with the two other films that are the central focus of this essay, I will
elaborate at greater length on Kicks below.
The multiple storylines and multiple characters that these films share reflect the
ongoing shifts in the loci of focus and importance between the center and the peri-
phery in a transnational world. In the three films that I discuss in this essay, Morocco
is a central location or point of reference, displacing the traditional centrality of
the West. In addition, the conventional relationship between center and periphery
with respect to the cast (Hollywood stars vs. amateur actors) is also disturbed: the
multiplicity of characters evens out the status distinctions between the characters.
Even Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, who play Richard and Susan in Babel, are just a
part of the larger cast in which a number of nonprofessional actors take part.
Media Technology: Binding and Separating Forces

Media technology also plays an important role in the new mosaic film. Paradoxically,
the pervasive reach of television news appears to be both a binding and splitting
force. Both in Babel and in Kicks, news of the accident spreads quickly, and is then
interpreted in relation to ethnic tensions and threats of terrorism. In Babel, the news
media immediately interprets Susan’s being struck by the bullet as a terrorist attack
on American tourists, a news item that Cheiko, in Japan, stumbles on while flicking
the channels. In this way, global television news creates a strange (paranoid) kind of
transnational “imagined community” (Anderson, 1991) that functions like an anxiety
machine. “Media are spreading the fear of the other,” Iñarritu says in The Making of
Babel. Kicks provides a similar view of television news when, after the death of his
brother, journalists confront Said with the rap texts Redouan sung earlier; in doing so
they are trying to characterize Redouan one-dimensionally, as a (potential) terrorist.
The television news further enhances polarization by announcing that an opinion poll
held immediately after the incident shows that 79% of the Dutch-Moroccans think the
motives for the murder were racist, while 77% of the indigenous Dutch think this is
not the case. On the other hand, the news (both on television and on the radio) also
provides all of the members of the community with a common point of reference, and
provokes Kim to begin, naively perhaps, to change her own attitude, and to look for
connections beyond her own circle of well-to-do Dutch friends.
The technologies featured most prominently in WWW. What a Wonderful World are
the computer and the mobile phone. As noted above, the Internet connects Hicham
(and many other Moroccans) to the rest of the world, while, at the same time, politi-
cal conditions are restrictive with respect to their ability to physically travel abroad.
The mobile phone is another important connector. Kamel falls in love with Kenza’s
voice, which he has heard only through the phone and which he does not recognize
in embodied form until the very end of the film. Kenza earns some extra money by
renting out her mobile phone to friends and acquaintances. Here too, new technology
does not change everything: not everyone owns a (mobile) phone, the new is not for
everyone. Technology connects and disconnects.
In Babel, the telephone is also used as a cinematographic enfolder of time. Here,
communication technology’s ability to bind and/or separate is realized particularly in
a temporal dimension. Most of the events in the film are presented more or less
chronologically, except for one moment when time is enfolded in a sort of loop.9 At
the beginning of the film, Amelia, the Mexican nanny, picks up the phone when she is
playing with the kids, Debbie and Mike. It is their father Richard, who phones from

Morocco to tell Amelia that his sister will take care of the kids the next day so that
she can go to her son’s wedding across the border. He also talks to Mike on the
phone, who tells him about his day at school. At the end of the film we return to the
same phone call—but now it is presented to us from Richard’s point of view in
Morocco. What makes this scene particularly touching is the fact that we not only
now know what happened to Richard and Susan before the call was made (we did not
know at the first iteration that Susan was hit by a bullet and that Richard is calling
from the hospital in Casablanca). We also now know what will happen to Amelia after
this call. Richard’s sister will not come after all and, in desperation, Amelia will take
the kids with her across the border. In Mexico, they will attend a wonderful wedding
party, but on the way back home they will get stopped at the border. Amelia’s nephew,
Santiago, who is driving the car, then panics and drives away, leaving Amelia and the
kids in the desert. They will survive, but Amelia, who has been taking care of Debbie
and Mike since they were born, will be sent back to Mexico for illegally taking
American kids over the border. Because we know what happened before and what will
happen after the phone call when we see it for the second time, Amelia’s answer,
“Everything is fine, Mr. Richard” is just as heartbreaking as the tears that fill
Richard’s eyes when he hears the voice of his son, knowing, as we do, that Susan is
still in critical condition. The significance of the shared moment in the present (the
phone call) has been augmented by virtue of its interrelation with the past and the
future. Temporally has multiplied, become “heterochronic” (Bal, this volume, p. 218).
On a narrative level, the telephone is here used for its dramatic possibilities—the
play between embodied and disembodied voices, and the spectator’s knowledge of a
particular situation. But the telephone also reveals the temporal out-of-syncness or
dyschrony that is characteristic of migratory movements and migratory aesthetics. As
Miguel Hernández-Navarro asserts, “the conviviality of times as a collision and irre-
ducible tension, a fundamental “dyschrony,” impossible to assimilate” (Hernández-
Navarro, this volume, pp. 193–94). The transnational mosaic film reveals the
contradictions and temporal tensions that come into existence when (via technology)
time and space are traversed in an out-of-synch way.
Finally, the cinematographic technology itself must be addressed. In the second
part of this essay, I will examine the political implications of the mosaic film, and
argue that this type of film can inject narratives that are political, that constitute
acts of resistance, into the mainstream media network. I will first describe how the
particular nomadic styles in which these films are shot enhance their relation to
contemporary reality.
Nomadic Style: Mixing the Codes

The contemporary mosaic film is often presented in a nomadic style. As the term
derives from Deleuze and is often misunderstood, I will briefly revisit Deleuze’s
thoughts on the nomadic before returning to the films. Postcolonial theory has put
forward many objections to Deleuze’s conceptual response to the postcolonial situa-
tion. His concept of the nomad has met with particularly heavy criticism. It is often
seen as an all too easy way of describing migrants as nomads without any roots, or
without any hierarchical relations. Deleuze’s notion of the nomad is seen as both
romanticizing and assimilating. Hence, this concept is believed to contribute to “per-
petuating a universalized and unmarked western norm, [leaving out], or marginalizing
local knowledges and prioritizing theoretical validation over political exigencies”
(Wuthnow 2002, 194). While acknowledging the dangers pertaining to simplified
equations of the nomad and the migrant and the universalizing powers of conceptual
thinking, however, I would like to argue that the films under discussion are nomadic
experiments in the sense that Deleuze explains in his essay “Nomadic Thought,” in
which he argues that “the nomadic adventure begins when the nomad seeks to stay
in the same place by escaping the codes” (Deleuze 2004, 260). As the different
types of mosaic film discussed above make clear, real mobility is not a necessary
condition for establishing a transnational dimension, hence the nomad does not need
to be a migrant. Other elements of the mosaic aesthetics of these films make them
nomadic. As such, I am not arguing that nomads (as a special category of people)
escape the codes, but that escaping the codes (in any possible way) is nomadic.
By presenting complex, fragmented, and multiple stories and characters, the films
that I am discussing here themselves escape or mix the codes of conventional film-
making that demand a central narrative and clearly goal-oriented main characters.10 Babel
escapes the code requiring a star-driven plot by giving equal amounts of attention and
screen time to Hollywood stars and amateurs. The unusual combination of Moroccan,
Mexican, and Japanese settings and story lines is also refreshing. Even though the
cinematographic techniques applied to making the transition from one scene to
another are conventional (match on action, graphic matches or sound bridges), they
are handled with such brilliance that crossing continents feels quite enchanting.
Stylistically, WWW. What a Wonderful World is more obviously concerned with mix-
ing the codes (genres) of the crime film, the romantic comedy, Buster Keaton (the
director, Besaidi, who plays Kamel himself, has an inexpressive face like Keaton),
and Jacques Tati (some of the scenes where Kenza directs the traffic in Casablanca
call Playtime to mind). And by presenting a stylized and modern image of Morocco,
the film also breaks with Moroccan cinema’s clichéd images of pitiful women, poor
children, and powerless or/and tyrannical men. This nomadic representation of
Morocco is often funny in its absurdity, but also in the intensity with which it con-
founds Morocco’s traditional images. This is typical of nomadic style: “You cannot
help but laugh when you mix up the codes,” Deleuze argues (258). The mood in
transnational mosaic films is not exclusively sombre; it also embraces cheerful
moments, moments of humor and lightness.

Moments of laughter are also present in Kicks, in those situations when cultural
codes are explicitly scrambled by Nordin, who, for instance, loves singing typical
Dutch songs by the 1960s singer Boudewijn de Groot. The characters in Kicks may
typify certain recognizable figures in contemporary Dutch society; the fact that Dutch
Moroccans and indigenous Dutch meet and interact is a mixing of social codes that
is not often seen in Dutch cinema. Cinematographically, the characters break another
code: especially at the beginning of the film, during the introduction of the characters,
but also at moments later in the film, the characters look straight into the camera,
into the eyes of the spectator. This is unusual in feature films and sets up the very
powerful effect of direct address, enabling the direct involvement of the spectator:
it is not just the world on the screen but our own world that we are engaging with.11
Which leads me to the second important attribute of the nomadic, namely its political
implications.
Nomadic Politics: Outside and Intensity

Nomadic politics appears to be an essential constituent of the contemporary mosaic
aesthetic. A political engagement with the contemporary world is an important
aspect of all of the mosaic films that I am discussing here, and is generally charac-
teristic of this type of film. Therefore, it must be observed that “escaping the codes”
does not mean envisioning the world in terms of some transcendental realm wherein
politics is no longer necessary, a formulation that is central to the critique that Peter
Hallward and others have deployed against Deleuzian nomadism (Hallward 2006). On
the contrary. The ideas that Deleuze distinguishes as characteristic of Nietzschian
philosophy, and which are the basis of his nomadic thinking, point toward an engage-
ment with the world. Nomadic thought connects works of art (here, cinema) to the
outside and to intensity. Both concepts, the outside and intensity, relate to what
Deleuze describes as “being in the same boat,” where everyone is pulling an oar, is
sharing something beyond any law, contract, or institution:
We are in the same boat: a sort of lifeboat, bombs falling on every side, the lifeboat
drifts toward subterranean rivers of ice, or toward rivers of fire, the Orinoco, the Amazon,
everyone is pulling an oar, and we’re not even supposed to like one another, we fight,
we eat each other. Everyone pulling an oar is sharing, sharing something, beyond any
law, any contract, any institution. Drifting, a drifting movement or “deterritorialization”:
I say all this in a vague, confused way, since this is a hypothesis or a vague impression
on the originality of Nietzsche’s texts. A new kind of book. (Deleuze 2004, 255)
The relation with the outside is thus not the exclusion of reality but, on the contrary,
the opening up of a philosophical text, a work of art, or a film to the forces of life. As
Deleuze points out further:
What is this: a beautiful painting or a beautiful drawing? There is a frame. An apho-
rism has a frame, too. But whatever is in the frame, at what point does it become
beautiful? At the moment one knows and feels that the movement, that the line which
is framed comes from elsewhere, that it does not begin within the limits of the frame.
It began above, or next to the frame . . . Far from being the limitation of the pictorial
surface, the frame is almost the opposite, putting it into immediate relation with the
outside. (255)
Let me first look at some of the ways in which Babel, WWW, and Kicks open up to the
outside and engage with the world. This is done in several ways. A classic way of
engaging with politics in art is by means of metaphors or other tropes. When film is
not overtly political (such as the Soviet revolutionary films of the twenties, or other
overtly propagandistic films), political references are often made by using a small inci-
dent to illustrate something bigger, or by using symbolic images that allow allegorical
readings. At moments, Babel, WWW, and Kicks all express their concerns with the
contemporary world in this classical way. In Babel, the accidental gun shot that sets all
of the other events in motion is clearly intended to be read in an allegorical way. By
means of this small incident, we understand how quickly assumptions and misunder-
standings turn every incident into an act of terrorism and add to the fear of the other.
It is not just the events of the story that are being told. Babel reveals all of the
tragedies that are generated by the events that the media isolates to present as news
items. And, in doing so, the film actually shows not what divides us, but what binds us:
the air we breathe, the love we feel, the miscommunications we cannot circumvent.
WWW presents symbolic images that have evident political significance. When,
after his first attempt to cross the ocean (which costs him and his father all of their
money), Hicham is thrown back on the Moroccan shore, he disassembles all of the
computers in Club Internet l’Univers and sells the separate parts to get money for a
second attempt. Then, in a striking and heartbreaking twist that is at the same time
almost comic in its absurdity, we see the image of the little boat with Hicham and
other immigrants encountering an enormous cruise ship, full of lights and music.
Although the people on board the tiny boat begin to wave and scream to the cruise
ship, their boat is heedlessly obliterated by the ship, which does not even notice
them. We never see Hicham again after that moment.
Kicks begins with an announcement that everything in the film is based on true
events. Here too, a gunshot accident is the basis for further reflections on the
media’s propensity to swiftly categorize the other as a potential terrorist, and, on the
other hand, immediately label the police officer (and indigenous Dutch society) as
racist. Although the rap songs of Redouan and Karim are strongly worded expres-
sions of frustration about their own situation that are related to or projected onto
world politics, in fact, misunderstanding, fear, and frustration are the experiential
roots of this tragic incident, which is emblematic of many other tragic incidents and
misunderstandings in contemporary multicultural societies.12 More explicitly, the film
also self-reflexively comments on how sensationalism and opportunism drive the

media to misrepresent multiculturalism. In this sense, the role of the filmmaker,

Wouter, is telling. Wouter trolls news sources to seek out ideas for his films. When
he finds a story that describes female illegal immigrants being harried by dogs in a
shed, he sets out to reproduce the story on film, looking for (as he says) “real illegal
women” and “real dogs” to tell a “real story” of present-day Netherlands. Wouter’s
eagerness to “do something” related to multicultural society without any real involve-
ment can be considered another example of the abusive potential of the media,
while, at the same time, Kicks itself clearly addresses all these multicultural issues
in a much more clever way. So the use of symbolic and allegorical images is one way
of relating to the outside.
In The Making of Babel, there are a few other instances that indicate how this film
relates to the outside more implicitly, beyond what can be seen on the screen. One
of the scenes that is shown in rehearsal is the scene in which Said, Yussef, and their
father are surrounded by Moroccan police officers with guns, and Said gets shot.
After several failed attempts at shooting the scene, Said finally gets it right, at which
point the Palestinian-Arabic translator of the film begins to cry. She explains that the
scene reminds her of a moment in her own past, when she and her father were
surrounded by men with guns. In the Mexican part of the film, the actor who plays the
border patrol agent who arrests Amelia remarks that his own parents are Mexicans
who illegally crossed the border to settle in America. And that, for him, it now feels
very paradoxical to perform the role of an American cop who could have arrested his
own parents (which would have prevented his performing this role in the film now).
This bonus-DVD information does not directly feature in the film. But the real emo-
tions and direct engagement that are related by members of the cast and crew are
felt beyond the frame of the images. In all cases, the outside that the films relate to
is shared by the audience, either through personal experience, or by way of the more
extended shared image culture (including the bonus DVD) that we share, and through
which we know or are able to imagine more than what is seen strictly on the screen.
In these ways, the mosaic film is “hooked up to its [external] forces . . . like a current
of energy” (Deleuze 2004, 256).
The second crucial dimension of nomadic thought with respect to the work of art
is that of intensity:
The lived experience is not subjective, or not necessarily. It is not of the individual.
It is flow and the interruption of flow, since each intensity is necessarily in relation to
another intensity, in such a way that something gets through. This is what is under-
neath the codes, what escapes them, and what the codes want to translate, convert,
cash in. But what Nietzsche is trying to tell us by this writing of intensities is: don’t
exchange the intensity for representations. . . . There is a kind of nomadism, a perpet-
ual migration of the intensities designated by proper names, and these interpenetrate
one another as they are lived on a full body. The intensity can be lived only in relation
to its mobile inscription on a body, and to the moving exteriority of a proper name, and
this is what it means for a proper name to be always a mask, the mask of an operator.
(Deleuze 2004, 257)
The intensity of the images in the mosaic film is also felt through the bodies of the
actors. In Kicks, the nomadic, nonrepresentative intensity is mainly felt in the body
of the kick boxer, Said (Mimoun Oaïssa). He is the one who has learned to channel
his frustrations and anger in a positive way, apparently taking the news of the death
of his brother calmly, waiting for the results of the official investigation before judging
what happened. This response is not appreciated by Karim and other friends of
Redouan. Said remains in control, but one can feel the mounting tension expressed
in his body, in the look in his eyes. It is only in his final boxing match that Said
expresses his pain, which translates into a series of intensities related to the com-
plexity of the contemporary situation, both personal and collective. Other characters
express themselves bodily as well. Most striking is the silent scream that Lisette
(Eva Duijvestein) utters the day after her thirtieth birthday party; she is fed up with
everything and longs for more substantial recognition, a successful career as a
singer or as an actress perhaps. In this way, Lisette embodies the pervasive contem-
porary sentiment that in order to count one must actually become a media star.
Everything else is dull and boring. It is a sad sign of the times, but one that can give
rise to intensive feelings of longing and boredom. Chiel (Jack Wouterse), a middle-
aged drop out of Dutch origin, expresses his anger and frustration by bursting into
racist slogans and constantly getting into fights.
WWW achieves intensity through abstraction and minimalism, especially in the
body of Bensaidi in the role of Kamel. His face is always impassive, like a blank slate,
his body performing his actions in ritualistic style: downloading the data of his next
victim, performing the murder, having sex with Saoud, whom he literally throws out of
bed at 4 a.m. sharp, etc. The only time we hear his voice is when he is on the phone
with Kenza. Which is when we realize that she must mean a lot to him. It is by means of
this minimalistic and nonrealistic approach that WWW translates the intensity of love.
In Babel, it is striking to notice how the body takes over when communication fails.
This is why Iñarritu gives so much emphasis to close ups of faces and hands, so
called affection-images that work directly on our senses (Deleuze 1992, 87–111).
Susan and Richard are both devastated by the loss of their third child and cannot com-
municate. It is only after Susan is shot, and her emotions are expressed through the
extremely physical gestures that are the vocabulary of a wounded body, that things
between them start to move again. In Mexico, it is through Amelia’s body, carrying the
children through the extremely hot and dry desert, that we experience the intensity and
tragic implications of the situation. And, since Cheiko is deaf and dumb, her mode of
expression is physical from the beginning. Her movements are very expressive; she
tries to embrace her dentist, and she takes off her panties out of frustration with not

being accepted by boys as soon as they discover her deafness. The camera work
and use of sound reveal how Cheiko perceives the world very well. A scene in a hip
Japanese night club is especially amazing in the way that stroboscopic light effects
and sudden silences translate Cheiko’s perspective. Cheiko’s loneliness and longing
is also captured in the last scene of the film, where she is shown standing naked on
the balcony of a very high Tokyo apartment building. When her father puts his arms
around her, the camera zooms out until we see only the lights of Tokyo by night to the
point where the image becomes a sea of particles. And, through this image, we feel
and know what intensities are traversing the city, the world.
The outside and intensity open up the interiority of the text or the image, thus
giving the new mosaic films nomadic political dimensions. By relating to the virtual
(invisible) but very real forces in the world that we truly share, they express and
address what we can call a universal consciousness of becoming-minoritarian, which
notion I will further develop in the last part of this essay.13
Becoming-Minoritarian as Everyone’s Affair

The nomadic nature of the mosaic film relates to a politics of becoming-minoritarian.
Again, this is a concept to be used with caution. Just as the nomadic should not
(automatically) be equated to the migrant or the nomad as a category, becoming-
minoritarian does not necessarily mean becoming a member of a minority group. This
is, in the first place, because becomings in general are not representational. In fact,
“any becoming is a movement of de-identification” (Marrati 2001, 211). The notion
of becoming has also stirred many debates, but here I would like to refer to just the
political aspect of becoming-minoritarian as it is explained by Paola Marrati. Marrati
compares becoming-minoritarian to the concept of the majority. The majority is usu-
ally related to its representational value in politics. However, Deleuze has argued that
the majority can never have genuine representative value:
First and foremost, the majority is a constant, a model determining what is, inde-
pendent of relative qualities, what is majoritarian and what is minoritarian . . . The
representation cannot but confirm the relationship between existing forces . . . The
majority represents literally no one. It is a model of the construction and attribution of
identities; as such, it is necessarily an empty model. (Marrati 2002; 207, 208)
The majority is thus the normative, but in fact empty, model of measurement. According
to Deleuze (and Guattari), the face relates to Nobody (Ulysses) because it functions as
an “abstract machine.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 167–191) The normative face
provides a model of identity and normality in relation to which deviations can be
detected.14 Becoming-minoritarian, on the other hand, is always a process of deidenti-
fication and defiguration. It needs an encounter that “allow[s] for new relations to be
established and new experiments in life to take place” (Marrati 2001, 212). It is a
flight from the face, which in its final stage will reach a becoming-imperceptible.15
As Marrati explains, the “man of becoming” must go unnoticed; there must be nothing
special to be perceived from the outside. Becoming involves a becoming-everybody,
but “becoming-everybody” (devenir tout le monde) is not just a matter of being
unrecognisable, of being like “everybody else.” Deleuze and Guattari are playing here
with the different possible meanings allowed by the French expression “tout le monde.”
Thus devenir tout le monde also entails a becoming of everybody, a becoming-
everything and a becoming of the world itself . . . Deleuze and Guattari oppose the
figure of a universal minoritarian consciousness that in principle concerns everybody
to the majoritarian “fact” that itself is the product of a state of domination, but is the
analytical fact of nobody. (Marrati 2001, 214)
Becoming-minoritarian is what Deleuze and Guattari call micropolitics, which is not
related to any form of representation either of majorities or of minorities. Its aim is
to resist, to resist power, resist the intolerable, resist fear and to shame, resist the
injustices of the present. Contemporary mosaic films function precisely as such
micropolitical acts of resistance, first and foremost by proposing for the spectator an
intensive, affective encounter that can provide a slightly new perception of the world.
A final point that should be noted in this respect is that this act of resistance does
not entail a pure moral judgement as to who is good and who is bad. On the contrary,
micropolitical acts of resistance reveal the complexity of all emotions; they do not
express any judgemental value. In Babel, Kicks, and What a Wonderful World none of
the characters are judged, precisely because they are shown in the context of their
multiple relations. In Kicks, the Moroccan boy who seems to be a burglar is actually
innocent; the police officer who shoots him seems to be terribly racist, but the film
also presents him as a stranger in his own country (especially when he visits the
wedding of his Moroccan colleague), who simply does not know very well how to deal
with this new situation. Richard, in Babel, seems to be a jerk at first, not allowing his
Mexican nanny to go to her son’s wedding, until we find out why he does so. In What
a Wonderful World, nobody (murderer, hacker, prostitute, drunkard, police officer) is
judged either. This nonjudgmental quality of the mosaic film is part of its non-normative
strategy to provoke a universal minoritarian consciousness.
It is through nomadic aesthetics and its political implications as described above
that these films relate a becoming of the world as a “possibility of inventing new
forms of life, different modes of existence” (Marrati 2001, 214). As Mexican actor
Gael García Bernal (who plays Santiago) says in The Making of Babel: “We still
haven’t realized we are sharing the same planet, building fences where there are
none; things have to change, one day will change.” In any case, the contemporary
mosaic film clearly addresses a micropolitics of becoming-minoritarian and makes us
feel and experience that this is everyone’s affair, transversing minorities and majori-
ties by affecting and addressing us as “participant observers” of the same world
beyond the screen.16

Notes
1. I would like to thank Albert ter Heerdt and the car accident is used more politically, with
Mimoun Oaïssa for giving me the opportunity to the implication that in LA today it seems to
see Kicks outside of its theatrical release and be almost the only way people can still
René Wolf (EYE Film Institute Netherlands) for connect.
a viewing tape of What a Wonderful World.
9. There is also one flashback in the film
2. To the point that a filmmaker who presents that occurs at the moment when Said has
a mosaic story is quickly labeled “an Altman- been shot by the police in which we see
clone” (Ockhuysen 2006, 1). how he and his brother Yussef used to hang
into the wind on the top of a mountain,
3. This does not mean that all mosaic films imagining they could fly.
today are just about randomness. In some
mosaic films, like Magnolia (USA, Paul Thomas 10. This does not mean however, that more
Anderson, 1999) the different plots are much conventional stories cannot have means of
more tightly connected around a few themes “escaping the codes” on other levels. Or that
(facing death, relationships between parents mosaic aesthetics of multiplicity are necessarily
and children, regret) and a surreal ‘biblical’ already nomadic to begin with.
ending of a rain of frogs.
11. In High Fidelity (Great Britain, Stephen
4. See Miguel Hernández-Navarro and Mieke Frears, 2000), the main character also looks
Bal in this volume. directly into the camera regularly. Here, the
camera and the spectator are addressed by
5. This literal transnational movement between way of a confession of the character’s attitude
countries and continents can also be found in towards his previous girlfriends.
conventionally narrated films that are related to
migratory politics. For instance, the French beur 12. The text of the song they perform together
filmmakers (second generation Maghreb is as follows in English translation: “We can’t
immigrants) now frequently leave the banlieue forget how Palestinians sweat/how they sigh,
in order to travel back to their country of origin. cry and die/young Palestinians defend their
See, for instance, Beur, Blanc, Rouge (Mahmoud land/caught up in the struggle/stone in the
Zemmouri, France, 2005) and Du côté de chez hand/fathers and mothers all are dead/
soi (Rahma El Madani, France 2004). missiles, grenades, bullets in the head/moms
and kids are the ones they scare/dirty fucking
6. Another example of such a transcontinental Jews have gone too far . . .”
mosaic film would be Claire Denis’s L’Intrus
(2005). 13. A third characteristic of nomadic thought
is “humor.” Although this is an aspect that
7. In Loin and also in Les temps qui changent, can certainly be related to Kicks and What a
there are multiple Western characters who Wonderful World (though less to the emotions
choose to stay in Morocco in Babel), I will not deal with this aspect in this
for several reasons. See Pisters (2010). essay. See Pisters (2010).
8. The car accident seems to be another 14. Deleuze and Guattari take the face of
typical characteristic of the mosaic film. In Jesus (white man) as the prime marker of this
Winterschläfer (Germany, Tom Tykwer, 1997), normative model, which functions as a
Amores Perros (Mexico, Alejandro González “computation of normalities” and then as a
Iñárritu, 2000), and 21 Grams (USA, Alejandro “deviance detector.” It is an “abstract machine”
González Iñárritu, 2003), a car accident is also in that it very often works in an unconscious or
a force that connects random lives. In Crash, implicit way without a particular agent. See the
chapter on “Faciality” in A Thousand Plateaus 16. The term “participant observers” derives
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 167–191). from visual anthropology but is introduced by
Martha Blassnigg to discuss the experience of
15. A film that most beautifully expresses the film viewer (Blassnigg, 2007).
“becoming-imperceptible” is Bin-Jip (South
Korea/Japan, Kim Ki-Duk, 2004).
Works Cited
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Hallward, Peter. Out of this World: Deleuze and
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of the Philosophy of Creation. New York and
Nationalism. Rev. ed. London and New York: London: Verso, 2006.
Verso, 1991.
Marrati, Paola. “Against the Doxa: Politics of
Bensaidi, Faouzi. “Fakeglobalisering en Immanence and Becoming-Minoritarian.”
fundamentalisme.” De Filmkrant 286. Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the
⬍http://www.filmkrant.nl⬎ (July 2007). Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari. Ed. Patricia
Pisters. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Blassnigg, Martha. The Cinema and its Press, 2001. 205–20.
Spectatorship: The Spiritual Dimension of the
“Human Apparatus.” Dissertation. Newport: Ockhuysen, Ronald. “Mozaïek over paniek en
University of Wales, 1997. angst.” (2006) ⬍http://www.cinema.nl/
artikelen/2157217/mozaiek-over-paniek-
Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin en-angst⬎ (July 2007).
Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema:
Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. Pisters, Patricia. “La ville frontière: Filmer
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Théorème, vol. 10. Eds. Laurent Creton and
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Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Nouvelle, 2007. 191–197.
London: Athlone Press, 1992.
———. “Violence and Laughter: Paradoxes
———. “Nomadic Thought.” Desert Islands and of Nomadic Thought in Postcolonial Cinema.”
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Brian Massumi. Minneapolis and London: Theory 3.2 (2002): 183–200.
University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Out of Synch: Visualizing

Migratory Times through
Video Art
Miguel Á.
Hernández-Navarro
ABSTRACT
This essay explores the ways in which migration, conceived not only as a movement
in space but essentially as a movement in time, can contribute to demolish the illu-
sory, monolithic conception of temporality in the Global World. Going beyond the
theories of hybridization, which tend to find a sort of agreement between different times
(a “third time”), I find synchronization impossible and therefore argue for a model of
time that is capable of dealing with conflicts, blind spots and “dyschronies”: a sort
of “fourth time,” an antagonistic temporality that shows us that migration is always
“out of the clock.” That fourth, conflictive time is enacted and embodied in some
recent works of art. Departing from the idea that visual art can make us understand
contemporary problems even better than our humanistic practices of writing, I exam-
ine some video artworks that show us migration as an “out of synch” experience.
The “Western Hour”

Migration has been routinely conceptualized as a movement in space, a dis-
placement (Bottomley, 2010). To migrate is, above all, to look for a site, a home, a
place to inhabit. Moving is going from one place to another. The metaphors of migra-
tion are mostly connected with place: home, land, distance, borderline, and so forth
(see, for instance, Durrant and Lord, 2007). However, when you examine the question
more closely, moving or shifting places is not just a matter of space, but also, and
especially, a question of time. All movement involves time, both a sequence and a
Out of Synch: Visualizing Migratory Times through Video Art | 191

duration, a passing and an experience (see May and Thrift, 2001). As Mieke Bal has
pointed out:
Migration is also an experience of time—as multiple, heterogeneous. The time of
haste and waiting, the time of movement and stagnation; the time of memory and of
an unsettling present not sustained by a predictable future. The phenomenon I call
multi-temporality; the experience of it, heterochrony (Bal 2008, 34).
All time is multiple, dynamic, and heterogeneous, composed of countless little
mobile and changing shades (May and Thrift, 2001). There is a time of succession
and a time of duration, a quantitative and a qualitative time, chronos and kairos—two
inextricable modalities of time that we could call “temporality” and would be some-
thing like “the experience of time” (see Valencia, 2007). Each society and each sub-
ject within a society possesses a specific experience of time—temporality composed
both by the rhythm of events and by the way in which the subject experiences them.
However, the Western hegemonic temporal regime has tended towards the suppres-
sion of the plurality of time. Such plurality is intrinsic to human nature, but, since the
beginning of technological modernity, it has gradually been displaced by the rhythms
of commodity production. The modern individual then turned into the “subject” of a
single time imposed by the prevailing forces. The famous scene in Modern Times in
which Chaplin, exasperated by working on the assembly-line, ends up screwing
together any objects within his reach, serves as a perfect metaphor—in truth, per-
haps somewhat exaggerated—of the way in which the modern subject “extends” the
rhythm of machinery to daily life, thereby embodying and appropriating the times of
the production chain (Negri, 1982).
The multiple—human—experience of time has been replaced by the time of capi-
tal. The coming about of the modern subject became linked to “subjection” to a time
less and less his or hers, rather a simple time, a time of the succession of events.
In some way, one might say that modernity established monochrony, the single time
of production and technology—still today the sole remnant of the belief in progress.
This is the time of continuity and velocity (Virilio, 1986), the “cinematic time” (Doane,
2002), characterized by the ellipsis and suppression of dead times, those times that
precisely are human times and escape the spotlight of spectacle, the immaterial
times of shadows.
The time acceleration process initiated with modernity, as Paul Virilio has sug-
gested (1986), rather than coming to a halt, has become increasingly drastic, even
to the point that it may be said that today we move directly towards the suppression
of all time, towards the total elimination of temporal experiences. According to Gilles
Lipovetsky, ours is no longer the era of speed, but that of urgency, the era of time-
zero, of immediacy, of instantaneity (Lipovetsky and Charles, 2005). “Hypermodern”
times are precisely defined by their suppression of temporal distances: a suppres-
sion of waiting, of transition, of intervals, of the “in-between.”
192 | Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro

This single time, linked to the Western temporal regime, is, over recent decades,
experiencing an expansion throughout the globe. One of the primary consequences
of globalization—or of the different globalizations—is the imposition of what Sylviane
Agacinski has called “The Western Hour” (2000). This hegemonic temporality, of
global time, tends to eliminate and subsume distinct local and individual times. The
new time, much like the new space, tends towards homologability, towards adjusting
the other’s time to one’s own. And such adjustment, under the banner of dialogue
and multiplicity, establishes a new single time, cloaked in heterogeneity.
Therefore multiple, heterogeneous temporality is sacrificed in the Western con-
ception of time (Baier, 2002). The time discourse of Western contemporaneity talks
constantly about the appearance of a “single time,” a chronological imperialism. The
discourse of globalization presents itself as unavoidable in terms of space and time,
something as difficult to resist as the law of gravity. This idea, according to Massey,
stands for a certain conceptualization of time and space: “The proposition turns geo-
graphy into history, space into time” (Massey 2005, 5). It is about making us think
that there are no differences or that they can be abolished: “That cosmology of ‘only
one narrative’ obliterates the multiplicities, the contemporaneous heterogeneities of
space. It reduces simultaneous coexistence to place in the historical queue” (2005, 5).
Beyond the Third Time

Migrant temporalities contribute to the overthrowing of that fiction of a new single,
compressed and accelerated time. In a sense, they emphasize the fractures in the
chronological regime of the West. The multiple time of the migrant collides with the
single time of globalization. The adjustment of the clock (to concur with Agacinski,
2000) that the migrant undergoes is a metaphor for a radical change of temporality,
for that clock presupposes a whole system, a whole chronological regime, a tempo-
ral structure, a history, and a certain perception of time.
Contemporary theories of hybridization defend a temporal hybridization. Along with
a third way, or a third space, the possibility of a third time has been addressed. Such
is the position of Homi Bhabha and his analysis of the hybrid dimension of postcolo-
nial time (Bhabha, 1994), a claim for a sort of temporal in-between that would make
the hybridization of time possible, where local and global temporal specificities coex-
ist without problem. This is a sort of temporal utopia of miscegenation that, under
its apparent goodness, hides a dark flipside. Hybridization, the discourse of the
in-between and of miscegenation, is too close to the new single time. Like the third
space, the third time is realized in Western time. It is a time conceived from the
Western present, from its chronological regime. A time that, at heart, tends to anni-
hilate all local times. It is a time of adequacy.
I think that it is necessary to go beyond the temporal model of interculturality,
because it is deceitful. It might be more productive to think of the conviviality of times

as a collision and irreducible tension, as a fundamental “dischrony” impossible to
assimilate. Immigrants shift times, move in time, but that shift is never clean, is
never total. There is an excess, something that cannot be moved, something that
remains immobile. There is always something chronic, in the sense of something
specific and proper, like a chronic disease, something that cannot be mobilized,
something that cannot be adequate. There is a chronic dimension to chronology.
There is a “real,” in Jacques Lacan’s sense, that cannot be assimilated (Lacan,
1992). And that “real” is that which produces contradiction, which breaks the illusion
of integration. A complete adjustment is never possible.
This will lead us to conceive of an antagonistic temporal model, in which the differ-
ences are valued and there is no possibility of solving the originating conflict because
any agreement without fissures is an act of masking reality. In this antagonistic
model, which would be derived from Laclau and Mouffe’s theses on democracy
(1985), agreement between the parts would not be possible, since there would always
be empty spaces, impossible to fill.1 Temporal vacuums, errors, blind spots, nonho-
mologizable temporal specificities that, on the one hand would contribute to enriching
the spectrum of temporalities of the present and, on the other hand, could be useful
in demolishing the fictions of the Western chronological regime; a regime that, pre-
cisely, under the model of the imaginary hybridization of time, proposes a single nar-
rative and a single time: the imaginary time of globalization (García Canclini, 1999).
When we think about it properly, the model of antagonistic temporalities corre-
sponds to a mental schema that is nonrepresentative, in the sense that the
conflict—and its resolution—cannot be thought structurally, among other things,
because it is mobile, changing, and because not all places are accessible to reason.
If we were to write a history of modern time and subjectivity, we could easily repre-
sent them mentally in an almost spatial way, as if they were a map. The modern
conception of time has been essentially topographic, representable in a Euclidian
space. A space that is fixed and immobile. In this space we could say that modernity
valued the time of the One and built its project on the evolution and development of
the Self. Postmodernity attended to the minorities and was built on the time of the
Other, that is, the time of the minus one. What we could call interculturality, the offi-
cial time of the present, has been forged by adding the time of the Other, the local
time, to the time of the One, the global time of the hybridization of the Other with the
Self; that is, minus one plus one. A perfectly representable equation on the temporal
mental map. A perfect equation, seamless, fixed, visible, and, therefore, localizable
and controllable.
Under close scrutiny, these three temporal models turn out to be completely spa-
tial: rational and mentally representable. And all of them are built from the same
place: the time-space of the One. Everything happens in the same playing field. Even
if the players are different, the structure is the same. Therefore we need to introduce

a fourth model of time beyond interculturality and hybridity. This model would involve
a discontinuous and antagonistic time that cannot be added or subtracted, and that
therefore cannot be represented, a mobile and shifting temporality, multiple and
absurd. In brief, this fourth model would work as an antagonistic temporality in
constant conflict. And an antagonistic temporal model that values residues and
unusable surplus, the blind spots and temporal lapses; we need to break with that
topographical structure in favor of a topological “de-structure.” A temporal space
which is not Euclidian, but rather möbian: without an inside or an outside, a near or
a far away, where there are no correspondences or neighboring alliances that are
completely rational (at least if we understand reason as a spatialization). That time
is produced, as Jacques Lacan pointed out, through a series of correspondences and
neighboring points that are closer to a psychic space and time than to geographical
or historical ones: a confused space-time where before, after, and now are mixed and
intermingled, a space where the exterior configures the interior . . . a space that
subverts the intuition, a scotomic space, the blind spot of an empty place, the absent
center around which that whole topological space is configured (see Ragland and
Milovanovic, 2004).
A topological thought of time would lead us therefore to value discontinuities,
breaks, inadequacies, absences, etc.: in short, to value downtime. It is precisely
these times that have tended to be eliminated from all the discourse of the elliptical
time of the cinematograph and the narratives associated with it (Doane 2002).
Maybe we should consider the contemporary subject and its time from the topology,
beyond the location and beyond linear time, within a time of absences. Not in an eter-
nal intemporality, but in a multiple and heterogeneous temporality, but not a hybrid
one (at least, if by hybrid we understand a sum of the parts). A discontinuous tempo-
rality. A heterochrony, or rather, emphasizing its conflictive nature, a dyschrony—an
impossible to resolve clash of temporalities.
My point so far could be summarized as follows: migratory temporalities introduce
and make evident the conflict inherent in that apparently hegemonic Western tempo-
rality. That conflict breaks and fractures the illusion of a single time, of the imaginary
monochrony of cultural capitalism. Hence, conflict should not be understood nega-
tively, and resolution positively. We need to banish the notion that resolution is always
positive: a seamless resolution tends to be that of a dominant triumphalism. Conflict
and dissensus are constitutive elements of community (Rancière 1995). Resistance in
the face of power has to be engineered precisely through disagreement and tension.
Visualizing Time Conflicts

Now I will enter the field of visual art to observe how the above-mentioned conflicts
are in the core of some contemporary artworks, informing them as a subject matter
but also embodied in them as a principle for their configuration.

Migration is a key subject for contemporary art (see Smith, 2009; and Mercer,
2008). That was too the core of 2MOVE: Double Movement/Migratory Aesthetics, an
exhibition that took place in some European cities exploring the relations between
the mobility of people and the mobility of images. The exhibition, curated by Mieke
Bal and myself gathered together a series of artists intending to build a bridge
between the medium of video and the issue of migration.2 Although the variety of
problems and questions posed by the artists were broad and diverse, in this text
I would like to focus only on three of the works shown in 2MOVE, trying to observe
how the previous outline argument about time conflicts is visualized and mise en
scène by means of art. My thesis is that these works make evident, bring to vision
temporal conflicts, showing the inconsistencies, falseness, and artifices of chrono-
logical imperialism. In doing so, these works produce knowledge about society. And
then one has to affirm that art thinks and makes us think about the world with differ-
ent tools but with the same—or even more—efficiency than the social and humanis-
tic disciplines (see Bal, 1999). In fact, as John Urry has pointed out, to give account
of our complex global world, sociological discourse has to incorporate the use of
metaphors, a form of expression characterized precisely by its visuality (Urry, 2003).
Working through visual metaphors some contemporary artists are working literally as
social researchers.
The Real Distance

Mimoune (2006) is a single channel video piece created by the young Spanish artist
Gonzalo Ballester. It is an exceedingly simple work, but that simplicity makes it
extremely effective. The artist recorded in video an interview with Mimoune, a
Moroccan immigrant who now lives in Murcia (in the south of Spain) who—facing the
camera—sends a message to his family. This is a message made up of affective
clichés: “I’m fine, I have a job, but I miss you.” The artist then took this message to
Mimoune’s family in Morocco and recorded their reaction to his message, subse-
quently recording another message from the family to Mimoune. The circle is closed
when the message comes back to Murcia, where Ballester records Mimoune’s face
while he watches the message sent by his family.
Overall, there are four sequences of images that belong to four different
moments: 1) Mimoune sends the message, 2) his family receives the message 3)
his family records the message 4) Mimoune receives the message. Between the first
and the last sequence of images there has been a time lapse of several weeks, for
a real trip was involved, an inevitable distance and time. However, and this is what
makes the work so interesting, Ballester has edited the images as if they were simul-
taneous, through the use of a plane and counter-plane technique. Hence, we see
Mimoune talking and, in the next shot, we see his family reacting to his words.
Used to the instantaneity of television Western spectator immediately thinks that

Hernández 1 Gonzalo Ballester – Mimoune
Hernández 2 Gonzalo Ballester – Mimoune

those images are taking place at the same time, that there is an instantaneous
communication between Mimoune and his family.
If we think about it properly, however, Ballester is playing with four temporalities.
In the first place, there is the epistolary temporality of the message. A message is
sent, it takes time, it arrives at its destination and afterwards it either returns or not.
This is the time of uncertainty, the time of a real distance, for the letter takes the
same time to arrive at its destination as a real person would do. This is a distance
that modern communication technologies have contributed to symbolically obliterate.
Telephone and e-mail have compressed that long temporal regime of the letter, in
favor of an instantaneity that seems to abolish geographical distances and, conse-
quently, also temporal ones (Baier, 2002).
The second time of Mimoune’s image is the time of television, the instantaneous
time of Western technologies of the image. While the first time belonged to what
could be a specific chronological regime of Mimoune’s place of birth, the time of tel-
evision belongs to another moment, to another chronological regime, that of Western
contemporaneity.3 This is the accelerated zero-time we find in the discourses of—to
name a few—Virilio (1986) or Lipovetsky (2005). This is the time of the host country
and also the time of the spectator.
The third time of the work is the imagined time of agreement between the episto-
lary and the television times. It is the illusion of both mediums joining together
perfectly, creating a new, hybrid medium, in-between of the epistle and television, a
sort of transcultural medium capable of pacifying and fixing the two times. But that
time is only a fiction, for the assemblage between the slow, embodied time of the let-
ter and the instantaneous, immaterial time of television is merely an imagined con-
struction. Behind this third time, we find another time: the time of the conflict that
makes the two specific temporalities collide, the two regimes of communication, the
epistolary time and the time of television. This is the true migrant time because
Mimoune is stranded between two times. Although at first sight, Ballester’s work
could appear as a hybridization of temporalities, it is actually made up of the unsolv-
able tension between the two times, a tension that refutes the fictitious tale of the
dominant time, of the medium through which the message is transmitted.
Like a paradox of the world of media communications and the fast pace of glob-
alized society, a slow time of emission and answer is introduced here almost as a
parallel universe, producing a breach in time, a breach that makes conflicting tem-
poralities emerge, an asynchrony between media and the uses to which they are
put. Video, characterized by its immediacy, is used here in a slow time; the same
applies to television, refusing the fashion for live broadcasting to operate in play-
back, deploying a different time from the one we have learnt to expect from this
medium.

Compared to the supposed immediacy of the voice that many immigrants experi-
ence in telephone conversations, it is still difficult for images to arrive at such speed;
often, they do so only through photos or postcards of relatives and hometowns.
Hence, compared with a voice that can seem to be immediate and close, the image
betrays the insurmountable distance between the places. Ballester’s work empha-
sizes how out of synch the visible and the audible are, an essentially temporal out-
of-synchness that fractures any possible meaning; what we find on the screen are not
stories, but rather voices made bodies. This would appear to be its main point; that
the voices have a place in the body. We could say, then, that Mimoune’s tears are not
so much due to the significance of the words but rather to the reconstruction and
recomposition of voice and image, of word and body—something that is always lost
with distance.
The temporal antagonism that Mimoune presents contributes, on the one hand,
to shattering the myth of the single time, introducing a plurality of times that clearly
shows the heterogeneity of the experience of time. On the other hand, however, the
work also manages to abolish the supposed compression of space-time, which is so
often found in contemporary theorizations of temporality. The compression of space
makes us think that all places are accessible at any time, and that, precisely for this
reason, we will find the same things in all places: “because space has been mar-
shalled under the sign of time, these countries have no space—precisely—to tell dif-
ferent stories, to follow another path” (Massey 2005, 82). This new atlas, however,
in which distances are abolished, is no more than a fiction (Serres, 1994). It is an
imaginary construction: there is no “free space,” but, quite the contrary, a space that
resists movement and obliteration (García Canclini 1999). This is precisely the space
that appears in Mimoune. The temporal collapse of the work shatters the illusion in
order to show us that there is a “real distance” that cannot be abolished by commu-
nication technology. In this way, Mimoune presents a strategy of resistance to the
compression of space and time.
Condensed Time
In another work, the scene takes place in a parlor [locutorio]4 located in Murcia.
The manager of the place, a Bolivian immigrant, starts to talk about the ways in which
the Internet has changed communications between immigrants and their home
countries. He argues that it is a way to “keep in touch” and to shorten the distance
between the immigrant’s adopted country and his homeland. While we listen in on his
improvised yet very well-reasoned and orderly speech, we see a woman talking via
computer to a young girl, probably her daughter. The image of the girl is of poor qual-
ity and barely moves—as though the bandwidth and the computer’s technology were
insufficient to support a video chat over a webcam. At a certain moment, we see

Hernández 3 Mieke Bal and Gary Ward – A Clean Job

another person inside a sort of phone booth. The glass door of the booth reflects the
image of the woman video-chatting with her daughter.
The two communication technologies of telephone and Internet seem to overlap
and melt together like ghost images. In a subsequent shot of the call center, we see
several clocks decorated with banners from different countries, each clock showing
a different time. One of them, featuring a Spanish banner, shows the local time; the
others, the time in the home countries of the immigrants who most often frequent
this place: Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia.
This is the opening scene of A Clean Job (2007), a video work by Mieke Bal and
the Irish video artist Gary Ward that focuses on the issue of migration in Murcia.
Along with locations such as the local schools and the city itself, the authors have
chosen the locutorio and its idiosyncrasies, reflecting its status as one of the core
nodes generating discourse on immigrants: the locutorio as a sort of halfway space,
between two worlds, between two time zones, and between two technologies.
Although the video is more complex, I would like to focus here on the power of the
above-described scene, essentially on one single image: the reflection of the com-
puter video-chat on the phone booth’s door [Figure 5]. That image condensates all

the things one could say about conflict, time, migration, displacement or technology.
Sometimes a sole image can speak better than a thousand theories.
Over the last decade, the locutorio has become consolidated in Spain as one of
the most powerful symbolic places in the migratory sphere (Aubarell and Roca
2003; Rodríguez 2008). It is here that a sort of communicating door opens between
two worlds. It is the ultimate intermediation place. There is telephone and the
Internet, but also a parcel and money wiring service. One might say that different
communication regimes coexist between host and home countries. But the locutorio
is also a space of synthesis, rife with symbols from the immigrants’ countries of
origin—cultural symbols that place it outside the host country. It is located between
two spaces. And, in this sense, the locutorio belongs to the kind of spaces that
Hannerz has referred to as transnational (1996), spaces that comprise small
transnationalities, those “small workshops” that represent the transnational aspect
from beneath, in terms relating to mundane experience and necessity, as opposed to
the transnationality of large multinational and globalized corporations.
The locutorio embodies two opposite communication systems or regimes. While
communication systems have become increasingly characterized as individual,5 here
they are offered as public. The use of computers and the Internet seems to have
been democratized in Western society—the technologies have been designed and
are intended for private and personal use—that is the meaning of “personal com-
puter.” The use of web cams and 3G mobile communication systems has also been
thought of in the sense of what Jorge Luis Marzo has called “indivisual technologies”
(2003). However—be it for economic or legal reasons—a large number of immi-
grants have no private access to these technologies. This is where locutorios come
into play, being public spaces that articulate distinct private spaces. This very sense
of articulating privacies is also found in cyber cafes, which still exist, even though
they are rapidly disappearing. However, the locutorio is not exactly a cyber cafe. There
is something in the name that links it to an older communication system, to a
precarious and past world, since locutorios from the outset were used by immigrants
exclusively to talk over the phone, at a time when the telephone was a luxury item
that immigrants could not afford. It is as though the locutorio were an “outdated
space,” functioning publicly with technologies that since have become private and
individual.
Inside the locutorio, distances are cancelled out, as they simultaneously material-
ize (see Ramírez, 2007). There one can find technologies of approach and technolo-
gies of separation. Phone calls or chats fit in with letters, wire transfers, or sent
objects. They are places where distances are virtually cancelled out through the
Internet as they are simultaneously evidenced through mailed letters or shipped
parcels. The human time of displacement of bodies coexists with the virtual time of
displacement of image and information. Much like the game of Fort/Da (Gone/There)

that Freud observed his grandson playing, inside the phone shop the dramatic game
of distance is played out: near and far, present and absent (Freud, 1990 [1920]).
One might say that the phone shop is a transnational space, but not that it is a
non-place in the sense proposed by Marc Augé (1992). Rather the contrary: an exces-
sive place, saturated with meaning, impregnated with sense. A place of memory and
encounter, between past, present and future. Like a threshold: a place that produces
a sense of history; a place where time is articulated and strata become transparent
and permeable.6 As we can see in the video work A Clean Job, the locutorio is a space
between time zones, between the time in the host country and the time in the coun-
try of origin. This space is located between present time—the here and now—and the
past-future time of departure and eventual return. The latter is a time in suspense
that, like a ghost, invades the phone shop, fracturing and scattering the present
time.
Almost beyond anything else, the locutorio is a space where different technologi-
cal systems coexist. “Advanced” technologies like the video-chat coincide with oth-
ers like letters or postcards, that are still in use. Present day technologies coexist
with technologies from the past. The mother who talks to her daughter sends a mes-
sage and waits to be answered; the moving image is used almost as a still image.
Instead of convergence (Jenkins 2006), a conflict arises from homologous systems.
It is a space where technologies collide. And what is even more remarkable, the ways
of using both technologies intercontaminate each other. This is what makes the
video-chat session at the beginning of A Clean Job so significant. The great majority
of immigrants from “Non-Western” countries engage directly with these “advanced”
communication technologies without having undergone the logical learning and
indoctrination process (Capurro et al., 2007). Their modes of appropriating and using
these new communication technologies generate new forms and means of dealing
with them. As opposed to institutional and preprogrammed uses of technology, the
“illiterate,” non-indoctrinated, or unskilled use of technology by some immigrants can
be construed as a deprogramming of or a rupture with the ultimate generator of the
Western idea of progress: technology.
The Migratory Focus

What this heterodox and anachronistic use of technology teaches us, is that perhaps
it is necessary to introduce a dose of technological illiteracy, an illiteracy that pro-
duces “aberrant”7 uses of technology, uses that are not predetermined, that break
the teleological discourse of technology and bring it closer to the subject. In this way
the chronological discontinuities, the time periods that are produced with this
migrant use of technology, would propose modes that have not been considered and
roads not yet walked by the contemporary subject, roads that lead beyond instru-
mentality and transparency. That is exactly what happens in Daniel Lupión’s video

Hernández 6 Daniel Lupión – Entrevistándome con inmigrantes
Entrevistándome con inmigrantes (2002), the last work I will examine in this text that
will serve here as a kind of conclusion.
As in the case of Mimoune, we are faced here with a simple but blunt work. During
two weeks, Lupión, the Spanish artist, goes out into the Madrid streets with a video-
camera to interview immigrants with different nationalities. But rather than asking
the questions and looking at the other, the artist offers the camera to the immigrants
and suggests to them that they question him. In this way, the artist becomes the
interviewee, rather than the interviewer. It is a kind of reverse interview in which the
other is not objectified by the camera lens—instead, his or her body and face is
always out of sight. We only hear a voice, while the artist’s face appears constantly
on the screen. Afterwards, during the editing process, the artist cuts out his own
answers to the immigrants’ questions, so that we hear only questions, not answers;
that is, we only hear a language that moves. That movement serves to condense all
those issues that truly concern the immigrants; here he is no longer subjected to the
gaze and the enunciation of the other, but rather he is the bearer of the look of the
word. Rather than being seen and talked about, the immigrant here looks and talks.
But what is really relevant to the matter at hand is the way this work introduces
the question of technology and technical literacy. Some of the interviewed immi-
grants are not familiar with the use of the video technology and they introduce new

and unexpected ways of using the technical apparatus. For example, one of them
focuses the camera strictly on the artist’s chest, rather than focusing on the face,
where the West has placed the differential of identity. This fragmentary approach can
be seen as “aberrant”; however, it also suggests a model of vision that departs from
most established ones, where a chest, or some other bodily feature, might stand for
a whole subject, a subject that is thus not reduced to faceness. At a different point,
one of the interviewers practically relinquishes control of the camera when the
conversation with the artist starts. The dialogue goes beyond vision. It is a radical
contraposition of the point of view of the omnivoyeur, in which the camera focuses on
reality at any cost, as tends to be the case in recent documentary practices or in
films such as The Blair Witch Project (1999) or the more recent Cloverfield (2008),
where the camera functions as an epigone of the human eye, an unblinking and per-
manently attentive eye. Conversely, the “migratory focus” produces a suspension of
the kind of attention “preprogrammed” by technology. What we could call its system
memory is somehow fractured and new ways of seeing—based in closeness and
affectivity towards the other, and not in the virtual foreclosure of the humanity of the
other which is a precondition of the development of Western technologies—are
achieved.
The time of the other—the plurality of the others—is entering in the western time
of technology, producing a destabilization in the continuum of time concealed in the
ideology of technological progress. In a way, the uses of this technological illiteracy
provided unexpected paths in the routes of Western technology. Of course, like any-
body else, the immigrant quickly masters technology and gives in to the indoctrina-
tion process. He or she transforms into a technological subject, a being “subjected”
by technology. There is, however, always a place that does not get fully covered, a void
that does not cease to exist; a void that breaks up the use value of technology, its
mere instrumentality, brings it within reach of the subject, and thus imbues it with
proximity and empathy. Maybe it is time to learn from such void places.
Conclusion
The artworks I have presented here show different ways of dealing with temporality
and migration. In the three cases explored, by means of different processes and
strategies the artists propose ways of resistance to the “monochrony” of the Global
World. In Mimoune, making two different temporalities collide, Gonzalo Ballester
makes evident the impossibility of avoiding the real distance and the real time—the
space/time of the bodies—that operates under the contemporary systems of commu-
nication. In A Clean Job, one single image condensates in a spectral way the plurality
of times, technologies and experiences that take place in the locutorio, working as a
sort of metaphor of the heterochronicity of the migratory temporality. And lastly, the
simple but insightful action unfolded by Daniel Lupión in Entrevistándome con

inmigrantes draws attention to the processes of technological indoctrination and the
possibilities of skipping them, providing other ways of experiencing life.
These artistic strategies, in the end, are attempts to escape the linearity of time,
but above all they are examples of ways of making visible the discontinuities, inter-
ruptions and multiple roads hidden below the chronological imperialism of the
“Western hour.” To be sure, under these practices one can find the echo of a sort of
fight against progress and against the continuity of time along modernity. This fight
was started long time ago by thinkers such as Walter Benjamin but is still in force
(Benjamin, 2003 [1940]). As is well known, in his philosophy of History, Benjamin
developed a critique of the linearity of time, a critique to the inexorable continuum of
History, to the time of progress that moves forward with no mercy, destroying every-
thing in its path, leaving victims whose history will remain forever in the realm of obliv-
ion, in the debris of the conquered. To go beyond this continuous time, Benjamin
proclaimed the virtues of interruption as the real opportunity for Revolution, a sort of
brake in time, a detention of time. For Benjamin, this revolutionary-time is the time of
the cut, the time of suspension, the time of clash. The artworks presented here—and
they are only a small, representative part of a larger attitude in contemporary art—
operate a kind of Benjaminian interruption in the continuum of time. By enacting,
embodying and developing a sort of “out of synchness” these works make us aware
that migratory times are always a battlefield but, “at the same time,” a constellation
of possibilities.

Notes
1. The classic formulation is in Laclau and Ward. For more information about the
Mouffe (1985). A reflection of time and space exhibition, see www.doublemovement.org.
introducing the concept ‘dislocation’ is
developed in Laclau (1990). 3. One seminal recent reflection on TV appears
in Joselit (2007).
2. The exhibition was shown at the Sala
Verónicas in Murcia (Spain), the 4. The Spanish word locoturio does not have a
Zuiderzeemuseum in Enkhuizen (The proper English equivalent. ‘Parlor’ or ‘Phone
Netherlands), the Stenersen Museum in Shop’ could be the most similar terms.
Oslo (Norway) and the Solstice Arts Centre,
Navan, County Meath (Ireland) and Belfast 5. On the individual nature of contemporary
Exposed, Belfast (Northern Ireland). The artists technologies, see Marzo (2003).
included were: Atlas Group (Walid Raad), Mieke
Bal, Gonzalo Ballester, Ursula Biemann, Célio 6. I use here the formula ‘time strata’ in the
Braga, Cinema Suitcase (Michelle Williams sense understood by Reinhard Koselleck
Gamaker), Conce Codina, Denis Connolly and (2004), who conceived time as porous strata
Anne Cleary, Keren Cytter, Wojtek Doroszuk, in which there is constant relation and
Olafur Eliasson, Mona Hatoum, Anthony intersection.
Haughey, Samira Jamouchi, Liza Johnson,
Farhad Kalantary, William Kentridge, Daniel 7. I use this term in the sense of Umberto
Lupión, Zen Marie, Michael McLoughlin, Melvin Eco’s ‘aberrant decoding’: a text which has
Moti, Pedro Ortuño, Javier Pividal, Jesús been decoded using a different code from the
Segura, Thomas Sykora, Roos Theuws, Gary one used to encode it (Eco 1976).
Works Cited
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Aubarell, Gemma, and Albert Roca Parés Jennings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott et al.
(eds.) Perspectivas de la inmigración en Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
España. Barcelona: Icaria Editorial, 2003. 2003. 389–400.
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anthropologie de la surmodernité. Paris: and New York: Routledge, 1994.
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l’accélération. Trans. Marie-Hélène Desort Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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———. “Double Movement.” 2Move: Video Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic
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Hernández-Navarro. Murcia, Spain: Cendeac, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2008. 13–80. 2002.

Durrant, Sam, and Lord, Catherine M. (eds.) Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage,
Essays in Migratory Aesthetics: Cultural 2005.
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Geographies of Temporality. London:
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Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principe.
Strangers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
1920. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1990.
Morgan, Jessica, and Gregor Muir. Time Zones:

García Canclini, Néstor. La globalización
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imaginada. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1999.
2004.
———. Culturas híbridas. Estrategias para
entrar y salir de la Modernidad. Buenos Negri, Antonio. Macchina tempo. Rompicapi,
Aires: Paidós, 2002. liberazione, constituzione. Milano: Feltrinelli,
1982.
Hannerz, Ulf. Transnational Connections:
Culture, People, Places. London and Ragland, Ellie, and Dragan Milovanovic (eds.)
New York: Routledge, 1996. Lacan: Topologically Speaking. New York: Other
Press, 2004.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where
Old and New Media Collide. New York and Ramírez, Jacques P. “Aunque se fue tan lejos nos
London: New York University Press, 2006. vemos todos los días: migración transnacional
y uso de nuevas tecnologías de comunicación.”
Joselit, David. Feedback: Television Against
Los usos de Internet: Comunicación y sociedad.
Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.
Ed. Consuelo Albornoz et al. Tomo 2. Quito:
Flacso Ecuador, 2007.
Koselleck, Reinhard. Futures Past: On the
Semantics of Historical Time. New York:
Rancière, Jacques. La mésentente. Politique
Columbia University Press, 2004.
et philosophie. Paris: Galilée, 1995.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar, Book VII. The
Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960. Ed. Rodríguez, Nora. Educar desde el locutorio.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter. Barcelona: Plataforma Editorial, 2008.
New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1992.
Smith, Terry. What Is Contemporary Art?
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Revolution of Our Time. London and
New York: Verso, 1990. Urry, John. Global Complexity. Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2003.
Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe.
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a Radical Democratic Politics. London and New formas del tiempo sociohistórico. Barcelona:
York: Verso, 1985. Anthropos, 2007.
Lipovetsky, Gilles and Sebastien Charles.

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Semiotext(e), 1986.
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movilidad y vida social. Barcelona: Fundación
Tapies, 2003.

III. Tension: Intention,
Contention
Heterochrony in the Act: The

Migratory Politics of Time
Mieke Bal
ABSTRACT
While the moving image and migration were both phenomena of substantial currency
and effect during the twentieth century, in the present moment, it appears that the
visibility of video and migration is increasingly enhanced based respectively on the
sheer volume and variety of populations on the move, and the pyramiding appeal and
accessibility of video. Video is a medium of time; of time contrived, manipulated, and
offered in different, multilayered ways. Time no longer captured, as in the very first
strips of celluloid, nor even “sampled” in bits separated by cuts; time is “framed,”
made to appear real but no longer indexically attached to the real time that it purport-
edly represents. Like cinema, it offers images moving in time—slow or fast, interrupt-
ing and integrating. Similarly, migration is an experience of time; of time as multiple,
heterogeneous—the time of haste and waiting; the time of movement and stagna-
tion; the time of memory and of an unsettling, provisional present, with its pleasures
and its violence. I explore the interactions, connections and discrepancies between
these two temporalities.
Through several works from the video exhibition 2MOVE, I examine three intersec-
tions between video and migration. First, both are anchored in the conceptual
metaphor of movement—but a movement that cannot be taken for routine, “natural,”
or realist. Second, heterochrony offers temporal shelter to memories. And memories
are themselves heterogeneous, multisensate, and multitemporal. Third, I probe the
time of the viewing, which is the present.
Heterochrony in the Act: The Migratory Politics of Time | 211

Introduction
Gonzalo Ballester’s video work Mimoune (2006) appears, on first viewing, to be quite
simple and straightforward. Mimoune, an immigrant “sin papeles” (“undocumented”)
who is living in the south of Spain, enters the frame and begins to talk to his family
in Morocco. In the next shot, which is of a different technical quality that fictionally
suggests it was shot with an analog camera, we see the family speak back to him.
Mimoune is based on epistolary aesthetics. Instead of consisting of letters read and
images added, however, it is itself a letter or, better, a correspondence conducted by
means of video. Video: an electronically processed moving image, and image of move-
ment. Along with the mobile phone and the digital camera, video is today a widespread
instrument of cultural practice. In particular, it is used a great deal by migrants as
a means to connect across great distances to family and friends “back home,” thus
supplementing their existence in movement with moving images of that existence.1
While the moving image and migration were both phenomena of substantial cur-
rency and effect during the twentieth century, in the present moment, it appears that
the visibility of video and migration is increasingly enhanced based respectively on
the sheer volume and variety of populations on the move, and the pyramiding appeal
and accessibility of video. As a work “about” migration, Mimoune demonstrates anew
that the aesthetic dimension of the social phenomenon of the movement of people
moves in two asymmetrical directions. On the one hand, migrants influence their host
countries’ cultures, enriching them with new possibilities of experience; and, on the
other hand, their stay in their host countries influences the subjective relationships
between migrants and their attachments and situations with respect to their places
of origin. The former influence is future-oriented, the latter anchored in the past,
and primarily entertained through memory.2
But memories are often permeated with longing, the unbridgeable gap of desire.
And desire, in turn, is infused with futurality. Thus, memory skips over the present,
as if exercising a cinematic cut of cosmic proportions. Mimoune is permeated with
these temporal tensions, and images of longing shape them. The sense of pastness,
which is central to the relationships between migrants and their homelands, pro-
vides, in effect, the temporal sustenance for a life that entails at once existing in
the now and striving for a future. This dynamic is operative whether or not they have
personal memories of their homeland; whether their homeland is imaginary or the
product of “post-memory.”3
In spite of the century-long history of the moving image, by virtue of its widespread
use and its now predominantly digital mediality, video is the medium of our time.
It is also the medium of time; of time contrived, manipulated, and offered in different,
multilayered ways. Time no longer captured, as in the very first strips of celluloid, nor
even “sampled” in bits separated by cuts; time is “framed,” made to appear real but
no longer indexically attached to the real time that it purportedly represents. Like
212 | Mieke Bal

filmic cinema, it offers images moving in time—slow or fast, interrupting and integrat-
ing. Similarly, and again, in spite of its extensive impact throughout world history, as
a cultural phenomenon, migration is the situation of our time. But it is also an expe-
rience of time; of time as multiple, heterogeneous—the time of haste and waiting;
the time of movement and stagnation; the time of memory and of an unsettling,
provisional present, with its pleasures and its violence.4
Video and migratory life have, thus, something in common. A complex, and some-
times confusing, challenging multitemporality characterizes both. I will approach this
communality obliquely. First, I seek to illustrate how video art can contribute to a
better understanding of migratory culture through an analysis of a few video works
relating to it. This approach primarily concerns the experience of time. Conversely,
I will argue that migratory culture helps us to engage with video art on a different,
more socially engaged level than might be obvious, also, particularly, in terms of
temporality. I proceed in this oblique and dialogic manner because video, as an
artistic medium can, arguably, provide an experiential understanding of what such a
multitemporality means. The phenomenon itself I refer to as multitemporality; the
experience of it, heterochrony.5
I contend that the concept of heterochrony is indispensable for insight into the
“micropolitics” of migratory culture, and that, therefore, it should be added to the tool-
box of cultural analysis. In making this argument, I follow a key argument from the
work of anthropologist Johannes Fabian. He repeatedly argues that “culture” is not a
situation, space, or state but a process of confrontation. Otherwise conceptualized,
attempts to study cultures invariably rely on an “allochronic” approach that relegates
others into a contradictory pastness and timelessness. Such an approach denies the
coevalness of the encounter between the “native” and the “other,” which is the conditio
sine qua non of any study of cultural difference, multiplicity, or alterity. Migratory culture
provides an eminently suitable model for understanding the value of Fabian’s view.6
In line with this dual argument, I propose that an engagement with current migra-
tory culture is key to understanding such a process of confrontation, since it is clearly
based on coevalness as well as its spatial counterpart, colocation. But neither
shared space nor shared time is homogeneous. Limiting my argument to time, I put
forward the concept of heterochrony to foster insight into the state of migratory
culture and its politics, and seek to demonstrate how such insight enhances our
ability to understand video art that is related—however loosely—to the migratory.7
Video and migration are both anchored in the conceptual metaphor of movement—
but a movement that cannot be taken for routine, “natural,” or realist. On the one
hand, there is the moving image with its video-specific effects—of digital video, specif-
ically in installation and other exhibitionary practices—that multiply and complicate,
and then frame, time; on the other hand, there are moving people, with the moving—
including, emotionally—images they generate in the temporality of the social

landscape. Our intuitive sense of the connection between videographic and migratory
cultures inspired Miguel Ángel Hernández-Navarro and myself to create an exhibition
of video art that explores this connection further. To highlight the common aspects
between moving images and moving people, we called this exhibition 2MOVE. In this
paper, I single out this double movement of temporality for closer scrutiny.8
In the following section, I present three works that demonstrate how the concept
of heterochrony I wish to put forward enhances our understanding of the double
movement—the mutual illumination of the migratory and the videographic. From the
vantage point of these three works, here considered as “theoretical objects,” I will
then point out forms of heterochrony and their political potential in a number of other
works from the exhibition 2MOVE.
My inquiry focuses on three aspects of this larger issue. First, how the relation-
ship between video and heterochrony can be clarified by viewing it in terms of
performance and performativity. Second, one obvious realm of both experience and
aesthetics, where heterochrony intersects provocatively with both migratory culture
and video, is memory. That is why I discuss memory’s entangled relationship to both
movements. Third, in a final section I discuss heterochrony in the present, the here-
and-now of migratory culture—its violent potential and the possibilities for dealing
with it ethically within the migratory culture of the present.
Videos of Temporalization
Having looked at Mimoune, which deals explicitly with migration and its temporality of
delay, I will now address a work that has no explicit connection to migratory culture
at all, but in which time is a key player. Roos Theuws’s Gaussian Blur (2005–2006) is
an experimental video with a double image stream, each stream moving at a slow,
but different, pace. Through its slowness, the video probes the question of whether
we are more deeply touched, and transformed, by image fragments that float in our
subconscious than by our more conscious responses. The underlying stream con-
sists of images of idyllic rural landscapes, populated by animals and children, trees
and barns, and water. Superimposed over these images is a layer of flickering points
of light, which move faster, making the underlying images very hard to see, and some-
times giving them an eerie, unsettling appearance. A child’s sunhat becomes like a
soldier’s helmet, for example. A kind of timelessness infuses the video’s undeniably
slowed-down movement. Yet, time is at the heart of the slowness. Vision becomes
more difficult and demanding, and the effort required to discern the images qualifies
the viewer’s participation, or performance of looking. While the viewer is physically
aware of the temporality of his or her physical body—an awareness augmented by
the points of light that prick our consciousness with a very different pace—another
temporality reaches out, interferes with ordinary haste, and insinuates slowness into
the sensation of looking.9
214 | Mieke Bal

Bal 1 Roos Theuws – Gaussian Blur
Far from being a video on migration, Gaussian Blur is an abstract work in several
ways that all bear on the temporality I consider significant for migratory culture.
Hence, while this work has no thematic engagement with migration, it nevertheless
sets the tone for the focus of inquiry of the exhibition. The work’s first form of
abstraction emerges from its experimentation with movement on the edge; move-
ment, that is, dressed down to its bare essence. This is abstraction as the presenta-
tion of what is barely visible; of looking around the corner of routine vision. Since one
of the tools used (but by far not the only one) is an extreme retardation of the flow of
images, the work’s second form of abstraction resides in its experimentation with
temporality.
When we approach this work, heterochrony sets in as our routine temporality is
confronted with the artificial one presented. The third form of abstraction comes from
the work’s uncontrollable figurations, our sense that our routine templates and nar-
rative fillers are inadequate in their capacity to enable us to account for or engage
with what we are seeing. The fourth form of abstraction is best characterized as an
entirely new, sensate production of surface as skin. The surface of the second layer
of images, then, in its very abstraction, anthropomorphizes the video. That the flick-
ers of light look like blisters is no coincidence. They hurt; they touch us; they make
contact, but not an easy, self-evident contact. Vision made difficult; a slowed down
temporality; uncontrollable, non-narrative figuration; and a sense of a new, as yet

unseen, skin: these are four forms of abstraction that provide access into the migra-
tory aspect of culture.
Challenging its viewers to see beyond the routine, to take or give time, to open up
to unexpected figurations and to sensitize themselves to the pain of excision, this
work mobilizes abstraction in terms that can suitably address the confrontational
nature of migratory culture. The cuts from clip to clip, “behind” the skin of the video,
never mitigated by smoothing transitions, are significantly abrupt. The flickering
points of light read as blisters on the skin of the visible, kinetic world. The work’s
varied forms of abstraction harbor confrontation as abstraction’s “natural” state.10
A second key work is Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance (1988). This video, in
contrast to Theuws’s work, is thematically devoted to migratory culture. It consists of
still images that are over-layered by Arabic letters, a soundscape of the artist’s home
in Bayreuth, and a voice-over of the artist reading, in English, letters that her mother
sent to her, letters that were written and sent following their separation. The bidirec-
tional but asymmetrical movement of migration is aesthetically elaborated. If we look
back, “preposterously,” from the now, with Ballester and Theuws, to this earlier work
from 1988, we see how it, too, elaborates on video’s potential in ways that integrate
the double movement of migration.
Bal 2 Mona Hatoum – Measures of Distance
216 | Mieke Bal

In the artist’s mother’s letters, there is a movement from “home” to the far-away
place where the daughter has ended up; the other movement takes place in the
memories of the daughter, who is “set” in Bayreuth. These memories are presented
in layers; through the voices, the lettering, and through images of Hatoum’s mother’s
body in the shower. The recorded Arabic voices from “home” speak at a rapid clip;
the reading in English is slow and delayed; the lettering is permanent, and the body,
rather than moving, morphs. All these media deploy different temporalities, so that
multi-temporality is implicit in the work itself. Thus, the video “represents,” “explains,”
“generates,” or conveys the experience of heterochrony.
Like Theuws’s video, Hatoum’s work articulates video’s most significant character-
istics as a moving medium, in the triple sense—the moving image, the movement of
people, and the emotionally moving quality of the resulting situation. In this respect
it is important that the movement is constructed, made, not recorded, as if the artist
were demonstrating medium specificity by making a video out of what it is not. Still
photographs are blurred into one another. The movement, then, is only that of the
surface, the screen, not of the figures “in” the image. Hatoum’s work, layered like
Theuws’s, makes the surface of the screen opaque, and only slowly reveals the
mother’s body. First covered by the opaqueness of the shower curtain so that it looks
abstract, then by water, and, throughout, by the Arabic lettering of the mother’s own
words, the mother is not given over to the viewer without several layers of protection.
The transitions from one still image to the next, the rapidly spoken Arabic followed
by a slower and delayed English voice, make time a multifaceted experience; a
heterochrony. The delayed temporality of epistolary contact, moreover, is another
layer that complicates visibility.
Together, these three works offer specific elements that may flesh out the concept
of heterochrony. Mimoune stages the discrepancies in the gap between emission
and reception, eliding the real, slow time of epistolary traffic. Thus, it emphasizes
the heterochrony inherent in video—the gap of the cut—and, or as an image of the
cut in migration—the gap of distance. Revisiting the Deleuzian distinction between
movement-image and time-image, Gaussian Blur emphatically slows down the viewer’s
experience of visible movement, offering a meditative viewing experience that counters
both routine pace and narrative (“page-turning”) haste. Moreover, the difficulty of see-
ing the underlying images heightens the viewer’s visual engagement; the desire to see
who and what is there. Measures of Distance offers a temporal cacophony of different
paces within a single videographic space. This entices the viewer to juggle different
temporalities. These videos transform our experience of time—they temporalize.11
Performance and Performativity

Heterochrony, then, is a primary point of intersection between the videographic and
the migratory. The superimpositions, tensions, and incongruous encounters between

different temporalities alert us to the simple but oft-forgotten fact that time is not an
objective phenomenon. A relentless clock, and the fixed schedules it prescribes,
regulate our lives. This makes other temporalities we also live almost invisible. This
regulation based on calendars and clocks, on productivity measured in time, and
capitalist governance is called time reckoning. It interferes with rhythms and dura-
tions that have personal impact on individual lives. Through time, politics enters the
private lives of all. As a consequence, video art that solicits the performance of
heterochrony by the viewer, who is compelled to such performance by the multitem-
poral works on display, might produce new if precarious and provisional communities
along experiential lines. If and when this happens, the works can be said to have
performative force.12
The genesis of such performativity lies in the identificatory politics of time. People
in situations of migrancy are often torn between haste and stasis. This simple expe-
riential discrepancy is compounded by political and economic temporal multiplicities
in the postcolonial era. Time, in spite of all its internal differentiation, is usually,
sometimes forcefully, relegated to one aspect only, that of the chronology of divisible
units. This linear logic has a profound sensate effect on everyone, and more strongly
so on those whose relationship to the local chrono-logic is oblique. Thus conceived,
chronology is a stricture that looms over events and thus colors the experience of
time with a dark shadow of inevitable inadequacy.13
Imagine the everyday life of someone who is waiting for legal residency, or for
much-needed employment permits, or for news from far-away family members. At the
same time, as they say, the clock is ticking. That person needs to earn money to
support his family “back home” and thus justify the tearing apart of his family, his
life. This is, in short, the stage on which Mimoune is set. In such situations, the hec-
tic rhythm of social and economic life, always too fast, contrasts sharply with the time
of waiting, always too slow. Although temporal discrepancies and disturbed rhythms
occur in all human lives, it is easy to realize that heterochrony is specifically tangible
in the life of someone who is in one way or another, as the saying goes, on the move.
Seen in this light, the deceptively smooth and fast editing of Mimoune constitutes a
sliver of monotemporality, a resting place within a hectically heterochronic life.
Heterochrony is more than subjective experience, however. Because it contributes
to the temporal texture of our cultural world, our ability to understand and con-
sciously experience it is a political necessity. Living heterochrony means that we
perform our lives within it. Precisely because it is a formally experimental work that
comprises multiple levels of abstraction, Gaussian Blur captures the profound and
physical sensation of a multitemporality that entails the experience of heterochrony
in its bare essence, outside of the distractions of a captivating narrative. There is a
relentlessness to the slowness, an insistence on the ongoing quality of time, that
stems directly from the almost unbearably slow pace. The storm-riddled tree branches,
218 | Mieke Bal

a dark leaf falling on a child, become more threatening as a result; the human fig-
ures, the horse, detach themselves through this slow movement from the still,
impressionistic atmospheres of the paintings they invoke. They move infinitely slowly,
yet infinitely faster than their painted counterparts, our visual memory of which
infuses them. Meanwhile, the flickering of points of light on the outer layer or “skin”
of the video, which make the underlying images hard to see and dreamlike, keeps us
aware of the fleeting speed of time “outside” the slow unfolding of movement.
Reminiscent of the flicker in early cinematic images, as well as of the video effect
called Gaussian blur that is evoked but not used, the somewhat faster speed of the
flow of the surface images is disjunctive in relation to the slower speed of the images
it covers.
Mimoune, in contrast, appears to be set in real time. This work is based on a very
simple idea—a fiction. It is a postcard—made video—with a second card sent in
response. As with all epistolary traffic, there is a time gap between sending and
delivery. This gap is constitutive of writing, with all its political and juridical conse-
quences. At the same time, this gap is a profoundly personal experience. In this light,
to see the interchange between senders and receivers occur more rapidly than real-
ity would allow is a poignant experience for the viewer. We see Mimoune sitting down
and saying hello and, in the next instant, see his wife, children, and other relatives
watching and reciprocating the greeting. It all looks so simple, so normal, yet it is
impossible.14
Time, its elision, lies at the heart of fiction—the fiction that is truer than reality.
The simple aesthetic that this work mobilizes makes that fictionality look deceptively
real. In stark distinction from the sophisticated aesthetics of both Gaussian Blur and
Measures of Distance, the look of the images evokes home video, in two distinct
ways. The images in Spain have the clarity of digital video. But Mimoune barely fits in
the frame. It is as if he needs to bend his body and bow his head to enter it. He is to
record a video message under conditions of confinement. His visual confinement in
the space of the frame can be read as a metaphor for his temporal confinement
in heterochrony. The images shot in Morocco, in contrast, have the grainy quality of
analog transferred to digital. Here, the frame is larger and the homemade quality
derives not from narrow framing but an uncertain engagement with the camera. The
relatives are doing their best to perform the script.
Far from being a simple aesthetic, this variegated home video look creates a sur-
face that sometimes evokes an uncertainty of looking—a look that wavers between
its possible inappropriateness, even voyeurism, and its necessity, because it acknowl-
edges the tearing apart of the family through migration. It is as if the surface affects
the performance. We see people who long to be together, yet seem to have little to
say; whose hearts are full, probably, but who lack the time to express what’s in them.
Groping for words, they slow down the event of speaking. Pressured to speak, however,

Bal 3 Gary Ward – Inflection (8till8)
they also speak before they find the right words. And the gaps are elided but not
hidden. Time is completely messed up.
In other video works, too, double or multiple temporalities are the engine of a
heterochronous viewing experience that obstructs a smooth performance. While
Ballester uses video editing to close the gaps between timeframes separated by
migration, Gary Ward’s installation, Inflection (2002–2007), constitutes heterochrony
as a sense of stagnation through circularity. This work consists of two videos
projected on screens standing, at a ninety-degree angle to each other, on a glossy
surface. One video is a portrait of the African janitor at the school building in which
the artist studied. The other, set in a launderette, is a self-portrait of the artist. Both
portraits are indirect, and consist mainly of projections—in water, in shiny surfaces.
While the cleaner makes circular movements with his wet mop, we see the artist
reflected in the round eye of the washing machine.
In cultural studies of time, circularity, or circular movement, is opposed to the
relentless linearity of evolutionist culture (e.g. Kristeva 1986). But, as Nancy Munn
(1992, 101) and others have pointed out, circularity is not exactly the opposite of
linearity; each repetition necessarily occurs later than the previous one. Both the
circularity-in-linearity of time, and the loop that is the constitutive form of exhibitionary
220 | Mieke Bal

Bal 4 Gary Ward – Inflection (Kofi Cleaning)
video are principles informing Ward’s installation. Circularity is embodied in the loop.
In Ward’s double reflection, time is (fictitiously) presented as circular.15
The self-portrait, 8Till8, is mainly composed of the rotating inside of the washing
machine, as seen through the window in the machine’s door. All images of the artist
are indirect, either shadows or reflections. The spinning of the washing machine, in
the eye of which the artist sees himself distorted, is a visual model of the circularity
in which people can be caught. The machine is the maddening clock that goes round
and round and will not let go of the subject caught up in its wheels. Ward’s reflected
face is distorted and mangled by the turning backdrop of the machine. This turning
can be seen as a critique of “capitalist time”—the divided, streamlined, and exchanged
time that precludes yet initiates heterochrony. On the soundtrack, a quiet voice
speaks of climbing mountains in search of confidence and security (“you trust the
rope”). The rhythmic contrast between the turning machine and the voice installs
multitemporality into the experience of the work. The mountain climbing narrative
thus becomes a “little resistance”—a barely noticeable resistance against the image
of the artist/viewer’s absorption by capitalist time.16
Then, when the viewer looks to the other screen, at Kofi Cleaning, that circularity
becomes embodied in the act of labor, and the pace in the crush of boredom. Slowly

moving his wet mop around the floor, Kofi’s presence is at once invisible and an indis-
pensable condition for life in the building to continue as usual—the epitome of capi-
talist time. Here, too, most of the images of Kofi are reflections of him in the water
or the wet tiles of the floor. As the viewer shifts her attention between the screens, it
becomes apparent that the pace of the two loops is different, as if they were slightly
out of sync. At the same time, these two portraits seem to need and sustain each
other, and it falls to the spectator to perform their togetherness. Their simultaneous
display sets up a different kind of multitemporality, a psychosocial one, not within but
between the two wings of this diptych. Together, they explore the irruption of other-
ness within the self and between self and other that the viewer as intermediary is
asked to perform.
This irruption is visible both within 8Till8 and in that self-reflexive work’s encounter
with Kofi Cleaning, which, exhibited at a right angle to it, literally touches it. It is
between the two screens that otherness irrupts. Hence, there are three, not two time
frames, each with a different rhythm: the self-portrait in the glass door of the spin-
ning washing machine; the mop of the slowly cleaning Kofi, turning in circles as does
his life; and the time defined by the two videos joined together, out of sync yet
embracing each other in a silent dance. Circularity changes into engagement. This
joined and out of sync quality turns the encounter with otherness into an everyday
moment of migratory culture. In Ward’s loops, the migratory erupts to stipulate that
one plus one makes more than two—it makes a world.
William Kentridge’s Shadow Procession (1999), like Mimoune (2006), appears to
be temporally straightforward, yet harbors great complexity. During most of the
twenty-minute video, cut-out silhouettes march from left to right across the screen, to
the sound of merry street music. Two temporalities are merged, yet inscribe opposite
moods into the viewing experience. First, the haunting street music elicits a feeling
of cheerfulness; then the relentless procession, including absurd figures, conveys
a sense of unsettledness. The rhythm of the figures’ movements is unreal in its
regularity. This is yet another way of foregrounding and denaturalizing time to political
effect. Implicit in this heterochrony is a double reference to two distinct, early forms
of political art: Brecht’s anti-empathic theater, and Goya’s ambivalently dark, yet often
comical drawings. Goya’s depictions of horror, the awkward poses of his figures,
which are recognizably evoked in Kentridge’s, produce an openness and ambivalence
of mood that “democratizes” affect—understood here as the transmission of inten-
sity from work to viewer. The theater as play(ful) and as public ritual, and the still
image as record, merge in this work.17
The paradoxes in these artists’ works raise the issue of time in exemplary fash-
ion. Time made so dense, contradictory, and, almost, nonlinear first sharpens, and
then overcomes, the opposition between “still” and “moving” images. Hence the
relevance of Hatoum’s video, which consists of still images made to look as if they
222 | Mieke Bal

are moving only by means of fades. Theuws’s work, in turn, also exemplifies this over-
coming by effecting a slowness that all but cancels the movement. The importance
of this slow-down resides in its affective impact. For, through this, it also overcomes
the gap between an object and its affective charge; in other words, between the
object perceived at a distance and the viewer whose act of viewing affects her,
beneath consciousness. That is Gaussian Blur’s (2006) proposal for an affective
aesthetic. Among the consequences of this paradoxical “state” is a complex relation-
ship, not only with representation and figuration—the work with the human form—but
also with another aspect of “human nature,” that of existing in time.
Video and the migratory intersect at these different aspects of temporality:
heterogeneous time, slowdown, the past cut off from the present, and the need for
active acts of looking “in actuality”—as Attridge would have it, “in the event” (2004).
The ambition of our exhibition is to draw viewers into the heterochrony of these video
works, and the migratory. This is where it can gain actuality—not or not only, political
actuality, but aesthetic, social, and semiotic actuality as well. Actuality is the experi-
ence of the now removed from its mundanity. Actuality can come across as a moment
of shock, as in some frames in Ursula Biemann’s video essay Remote Sensing
(2001), where the drabness of existence seems to wake up and come to life. This is
an effect of the temporal discrepancy between the past and the present, when our
acts of viewing become, suddenly, acts of a different nature than that of routine look-
ing in a continuum.
Something happens that links the violence of such moments, the disappearance
of linear time itself, to us, now. It is a mobilization of actuality as a temporal unit, an
experience, and a political urgency. Attention and actuality together begin to approach
the kind of temporality that is at stake in Biemann’s ongoing search for an effective,
newly conceived, political art through temporal and spatial foreshortening. Actuality
sometimes pricks us suddenly, sometimes pops out of its dreariness. Representational
third-person narrative as a readerly attitude is no longer possible here. Biemann’s
sequences of dramatically different shots preclude that. Her film relentlessly moves
from global perspectives from above to the horizontality of fast-riding trains to the
unsettling proximity of people in drab streets at night.
Biemann’s work foregrounds the antinarrative thrust of heterochrony. Narrative
strives to an end—a word that intimates both death and goal—and its suspension or
disruption constituted the politics of time for the early twentieth-century avant-garde
(Osborne 1995). Informed by Biemann’s video, we can see that the migratory tempo-
rality of contemporary culture—its defamiliarizing multitemporality, its suspension of
narrative linearity—is itself infused with a “politics of time.”18
Remote Sensing (2001) exemplifies a genre that mediates between documentary
and narrative fiction, avoiding the illusions of both. Biemann’s chosen genre, the
video essay, is particularly apt for proposing visions of migratory culture that neither

of the two traditional genres can capture quite as effectively. And this is so partly
because, as an essay, the work avoids narrative, with its chronological pull. Explaining
her interest in the video essay, she sees the genre as falling between institutional
contexts:
For a documentary, they are seen as too experimental, self-reflexive and subjective,
and for an art video they stand out for being socially involved or explicitly political.
(2003, 8)
Biemann aptly sums up the positive features of the genre in relation to its literary
counterpart:
The essay has always distinguished itself by a non-linear and non-logical movement
of thought that draws on many different sources of knowledge. (2003, 9)
This formulation—non-linear, non-logical—resonates with the notion of multitempo-
rality that informs heterochrony. In this sense, the video essay, rather than being mar-
ginal, can be seen as central to the concept of this exhibition. When, a bit later,
Biemann characterizes the video essay’s aesthetic as “more dissociative, multi-
perspective and hypertextual in the structuring of images and sounds” (9) this is as
good a characterization as any of the work(ing)s of 2MOVE as a whole. The genre of
the video essay is subjective and speaks from “placelessness” (10); it displays the
traces of mediation and the processes of perception, in and through temporalities
that allow for heterogeneity.
Heterochrony can be seen as a form of foreshortening. Like its better-known
spatial counterpart, foreshortened time is distorted—made wider or thicker—and
condensed. It thus comes forward like Christ’s arm in Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus
(London, National Gallery) to affect the viewer, so that we experience the almost
tangible push of time. It also challenges the ontological temporal cut between past
and present. In terms of grammar, time becomes what the French linguist Benveniste
calls “discourse” (as opposed to “story”). Such time is expressed in tenses and
verbs. Discourse manifests itself in tenses that connect the past to the present, as
opposed to ones that separate the two, and in verb forms in the first and second
person between which speech emerges, rather than those in the third person, which
refer to someone or something that is being spoken about. The viewer is thus drawn
into the work, because, as the second person to which it speaks, she must, in turn,
following the example of Mimoune and his family, take on the exchangeable role of
first person. But in order to do this, one must play the game of the cut; suspend
one’s disbelief in its capacity to link rather than sever. This is how fiction becomes a
reality-shaping tool.
In different ways, the works discussed so far all deploy multitemporality to draw
viewers into a heterochronic experience that prepares them for an understanding of
and engagement with the migratory culture that surrounds them, and in which, unwit-
tingly or not, they take part. With foreshortened time specifically, this also happens
224 | Mieke Bal

between the viewer’s present, and the past that the works so precariously hold. Thus,
video effectuates the visualization of duration, as can be sensed in works that are
both time-specific and time-dependent, in terms of the works themselves, of the past
they carry, and of their relationship to the viewer. This time-specificity raises a ques-
tion that is crucial to video in installation: that of the meaning and performativity of
actuality.
Actuality—the actuality of viewing, the actuality of the transformations of migra-
tory culture—is the arena in which this heterochronous aesthetic works. It is the
“now-time” of the viewer, the existence and significance of which the latter is hardly
aware. Each moment of viewing takes one such instant—between the ticks of the
watch, a dark moment between the flashes of ordinary life (Kubler 1962, 17)—and
captures it, in an image, a frame, a slowed-down or sped-up sequence, where it then
lingers. Thus the art in this exhibition fights the standard narrative push to the end,
and the anonymity as well as the ephemeral quality of actuality. There lies its perfor-
mativity. This, then, is how actuality makes time for memory.
Memory and Forgetting in Now-Time

For, if heterochrony disrupts the traditional linear narratives onto which routine
responses and images are grafted, it also offers temporal shelter to memories. And
memories are themselves heterogeneous, multisensate, as well as multitemporal.
The most important and perhaps counter-intuitive aspect of memory is that it takes
place in the present. Memory is not passive recollection, a kind of invasion of the
mind by the past. It is neither passive nor past-based. People perform acts of
memory, and they do so in their present moment. Without memory there can be no
livable present. Without a position in the present one cannot “have”—better,
perform—memories. In times of political and social hardship in the present, acts of
memory become both indispensable for psychic survival and attractive for their com-
forting allure, suggestive of a privacy one can fall back on. And because memories
are acts, they can be performative in the agential sense of speech-act theory.19
Video can serve as a tool for bridging the gap between the illusion of privacy and
the need for public recognition of the importance of the memories of others. The
fleeting instants of actuality within which someone who is subject to the chrono-logic
of Western temporality lives do not offer sufficient time to harbor the necessary
memory acts. The heterochronous variability of the video works displayed here
contributes to our awareness of that lack, and points up a way of remedying it. These
video works fill actuality’s voids, or dead moments, stretching their space to make
time for a remembrance of a past that is now lost but, often violently, present in
actuality, irrupting when it is least desired.
Migratory experience is exemplary of the presence of the past within the present.
It is what rhythmically defines the letters—written, read—of the mother in Measures

of Distance (1988). Time is foreshortened to the extent that it is distorted, so as to
stagger forward from the black hole of linearity. Walid Raad’s Hostage (2001) strug-
gles and plays with this foreshortening, while also exploiting it to poke fun at the
television-fed viewer’s confidence in the news media and the compressed duration
of the sound bite. The artist presents this work as a deadpan documentary project
while, in the same presentation, he uses words that indicate that the work is fictional
(Raad 2003, 45).
The narrative action of Raad’s work is double. The work is nominally presented as
a segment from an archive collected by the Atlas Group (Raad’s artistic nom-de-
plume). It represents the lived past of a Lebanese man, Bachar, who has been acci-
dentally taken hostage along with the, targeted, Americans. He has spent ten months
in forced intimacy with these strangers. The video, intentionally made to appear that
it is of wavering quality—again, among other technical oddities, looking as if it has
been transferred from analog—tells the story of his captivity. Bachar says he wishes
his account to be narrated by a young female citizen of the targeted country. Memory-
based, this work does provide information. But is it factual? We soon realize that this
is unlikely.
Seeking to subvert any implicit trust in the facts—a trust that is, in spite of an
abundance of ideological critiques, still rampant—the artist stages an act of memory
that is, because of its (fictive) documentary status, inherently distorted, fictionalized.
Thus, he questions the terms by which “facts” can be made visible, and thereby pre-
cludes the escapism that adheres to the belief in truth. War, violence, hostage-
taking, and other atrocities committed in the world in general, and in the context of
Lebanon’s war in particular, cannot be distanced—neither in time nor in space—as
long as such distancing comes with the documentation of the truth. The video
employs its fictionalized documentary format to drive a wedge between the viewer’s
notion of the substance of truth as opposed to the fact of truth. The figure held
hostage for many years tells the viewer about his ordeal in front of an off-white cloth.
This cloth resembles a film screen but, then, an improvised, sloppy, and overly small
one; a Hollywood unmasked. That makeshift screen is also a motif that is shared by
the cinema and the genre of videotaped confession—in particular the final speeches
of martyrs—the latter of which are notoriously hard to date, hence, to time. But,
despite all of the tricks that infuse this video with allusions to the different temporal-
ities of media culture, the “contemporary history of Lebanon” in this video is present
and actual, including the event from the past it “tells.” In view of Israel’s invasion into
Lebanon in the summer of 2006, the work can even be seen as prophetic. This is
how history catches up with its memories to become now-time. Fiction is deployed,
then, to propose prophetic memory as a tool for political action.
In terms of heterochrony, Hostage (2001) uses its disturbing merging of fact and
fiction to make the following point. Foreshortening remains an illusion, but one in
226 | Mieke Bal

which the deception flaunts itself. Foreshortened time is both irresistible and disen-
chantingly unreal. At no time does the foreshortened duration offer us a bridge to the
past, to the other (life), yet it makes time so sticky that it feels as though we are
touched by, in touch with, the past. For example, we cannot suffer with the displaced
among us or inhabit their longings. Sympathy, compassion, even identification, do
nothing to reduce the unspeakable traces of what is buried in another time. But what
we can do is remember-with.
William Kentridge works with memory through a complex entwining of personal
and cultural memory. In Felix in Exile (1994), one of Kentridge’s most famous anima-
tions, the tool he uses to achieve heterochrony is the trace. A hyperbolic focus on the
trace makes a point concerning migratory politics as it is temporally defined. It does
so in three ways: through a slowness that competes with historical time; through the
artist’s engagement in manual labor in solidarity with workers; and through inscrip-
tion comparable to the traces left by the suffering that pushes people away from their
homes. Kentridge makes his films out of large-scale drawings in charcoal and pastel.
Each drawing contains a single scene. He photographs it, and then alters it, erasing
and redrawing the scene. After a while, the sheet becomes a palimpsest of its many
earlier stages.
This, of course, can be read as a metaphor of memory, but it is much more than
that. It is the result of labor—a labor as solidarity; of hope, of making as building.
Like Theuws, who painstakingly imitates the easily accomplished video effect called
Gaussian blur without using it, Kentridge also uses the model of a much easier mode
of achieving the effect, here, of animation. Instead of many drawings leading to one
film, a single drawing slowly morphs into a film out of many photographs, before it is
transferred onto video. Thus, he invents a new-old technique that commemorates as
it innovates a history of media in its complicity with political history.20
This reversal is a matter of time—a materialization of time. Thus, the labor-intensive
method becomes homage paid, by means of a humble aesthetic, to the subject that
emerges ever so slowly. Accompanied by Philip Miller’s and Motsumi Makhene’s
haunting music, the character, who is a recurring figure from the artist’s earlier films,
is alone in a hotel room pouring over the drawings made by Nandi, an African woman.
These drawings represent—or rather, explore and remember—the violence committed
against South Africa, both the land and the people. The drawings that float through
Felix’s field of vision are of the devastated landscape of mining and massacre.
The land itself bears the traces of South Africa’s violent history. Nandi’s drawings
result from her activities surveying the land, and watching bleeding bodies. When
Felix looks into the shaving mirror, he sees Nandi as if at the other end of a telescope.
Close proximity and vast, even cosmic distance are joined in an unbreakable bond.
When Nandi is shot and melts into the landscape like the subjects she was drawing,
Felix’s hotel room is flooded with blue water, water of tears, of animation itself, of

the possibility of new life. When Felix is almost flooded by the water (of his own tears?)
he almost merges with the history the traces of which the artist and his African-female
counterpart are insistently engaged in keeping alive.
Traces, then, are more than leftovers of the past. They are the stuff of this work;
they are the work. Temporally speaking, they bind the past to the present, and are
thus multitemporal by definition. They include traces on Kentridge’s drawing, which
transforms itself without erasing its past; traces on the land scarred by the mining
and the digging of graves; traces of the African woman’s drawings, of her drawing the
traces. The brutality of the racist regime cannot be erased, these indelible traces on
the palimpsestic images suggest. Forgetting, necessary as it sometimes is, must be
paired with acts of remembrance. Drawing is such an act. Drawing traces is a man-
ner, a method, of animating history and the memory of it in the present. And if the
single sheets that bear the charcoal traces of their earlier appearance also present
layers of landscape and layers of history, this means that both time and space must
be kept alive in the present.
But heterochrony has more layers than this memory-complex. While erasing the
past is neither possible nor acceptable, the very mode of setting the images in
motion in both Felix in Exile (1994) and Shadow Procession (1999) also intimates the
changeability of space, of history, and of the landscape in now-time. The procession
of the latter has neither beginning nor end; the slice of duration that moves on and
on also refuses to yield to the pressure of a narrative of closure. In Felix, Kentridge’s
acts of drawing foreground the nonlinear, multitemporal movement that is so essen-
tial for video as well as for migratory existence. Felix demonstrates that space, while
bearing the traces of its past, can be transformed. The work constantly produces
transformations, from drawings into landscape, from one figure into the other, from
bodies to the ground in which they disappear. This is how this artist makes actuality—
the time for hetero-memory in the present.
Temporalizing the Present

The present—that is, the time of the viewing. A time that thinks itself as over-
whelmed by migratoriness, forgetting the entire century that came before it, under
the sign of migration. Ultimately, it is in and for the migratory culture we live in, now,
including the heteropathic memories of its past, that the video art works in this exhi-
bition can deploy their multitemporal experiments; a culture where heterochrony is
the standard way of life. The vector of connection, then, is the act of viewing, an act
that is itself heterochronic; video installation by definition imposes such a temporality.
To begin with, in the exhibition, an event that is by definition situated in the present,
the participation of these works harks back to the heterochronic movements, slow
or fast, that underlie the other works in whose proximity they are installed, and
whose striking force they help sustain. I understand the ensemble and installation of
228 | Mieke Bal

the video works here not within an art-historical movement—within the story of
video’s evolution—but as a moment, a slow-down, of visual politics in and for the
present. The word “politics” is meant here to indicate the collective affect the videos,
together, facilitate; the solicitations of the performance of heterochrony mentioned
above. This exhibition deploys heterochrony to question the ontological distinctions
that define fiction as distinct from political reality—in that other sense of “politics.”
This is why Ballester’s erasures and foregrounding of the temporal gaps of epistolary
traffic is a way of making fiction, on the basis of a profoundly political reality.
In this final section, I try to make the political work of video in exhibition more
explicit. The best entrance point is the work that most emphatically questions the
medium and the way it prestructures and colors the world for us. Raad’s Hostage
questions the possibility for media to even be “in touch”—in actuality—with reality.
His work exemplifies a crucial ambivalence that defines political art today. It pro-
poses how narrative as the carrier of preconceptions can yield to a new narrative
anchored in heterochronous actuality. This attitude allows the work to tell the story
and, at the same time, identify its constructedness. It is in his acts of undermining
the (classical) truth status of his character’s testimony that he offers his own “touch”
with reality—the reality of media as mediation and fabrication.
One ground where the truth status of media reporting flounders is language.
Bachar translates his own discourse into an English that does not quite match the
Arabic, then insists that it be read by a young female voice in the target language.
When asked by his alter ego why the English does not match the Arabic he says: “I
have nothing to say about the second part of your question” (2003, 38). Asked why
he insists on a female reader, he answers with a comment on media:
A fascinating and revealing aspect of books written by the Americans [his fellow
hostages] is that of the literary contributions of the hostages’ girlfriends and wives . . .
In many reviews of the books in the U.S. popular press, I was surprised that critics have
characterized the contributions of the wives as “odd” and “distracting.” (2003, 40)
By questioning “from what” these accounts of the women distract, Bachar questions
not only the struggle about who owns the truth of events, but beyond that issue, he
expands the event itself. The women’s experience of being excluded from the (politi-
cal) event and the act of remembering it in writing, the interview intimates, is no less
real than the captivity narrative Bachar characterizes as male. Hence, the respective
durations of the two events mingle.
Bachar’s appearance and the female voice that speaks “for” him, over his voice,
slightly belatedly, capture the heterochrony of this narrative. Temporal aspects of this
sequential displacement are discrepancy, belatedness, delayed focusing, vanishing
and re-emergence, and performance; in short, a multi-facetted heterochrony. The
resulting temporal foreshortening is a device of primary importance. This is what
makes these works political in the specific way art can be political, without it being

Bal 5 Walid Raad – Hostage
thematically “about” migration—or “about” politics, for that matter. It is their timing
that constitutes the politics. In different ways, the temporal foreshortening at work
deploys the specificity of heterogeneous time in migratory culture. The artist is a
witness able to make this multitemporal, heterogeneous experience palpable.
230 | Mieke Bal

Bal 6 Melvin Moti – Stories from Surinam
A final example shows how memory acts can in and of themselves transform
violence into political agency. Melvin Moti, in search of his ancestors who came
from India to Surinam in the early twentieth century, turns the traveling shot of the
landscape, the haunting song, the slow speeches and the old faces into tools for per-
forming acts of remembrance with such political effect. Moti felt an urgency to make
a connection to the past of his ancestors, a past about to be extinguished, even ren-
dered extinct, that was receding into oblivion as the elderly people were disappearing.
He wished to acquire their memories as his “heteropathic” memories, which
he needs to be who he is in the present. This is how Stories from Surinam (2002),
a collection of memories captured like butterflies, becomes itself an act of memory—
such an image that can stop the relentless course of a time moving too fast. “It is
only as an image, which flashes up in the moment of its cognizability, never to appear
again, that the past can be apprehended” wrote Weigel (1996, 9), paraphrasing
Benjamin (1968, 257).21
As the provisional outcome of an ongoing search for the possibility of deploying
time as a weapon against oblivion, the gap between the occurrence of the event and
its remembrance is made visible. Comparing memory with video, that gap is that of
the edit, the montage that opens the conjunction of two clips for the viewer’s imagi-
nation. In that gap, the meaning is “made,” the memory is constructed, and the pres-
ent is acted upon. The event flares up for those same, but belated, hours in the
present that the event had occupied in the past, and the memory could only effec-
tively inscribe itself—in the culture whose memory it was—in the brief experience, in

the shock of recognition of the passers-by or the visitors in the gallery who are
witnessing it. Their acts of seeing constitute the visual event these works are meant
to effectuate. Thus, video intimates, the here and now of viewing is the present here,
where political agency, activist or simply at work in social living, takes shape and is
performed.
This brings me back to Theuws’s work, exemplary in its fourfold deployment of
abstraction. Through the abstraction, the work makes possible the emergence of
forms or shapes within which the images of the past can be encapsulated. It hosts
past images in now-form. Slow-down, in art, has political ambitions in itself. Beyond
the everyday bombardments of fleeting images, art seems a suitable place for us
to stop and to invest the events from people’s past they carry on their backs
(Kentridge), or that resonate with the epistolary reminiscing of Hatoum’s mother, with
cultural duration. According to my interpretation of temporal foreshortening, Theuws’s
work thickens time to the extreme without entirely freezing it. This does not make
the images still and available for contemplation. On the contrary, they are just barely,
with difficulty, available for participation. Moti shows that need for time in now-
images retrieved from the past.
Let me give an example of how this works. At the beginning of Stories, a hand-held
shot of a decrepit building remains in the frame for quite a long time. During this
shot, a haunting song begins. This song, sung by an elderly voice, tells the story of
the cruelties committed in the past the singer has presumably experienced. The shot
is rather wobbly; not because it is poor camerawork, but because it is empathic
camerawork: it moves on the rhythm of the song. This coordination of the image to
the song foregrounds the sense of the present; singing by definition happens in the
present, even if it tells a story from the past. The precariousness of the transgene-
rational passing on of what are memories for the singer and building blocks for his
identity for the filmmaker is thus given shape in the interstices of the irreducible gap
between the audio and the video.
The experience of belatedness Moti stages is, ultimately, the political arena—a
migratory politics of temporality—in which these video works seek to transform the
relationship to a past we cannot reverse, into a present in which we can work. It is
the intersection of form and time as the construction site of a politically effective
affect toward which the deployment of the videographic imagination works. The inter-
val that separates us from the past when the violence, exploitation, depletion
occurred is the moment, the submoment, of actuality that is foreshortened. Not quite
frozen, but slowed down below perceptible time—thus making now-time “sticky.” As
a result we cannot ensconce ourselves in the ethical indifference of aesthetic
contemplation defined in a misguided distortion of Kantian disinterestedness, for we
are “touched” by that moment, now, even though we cannot appropriate it. But it
does leave a remainder—if only we can hear it.22
232 | Mieke Bal

For “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its
own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (Benjamin 1968, 255). And that
present, that here-now, is an experiential, and, if the videos are effective, a corporeal
time. We need the heteropathic memories, traces, and fictions that constitute the
texture of the migratory culture we share, in order to live in an actuality saved from
its dreariness.

Notes
1. For two stills of this work, see chapter 12. 7. For my thoughts on the concepts of time in
The notion of an epistolary aesthetic is narrative theory, see my handbook on the
propounded by Hamid Naficy in his discussion subject (1997). For the purpose of this essay,
of “accented cinema” (2001). Verstraten (2009) helpfully aligns film analysis
with narrative theory. The handbook by Bordwell
2. On migration and its history, see the work and Thompson (2004) is most widely used. On
of Sassen (esp. 1994). For the history of the performance and performativity treated as
moving image, Doane (2002). On memory, neither identical nor entirely distinct, see Bal
Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer (1999). (2002).
3. The term postmemory has been proposed 8. 2MOVE: Migratory Aesthetics was first held
by Marianne Hirsch (1992–1993, esp. 8–9). in Murcia, Spain, in Sala Veronicas, and Centro
Ernst van Alphen contests the appropriateness Páraga from February 4 to May 11, 2007, then
of the element “memory” in this term (2006). in Enkhuizen, Netherlands, Zuiderzeemuseum
Hirsch replies to her critics (2008). from September 19, 2007 to February 3, 2008;
from March 27 to May 10, 2008 in the
4. In his 2004 book, Sean Cubitt goes so far Stenersen Museet in Oslo, and on to the two
as to identify the flicker effect of early film with Irelands, where it was jointly held in the
the pixels of digital video. Although this Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, Ireland (3 May–2
identification seems to make short shrift June 2008) and in Belfast, UK, at Belfast
of the technical differences, the concise Exponed, from 3 May to 6 June 2008.
formulation of the differences among a
cinema that represents, one that reproduces, 9. Theuws’s Gaussian Blur (2005–2006) and
and one that generates (360) makes sense, Mona Hatoum’s Measure of Distance (1988)
albeit not ontological sense. Manovich uses were the two starting points of the exhibition.
the phrase “sampling time”; Stewart (2007) While the former is a self-reflective work on
speaks of “framed time,” referring to the video and the latter a visual essay on migration
contemporary (digital) aesthetic in Hollywood and intimacy, screening them in immediate
cinema. proximity to each other turns the tables on
such thematic divisions.
5. Foucault favors the term heterotopia over
heterochrony, a term he also uses. See Doane 10. I have developed the concept of
(2002, 139). abstraction I am using here elsewhere (2003).
6. For an exposé of micro-politics, see 11. For the distinction between movement-
Hernández’s contribution to this volume. Fabian image and time-image, see Deleuze (1989) and
forcefully proposes the concepts of allochrony Rodowick (1997).
and coevalness (1983). His later work
continuously reframes these issues. I rely on 12. The formulation I use here intimates that
his book Power and Performance (1990) for a experience, like memory, is something we do,
demonstration of an alternative, performance- not something that just happens to us. See
based approach, congenial to the exhibition Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer (1999) where this
discussed in this paper. His book Time and the performativity is explained in relation to
Work of Anthropology (1991) usefully sums up memory.
the relation between a static concept of culture
and the denial of coevalness. In an article 13. For a comprehensive presentation of
published in 2001, the issue of temporality is issues of temporality in anthropology, see Munn
brought to bear on the “-graphy” of ethnography (1992) and, more detailed but more limited in
and, by implication, of, my case here, scope, Gell (1992). On the oblique but enforced
videography. impact of chrono-logic, Toufic (2003, 31).
234 | Mieke Bal

14. The plot of the biblical Book of Esther is postapartheid South Africa on the one hand,
largely based on this motif of epistolary delay. and the global migration such situations, as
See Bal (1991). The temporal discrepancies of well as, literally, Kentridge’s work, set in motion,
writing are, of course, most forcefully explained on the other. On affect in this (Deleuzian)
by Derrida (1967). By the change in image sense, see Van Alphen (2008).
surface quality between the footage shot in
Spain and that shot in Morocco, entirely 18. Whereas Osborne’s study focuses on the
constructed, Mimoune explodes the inevitable historical avant-garde, Ruby (2007) develops a
gaps in the temporality of film, exacerbated, in concept of the contemporary as itself political
turn, in video. See Doane (2002, 177) on the by definition.
inevitable discontinuities in film.
19. For the various consequences of this view
15. Ward’s reflection is double in two distinct of memory, see the essays in Bal, Crewe, and
ways: as “reflection on” and “reflection of,” Spitzer (1999). Michael Rothberg argues for
but also in two parts of the work, each another consequence of this active nature of
reflecting on migration and alterity as well as memory, namely the possibility to relate to the
(self)portraiture, and reflection of self and memories of others and other groups. (2009).
other as linked.
20. Kentridge’s technique is extensively
16. For an important discussion of capitalist described by Boris (2001), a useful essay for
time and alternatives, see Casarino (2003). understanding the meaning of the acts of
I owe the term “little resistance” to Hernández’s memory the artist performs. The importance of
catalogue essay for the exhibition. the trace and its relation to indexicality in the
history of the moving image is analyzed in
17. See Goya’s famous series of etchings, Los Doane (2002). Since his work is widely
Desastros de la Guerra (the Disasters of War), published I refrain from including images
from the second decade of the nineteenth here.
century. Although Goya was one of several
artists to respond to the gruesome carnage 21. I borrow the concept of heteropathic
of the Napoleonic wars, his etchings focus on memory from Silverman (1996), a study that is,
the horrors of war in general. They are not a in its entirety, extremely relevant for our topic.
nationalistic protest but a humane one. As one
of the last of the old masters as well as the 22. I borrow the term “remainder” from
first modern artist in Western Europe, he helps Lawrence Venuti. In three different publications
the contemporary artist to position himself (1994; 1995; 1996) Venuti makes a fabulously
more specifically in relation to the specificity of productive, differentiated use of this concept.
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in the Digital Age. Zürich: Edition Voldemeer,
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Habberjam. London: Athlone Press, 1992.
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Press, 1989. Press, 1986. 187–213.
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Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Undead in Film. Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo
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Postfilmic Cinema. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007.

Molding Resistance: Aesthetics

and Politics in the Struggle of
Bil’in against the Wall
Noa Roei
ABSTRACT
The residents of Bil’in, a Palestinian village located in the West Bank, make use
of sculptural objects in their weekly demonstrations against the separation wall
that is being built on their land by the Israeli authorities. In March 2006 some of
these objects were displayed at an art exhibition in Tel Aviv. This paper draws on
the work of Jacques Rancière in order to gain insight into the politics and the aesthet-
ics of the sculptures in both locations: it examines their role in their original
context, as material parts of a performance of resistance at the border as well as
against that border; and in their secondary context, displayed in a white cube
gallery in Tel Aviv. I show how, in Rancière’s vein, both events are related inasmuch
as the same objects bring about political occurrences that involve a reorganization
of the senses. This proposition is relevant for expanding the notions of migratory
politics as a part of migratory aesthetics. Migration here does not refer to the
movement of people: it is both a migration of a condition, from relative freedom to
confinement, where the residents of Bil’in are dislocated from their lands without
leaving their homes; and a migration of objects from one regime of visibility to
another, where the sculptures refer to a different set of questions regarding their
artistic nature in each location. Both movements suggest that the politics of the
migratory has as much to do with moving mindsets as with moving bodies, in its
attempt to make visible the space where categories transform into, through, and
against each other.
Molding Resistance: Aesthetics and Politics in the Struggle of Bil’in against the Wall | 239
Roei 1 Gallery view with lock-ons. Fence Art exhibition, Minshar Gallery, Tel Aviv,
March 2006. Courtesy of Minshar Gallery.
Roei 2 Lock-ons in use at Bil’in demonstration, 2006.

From http://www.bilin-village.org
240 | Noa Roei

In March 2006, several huge sculpture-like objects filled the Minshar Gallery in Tel
Aviv. Among the objects displayed in the exhibition, titled Fence Art, one could find,
for instance, a large locked iron cage, a huge metal scale, a fragile scaffold, a tin
fence covered with graffiti in Arabic, mirrors with inscriptions in red paint, segments
of rusty pipes, blue tin barrels, and an enormous black viper made of cloth. Marked
and worn with unmistakable signs of use, these sculptural objects conjured up a
hallucinatory narrative. Walking between them felt like walking within a riddle. The
riddle was only solved in a small side niche in the gallery, where one could view a
series of photographs spread out on a wall. The photographs documented how the
objects functioned in their original context: people sitting in the large cage, carrying
the black snake or the coffins, standing inside the barrels. Together with the accom-
panying explanatory captions, what unfolded materially as well as visually was the
story of the Bil’in demonstrations.
Bil’in is a small Palestinian village of 1,700 residents located in the West Bank,
west of Ramallah, and east of the Modi’in Elite settlement. Bil’in is under the civilian
control of the Palestinian authority, but under the military control of the Israeli secu-
rity forces (both army and border police). As with many other Palestinian villages,
Bil’in has been suffering from the loss of its land to Israeli settlements throughout
the last four decades, and is now facing dire impoverishment, as most of its agricul-
tural lands are located west of the separation wall.1 The wall, a combination of
barbed wire and concrete, includes locked gates and, officially, the villagers that can
prove land ownership are allowed to cross it and reach their lands. In practice, how-
ever, this proves to be almost impossible. The separation wall works in effect to cre-
ate forced migration due to loss of livelihood, but even those who do not move away
are separated from their own land as effectively as any migrant might be. Thus, the
situation of Bil’in can be understood as a special type of migration, where people are
dislocated from their lands without leaving their homes.2
Since 2005 the residents of Bil’in have been fighting against the imposition of the
wall on various fronts. Under the leadership of the Bil’in Popular Committee Against
the Wall, the villagers filed numerous appeals with the Israeli Supreme Court.3 The
Popular Committee has also filed a lawsuit in Canada against companies that are
building settlement housings on their lands. In addition, the village yearly hosts inter-
national conferences on the subject of popular resistance, and holds weekly demon-
strations that include residents as well as Israeli and international supporters. The
demonstrations, consisting of a march from the village houses to the trajectory of
the wall, are decidedly nonviolent. Israeli security forces repeatedly use violent means
to stop or pre-empt the demonstrations.4
Each weekly demonstration has a specific theme, and, so far, the various themes
can be divided into three groups. One type of demonstration is thematically shaped
with regard to its participants: children’s demonstrations, women’s demonstrations,
demonstrations of the handicapped, and so forth. A second type of demonstration is
dedicated to relevant historical dates or to contemporary events, both political and
cultural, such as the FIFA World Cup, May Day, the Gaza siege, or the memorial day
for Yasser Arafat. A recent and most lively demonstration of this sort included
demonstrators dressed as the blue Na’vis from James Cameron’s box office success
Avatar. A third type of demonstration is aimed at emphasizing the dire consequences
for the village of Bil’in that have resulted from the construction of the separation wall.
In these demonstrations, demonstrators chain themselves to olive trees, or lock
themselves up inside an iron cage, as a way to impede the construction of the wall.
Other demonstrations of this sort are more conceptual, such as one in which demon-
strators wore black viper dolls around their neck to symbolize the psychological,
cultural, and economic suffocation that the wall causes. The sculptural objects that
were presented in the “Fence Art” exhibition at the Minshar Gallery in March 2006
were all used as part of these weekly demonstrations.
This paper will examine the role of the sculptures, both in their original context, as
material parts of a performance of resistance at the border as well as against that
border; and in their secondary context, displayed in a white cube gallery in Tel Aviv.
I will chiefly draw on the work of Jacques Rancière, specifically on his unorthodox
definitions of aesthetics and politics, in order to gain insight into two issues. Both
issues relate directly to the question of migratory politics, the theme at the heart of
this volume. The first pertains to the political struggle against the forced migration
of people (from their land) and of land (from one national territory to another). The
second deals with the movement of objects between spaces and cultures, and with
the subsequent transformations in their aesthetical and political aspects. I will begin
by analyzing how Bil’in’s creative popular resistance against a fenced “inner” migra-
tion allows for a new form of political subjectivity to emerge. I will examine the
demonstrations as happenings that make use of a migratory space—a borderland
where various mind sets clash, collide, and mutate—in order for their politics to be
enacted. Later in the essay I will show how the sculptures’ function, as aesthetic
objects and political arguments, is affected by their terms of engagement both at
home, in Bil’in, and away, in the space of the gallery. From both angles, the sculptural
objects of Bil’in offer various sketches of what migratory politics could be, and of
what it could be about. An additional goal of this paper is to raise awareness of the
struggle of Bil’in and its neighboring villages, which has not received sufficient atten-
tion in mainstream international Western media.5
Redistributing Visibility
Bil’in village receives an unusually extensive amount of media attention, especially
when compared to the many other villages that are afflicted by similar circumstances,
such as Biddu, Beit Surik, Beit Ulla, and Kufar Kadum. Brief reports about the weekly
242 | Noa Roei

demonstrations in Bil’in often appear in the mainstream media, focusing on how

many demonstrators and soldiers were injured or detained, thus emphasizing the
violent aspect of the demonstrations. Other reports in mainstream newspapers and
TV channels are concerned with the related legal trials, which have to do with either
the demonstrations (such as cases in which claims of soldiers against the sup-
posedly violent protestors were found to be untrue) or, more importantly, with the
villagers’ court cases against the trajectory of the wall through their agricultural
lands. At alternative news web sites the village receives special attention as well,
and its mode of creative protest (together with the army’s aggressive response) are
described by eye witnesses or displayed in short videos. Within the cultural arena,
films documenting the struggle of Bil’in have been screened at international festi-
vals, and members of the village are frequently invited to conferences across Europe
and the United States. The village’s success in drawing known Palestinian and inter-
national figures (amongst which are Salam Fiad and Naomi Klein) to the weekly
demonstrations and to the yearly conferences has also helped in turning Bil’in into a
symbol of successful nonviolent political struggle, which manages to attract attention
both in Israel and abroad.6
Those involved with organizing the demonstrations agree that their success has
much to do with the creative aspect of the weekly events. Abdullah Abu Rahmeh,
coordinator of the Popular Committee of Bil’in, focuses on two aspects of this creativ-
ity: innovation and nonviolence (Abu Rahmeh 2007; Daraghmeh 2005). Mohammed
Khatib, another member of the Popular Committee and the mind behind many of the
sculptural objects, emphasizes their function within the demonstrations. He too
contends that the sculptural objects undermine the potential for violence and relieve
the demonstrations of the kind of repetitiveness that could minimize public interest.
In addition to delaying the construction of the wall and getting a political message
across, the artifacts attract people. He states:
even from the village people started asking what we are planning for the next
demonstrations. Israelis are also coming for this reason . . . Every time there is some-
thing new that attracts the media. It is much more interesting . . . than another group
of people walking and holding signs. We also managed to show the world that we are
not violent. The only violence that comes through the photographs is that of the
soldiers. (quoted in Gilerman 2006; my translation)
As Khatib notes, the demonstrations’ creative aspect encourages residents and
attracts a large amount of supporters as well as media coverage. On the whole, then,
the sculptural objects seem to have an effect in three directions: inward, to keep
demonstrators motivated and to direct the energy of the youth away from violence;
forward, toward the soldiers and construction workers who face the demonstrators,
so as to change their conception of the demonstrations and to keep their use of force
minimal and the disruption of the construction works maximal; and outward, to the
media, to sustain its interest in the case of Bil’in by adding the aspect of entertain-
ment to an often over-exposed political struggle.
But, above all, the sculptural objects of the Bil’in demonstrations have helped to
redefine the meaning of political resistance in the Palestinian context. This, I believe,
is the deeper cause for the demonstrations’ media success. The common perception
of Palestinians as an occupied people is that of fighters and/or victims. Palestinians
appear in the media either as a great mass of young men filling the streets in demon-
strations and funerals, shooting guns in the air or shouting slogans; or as individual
women, children, or old men, helplessly telling stories of suffering and loss. The first
type of image brings home to the viewer the potential for violence; the second bears
witness to a victimhood that may bring about a sense of guilt or indifference. Neither
involves or affects the viewer within their world; whether they inspire outrage, pity, or
indignation, such media reports emphasize the distance between the fates of those
who are participants in and those who are observers of the occupation narrative.
The use of sculptural objects makes it difficult to perceive the villagers of Bil’in
in terms of these conventional roles. The demonstrators-turned-performers become
a part of the art world, as well as part of the larger Palestinian community. By appro-
priating the art world, their political claims acquire a different tone. This conceptual
shift in the politics of resistance can best be explained through Jacques Rancière’s
conceptualization of aesthetics and politics. Rancière focuses on French history, but
his theory proves to be most relevant for comprehending the politics at play in the
Bil’in demonstrations.
For Rancière, “politics” is first of all a battle about perceptible or sensible material.
It aims for the rearrangement of the existing “distribution of the sensible,” that is, the
laws that prescribe what can be heard and seen in a specific political and social con-
stellation. A politics of recognition is central to Rancière’s theory, but in a more radical
sense than that of identity politics: Rancière’s politics “does not simply presuppose
the rupture of the ‘normal’ distribution of positions between the one who exercises
power and the one subject to it. It also requires a rupture in the idea that there are dis-
positions ‘proper’ to such classifications” (2001, 4). In other words, for Rancière the
essence of political struggle does not consist of gathering people into communities
and fighting for the rights of these communities. Rather, it consists of exposing
subjectivities that challenge existing social delineations and hierarchies.
Rancière contrasts politics [la politique] with police [la police]. He defines the
police not as a strong-arm repressive force, but as “a form of intervention which
prescribes what can be seen and what cannot be seen, what can be said and what
cannot be said” (1998, 28). He suggests that the manner in which the police inter-
fere with public space does not lie in interpellation (“Hey! You there!”), but rather in
the regulation of what will and will not be seen (“Move along! There is nothing to see
here!”).7 Political action is defined in opposition to this prescription of the police, and
244 | Noa Roei

consists of “transforming this space of ‘moving-along’ into a space for the appear-
ance of a subject” (2001, 9).
Politics and police are thus in constant struggle. Politics, by definition, must break
with the social order and create subjects and scenes of dialogue that did not exist
beforehand. But when does this take place, and how can the policed “distribution of
the sensible” be remobilized, redistributed? Spectacle could be one tool to compel
acknowledgment: there is definitely something to see when there are costumes and
sculptures around. However, for Rancière, spectacle is not enough. He discusses a
deeper level of invisibility, where people and events are seen but are not acknowl-
edged as meaningful subjects. In many of his writings, primarily in Nights of Labor
(1989), Rancière points to the double bind of social struggle. According to his theory,
whenever minority groups achieve a wider recognition for their social rights and
contributions, they simultaneously are subject to a reaffirmation of the existing
power structure, and a retrenchment of their position in its terms (Deranty 2003,
152). Thus, whenever a minority group achieves recognition for its rights it also simul-
taneously reaffirms the existing power structure. The real rebellion lies in transgress-
ing forms of accepted and expected social norms, positions and behaviors.
Rancière uses the rebellion of the workers in nineteenth-century France as his
prime example. These workers transgressed and subverted this “order of things” by
claiming the right to be something other than workers: to be recognized as poets.
While their social status demanded that they work in the day and sleep at night,
these workers distributed their time differently and transgressed the type of their
accepted and expected labor. This, according to Rancière, was the means through
which workers claimed the right to a meaningful voice beyond the constraints of their
social destiny (Deranty 2003, 152).
The worker emancipation movement disrupted the organizational principle of
society and made workers visible as social partners, through their appropriation of
the tools of the bourgeoisie (Deranty 2003, 151). The unsettling effect that the Bil’in
popular resistance movement has caused can be understood in the same light. “The
particular feature of political dissensus,” Rancière tells us, “is . . . the ones making
visible the fact that they belong to a shared world the other does not see” (Rancière
2001, 10). By writing poetry, the French workers made visible the fact that they
belonged to a world shared with others—the upper social classes—with whom the
art of poetry was more readily matched. The Bil’in inhabitants mould sculptural objects
in part as a means to reach a similar goal. Their use of art makes visible their creative
equality to the ruling class, comprised in this case of Israeli citizens and soldiers, and
thus opens up a space of possibilities for situations of speech and dialogue that did
not previously exist.
Rancière names this space le politique: the space where two principles of visibil-
ity, la police (policing the distribution of the sensible) and la politique (contesting and
transforming the existing distribution) confront each other. This confrontation can
lead to a recognition of dominated individuals as speaking subjects (in a different
world, previously unseen), rather than as mere rebels (against the world as seen and
known), and to a shift in the accepted positions of power of the parties involved.
Rancière summarizes this aspect in “Ten Theses on Politics” when he writes,
If there is someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by
not seeing them as the bearers of politicalness, by not understanding what they say,
by not hearing that it is an utterance coming out of their mouths . . . And the politics of
these categories has always consisted in re-qualifying these places . . . of getting them-
selves to be seen or heard as speaking subjects . . . It has consisted in making what
was unseen visible; in getting what was only audible as noise to be heard as speech;
in demonstrating to be a feeling of shared “good” or “evil” what had appeared merely
as an expression of pleasure or pain. (2001, 10)
When the case of Bil’in is examined from Rancière’s perspective, the demonstrators’
use of artistic form becomes more than a media attention grabber. The sculptural
objects become the tools through which the clear “division of labor” between the
oppressors and the oppressed collapse, and the existing “distribution of the sensi-
ble” is reconceived. The demonstrators break through the boundaries of their social
identities, as they manifest themselves as occupied people and as free artists at the
same time. They assert their right to belong to a world that includes leisure time for
contemplation; they assert their right to voice their claims not only as occupied peo-
ple but also as men and women of the world. The notion of the free artist is of course
problematic, but the Bil’in demonstrators do not explore this fallacy; they exploit the
myth of artistic freedom for their own purposes. Their appeal to the basic right to
keep their land is thus empowered by a political move that asserts their right to
appeal as equals in the first place. In this respect, too, the sculptural objects effec-
tively work in three directions: inward to the demonstrators; forward to the soldiers
and construction workers; and outward to the media and to us, viewers watching from
home. In all directions, they rupture and “redistribute” what is visible and sayable in
the confrontations between Palestinian inhabitants and Israeli security forces, as
they bring into view notions that are not connected with the policed version of
Palestinians under occupation: leisure, creativity, artistic vision, modernity, universal-
ity, and freedom. According to Rancière,
Political argument is at one and the same time the demonstration of a possible
world where the argument could count as argument, addressed by a subject qualified
to argue, upon an identified object, to an addressee who is required to see the object
and to hear the argument that he or she “normally” has no reason to either see or hear.
(2001, 11)
The Bil’in sculptures function as a political argument in this vein. They confound a
denial of recognition, and create, every week, a possible world where the colonizing
246 | Noa Roei

parties are required to see the colonized in a light that they normally would have no
reason to see. By way of reconfiguring the sensibilities of this overexposed struggle,
the sculptural objects demonstrate the equality of the subjects that made them with
the subjects that view them on the other side of the wall, an equality that is anything
but taken for granted in the context of Israel and Palestine.
From Bil’in to Tel Aviv

During the demonstrations, the sculptural objects and the demonstrators merge. At
times, the interaction is as simple as people carrying the constructions in their
hands or around their necks. At other times the event is more theatrical, such as the
demonstration in which several protestors were covered with white cloth, their necks
surrounded with rope nooses that were attached to a metal frame held up by their
peers. There are also cases in which flesh, iron, and earth interact more intimately.
These result in happenings that involve the active participation of everybody. On one
occasion, for instance, demonstrators chained themselves to olive trees that were
marked for uprooting because they were in the way of the route of the wall. On
another, demonstrators locked themselves in an iron cage that was firmly attached
to the ground, blocking the road that led the bulldozers to the trajectory of the wall.
Yet another demonstration involved demonstrators that were tethered to the ground
by the metal foundations of a barbed wire fence.
The fusion between human bodies and sculptural objects added a theatrical
quality to the demonstrations. This theatrical quality enhanced, on the one hand, the
redistribution of the sensible, by reframing the role of the protestors as performers.
At the same time, this theatric quality reframed the position of the soldiers and dis-
rupted their ability to fulfill their traditional role: while the soldiers were busy taking a
fence apart, breaking a metal cage open, or cutting the chains loose from olive trees,
they found themselves involved in bizarre happenings, participating actively in actions
the rules of which were determined by the party that they were supposed to control
and contain. While the soldiers were, from a certain perspective, fulfilling the role of
the police in restoring the order, they were also inadvertently aiding the protestors’
redefinition of the terms of discourse by engaging with their play. Thus, the framing
of the dispute in theatrical terms through the use of sculptural objects effectively
destabilized the roles of demonstrators and soldiers alike.
All this, clearly, did not repeat itself in the Minshar Gallery in Tel Aviv in March
2006. There, the sculptural objects were detached from the people who built them,
from the event of the demonstration, from the ground and the flesh that were an inte-
gral part of their role in Bil’in. The dynamic and disputed borderland that accommo-
dated the sculptural objects in Bil’in persisted only as an appellation (“Fence Art”),
replaced by walls that uncontestedly differentiated the representational space of
the gallery from the outside world. Gallery visitors that entered, willingly, to see
“Fence Art” took the place of the border police, and they experienced the snake, the
cage, the mirrors, and the rest of the sculptural objects in the sterilized, white,
cubic space of the gallery, as static “enigmatic sculptural objects” (Tzur 2006). The
role of the sculptural objects in their original context was documented in a side
space in the gallery, but the objects themselves were presented as stripped of their
primary symbolic, practical and, most importantly, political functions. Their textured
surfaces, ragged from the confrontations on the field, received the audience’s
complete attention.
The sculptures’ relocation—their “migration” to the gallery space—clearly
affected their function and their significance. In the space of the gallery, the objects
did not move, they were not part of a rebellious action, nor did they merge and clash
with the living bodies that walked around them. On the contrary: the objects were
placed in the gallery in a way that essentially differentiated them from their surround-
ings. To the extent that museums and galleries are commonly perceived as represen-
tational spaces that encourage a contemplative relationship to what is being
exhibited, the sculptures’ new and somewhat subdued role—as art objects on
display—suited their new environment.
It is tempting to read “Fence Art” in light of Joaquín Barriendos Rodríguez’s criti-
cal analysis of the politics of mobility in contemporary art, included in this volume.
Indeed, at first sight, the exhibition seems to fit the general trends of “fetishization
of alterity and aesthetization of what is subordinate or at the frontier,” taking part
in what Rodríguez terms as the most contradictory forms of internationalization
processes of contemporary art (Barriendos Rodríguez, this volume, p. 323).
Exhibiting Palestinian activist art in an Israeli gallery runs the risk of turning its
confrontational power into a static fetishized representation and, as a consequence,
appropriating and taming the rebellious message it carries.
While I agree with Rodríguez’s analysis in general, I believe that “Fence Art”
cleverly manages not to strip the sculptural objects of their dissentient quality. The
objects were indeed tamed by their relocation, but their poignant political character
was not lost: it was simply redirected to the artistic sphere. The exhibition did not
linger on the role of the sculptural objects in the field, but focused instead on their
role in the gallery space. The way in which the sculptures were distributed in this
space and, more importantly, the way in which they were separated from photographs
that documented their role in Bil’in, called for a conceptual discussion of their signi-
ficance, and brought their volatile identity to the fore. Interestingly enough, precisely
this move away from the objects’ original role allowed them to retain their dissident
character. To put it differently, if, in the field, the Bil’in villagers transgressed the order
of things by being something other than workers, in the gallery, the Bil’in sculptural
objects subverted this order by being something other than art. Once more, Rancière’s
theorization of aesthetics and politics may help to clarify this proposition.
248 | Noa Roei

Similarly to his definition of politics, Rancière’s definition of aesthetics is atypical.

Rancière uses the term in two different senses. The first, broader sense refers to the
aesthetic dimension of the political experience (Guénoun and Kavanagh 2000, 11).
Far removed from Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the aestheticization of politics
in the age of the masses, for Rancière the political is aesthetic in principle. He
describes the aesthetic as “the attempt of reconfiguring the partitions of time and
space” to bring new forms into vision (Rancière 2005, 13). Consequently, his notion
of the political has an inherent aesthetic dimension to it, as it creates a renewed
perception of the relationships between the sayable, the seeable, and the doable in
a social reality (Guénoun and Kavanagh 2000, 17). The French workers’ revolution
was an aesthetic revolution in this sense; the politics of the Bil’in demonstrations,
too, are intrinsically aesthetic, as they involve a reorganization of the visible within
the terms of Israeli-Palestinian politics.
The second, more narrow sense of the term “aesthetics” in Rancière’s writing
refers to “a specific regime for identifying and reflecting on the arts” (2004, 10). This
implies not a theory of art; rather, aesthetics is a configuration of the art domain that
is based on distinguishing a sensible mode of being, specific to artistic products.
However, while “[t]he word aesthetics . . . strictly refers to the specific mode of being
of whatever falls within the domain of art” (2004, 22), an art object can only be an
aesthetic object when it is “something else than art,” posing as what Rancière
describes as a “form of life” (2002, 137). Evidently, this definition is contradictory
and somewhat abstract, and as Rancière himself admits, it eliminates any pragmatic
criterion for distinguishing art from non-art. It results instead in a focus on the
thought that art contains and engenders.
This focus marks the essential difference between the aesthetic and the repre-
sentational regimes of the arts. The latter, according to Rancière, is a pragmatic sys-
tem that differentiates between art works according to forms, genres, mediums, and
so forth, defining proper ways for making and judging art (2004, 91). The way in which
the “distribution of the sensible” takes place within the representative regime of art
is essentially the same as the policing of the social order that takes place in the
larger world: each art form has its clear place and there are no exceptions, no voids.
The aesthetic regime, on the other hand, approaches art objects from a conceptual
point of view and relates to their mode of being, extricated from their ordinary connec-
tions (2004, 22). Consequently, the way in which the aesthetic regime opposes the
representational configuration, by freeing art from specific rules and hierarchies, is
equivalent to the rearrangement of the sensible that occurs through a political strug-
gle. Thus, aesthetics in the broad sense (relating to the distribution of the sensible)
and aesthetic in the narrow sense (referring to a specific regime of art) are very much
related. Both refer to “a specific sphere of experience which invalidates the ordinary
hierarchies incorporated in everyday sensory experience” (Rancière 2005, 14).
Within the prism of the aesthetic regime of art, aesthetic art objects accomplish the
same task as political actions, that is, they reorganize the accepted perceptions of
reality (Deranty 2003, 137).
In the demonstrations, the sculptures take part in events that suit Rancière’s
broad definition of aesthetics; events that attempt to undermine the policing division
between different sociopolitical groups. But the sculptural objects also fit with his
narrower definition of the term, because they could be interpreted as aesthetic art
objects that belong to a regime of the sensible “that is extricated from its ordinary
connection and is inhabited by a heterogeneous power foreign to itself” (Rancière
2004, 23). In Tel Aviv, the sculptural objects were seemingly presented as unambigu-
ous art objects, in a classic modernist constellation that emphasized their form. They
were displayed to an art-educated audience, and that audience was invited to exam-
ine them through that frame. In spite of this, the exhibition left the audience with no
clear answers, because it could only separate, cordon-off but not remove, the sculp-
tural objects’ preceding functional aspect. The exhibition brought to the fore the
sculptural objects’ aesthetic quality, their “mode of existence as ‘free’ objects, not
the projects of will” (Rancière quoted in Guénoun and Kavanagh 2000, 22) and at the
same time manifested their functional non-artistic aspects. The volatility of the sculp-
tural objects’ definition, as well as the incessant (and constantly failing) need to
define them as art or as artifacts of a political struggle, turned into the “thinking”
that inhabited the sculptural objects in the gallery space. Therefore, and despite the
fact that the distinction between art and non-art is irrelevant to the aesthetic regime
as such, I argue that precisely this distinction—or better yet, the questioning of this
distinction—remains at the core of the politics of the “Fence Art” exhibition.
The instabilities and uncertainties that informed the sculptural objects’ aesthetic
presentation in the exhibition were already evident during the curatorial stage. In an
interview with art critic Dana Gilerman (2006), the curator, Oded Yedaya, asserted
that the sculptures were first and foremost art works, and that Muhammad Khatib
(the maker of most of the sculptures) is an artist in this respect. However, Khatib him-
self was opposed to these definitions. He would have preferred the sculptural objects
to appear in close connection with the explanatory material found in the next room,
in a sort of a documentary exhibition, rather than separately, and hence aesthetically.
Curator and creator also differed with regard to their respective reasons for mounting
the exhibition. While Khatib’s sole objective was to get further exposure for Bil’in
in the Israeli media, Yedaya also wanted to create an intellectual discussion that
would explore the possibilities of the terms “drafted art” and “drafted gallery.” In her
article, Gilerman finds the curator’s choice infuriating, “as if the art world found a
new toy to adorn itself with,” but only until, having interviewed Khatib, she too came
to the conclusion that he works “as a true artist” (2006). The attempt to define the
different actors and objects takes up most of Gilerman’s article.
250 | Noa Roei

At first, Khatib’s refusal to be labeled as an artist seems to contradict the analy-

sis that I have conducted in the previous section of this text, where I suggested that
the demonstrators were empowered by the fact that, through the sculptural objects,
their identity oscillated between that of villagers and that of artists. However, Khatib’s
rejection of the title “artist” was uttered in the context of the exhibition, not in the
context of the demonstrations. As Khatib tells Gilerman: “The power and the beauty
of the tools that I made manifest themselves in the demonstration itself. As far as
I’m concerned, only there are they art” (quoted in Gilerman 2006; translation mine).
This statement is significant, if we take into account that political action is always
specific and context-bound. By denying the sculptural objects’ artistic aspect in the
gallery space, Khatib emphasized their—and his—political character. This move is
the mirror image of how the sculptural objects operate in the politically-framed space
of Bil’in, where their artistic aspect is frequently emphasized. What Khatib accentu-
ated is the sculptural objects’ adherence to two incompatible classifications of the
representational regime, as artifacts (engaged and functional) and as art (disen-
gaged and formal) at one and the same time, but never completely one or the other.
In the vein of Rancière, precisely this taxonomical challenge pinpoints the sculptures’
political potential.
Yedaya approaches the issue from a different perspective. As art works, the sculp-
tural objects allow Yedaya—an artist of his own accord and an active participant in
the Bil’in demonstrations—to question his role as curator-activist, as well as the
potential political role of an art gallery space. In the introductory text to the exhibi-
tion, Yedaya outlines a mutual process of stimulation between the sculptural objects
and the gallery (2006). On the one hand, by means of classical curatorial tactics
such as the isolation of objects and their aesthetic placement in space, the gallery
is able to serve the cause of Bil’in and, as he writes, to “exploit all of art’s shrewd-
ness to create a political provocation,” and so to alert the public to the village’s dire
circumstances. On the other, the Bil’in sculptural objects allow him, as curator, to
exhibit something different from what is usually labeled as political art, that is, either
high art that comments on the political situation, or documentary art that records it.
Yedaya writes:
Documentary art remains documentary art even when it is displayed in a gallery,
and high art remains high art that talks to a closed circle even when it makes an effort
to take a stand and make a difference. The fence-art from Bil’in offers us a different
possibility; completely authentic products, made by locals and not by onlookers, that
are displaced to the “art” environment, an environment of citations, appropriations and
post-modern simulacrum, and thus examines them from various levels, and maybe
examines anew the notion of “political art.” (Yedaya 2006; my translation)
The novelty of this exhibition’s concept can be disputed, as it is partially based on the
historical precedence of the readymade.8 The text’s assertion that categories such
as “documentary art” or “high art” are not challenged when certain objects are
displayed outside of their “home base” can also be debated. Maaike Bleeker’s text,
included in this volume, is a strong argument in favor of staging as a means to
destabilize self-evident modes of looking. Nevertheless, I would argue that the
aesthetics of the Bil’in sculptural objects did in fact allow “Fence Art” to examine
anew the notion of “political art,” but in a way that differs somewhat from the
curator’s approach. Once more, I turn to Rancière. He writes:
It should be clear . . . that that there is politics when there is a disagreement about
what is politics, when the boundary separating the political from the social or the pub-
lic from the domestic is put into question. Politics is a way of re-partitioning the politi-
cal from the non-political. This is why it generally occurs “out of place”, in a place which
was not supposed to be political. (Rancière 2003)
The sculptural objects confuse and disturb the powers that are at play within the art
discipline: Gilerman disagreed with Yedaya’s choice to appropriate the sculptural
objects from the political sphere and to label them as art contrary to their maker’s
will, but at the same time, she disagreed with Khatib when she found him to be a
“true” artist. This contradiction cannot be solved—is not meant to be solved—but it
can lead one to question the axioms of the art discipline. The sculptural objects are
simultaneously already engaged and contemplative, and this is a contradiction only
as long as we continue to separate aesthetics from politics. This is what makes the
sculptural objects political in the sense that Rancière defines this word. They do not
only, I quote again, “presuppose the rupture of the ‘normal’ distribution of positions,”
but also require “a rupture in the idea that there are dispositions ‘proper’ to such
classifications” (Rancière 2001, 4). The sculptural objects carry within themselves
the ability to challenge the imposition of naturalized divisions and hierarchies
between social identities, whether these relate to national subjectivities or to artistic
categories, and whether these are kept apart by the separation wall crossing through
Israel and Palestine, or by the walls of the gallery that connect formal objects with,
and/or separate them from, political causes.
Afterword
The struggle of Bil’in against the trajectory of the wall has not ended and, at this
point, its outcome remains uncertain. On the one hand, Bil’in receives an increasing
amount of attention and support worldwide, and on the other, the measures taken
against demonstrators by the Israeli army and border police are growing more violent
and result in more injuries and casualties. While Bil’in residents and supporters
celebrated the village’s victory on September 4, 2007, when the Israeli Supreme
Court ruled in favor of the village and determined that the wall must be moved further
east, they remained cautious for various reasons. First, the court’s ruling in 2007
has not been fully executed by the state to this day. Second, the same court ruled in
252 | Noa Roei

favor of the settlement Mattityahu East just a day later, and legalized its unauthorized
expansion on Bil’in grounds east of the wall. And third, the ruling came with an unwel-
come side effect as it cemented the reality of the wall. The Bil’in demonstrations
have a pragmatic goal and an ideal one: to allow villagers to work on their land, and
to challenge the necessity of the wall as such. Both goals are yet to be achieved.
However, within the given circumstances, what Bil’in has achieved is already an enor-
mous success. A village of 1,700 inhabitants has become an international symbol of
resistance. It has managed to sustain its struggle (and the media’s interest in it) for
many months, and as a result, to affect public opinion and decision-making. This is
by no means a small feat.
In this text, I argue that the sculptural objects used in the demonstrations are
strongly related to the village’s success: the choice to employ art in the demonstra-
tions brought about a rupture in the accepted “distribution of the sensible” in rela-
tion to the Palestinian popular struggle. The sculptural objects also succeeded, in
another context, in disturbing another paradigm and in rupturing customary classifi-
cations within the art world. I show how, in Rancière’s vein, both events are related
inasmuch as the same objects bring about political occurrences that involve a reor-
ganization of the senses. Reading the Bil’in case through Rancière, I propose that
the attempt to separate politics from aesthetics is futile because the two notions
are bound together from the outset. Attempting to fit the sculpture-objects into one
Roei 3 Cloth snake in use at Bil’in demonstration, 2006.

From http://www.bilin-village.org
Roei 4 Gallery view with cloth snake. Fence Art exhibition, Minshar Gallery,
Tel Aviv, March 2006. Courtesy of Minshar Gallery
category or another failed time and again, due to a resistance found in the objects
themselves: these sculptures embody the fact that concepts, objects and meanings
travel through time and space, and their significance never remains the same.
This proposition is also relevant for expanding the notions of migratory politics
and migratory aesthetics. In Bil’in, the sculptural objects inhabited a migratory space
where dramatically different modes of sensing reality collide. In Tel Aviv, the sculp-
tural objects as migrant-objects remained politically poignant and challenged the
undisputed representational space that hosted them. Migration in both these cases
does not refer to the movement of people. It is, on the one hand, a migration of a con-
dition, from relative freedom to confinement; and on the other, a migration of objects
from one regime of visibility to another. As we have seen, both movements lead to
transformations in the spaces in which they occur, and both suggest that the migra-
tory has as much to do with moving mind sets as with moving bodies. A migratory
politics, then, could be a politics that challenges the policed division between the
local and the foreign, the established and the unknown. Inherently aesthetic, it would
aim to redistribute our senses and sharpen our awareness with regards to categories
such as place, movement, and stability, and to make visible the space where those
categories transform into, through, and against each other.
254 | Noa Roei

Notes
1. “Separation wall” is not the official name for by imposing collective punishments such as
the construction. It is officially called “Security curfews, night arrests, and the denial of
Fence” by the Israeli parties and “Apartheid permits to work in Israel. From the Palestinian
Wall” by the Palestinian parties. My choice side, village youths throw stones at the
to use “Separation Wall” or simply “Wall” soldiers, contrary to the Bil’in committee
throughout this paper is based on a Web regulations. In spite of this, and although the
research by Richard Rogers and Anat Ben David last year has shown a great escalation in
from the University of Amsterdam, who studied the army’s use of excessive force to disperse
the distribution of the different appellations of the demonstrators, the Bil’in demonstrations
the construction among grassroots and official remain focused on creative nonviolent
Web communities. See (Rogers and Ben David, resistance as a major component of their
2005) at http://www.govcom.org/ approach.
publications/full_list/ben-david_rogers_
coming_to_terms_2oct.pdf. 5. The village website, at http://www.bilin-
village.org, includes a comprehensive
2. See the section, “Cases, Advisory compilation of images and texts on the
Proceedings” on http://www.icj-cij.org for subject.
information about the International Criminal
Court ruling on the illegality of the route of 6. That being said, it is important to
the wall. The Bil’in village Web site (www.bilin- emphasize that the average Israeli viewer
village.org) offers a large collection of articles who does not seek information beyond what
regarding Israeli court hearings and rulings on is offered in the mainstream media will not
the topic. necessarily be aware of the creative and
nonviolent aspect of the Bil’in demonstrations.
3. In fact, on September 4, 2007, Bil’in won a In fact, the spokesman of the IDF considers
major court case against the state of Israel, in this lack of knowledge a professional success
which the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the (Kremnitzer and Levi 2005).
route of the wall must be moved so that the
village regains about 250 acres of its land. 7. Interpellation is a concept developed by
This is an exceptional success considering Louis Althusser as part of his theory of
the fact that only very few out of ten dozen ideological state apparatuses. Althusser
such cases have been ruled in favor of illustrates his concept with the example where,
petitioners since the beginning of the by responding to the police hail “hey, you
construction of the wall. However, the court’s there!” an individual is turned into a subject
ruling has not been implemented to this day. of the state. Ranciere’s “move along, there’s
In addition, Bil’in lost a case just a day later, nothing to see here!” responds to Althusser’s
on September 5, when the same court well-known illustration and offers an alternative
approved retroactively the settlement version of the function of the police in the
Mattityahu East, built illegally on Bil’in grounds state apparatus.
east of the wall. Most other cases related to
Bil’in and to neighboring villages are either 8. Yedaya contends that “Fence Art” breaks
denied or are pending judgment. away from the idea of the readymade because
its “found objects” were initially made for
4. The army breaks up the demonstrations creative use (Yedaya 2007). This argument
using tear gas, grenades, rubber bullets, and deserves a serious debate that, unfortunately,
noise ammunition, and also discourages them is outside the scope of this paper.
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Violent Resistance.” The Daily Star, June 27 ———. The Politics of Aesthetics. Trans. Gabriel
2005. ⬍http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/ Rockhill. London and New York: Continuum,
spages/826558.html⬎ (March 2008). 2004.
Deranty, Jean-Philippe. “Jacques Rancière’s ———. “From Politics to Aesthetics?”

Contribution to the Ethics of Recognition.” Paragraph 28.1 (2005): 13–25.
Political Theory 31.1 (2003): 136–156.
Rogers, Richard, and Anat Ben-David. “Coming
Gilerman, Dana. “The Art of Struggle.” to Terms: A Conflict Analysis of the Usage,
(Hebrew) Haaretz, March 28 2006. ⬍http:// in Official and Unofficial Sources, of ‘Security
www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/objects/pages/ Fence,’ ‘Apartheid Wall,’ and Other Terms
PrintArticle.jhtml?itemNo⫽699551⬎ for the Structure between Israel and the
(March 2008). Palestinian Territories.” Unpublished
manuscript, University of Amsterdam, 2005.
Guénoun, Solange, and James H. Kavanagh. ⬍http://www.govcom.org/publications/full_list/
“Jacques Rancière: Literature, Politics, ben-david_rogers_coming_to_terms_2oct.pdf⬎
Aesthetics – Approaches to Democratic (30 July 2007).
Disagreement.” SubStance 29.2 (2000):
3–24. Tzur, Uzi. “A Sculptural Setting Looking for
Souls.” (Hebrew) Haaretz, March 31, 2006.
Kremnitzer, Yuval, and Yair Levi. “Bil’in: Yok.” ⬍http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/objects/
(Hebrew.) The Seventh Eye, November 1, 2005. pages/PrintArticle.jhtml?itemNo⫽700667⬎
(March 2008).
Rancière, Jacques. The Nights of Labor: The
Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France. Yedaya, Oded. “Fence Art: Muhamed Khatib
Trans. John Drury. Philadelphia: Temple and Members of the Bil’in Popular Committee.”
University Press, 1989. (Hebrew) Introductory text for the Fence Art
exhibition, 2006.
———. La mésentente: Politique et philosophie.
Paris: Galilée, 1995. ———. Personal communication, July 24,
2007.
———. “The Cause of the Other.” Parallax 4.2
(1998): 25–33.
256 | Noa Roei

Ismaël Ferroukhi’s Babelized

Road Movie
Mireille Rosello
ABSTRACT
Ismaël Ferrouhki’s Le Grand Voyage follows a father and a son who leave Aix-en-
Provence to drive to Mecca together. The emphasis on religion, migration, genera-
tional and cultural or national differences invites us to place the film within a
recognizable French cinematographic tradition: at first sight, Le Grand Voyage could
be one of those “beur” or “banlieue” films, whose focus on the lives of migrants from
formerly colonized territories in North Africa have gradually imposed a familiar aes-
thetic grammar. I argue, however, that Ferroukhi breaks with those well-known genres
and experiments with a new type of migratory aesthetics. His Babelized road movie
does not represent Islam as the other’s exotic religion, an unknown set of dogmas
that is either feared or treated as a block of alterity. In Le Grand Voyage both prota-
gonists are Muslims, but the film shows that religion is both what they have in com-
mon and what creates divisions between them. What matters is not so much the
representation of Islam or even the notion that Islam is multiple, as the way in which
each character relates to his own religious beliefs.
This new point of view is constructed by the film’s treatment of geography and lan-
guage. Although the father and the son travel together, their journeys are radically dif-
ferent. The film reflects on this disconnection by simultaneously producing two
different superposed cinematographic maps of Europe, and by demonstrating that
each character adopts a unique way of communicating with the strangers that they
meet on the way.
Ismaël Ferroukhi’s Babelized Road Movie | 257

Introduction
In Ismaël Ferroukhi’s 2004 film Le Grand Voyage, two characters travel together from
the south of France to Mecca. Although the camera follows one small car from the
beginning of the journey to the end, the story insists that they do not share the same
experience. As a result, the spectator must take at least two trips with them instead
of one. The narrative as a whole superimposes two maps; two itineraries; two
European and Middle Eastern geographical, linguistic, and cultural constructions. The
protagonists may be travel companions in the traditional sense of the term, but the
terms of the narrative contradict our conventional assumptions about companion-
ship. The heroes’ ways of navigating through space, of mobilizing spatial conventions,
are radically different. They are often incompatible—so that the viewer is provided not
with a representation of one journey but with a series of disconnected moments that
highlight each of the protagonists’ discreet areas of expertise and incompetence,
their unique way of dealing with religious beliefs, languages, and illiteracy.
From Beur Cinema to Babelized Road Movie

Ferroukhi’s version of migratory aesthetics invites us to compare this trip to other
types of journeys organized according to pre-existing geographical but also cinemato-
graphical maps. Spectators familiar with Beur or banlieue cinema will certainly be
struck by the fact that this film lacks most of the conventional elements that we have
come to recognize as the main ingredients of those genres (Tarr 2005; Hargreaves
1999, 2003). Ferroukhi’s atypical Beur hero has nothing to do with the stereotypical
or archetypal images associated with French banlieue cityscapes. He does not hang
out with his male friends, he is not involved in any recognizable subculture, and
we will not have the opportunity to wonder how he relates to the idea of Frenchness.
The story immediately separates him from his neighborhood and from his familiar
surroundings. Not only does he get out of the cité (housing project), he leaves the
country.1 Throughout the film, both Reda and his father must communicate
on a transnational level. The cluster of stereotypical elements that we have come to
identify as comprising the Beur film is remarkably absent.
Since the beginning of the 1980s, Beur cinema has provided French and interna-
tional audiences with a photo album and an imaginary map of French banlieues, the
dense forest of low-cost housing projects that have surrounded French cities since
the 1960s. In the 1990s, the authors of banlieue films extended their geographical
repertoire, moving to the provinces—to Marseilles, Meaux, or Biarritz.2 But Ferroukhi
is not interested in portraying the characters’ banlieue of origin. His film starts with
a few shots of a village in the vicinity of Aix-en-Provence, and when the two men start
their journey, they leave behind a cluster of uncharacteristically small apartment
buildings. The beginning of the story highlights the structuring absence of other fami-
liar intertexts or inter-images. For if Feroukhi’s Le Grand Voyage and other Beur and
258 | Mireille Rosello

banlieue films were simply incommensurable, we would not even notice a lack that
begs to be interpreted. Preceded and surrounded by comparable works, the film opts
for new aesthetic strategies that we must also experiment with as relatively inexperi-
enced decoders. In order to notice that there are no high-rises, no stairways, no base-
ments, no verlan (or banlieue slang), no big or little brothers, no brother-sister theme,
no subplots involving drugs or police brutality, the spectator must on some level be
aware of other films.3 The question is, of course, what mental mechanism is acti-
vated when a spectator at once expects the film to belong to a certain genre and
recognizes an original variation on what we presume is a common theme. A synchronous
apprehension of conflicting yet correspondent interpretive impulses constantly maps
our reading, generating issues that we are impelled to encode as relevant or irrele-
vant, plausible or implausible, belonging to our sense of either cinematographic
tradition or modernity.
What remains of the list of classic ingredients of Beur cinema makes it difficult to
claim that a radical point of discontinuity has occurred and that any comparison
between Le Grand Voyage and Beur cinema is an arbitrary or even reactionary gesture
(subsuming any allusion to migration or Islam under the categories “Beur” or
“banlieue” is obviously highly suspicious). The story does address the familiar,
almost stereotypical religious, cultural, and linguistic issues with which a Moroccan
father who raised his children in France is expected to struggle. Yet, I am arguing that
Le Grand Voyage rewrites the genre to such an extent that it creates a bridge between
traditional Beur heroes and the new transnational characters that share the difficul-
ties encountered not only by the protagonists of globalized narratives such as Merzak
Allouache’s L’Autre monde (2001) and Nadia El Fani’s Bedwin Hacker (2003), but also
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2006 blockbuster Babel.
In those films, national identities or national boundaries do not define the border
between inside or outside, familiar or strange. Multilingualism and multinationalism
are the rule rather than the exception, so that in order to represent the heroes’
trajectory, filmmakers have to deal with many sets of assumptions about what is
familiar and what is not, what is understandable and what is not, given that charac-
ters and spectators do not necessarily belong to the same imagined community.
Stories cover territories that the spectator and the characters are not expected to
recognize, but to discover and chart at the same time. The issue of verisimilitude is
thus redefined. Both audience and characters are involved in inventing different
scales and different sets of symbols, rather than in simply relying on previously
established maps or landscapes.
Spatially, Le Grand Voyage takes us away from the suburbs, away from the banlieue
housing projects, and gives Reda access to an almost limitless territory that covers
Europe and the Middle East. But the price paid for this enlarged territory is that he is
forced to make a journey that seems to strip him of his freedom and of the defining

terms of his own life. Whatever may have constituted Reda’s routine before his depar-
ture is reduced to the picture of his girlfriend that he carries in his bag and to the few
clandestine and interrupted conversations that he manages to make on his cell
phone or from a hotel phone when his father is out of earshot.4
As for the old, frail, but tyrannical father, he is not the hero of a “going home”
narrative. Whereas some recent films have attempted to paint the Maghreb as the
ambivalent space that those who are “from there” seek to (re)discover, Reda’s father
chooses to embark on a very different type of journey, one that is both international
and profoundly individual since it is a pilgrimage to Mecca.5 This is no reverse migra-
tion but a one-way journey (he will not come back alive) that he cannot begin without
his son’s help for the simple reason that he cannot drive.
The other recognizable genre that Ferroukhi both invokes and redefines is the
road movie. The fact that both travelers understand the journey in radically different
ways makes it difficult to settle for a singular interpretation of this (non)pilgrimage-
(non)adventure, and the film both recalls and modifies the motif of Charles
Baudelaire’s “étonnants voyageurs,” (amazing travelers), whose literary heirs have
recently been proliferating in the context of the international Saint-Malo festival.6
Just as a new “littérature-monde” (world literature) seems to be displacing the old
“Francophone” category, new films treat France or Frenchness as one of the multiple
nodes in an individually reinvented global network.
Ferroukhi does not oppose France to Morocco, for example, at least not from a
recognizable postcolonial perspective (Higbee 2007), but neither does he describe
the two men’s point of departure as a monolithic and cohesive entity. And he does
not need to insist on their unrecognized hybrid Frenchness to take them out of what
Mustafa Dikeç calls the “Badlands of the Republic” (Dikeç 2007). What might be
strange or exotic to some (to some of “us”) already exists at home and does not
have to be sought elsewhere. Even Reda seems to find his dad as strange as
Montesquieu’s Persians. Being “from” (the same place) is not a relevant predictor of
future transactions with what “elsewhere” represents. There is more difference
between the two travelers than there will ever be between each of them and the
strangers they encounter. From the very first scene, the film establishes that nothing
is shared. We cannot read the trip as a movement from one unique and monolithic
point of departure (that stands for sameness and oneness) toward other spaces
whose different linguistic, cultural, religious, or political content will be emphasized
through an implicit process of comparison with the characters’ home.
The film emphasizes what separates the two protagonists who, according to other
types of biologically based narratives, share almost as much as it is possible for two
humans to share. They are, after all, father and son. But the fact that they have the
same origin is precisely shown to be an idea that we may well be misusing as a polit-
ical and cultural myth without even being aware of the consequences of that mental

process. We watch as two men drive together from the south of France to Saudi
Arabia. Throughout the film, their small blue car with an orange door serves as a con-
fined experimental space that highlights not their resemblances, but what makes
them different. What matters is not their identity (in both senses of the term: they are
not identical and their identities are difficult to pinpoint) but the tactics that they each
choose to deploy when they must cope with the unexpected, the unknown. In this
film, proximity never means complicity; it is imposed upon both characters.
Religion as Disunion
For the father, everything is simple: he wishes to go to Mecca. He travels as a pilgrim
and only the destination and the meaningfulness of the endeavor counts. His son, on
the other hand has no desire to leave at all and, if he must, his ideas of a worthwhile
trip have to do with efficiency (why, he wonders, not take a plane to Mecca?), with
quick communication (do you speak English?), and with tourism (why not stop and
visit Milan?). He shows no interest in religion, at least not in the way his dad prac-
tices it; he even finds it embarrassing or inappropriate. The film repudiates both
Western and non-Western stereotypes, negative and positive images of a monolithic
Islamic community.
The camera avoids positing a Muslim world in which the word “Muslim” is used so
loosely that the distinction between culture, religion, and history, and the differences
between Muslims, disappear, replaced by fantasies of conflicts (Muslims against the
West) or internal cohesion (the Ummah). The innermost circle, here constituted by
the father and the son, is systematically split by their individual positions in front of
the camera. Whenever the father prays, the frame physically separates the two men.
For example, when they reach the first border between France and Italy, in what
seems to be the middle of the night, the father, noticing that it is time to pray, asks
the son to park the car. According to Reda, he is breaking some unwritten rule of pro-
priety: “C’est une douane ici . . . Tu vois bien que ce n’est pas un endroit pour prier.”
(We are going through customs. Surely you can see that this is no place to pray). But
the son’s “Tu vois bien” has none of the expected rhetorical force, and the dialogue
is counterproductive because both men follow their own logic. The father retorts, in
Arabic: “Do you believe in God?” a non sequitur for Reda and the end of the conver-
sation. As usual, the father imposes his will but fails to convince. Intergenerational
difference is one of the most recurrent topoi in Beur literature and cinema, and the
way in which religion is defined and practiced among the immigrants and their chil-
dren changes from decade to decade. Since the rise, in the 1990s, of a much
maligned “political Islam,” the younger generations are expected to have rediscov-
ered a form of Islam that they did not inherit but rather reinvent as a response to their
marginalization. Sons and daughters can no longer be expected to symbolize an
unavoidable move toward secularization. Yet, Beur cinema and literature have

carefully accumulated references to the different problems raised by that phenome-
non, and Ferroukhi’s film deliberately focuses on a teenager who does not seem
interested in religion in general and who rejects his father’s beliefs in particular.7
As the father kneels on his prayer rug, we hear the son’s softly asking “Ça va?”
(Are you ok?), but just as we begin to be surprised by the unexpected tenderness with
which he addresses his father, the camera reveals that the gentle question is not
addressed to his dad. At first, the shot excludes Reda to concentrate on the silent
figure of the father, lost in his prayers. Only when the camera focuses on the car, leav-
ing the father out of the picture, do we realize that Reda is talking on his cell phone,
informing his girlfriend that he has “minor family problems” and asking her to inform
the school authorities that he will be away for a while. This first one way conversation
is interrupted by the father’s return as if, in that dimension, each man can only coexist,
but not communicate.
The same principle recurs like a refrain throughout the film. Although they are
cooped up in the small car, or share a hotel room, the camera isolates them when-
ever the father prays or when the son wants to talk to his beloved. When the father
reads the Qur’an in the passenger’s seat, the camera looks over his shoulder, fram-
ing him, then cuts over so that another shot focuses on Reda, who is seen driving,
as if he were alone. Later, the father prays in a hotel room. The next shot shows Reda
trying to call his girlfriend from the hotel phone, only to be interrupted again by his
father’s arrival. The father’s practice of his religion is set up as the crux that both
permits and inhibits Reda’s ability to engage with the touchstones of his everyday
life. They are in competition, as if they could not occupy the same space, the same
time, the same visual slots.
When they get closer to Mecca, the separation deteriorates into nightmarish
fears. The son dreams that he is sinking into the desert sand while his father walks
away, driving a little herd of sheep. When he wakes up, Reda looks around, frightened
and lost, and sees his father kneeling on a dune, praying. Once again, the camera
carves a frame around the solitary man. Finally, when they meet up with a group of
other pilgrims, the father joins his fellow travelers in prayer while his son plays in the
sand, the camera closing up on his sneakers. As the shot pulls back, the spectator
discovers that Reda has written something in the sand with his feet: a word that, like
the photograph and the interrupted telephone conversations, draws a different map
of what the journey represents. LISA, the missing girlfriend, is now back into the
picture. The name places her there, in the desert, with Reda, at the end of the jour-
ney that he could not take with her.8
Islam is not “their” religion, something that the father and son share, but “his”
religion as Reda angrily points out, when after a particularly violent quarrel, the father
walks out on his own. And the pronoun underscores the film’s constant allusions to
the fact that the father’s way of living “his” religion, is not necessarily shared by other

Muslims, which makes it all the more difficult for Reda to relate to his dad. One late
meaningful conversation during which father and son finally smile at each other
occurs at the very end of the film, but hardly makes up for the rest of the trip. The
scene, however, provides some resolution by giving the father a new role. For the first
time, he steps out of his figure of dependent tyrant to adopt the position of the native
informant who answers the son’s questions about the pilgrimage. No earthshaking
information is revealed, and the spectator will wonder how plausible it is that the son
could have ignored what any casual exposure to international media coverage (if not
his own relatives) would have taught him about Mecca. But from a narrative point of
view, Reda finally treats his father as someone who has something to teach him,
although at no point does the father try to convince or convert. Whatever respect is
finally and grudgingly expressed remains firmly grounded in a difference of opinions,
beliefs, and practices.
The practice of Islam itself is concretely represented as a multifaceted reality.
Earlier in their trip, when they arrive in Istanbul, they meet another Muslim who
represents a different conception of Islam, one that can accommodate drinking,
casual sex, and tourism, and one that the father will naturally try to preempt at all
costs. This man’s narrative function is to help them and then to be excluded as a
result of a terrible misunderstanding. Because he speaks French and knows how to
deal with the immigration officers, who expect a bribe, he, alone, makes it possible
for Reda and his dad to cross the border. Their passports are useless. Ironically, in
this case, fortress Europe is more difficult to leave than to enter, and only the father
with his green passport is allowed out.
For the first and only time, a third French-speaking character transforms the father-
son huis-clos into an unstable trio in which the place of the excluded third changes
regularly. Mustafa’s presence changes the balance of the relationship between the
powerful father and his young and inexperienced son. A figure of gentle authority, he
implicitly questions the father’s orthodox version of Islam and provides what could be
a third way between the two radically different manners in which the two men experi-
ence this trip: pilgrimage for one, failed touristic expedition for the other.
One scene shows Reda, Mustafa, and the father in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul.
The spectator, who may be inside the Mosque for the first time, is presented with two
different models and implicitly asked to either side with one, or at least reflect on the
two possibilities. Once again, the father is alone, sitting in a corner and reading the
Qur’an. Reda takes photographs of the architectural details. He has become one of
the many tourists who walk around in the great hall. The camera adopts his perspec-
tive, closing up on the details of the blue pillars and the stained glass, then reveal-
ing the father’s seated silhouette, blurred at first, and then slowly coming into focus
as if he had been metamorphosed into one of the aesthetic beauties that his son
wishes to capture.

Most of the time, however, any relationship to space that involves taking pictures
or sightseeing in general is vetoed by the father. Before they reach Turkey, the way
in which they travel generates two radically different maps of what should have been
the same geographical Europe: the pilgrimage is apparently incompatible with certain
itineraries (with certain stopovers) and with some navigational tactics (especially the
way in which Reda uses maps).
Two Maps of Europe: Geographical Negotiations

Reda is in the car as the driver because his father, who cannot drive, has demanded
that he take him. Reda is a reluctant traveler; all he wants is to get his father to his
destination as fast as he can and come back. Under such circumstances, the way in
which they encounter the strangeness of strangers, the novelty that each new coun-
try may represent, and even the shape of Europe in general, will always be a subject
of conflict and tense negotiations, the father usually imposing his will in a stubborn
silent way.
Each man will generate his own map. “Tourism” is one potential way of engaging
with the landscape, but what being tourists might mean is never explored because
the father simply spits out the word like an expletive when his son expresses desires
that do not correspond to his own definition of what the trip should be. What is
vetoed reveals to us how Reda perceives Europe. What he wants to see are cities
that he has heard about. He treats Europe as a patchwork of cities that he wishes to
visit, that are linked by fast expressways and clearly marked on a map that he con-
stantly checks for directions. Cities, expressways, and maps, however, are low on his
father’s list of priorities.
An initial conflict sets the tone for the remainder of the trip. One hour away from
Milan, where Reda intends to stop for the night, the father demands that they park
the car in a rest area and sleep. Unable to convince Reda, who wants to reach some
meaningful destination, he simply pulls the hand brake in the middle of the express-
way, at the risk of killing them both. The message is clear: it is better to die than lose
control, especially if his son’s way will derail the pilgrimage and turn the trip into an
adventure, a series of sightseeing stopovers. Reda pleads in vain that this may be
his only chance to see Milan; he does not even get the “one hour” that he asks for,
so that the city will remain for him unperceived, never experienced, to be talked about
only as an already nostalgically inflected non-memory. Venice is similarly ruled out
(but talked about), so that the film has a solid dramatic reason to avoid entirely post-
card aesthetics.
Some reviewers have commented on a “lack of scenery” and even assumed that
the filmmaker’s low budget is to blame (Papamichael 2004). In fact, this is a system-
atic narrative choice as long as the characters are in Europe. The system of repre-
sentation only changes once the men have arrived in Turkey; the spectator must wait

until the end of the trip to be provided with visual details of what occurs outside the
car. Typical touristy images have been successfully banned and the father has his
way. What we, as viewers, bring back from the trip are rare images of pilgrims com-
pleting the last leg of their pilgrimage. Most reviewers were impressed by the visual
depiction of Mecca. Bradshaw praises the “unprecedented scenes at Mecca itself”
(2005); John Nesbitt notes that “the film’s final scenes in Mecca are truly awe-
inspiring” and adds that “Few have ever been allowed to record the throngs of
committed Muslims circling the Kabba for a commercial film . . .” (2005).
By then, the modern gadgets that are symbolically linked to Reda, and that allow
information to circulate, have been discarded by the father. He has thrown out his
son’s cell phone while Reda is sleeping in the car. As for the camera that Reda
brought with him and with which he took a few shots along the way, it has disap-
peared from the story. The father exchanges it for a lamb that they plan to kill and
eat: at that point in the story, the travelers have misplaced their money and, to
Reda’s irritation, have been surviving on a diet of bread and eggs. But Reda, who is
supposed to hang on to the animal, lets him loose, so that the net result of the swap
is the loss of his ability to capture images. The spectacular images of the Blue
Mosque are therefore lost from their intradiegetic photo album. The images from the
Kabba will only exist in Reda’s memory.
Not only does the father avoid cities, he insists on avoiding expressways, at the
risk of finding himself literally off the map. Lost between Zagreb and Belgrade, the
two men are on a small country road, in the middle of what we tend to call “nowhere,”
because no familiar landmarks are present. Nothing stands out; no one drives by;
there are no buildings. The two men do not agree on how to find their way out of this
no man’s land. Reda, as a matter of course, sees the solution in looking for direc-
tions on a map, but his father is illiterate. Reda proposes to get back to the readable
track, pointing out that it was not his idea to get off the expressway. For reasons that
he does not make clear, the father stubbornly rejects the son’s solution, which
involves retracing their steps. When he simply gestures in a none too convincing way
“it’s this way,” Reda explodes and yells at his father: “Qu’est-ce que tu en sais? Tu
sais même pas lire!” (How would you know, you can’t even read!) The issue here is
not so much that Reda humiliates his dad, but that the two characters are incapable
of talking about their respective strategies. The father seems to know where to go,
and so does his son, but the film does not help us decide whether the old man has
some sort of unrecognized talent, a form of wisdom that his son never acquired, or if
he is just being stubborn, refusing to accept what, to Reda, is simple common sense.
Dialogue fails them lamentably.
Even when Reda calms down and suggests “Regarde papa . . .” (Look Dad . . .),
trying to point to the map, his father simply does not see. He stares silently in front
of him, refusing to as much as glance at what his son is trying to show him. The camera

keeps them both in the frame, sitting right next to each other, emphasizing the vio-
lent lack of eye contact. Later, when they find themselves closer to Belgrade after a
series of funny encounters with strangers who cannot help them, it is still impossible
to ascertain whether the father’s approach was indeed effective or if they have
wasted unnecessary time and energy. The story generally does not choose between
illiteracy as the lack of a basic skill that prevents the father from traveling through
Europe (tu ne sais même pas lire [you cannot even read]), and illiteracy as an object
of the son’s prejudice: he only recognizes the type of knowledge that the majority
accept as knowledge, and does not consider the possibility that his father knows
other things, knows differently.
Languages: A Bilingual Dialogue

One of the most original elements of this film is that the main protagonists do not
address each other in the same language, a linguistic issue that has constant and
direct consequences not only on the structure of the story (whenever the heroes deal
with other languages throughout their trip) but also at the level of the film (the way in
which subtitles are used is an implicit commentary on the theoretical difficulties that
such an interesting premise raises at the post-production and reception level). The
number of languages involved in this story as the characters move from country to
country allows us to observe what gets subtitled and what does not and what impli-
cations such decisions have on our position as spectators.
Migration and postcolonial studies have already drawn our attention to the power
relationship between languages, and each colonial or postcolonial situation has gen-
erated linguistic debates. Often perceived as an acute ideological issue in formerly
colonized lands, the canonization of Europhone cultural productions has been both
systematically embraced and critiqued by postcolonial authors who are not always
convinced that it is possible to effectively reappropriate the colonizer’s language.
Different approaches have been experimented with, and Le Grand Voyage both inherits
this critical legacy and moves on.
The film constitutes a radical break from some of the strategies originally adopted
in literature, the medium with which we associate the first substantial examples of
postcolonial creation. Some writers deliberately turned their back on French as the
language of the metropolis and accepted the consequences of addressing them-
selves to a smaller local audience that would have been excluded by a choice to pub-
lish in a more internationally recognizable language.9 In Algeria, one of the exemplary
representatives of that strategy is Kateb Yacine, whose experiments with dialectal
Arabic are often celebrated as evidence of his ethical and aesthetic engagement.
But the next generation of postcolonial authors opted for a more hybrid approach
to linguistic issues, privileging métissage, creolization, and multilingualism, espe-
cially in the context of diasporic literature and cinema. The original debate about

colonial situations of diglossia and vernacular languages has not disappeared. It now
overlaps with more general discussions about the role of English as the lingua franca
of globalization and the cohabitation of languages within previously monolingual
Western spaces.
The film is not interested in mixing French and Arabic, and allows both languages
to coexist, relatively peacefully, in a relatively egalitarian space. Reda’s father under-
stands French but never speaks it, except for a few odd words here and there. He
speaks Arabic throughout. He is not exactly monolingual, but his linguistic abilities
are selective. His knowledge of Arabic is more complex than the subtitles are able to
suggest. When they reach a portion of their journey where other pilgrims congregate,
the father can talk to Egyptian, Syrian, and Sudanese travelers, presumably because
of his familiarity with classical Arabic. Reda, however, cannot answer their questions,
and his dad must explain that his son only understands his own Moroccan Arabic.
The father’s Moroccan Arabic is not seen as colonized or dominated. It cohabi-
tates with the son’s French, and whatever miscommunication occurs between the two
characters has little to do with language but rather with the fact, as Reda will eventu-
ally tell him, that they are on different “wavelengths.” In Monolingualism of the Other,
Jacques Derrida explains his alienation from language as the impossibility of having
learned any language but French in a colonial space that, retrospectively, should have
always already been multilingual (1996). Ferroukhi’s characters, individually, function
within the same model, but the film’s originality is to suggest that both characters
need to be present, at the same time, to perform a certain version of what Abdelkebir
Khatibi calls “bilangue,” a problematic and poetic union of French and Arabic (1983).
Reda and his dad have a relationship to language that tolerates, if not welcomes,
different levels of competence and different uses of different languages. His dad
speaks one language and understands his son in another.
The bilingual dialogue is not celebrated (in the way in which creolization has some-
times been hailed as a poetic solution [Prabhu 2007]), but presented as an unavoid-
able fact of life. At times, it is also presented as the symptom of a gap between Reda
and his dad. They do not use the same language, but their performance also invites
us to recognize that the idea of “speaking the same language” has become a
metaphorical way of defining successful communication. Presented with this new
type of dialogue, we can read the film as embodying a form of linguistic engagement
that impels us to question the conventional wisdom according to which babelian
spaces are cursed. Here Babel is dedramatized yet not idealized. After all, the char-
acters do not have to speak the same language to communicate. But even if they do,
they remain on different “wavelengths.” The film does not creolize their language but
babelizes understanding.
On the other hand, the issue of subtitles is there to remind us that this original
bilingualism occurs in a work of art that circulates in a world where babelized

dialogues are neither the rule nor the norm. When the film is subtitled in English, the
bilingual dialogue is both preserved as oral object and erased as text by the mono-
lingual translation, but when the DVD is addressed to a French audience, only the
father’s Arabic is translated. In other words, the film must make assumptions about
different audiences, and privileges two Europhone languages when it creates its
imaginary public. As in Babel, another film that lets the story wander in various lin-
guistic territories, while we hear many different languages that we may or may not
understand, the principle of subtitling presupposes an audience united by a shared
knowledge of French or English.
The presence of subtitles represents the refusal of a risk, the decision not to
assume or create generic transnational literacy. For example, it is interesting to
notice that the conversations that take place in Italy, Slovenia, or Bulgaria are not
subtitled. We do not know more than the travelers and, in a couple of scenes, their
inability to communicate is a source of comedy or tragedy. But the system is imper-
fect or, rather, the (mis)match between the subtitles and the implied audience will
vary from individual to individual. For those spectators who also speak some of the
languages used in Turkey, Italy, Bulgaria, Bosnia, or in the Middle East, the narrative
contains facets that a French-speaking spectator would miss. For those who, like
Reda, understand both French and Arabic, most of the subtitles are redundant. As
spectators, we hear many different languages, and subtitling is never used to give us
more information than the characters themselves can digest. Each viewer is depend-
ent on his or her own background, and any audience, taken as a whole, might be
capable of deciphering most of the moments of incomprehensible dialogue. But as
individuals, we are expected to be in the position of the two travelers, who must
guess, assume, interpret, and sometimes just give up on the idea of understanding.
The film implicitly caters to a French or English monolingual spectator, reducing the
represented babelization to a strategic monolingualism without celebrating it as a
desirable centralization. Instead of presenting Babel as an undesirable fragmenta-
tion that occurs after a crisis, the film treats the unavoidable reduction of all forms
of languages to one protocol (subtitles) as a form of tactical deprivation. Throughout
the film, the issue of languages is emphasized both intra- and extra-diegetically to
point out that the equation between “speaking the same language” and “understand-
ing each other” is a convention based on a political definition of language.
Transnational Protocols and the Failure of “Globish”

Moving beyond the central linguistic issue relating to the functional and expressive
disconnect between the two main protagonists, Ferroukhi also examines the ways in
which each of them wield their expressive capabilities, or strive to overcome their
expressive limitations, in encounters with strangers with whom they share no com-
mon language at all. In this context, two primary issues repeatedly come to bear: the

father’s adaptive relation to his own illiteracy, and the son’s reflective reliance on
English (“globish”) as the language of last resort. Each representation of a new
encounter tests not only the limits of each of the characters’ competence, but also
their ability to make do, to find a way. While Reda interprets his dad’s illiteracy as
a radical form of disempowerment, the film refuses to validate this hegemonic
assumption. On the other hand, he considers his own ability to read maps and his
knowledge of “globish” as assets when it comes to negotiating with unknown land-
scapes and unknown languages. Yet, one scene in particular serves to illustrate the
limits of his system. Not only is “globish” not effective on this journey, but the power
of language itself, of any codified language, is shown to be less important, some-
times, than an ability to share other minimalist protocols.
His father is capable of carrying out a proper business deal with a person whom
he has never met, who neither speaks nor understands his own language. This busi-
ness deal without language is an implicit response to the humiliating moment when
his son refused to accept the possibility that he might know something about navi-
gating space based on his inability to read a map. When they arrive in Belgrade, Reda
and his son are filmed in front of one of those international offices where travelers
can exchange currency. The camera zooms in on an official panel that tells the two
characters and us about the official exchange rate and implicitly advertises the
proper and officially sanctioned protocol. A standard form of equivalency is part of
the system. People are provided with a sort of dictionary that gives them access to
two languages and allows them to cross over without having to negotiate their way
through the process. But the word “language” is precisely not appropriate in this
case and, in retrospect, the son’s “globish” will be shown to have the same limita-
tions as this rudimentary yet tyrannical code. For it is a code rather than a language:
it only allows preconfigured transactions to take place; it does not provide travelers
with the latitude to invent, to speak to one another.
What happens in the scene is a subversive transformation of this code into a
language. One man approaches Reda’s father and initiates a sort of conversation
without words. The two men appear to be the same age, and they are practically
silent. The camera films the whole scene from above, like a surveillance camera, but
also from a position that allows us to observe the way in which the conversation
turns into a sort of ballet. The place occupied by the men’s bodies signals who is in
and who is out, who has the power to engage in the dialogue and to communicate.
The stranger puts his hand on the father’s arm and gently drags him away from the
teller. The two men create their own space, away from the area where the official
exchange takes place. Their two bodies are very close to each other and they look at
each other very carefully (the opposite of what happens when Reda and his dad are
in the car). Only two words are exchanged or rather repeated by both protagonists:
“change” and “euro.” The nature of the transaction, the name of the currency, the

presence of the absolute minimum amount of information required to allow the nego-
tiation to proceed, all this is enough to create a strong channel of communication
between two men who have never met, who will never meet again, yet who can still
conduct business in a way that complicates the simple system of equivalency that
the poster proposes.
Something is added: the possibility of negotiating, of bartering—a layer of uncer-
tainty that is in counterpoise with the two men’s willingness to come to some sort of
an understanding. Arguably, the content of the negotiation is not semantically very
rich. It is obvious that the two men need to agree on an unofficial rate. They both
understand and accept, without having to discuss or argue, the existence of this pro-
tocol. They both know that they need to come to an agreement about how much
money will change hands. Nevertheless, their own skills play a role. The way in which
this scene is filmed reinforces the radical difference between the manner in which
Reda and his dad use language, and constitutes what we could call an unformulated
theory of communication.
The men talk with their fingers, opening their hands to propose rates, refusing or
accepting offers. At one point, when the father walks away, the spectator under-
stands that this is part of the vocabulary of bartering. So does the protagonist who,
once again, reaches out and touches the father’s arm to indicate that he is willing to
change his mind. We, presumably, do not speak that language. We recognize the
nature of the transaction, but it would be hard to provide a precise translation of what
the men say to each other: how exactly the two men convert complicated exchange
rates that usually have several decimals into a series of signals made with the fin-
gers of two hands is a bit of a mystery. The son and the spectator would probably
need a calculator to reach the same level of accuracy, but the film portrays the busi-
ness deal as an efficient, quick, and cordial affair. The performative marking of the
end of the deal is just as minimalist as the preceding conversation. The stranger
says, “Change?” and the father nods “yes,” while taking out his wallet. At the end, a
conventional handshake confirms that both men are satisfied with the transaction.
By then, the camera has shifted to a closer angle, catching the way in which the
stranger looks over his shoulder—a clear reminder that the whole exchange is part
of an illicit parallel economy.
While the two men focus on the money that changes hands, the son, caught
between them, stares at the panel, as if unwilling to concede to the two men’s mode
of transaction. He is left out, not only by the fact that he does not speak the
stranger’s language, but also by his own desire to try and use what he thinks is a
lingua franca, a tactic which proves useless under the circumstances. At first, he
wishes to stop or at least slow down the conversation that he does not understand.
When he sees his father talking to a stranger, he barges in: “Attends, attends, excuse
me do you speak English?” (Wait, wait . . .)

He obviously neither recognizes nor respects the way in which his father has
already started a negotiation into which not one ounce of superfluous information
needs to be inserted. The son’s language is useless, and the script reduces his
words to what Roman Jakobson calls the phatic function—what, in a conversation,
serves to check that channels are working (1960). The “Attends, attends”
addressed, to the father, in French, signals his desire to slow down what he perceives
as a conversation that may fail because the requisite tool is missing (a shared
language). But it is already too late.
As for the “Excuse me, do you speak English?” addressed to the other man, it is
much less efficient than the body language that the two men have been using.
Throughout the film, the use of “globish” fails to bridge linguistic gaps. Reda may
know much more English than “Do you speak English?” but the story does not give
him a chance to use whatever knowledge of English he may have in any meaningful
way. A few words here and there fall on deaf ears; the strangers to whom he tries to
talk either ignore him completely or answer him in their own language (especially at
borders or when he asks for directions). Yet it is clear that his penchant for switching
to English has become an acquired reflex: whenever Reda finds himself in a position
of linguistic insecurity, his reaction is to ask “Do you speak English?” His father never
attempts to speak English; conversely, when conventional language fails, he resorts
to a different type of protocol, a sort of sign language that privileges body language
and a will to communicate that bypasses other channels.
Conclusion
Le Grand Voyage is both a “babelized” trip, and the babelized representation of a trip.
The film invents a type of journey that is indistinguishable from the way in which the
visual narrative is composed. The familiar postcolonial logic that sets up an axis
between France and the Maghreb, or rediscovers, within France, the ghost of this con-
flicting duality, is replaced with a constellation that functions as if it were a point of
departure (except that even the idea of departing and arriving is modified by this con-
ception of the trip). The father-son unit is the hero, and the heroic function is a hybrid
combination of religious beliefs, languages, and traveling protocols. Two irreconcil-
able types of journey are described at the same time. Even at the end of the trip,
the two versions are not harmoniously fused—the images and dialogue constantly
emphasize the possibility of taking two simultaneous trips, of reading and writing two
maps that never quite overlap. Some postcards are never shown (Milan and Venice
are written out of the map); religious fervor can be turned into a postcard (when the
father prays in Istanbul); extremely readable geographical locations (the sacred
center of Mecca) coexist with “scriptable” blank pages (the soft sand where Reda’s
sneakers inscribe his angry message); the trip takes place in a car but the distance
between the two passengers is an unbridgeable gap.10 The simultaneous presence

of more than one language is neither an obstacle to a successful dialogue nor the
guarantee of a better, more opaque Glissantian conversation.11 The possibility of
silences, and each new encounter proposes a new way of dealing with the presence
of several languages, of reinventing the principle of translation and subtitling, and of
coming to terms with the babelization of our cultures.
The film never quite manages to give us a coherent vision of this journey or, rather,
makes the point that there is no such thing as a unified perspective. The two men
travel together. Literally, they are companions, but their journey is not identical. If the
father had his way, he would be a pilgrim and nothing else, but he does not have
a ready-made model of what a twenty-first-century pilgrimage could be. He prefers to
translate or transpose what happened to his own father, but the circumstances have
changed so much that none of the practical details are applicable. He cannot climb
the dune every morning to see if his father is coming back as he did when he was
a child, but he will not take a plane either because old stories have taught him that
experiencing the delays and uncertainties of a long journey matters. A pilgrimage
organized by professionals is apparently out of the question. The long car trip charts
an unknown road that neither the past nor the present has paved. The way in which
his own father used to travel is now a story, and the film provides no image of what
that road would have looked like. But Reda’s alternative solution (why not take a
plane?) does not exist visually either. Only words can be used to eliminate ways of
traveling that the father-son unit excludes from their own experience. This form of
pilgrimage must be invented.
Just as “his” (Reda’s father’s) religion cannot explain everything about this trip
because no set of rituals can be used as a map, Reda’s trip is just as ambiguously
situated in the interstice between pre-existing contemporary models. He is not a pil-
grim, and yet he follows exactly the same path as his father. The father leads, but so
does Reda, who knows how to drive, to read, to speak English, and who represents
the present and future generations. And yet, the limits of Reda’s competence are just
as systematically represented as the father’s dependency. Reda can drive a car but
his father can stop it from the passenger’s seat. Reda can read a map, but his
father’s illiteracy is not, or at least not only, a handicap. In a globalized and babelized
Europe, Reda’s “globish” is paradoxically not as effective as his father’s supposedly
archaic methods of bypassing languages altogether. In other words, Reda is not
a guide who knows what to do because he has already taken the same trip.
Aesthetically, the film respects, rather than fights, the fact that the main protagonists
have a different definition of space, of time, and of what matters in terms of commu-
nication. Visual and linguistic choices recognize that this journey can neither be told
by one narrative voice (or by one single hero), nor reduced to one visual logic. Le
Grand Voyage is the story of two men who are both traveling together and pulling in
different directions.

Notes
1. The banlieue is often filmed as a space (November 2007). See also the collective
surrounded by invisible borders and perceived volume edited by Michel Le Bris and Jean
as a world of its own. As many critics have Rouaud, Pour une littérature-monde (2007).
pointed out (see especially Begag 1999,
2002), the assumption is that people from the 7. Commenting on Akli Tadjer’s 1984 Les A.N.I
banlieues want to move to the city and that city du Tassili, Anne Cirella-Urrutia notices that only
dwellers fear their arrival as if they were one page is devoted to Islam in the novel but
barbarians. Besides, banlieues are separated that it emphasizes the chasm between
from each other as if, as Michel Laronde generations. When an older man invites the
argues, cities were built like a panopticon young Omar to pray with him, the young man
(Laronde 1993). See the double special issue feels caught between a rock and a hard place:
of Contemporary French and Francophone “Si je lui dis que mon savoir théologique se
Studies edited by Alec Hargreaves in 2004. limite à ‘Allah ou Akbar’ et ‘Inch Allah’, je vais
Reda is precisely not one of the typical passer pour le dernier des connards. Si je lui
“hittistes,” the young men whose narrative and réponds que ça ne m’intéresse pas, je vais
visual function is to “hold the walls,” as the passer pour le fils du diable en personne, et
original dialectal expression suggests. He is qui peut deviner la suite.” (If I tell him that my
not identified by his local environment (and it theological knowledge is limited to “Allah ou
should be pointed out that French banlieues Akbar” and “Inch Allah,” I’ll pass for a moron.
themselves are culturally glocalized). But if I tell him that I am not interested, I’ll
pass for the son of the Devil himself and who
2. See respectively Akhenaton’s 2000 Comme knows what will happen?) (63; quoted in Cirella-
un aimant, Jean-François Richet’s 1997 Ma 6T Urrutia 2003). In that text, the conflict is
va crak-er, or Djamel Bensalah’s Le Ciel, les staged as a dialogue that will not take place, a
oiseaux . . . et ta mère (1999). non-conversation that Ferroukhi’s film chooses
to represent as spatial alienation: the camera
3. Such as Malik Chibane’s Hexagone, Mathieu acts as if it were impossible to let the two
Kassovitz’s La Haine, Fabrice Genestal’s La characters share the frame.
Squale, Philippe Faucon’s Samia, or Jacques
Doillon’s Petits Frères. 8. At first, I read “USA,” which I interpreted
as a cryptic yet obviously defiant comment that
4. Unlike the typical banlieue film heroes, once again, would rewrite the pilgrimage as a
whose “sexual impotence is a trope for their complex and incomprehensible globalized
lack of agency in the wider world” (Tarr, 109), space. The father had reached Mecca; Reda
Reda has a stable romantic relationship with either dreamed of or had symbolically arrived in
a woman whom he treats with respect and some bizarre definition of the USA. I want to
affection. thank Tanja Franotovic for pointing out that I
had misread Reda’s inscription and for drawing
5. See Tarr’s analysis of Merzak Allouache’s my attention to the strange hallucination or
L’Autre Monde and Mehdi Charef’s La fille de mirage that the resemblance between the two
Keltoum (Tarr 2005, 202–205). words could generate.
6. The phrase that appears in “Le voyage” 9. At the end of the 1970s, in Martinique,
(Les Fleurs du Mal, CXXVI) has been appropriated Raphaël Confiant published three novels in
as a cultural logo by the organizers of the Creole and contributed to the Creole journal,
international festival of Saint-Malo. For a list Grif an tè, preferring his “creole-dragon” to
of “babelized” travel narratives recently “français-banane” as one of the titles of
published in this context, see ⬍http://www. an interview suggests. But even within the
etonnants-voyageurs.com/spip.php?rubrique33⬎ Creole-speaking community, the solution is not

unanimously accepted: the “creole-dragon,” 11. See Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean
i.e., the literary version of oral Creole, is Discourse (Discours Antillais) in which he
perceived as scary and artificial (Hardwick, 261). praises “La bienheureuse opacité, par quoi
l’autre m’échappe, me contraignant à la
10. To reuse the familiar opposition between vigilance de toujours marcher vers lui” (The
scriptible (writerly) and lisible (readerly) texts beneficent opacity through which the others
proposed by Roland Barthes in S/Z (Barthes escape me, forcing me to vigilantly always
1970). walk towards them) (Glissant 1981, 278).
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Paris: Seuil, 1970. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1998.
Begag, Azouz. Du bon usage de la distance chez
les sauvageons. Paris: Seuil, 1999. ———. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle
Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Trans.
———. Les Dérouilleurs: Français de banlieue. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford
Paris: Mille et une Nuits, 2002. University Press, 2000.
Bradshaw, Peter. Review of Le Grand Voyage.

———. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness.
The Guardian. Friday October 14, 2005.
Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes.
New York and London: Routledge,
Cirella-Urrutia, Anne. “Images d’altérité dans
2001.
les œuvres autobiographiques ‘Les A.N.I du
‘Tassili’ de Akli Tadjer et ‘Temps maure’ de
Mohammed Kenzi.” Mots Pluriels 23. 2003. Dikeç, Mustafa. Badlands of the Republic:
⬍http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/ Space, Politics and Urban Policy. London:
MP2303acu.html⬎ (November 2007) Blackwell, 2007.
Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie. Glissant, Edouard. Le discours antillais.

Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967 (English: Of Paris: Gallimard, 1981.
Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Hardwick, Louise. “Du français-banane
University Press, 1976). au créole-dragon: Entretien avec Raphaël
Confiant.” International Journal of
———. “Des Tours de Babel.” Difference in Francophone Studies 9.2 (2006):
Translation. Ed. Joseph F. Graham. Ithaca, NY, 257–276.
and London: Cornell University Press, 1985.
165–208. Hargreaves, Alec. “No Escape? From ‘cinéma
beur’ to the ‘cinéma de la banlieue.’” Die
———. Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber. Kinder der Immigration/Les Enfants de l’immi-
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, gration. Ed. Ernstpeter Ruhe. Würzburg,
1988. Germany: Königshausen and Neumann,
1999. 115–28.
———. Le monolinguisme de l’autre. Paris:
Galilée, 1996. ———. “La représentation cinématographique
de l’ethnicité en France: Stigmatisation,
———. Monolingualism of the Other, or, the reconnaissance et banalisation.” Questions
Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. de communication 4 (2003): 127–39.

Hargreaves, Alec (ed.) Banlieues 1 & 2. Special Le Bris, Michel, and Jean Rouaud (eds).
issue, Contemporary French and Francophone Pour une littérature-monde. Paris: Gallimard,
Studies 8.1–2 (2004). 2007.
Higbee, Will. “Locating the Postcolonial in Nesbit, John. “Long Trek to Mecca,” Review of
Transnational Cinema: The Place of Algerian Le Grand Voyage. 2005. ToxicUniverse.com
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Film.” Modern and Contemporary France
15.1 (2007): 51–64. Papamichael, Stella. Review of Le Grand
Voyage. Channel 4, 2004. ⬍http://www.
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MA: MIT Press, 1960. 350–77. Prabhu, Anjali. Hybridity: Limits, Transformations,
Prospects. New York: SUNY Press, 2007.
Khatibi, Abdelkebir. Amour bilingue. Paris: Fata
Morgana, 1983. Tarr, Carrie. Reframing Difference: Beur and
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L’Harmattan, 1993.

Interstellar Hospitality:
Missions of Star House
Enterprise
Sonja Neef
ABSTRACT
This article investigates the concepts of cosmopolitanism and hospitality in the TV

series Star Trek Enterprise: The Fifth Generation. In the Enlightened political philo-
sophy of the West, hospitality has been defined as a “universal” law on which “cos-
mopolitanism” is based (Kant). The aim of this article is to question the ideas of
“universality” and “cosmopolitanism” by studying them in a sci-fi space narrative
and bringing them back to the astronomical context they are derived from. In the
first episode of The Fifth Generation, Broken Bow, the encounter of host and guest
at first sight takes the shape of a stereotypical cultural clash between a Western
actor who is a priori conceived as “subject,” i.e. the one mastering the visual and
linguistic protocol of the encounter on the one hand, and on the other hand, the wild
and speechless other, or “alien.” The complex and paradoxical structure of hospital-
ity, as described in great detail by Jacques Derrida, however, remains not at all naive
or cursory in Broken Bow. Through detailed analyses of two scenes, this article
demonstrates the self-reflexive attitude of the television show. One case focuses on
camera work and the rhetoric of the visual in film-making, the other on the diegetic
technical device of the “universal translator.” In the end, the television, as a media
technology of space travelling, turns out to function itself as a universal translator:
a medium to produce the “cosmopolitical” as a possibility and an impossibility at
the same time.
Interstellar Hospitality: Missions of Star House Enterprise | 277

Star Time
Earth date 2151 is a cosmic year. The threats of nuclear and ecological disaster,
of poverty and disease, have been overcome. The disparate nations and cultures
coexist harmoniously and are ruled by a planetary state. All inhabitants of the
Earth, regardless of race, sex, nationality, or culture, are members of one united
“Humanity.” This is the phantasmatic future envisioned by the science fiction tele-
vision series “Star Trek.” The series’ detailed expostulation of this utopian vision of
humanity’s future shares ground with Immanuel Kant’s enlightened concept of a cos-
mopolitical “civitas gentium,” a universal “League of Nations” (Völkerbund) uniting all
peoples of the globe (Kant 1988, 79). In his famous philosophical draft “Toward
Eternal Peace,” Kant claims that “the law of nations shall be based on a federalism
of free states” (Kant 1988, 74). Eternal peace will be achieved when the idea of fed-
eralism will be extended over all states as the aim of a teleological process which is
guaranteed by “the deep-seated wisdom of a higher cause directed toward the objec-
tive ultimate end of mankind and predetermining this course of the word” (Kant
1988, 88). Kant knows about the time necessary for states and their citizens to
achieve the maturity for such a “universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose” of
“eternal peace”; he calls it a “cosmic time” and literally compares it to the whole
astronomic cycle, the circulation of planets and “the path which our sun with its
whole swarm of satellites is following within the vast system of the fixed stars” (Kant
1991, 50).1
The diegetic future world of Star Trek is cosmic in this Kantian sense. Unlike
Kant’s conception of an ideal society, the series presents the development of human-
ity’s universal civilization not as the result of ethics and laws, but primarily as an
achievement of technological progress. This technological progress is the central
focus of this paper. After all, on closer investigation, the technologies that promise to
create the future world of Star Trek reveal some tiny resistances, resistances that dis-
turb the cosmic utopia. These resistances are, paradoxically enough, not produced
by technological breakdowns or slip-ups but, on the contrary, by the trouble-free func-
tioning of high-technology, which is portrayed in the film series as absolute and
unmistakable.
It is important to distinguish two types of technologies to be investigated in this
paper: first, the diegetic technology that is portrayed or narrated in the film series
and, second, the technology of film itself, which functions as a technical narrative
device. The diegetic cosmos of Star Trek has its origins in a future historical period
during which technology literally changes the world. This history is the subject of the
fifth Star Trek TV series entitled Star Trek Enterprise, created by Rick Berman and
Brannon Braga, covering four seasons and consisting of ninety-seven episodes,
produced and run immediately after they were shot from 2001 to 2005. Although
this iteration of the series is the most recently produced, the time span it addresses
278 | Sonja Neef

precedes the others chronologically. The diegetic times in the other iterations are
chronological: Star Trek (The Original Series), with Captain Kirk, takes place from
2265 to 2269; followed by The Next Generation, with Captain Picard, from 2364 to
2370; followed by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine covering the years 2369 to 2375.
Finally, Star Trek: Voyager with Captain Janeway extends the chronology of the series
until 2378.2
As such, the fifth generation, with Captain Archer’s crew, is a prequel; it looks
“back” to a future past, set a century before the “original” series with Kirk and
Spock. Being, in this sense, at once old and new requires it to continually come to
grips with its own anachronistic structure. On the one hand, from a diegetic point of
view, this latest generation must lay the groundwork for the technologies of space
travel depicted in the Original Star Trek.3 Belatedly, so to speak, the plot describes
mankind’s initial contacts with foreign worlds and the creation of the technologies
that enabled the very first space voyages. On the other hand, with regard to film
making, the technologies used in filming Enterprise from 2001 to 2005 are far more
sophisticated than those used in the 1960s. Whereas the “Original” Star Trek,
produced in the Desilu Studios, used low-tech props to create unsophisticated filmic
effects, the fifth generation benefited from special effects produced by high-tech
computer animation, including its celebrated holographic spaces.4
In Captain Archer’s “cosmos,” April 2151 is an epochal date for humanity. After
decades of research into designing and building faster star ships for the Earth
Starfleet, the “warp five engine” has been developed by his father, Henry Archer, and
Zefram Cochrane. According to the “official Star Trek homepage,” the warp reactor,
technically known as the “Gravimetric Field Displacement Manifold,” consists of
a matter/antimatter reaction assembly. The discovery of warp technology initiates
humanity’s ability to leave its home planet to engage in deep space exploration. It is
due to this discovery of a revolutionary propulsion technology that humanity evolves
from a primitive (in universal terms), planetary pre-warp species into a universal
player. This expansion beyond or exceeding of the traditional human domain is not
without risk. After all, the space voyagers must relinquish the protection provided by
the host or the “house” of the United Earth. Crew members inhabit a ship rather than
a house; rather than planetary citoyens, they become literally cosmopolitans in the
sense of interstellar ambassadors whose inherent function is to be a “foreigner”
and, literally, an “alien,” ever the one who is about to arrive, always searching for first
contacts with new species, an eternal “newcomer” in the sense of Jacques Derrida’s
“arrivant,” always heading for the future.5
Pandora’s Box
April 2151 is the month that the first star ship, the Enterprise NX-01, has been
equipped with a warp five engine. Jonathan Archer is chosen to become its captain.

His task lies in discovering and exploring “alien” life forms, most crucially, intelligent
species, and in studying their modes of civilization. The “gift” of technology com-
prises a gift to exploration and, literally, to “enterprise.”
The first, feature-length episode of the series is entitled “Broken Bow.” The first
act takes place on Earth a few days before the launch of the prototype starship
Enterprise. Archer, accompanied by Commander Charles Tucker, nicknamed Trip, is
flying aboard an inspection pod around the Enterprise in a space dock orbiting Earth.
Both men go into raptures about the starship’s technical equipment:
Trip: The Ventral Plating Team says they’ll be done in about three days.
Archer: Be sure they match the color to the nacelle housings.
Trip: Planning to sit on the hull and pose for some postcards?
Archer: Maybe.
God, she’s beautiful.
Trip: And fast. Warp four point five next Thursday.
Archer: Neptune and back in six minutes.6
In this dialogue, the starship is adored for “her” beauty and strength: “she’s beauti-
ful,” Archer says, with a sigh of admiration. Throughout the series, “she” functions as
an independent agent that interferes with the plot. The link between technology and
gender contained in the epithet “she” has a long tradition. In Greek mythology, it was
Pandora (the “all-gifted”) who was sent by Zeus to seduce mankind. In the film
scene, Archer and Trip enact the role of mankind, to whom Zeus sent the beautiful
Pandora, who brings the box as a gift. This seductive “gift,” however, was in fact
Zeus’s revenge for Prometheus’ theft of the secret of fire. It is worth noting that the
gesture of “gift” enfolds a double structure, since it refers to a present or an offer
as much as—as the German word “Gift” indicates—a “pharmakon,” and also a
“poison.”7 Pandora’s gift is emblematic of the equivocal nature of offers as such, and
her seductive attributes—beauty, grace, and availability—are, ontologically, classic
signifiers of femininity. Like Pandora’s Box, the Starship Enterprise is a gift to Archer
and Trip with the implicit connotation of being a temptation that may lead its admirers
into danger.
Yet apart from any menacing connotation, Pandora’s Box remains a “gift” in the
literal (English) sense of the word: a donation, a present, a bargain, and—not least—
a gift for, in the sense of a talent, with an implication of the attendant duty to bring
one’s gift to fruition. A gift is an obligation. Receiving a gift—and here the meaning of
the German word mingles with the English, carries an injunction for the recipient,
turning her or him into a “donee” with an obligation for the future.
280 | Sonja Neef

It is significant that according to the myth, it was not Prometheus himself who
accepted and opened Pandora’s Box. Prometheus (⌸␳o␮␩␪␧␯´␵), the “technician”
and literally “the one who is looking forward,” had formed mankind from clay, had
taught them crafts and culture, and had even brought them the fire that Zeus had
refused them—in the same way that, in the Star Trek saga, the Vulcans refused
mankind the technological secrets of the warp-reactor. Rather, the box was accepted
by Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus ([‘E␲␫␮␩␪␧␯´␵’]: the one who is considering after-
ward). Although Prometheus warned him forcefully, he opened the disastrous gift
from Pandora and thus released—unforeseeably and irreversibly—the evils of
mankind: greed, vanity, slander, envy, and pining. Notably, in the Star Trek series,
these very evils were not unleashed by technological progress, but precisely over-
come through it. In its emphatic advocacy of the benefits of technological innovation,
the series reveals a techno-ethical position that ignores the metaphor of Pandora’s
Box as a warning against the perils of unbridled technological advancement. In Star
Trek, Pandora’s “gift” of technology is not poisoned, and accepting the box never
appears unanticipated or irreversible. Rather, the narration suggests a monodirec-
tional and monocausal relationship between technology and time.
In La technique et le temps (Technology and Time), Stiegler argues against such a
traditional teleological view on technological progress. Stiegler stresses that in the
myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus, it is precisely the essential discord or division
between the two brothers—the one ⌸␳␱, the other ‘E␲␫—in which lies the chronolo-
gical dynamics of the technical. Thus considered, technology is determined by a fun-
damental and “original” “Désoriention.”8
The advance of Prometheus and the retard (or delay) of Epimetheus (which is also
Epimetheus’ mistake as forgetfulness) join together the “prométheia” as “prévoyance”
(foreseeing) and the “épimétheia” as imprudent distraction and mediation après coup.9
It is precisely this “pro-epimetheic” paradox, or discontent (between brothers), which
for Stiegler forms the basis of an “original technicity” [“une technicité originel”]. The
relation between time and technology is thus not structured along a monolinear
axis—as suggested in the Star Trek series. Rather, the “original technicity” is always
already determined by the lack of origin.
In Star Trek, especially in the fifth generation (Enterprise), this anachronistic struc-
ture is not only significant regarding the rupture between the atavistic diegetic tech-
nologies and the sophisticated film technologies involved. The future portrayed in the
fifth generation is already a “past future,” it is a future that was imagined from the
point of view of another phantasmatic future, one that is at once “looking forward”
because further along in time, and—with respect to the narrating time of technical
production—“looking backward,” since it mirrors the technological fantasies of the
1960s. At the same time, I will argue in what follows, such an anachronism also
marks the chrono-logic of Enterprise as characteristic of—after all—a voyage.

Voyages, in describing the movement of a trajectory or a trace, are always “pro-epi-
metheic” because they always include reversals, pauses, and new starts as much as
loops and crossings in their spatio-temporal programs. That which seems to lay the
most claim on progress toward a utopic future appears to carry in its very structure
a resistance to time and technology.
First Encounter
Before accompanying the Enterprise on its first voyage through space, let me return
to the moment preceding the actual launch.10 It is not by chance that the first
mission of Starship Enterprise, featured in “Broken Bow,” the pilot for the series,
concerns a diplomatic intervention set in motion by an initial encounter with an alien
species. This encounter is enacted as follows. Immediately after having completed
the technical inspection of the Enterprise before launch, Captain Archer is urgently
summoned by Admiral Forest, the leader of the Starfleet of United Earth, to come to
Starfleet Medical. On arriving there, Archer enters into a room in which three officials
of Starfleet’s admiralty and three alien ambassadors from the planet Vulcan are
observing through a window how a medical team in a neighboring room is treating a
patient with high-tech medical equipment. A heated debate is taking place between
the Starfleet’s staff and the representatives from Vulcan.
Interrupted by Archer’s arrival, Admiral Forrest turns toward Archer to welcome him
to the conference. While shaking hands—in Western culture the symbolic gesture of
welcoming as such—the admiral asks: “Jon, I think you know everyone?” Archer,
being familiar with the presence of Vulcan ambassadors on Earth, ignores the
Vulcans. Though “aliens,” they are not foreign to him anymore. As such, his interest
is focused only on the foreign patient behind the window, the only one he does not
yet know. “Not everyone,” he answers to Forrest, gazing worriedly at the foreigner.
Officer Dan from Starfleet, interpreting Archer’s gaze as a question, states, with a
touch of doubt in his voice, “It’s a Klingot,” whereupon one of the Vulcan ambassa-
dors condescendingly corrects him, “A Klingon.” It is with this emphasis on the final
syllable—“A Klingon” that the Vulcan speaker asserts his superior knowledge in
questions of alterity and, by implication, the superiority of the Vulcan species in rela-
tion to Earth’s humanity as such. Archer is informed that the stranger was shot by a
corn farmer in a place called “Broken Bow,” Oklahoma, after a battle with still another
hostile species (the Suliban) and learns that the injured stranger comes from
Qo’nos, the home planet of the Klingon Empire. In passing, one of the Vulcans men-
tions the Klingon’s name: Klaang.
The Vulcans, more experienced in space travel than mankind, superciliously seize
the authority in this encounter. They insist that “Klaang’s corpse” should be returned
home to Qo’nos. This Vulcan imperative raises a myriad of issues for Captain Archer
and the staff of Earth’s Starfleet. After all, in doing so, the Enterprise would allow an
282 | Sonja Neef

alien guest aboard; it would be in the position of offering hospitality to a stranger.

Moreover, there is a suggestion that accepting the stranger aboard might evoke
certain dangers. After all, humanity lacks direct experience with the Klingons, and is
unschooled in interstellar diplomacy in general. In addition, the strange guest is
apparently entangled in an interspecies conflict with the Suliban, a conflict in which
Earth has no involvement. Allowing the stranger aboard implies assuming responsi-
bility for the guest in every respect, which could mean that United Earth, by taking on
the role of host, might be drawn into the Klingon/Suliban conflict and risk losing its
neutrality. As ship’s captain, Archer’s primary responsibility is to his ship and crew. In
the face of this other, or “first” responsibility, he asks the “first” question, the ques-
tion that always comes “before” the “offer” of hospitality and that precedes the con-
ditions of hospitality as such: he asks—not with words but with gestures—who this
stranger is.
The information Archer receives about the guest-in-spe—his offspring, his
species, his homeland, and lastly his proper name—do not absolve him of his com-
mitment to take care of the stranger. Adding to the complexity of the situation, it is
quickly revealed that another obstacle concerns Archer even more. Bothered by the
Vulcan’s description of the Klingon as a “corpse,” Archer protests that their com-
mand implies removing the Klingon’s lifesaving medical apparatus and letting him
die. The Vulcan dignitaries explain that their qualification rests on an essential touch-
stone of Klingon culture itself: “Klaang’s culture finds honor in death. If they saw him
like this, he’d be disgraced,” their ambassador, Soval, informs Archer, and the other
Vulcan quotes from “the profile report” stored in the Vulcan data base: “They’re a
warrior race. They dream of dying in battle.”11
In other words, for the Vulcans, offering hospitality to this alien implies treating
him according to his own law, tradition, and cultural rites. The protocol they have
developed for encounters with other species demands nothing less than welcoming
the Other aboard as an alien, in acceptance of his alterity, however distinct this may
be from the host’s own cultural or ethical values. Archer’s resistance to the injunction
to bring the Klingon home as an honorable—that is, dead—warrior would, from the
point of view of the Vulcan idea of hospitality, be raised out of dogmatic geocentrist
ethical beliefs. The hospitality they demand for the guest aboard a ship of the
Federation involves welcoming the foreigner as a foreigner, as one who carries with
him his own civilization, law, and language. They invoke tolerance toward the guest in
the Kantian sense.12 But although the Vulcan conception of hospitality may appear
to represent the fulfillment of the highest ethical imperative, on another level it
engages what might be termed the intolerable question of tolerance, or that which
Jacques Derrida in his famous essay “Of Hospitality” has called the terrible, unbear-
able question of hospitality (Derrida 2000, 25). In what follows, I will discuss this
question by focusing on how the Derridian aporia of hospitality is enacted in this

film-generated future world, that is, as an effect generated by the aesthetic strategies
of camera movements and angles.
Interstellar Hospitality
The mise-en-scène I am analyzing now has not yet moved aboard the Enterprise, but
remains at its threshold. At this point of the story, the injured Klingon is not yet a pas-
senger, but a candidate before shipping or take off, a disputed object of negotiation.
During the entire debate between the Starfleet’s officials and the Vulcan ambassa-
dors, the camera’s point of view rests in the conference room next to the medical
room; we see close-ups of the speakers involved in the discussion on “the Klingon”
in shot-counter-shot montages. “The Klingon” is seen in the background behind the
window; an unconscious patient, he remains a mute object who cannot take part in
the discussion (Bal 1996, 1–12). At the moment when Archer draws closer to the
window to look at the stranger on display, however, the camera takes a new position.
From inside the medical treating room, it zooms in on the foreign patient, showing him
in close-up lying in bed. The seven observers (three Vulcans, three Starfleet officers,
and Archer) are now seen standing on the outside, behind the window, gazing at the
unconscious Klingon like the seven dwarfs gazing at Snow White in her glass coffin.
The Klingon is thus exhibited from two sides. As an object of viewing he finds himself
in the middle between two windows and two gazes: observed by the diegetic viewers
from the back window and, in the front, mise en abyme: literally placed at the abyss
of the television screen.
The visual composition of this television image is striking because it questions
the complexity of viewing positions, and along with this, the irresolvable structure
of the concept of hospitality. This viewing situation does not merely expose “the
Klingon” to his diegetic observers, it also allows us to see the observers as
observers, on display, to us, or for us, in our capacity as viewers of yet another narra-
tological order, thus destabilizing any fixed or stable notion of who is gazing at whom
in this tableau. In doing so, I will argue, the composition of this television image
conceptually reframes the initial moment of encountering the “other” in still another
way. In the same way that the subject of viewing is displaced from his original and
privileged viewing position, the “originality” of the viewed object, emblematic of
“otherness” as such, also becomes problematic.
Strictly interpreted, the conflict between the opposing concepts of hospitality
endorsed by either the Vulcans or the Humans started earlier. Before the imminent
launch of the star ship, at the threshold of what was about to be transgressed, and
before any solution pertaining to how to deal with the stranger was proposed, the
impossibility of offering hospitality, of the “offer” or the “gift” of hospitality, was
already inevitable. What the Vulcan ambassadors defended as the highest, thus
most logical, “true,” or “universal” form of hospitality—welcoming the foreigner as
284 | Sonja Neef

Neef 1 Broken Bow, Chapter 2, 00:06:21
a foreigner, in casu, as a warrior to die in battle—already contravened the founda-

tional conditions of the law of hospitality. For “true” or “absolute” hospitality
requires, as Derrida writes,
that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner (provided with a
family name . . . ) but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, that I let them arrive,
and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them . . . their names.
(Derrida 2000, 25)
Derrida distinguishes this idea of “absolute hospitality” from so-called “conditional
hospitality,” which for him is based on a pact. In Star Trek, such a pact, or contract,
exists in the diplomatic interstellar agreements of the United Federation of Planets.
When the ambassador mentions the foreigner’s name, “Klaang,” and frames him
with a set of identificatory data—his species, his homeland, his cultural rites, and so
on—he in fact quotes from the law, or the contract requiring that Vulcan interstellar
interventions be undertaken in accordance with the diplomatic protocol. At the
moment when Archer—with a facial gesture expressing worry or confusion––asks the
first question: “Who is this foreigner?” both he and the Vulcan forfeit their chance to
become the “true,” “absolute,” or universal hosts of the stranger the Vulcans claim

to be. At the moment when the Vulcan ambassador authoritatively corrects Dan by
stressing the final syllable in pronouncing the name of the foreigner’s species, he
claims the name “Klingon” for himself, as if to say that Vulcans—not humanity—are
the actual, or “true” hosts.
According to the diegetic ethics enacted in the television series, human and
Vulcan culture and ethics always find themselves in opposition to, and in concurrence
with, each other. From the first episode, “Broken Bow,” on, Archer’s ethical habitus,
implicitly prototypical of human activity in general, is represented as more persuasive
and worthy than Vulcanian ethics. Humanity’s ethical strength lies precisely in its
weakness, that is, its emotional, irrational underpinnings. However, I will argue—at
once with and against the logic of the story—that the alleged superiority of Archer’s
concept of hospitality to that of the Vulcans is as problematic as would be the oppos-
ing hierarchical order.
After all, asking his first questions—“What is this foreigner’s name?” “Where
does he come from?”—already demonstrates the impossibility of deciding, or the
indecidability at work within any constellation of hospitality. For the right to ask this
question can never be granted to either the one (the host) or the other (the guest).
And, I will add to this, it is the medium of the television image itself—its technical
structure—that resists the televisionary fiction of a utopian cosmos grounded on
true, or unconditional, hospitality. After all, the impossibility of asking the first ques-
tion, as an indecidable constellation, takes visual shape in the composition of the
television image described above. After all, the position of the camera, focusing on
the foreigner from inside the window, authorizes him by visual logic to ask—from his
side—the first question. Like Archer and the Vulcan ambassador on their side of the
window, he is the stranger on the other side, and he could likewise and with the same
authority ask the question of foreignness, and, distressingly, he could do so at the
same time. Like a merry-go-round, the aporia of hospitality keeps turning around this
impossible point of origin.
The motor that propels the merry-go-round is itself generated out of the double
bind of technology that is on a chronological level at once narrating and narrated,
belated and premature, pro- and epimetheic, and, on a political level, at once earthly
and cosmic. Technology here appears as a paradoxical concept, a concept that
contains the notion of its own impossibility. This concept is proximate to Miguel
Hernández-Navarro’s idea of a “second-hand technology.” As I understand it, a
“second-hand” technology is not based on the idea of a “first-hand” technology from
which it derives and which it thus aims to re-establish ex negativo. Rather, the
secondary is, so to speak, always already at stake in the technical. This secondarity
relates to the Heideggerian idea that the techne does not merely comprise the
apparatus and machines evolving mono-directionally toward an ultimate technologi-
cal future, like the one depicted in Star Trek. The Greek word techne literally means
286 | Sonja Neef

“craft,” “manufacture,” “art,” “skill”; in German: “Handwerk” (trade) or “Werk der

Hand” (work of the hand) as Heidegger stresses. Heidegger insists on this figure of
the hand, as expressed in the German word “handeln” (acting), when he distin-
guishes an ontological yet hidden idea of the Zeug (the tool), which for him always
carries in it the notion of the poetic, creative, and artistic dimension of technology.
Second-hand technology, as I understand the concept expressed by Hernández-
Navarro, draws substance from this idea that techne is not entirely technological,
that even the most futurist technology carries in it a certain nucleus of the ancient
techne. Thus seen, techne both contributes to and resists the ideology of technology,
because it is dedicated to discovering what is hidden: second-hand technologies
“restore the human character of the techne and bring back the enigmatic and
hidden value of the true that had worried Heidegger so much” (Hernández-Navarro,
2007).
Star House Enterprise

The “painful paradox of hospitality,” as Derrida puts it, also enfolds another problem.
For, the duties of a host offering hospitality to a guest—be it the “patron” of a private
house, or a government ruling a state—are determined by the definitive characteris-
tics of their role as “a State responsible for the integrity of the territory, for sover-
eignty, for security and national defense” (Derrida 2000, 49). The host thus finds
himself perpetually confronted with a paradoxical obligation. On the one hand, he is
bound to protect the borders of his house, or territory, against intruders from the out-
side; to guarantee his guest the protection, immunity, or asylum he requires. On the
other hand, this impermeable border must be porous enough for the guest to enter
in. In this context, Derrida writes about the perverse, or pervertible, nature of the
laws of hospitality, since they presuppose
the necessity, for the host . . . of choosing, electing, filtering, selecting their invitees,
visitors, or guests, those to whom they decide to grant asylum, the right of visiting, or
hospitality. No hospitality, in the classic sense, without sovereignty of oneself over one’s
home, but since there is also no hospitality without finitude, sovereignty can only be
exercised by filtering, choosing, and thus by excluding and doing violence. (Derrida
2000, 55)
The inescapable perversion of the laws of hospitality lies in the paradox that their
exercise violates the necessary and indispensable conditions on which they are
based. In other words: at the root of hospitality lies inhospitality, namely the sover-
eignty of the host over his guest. And vice versa, hospitality is the basic principle of
any sovereignty:
In order to constitute the space of a habitable house and a home, you also need an
opening, a door and windows, you have to give up a passage to the outside world
[l’étranger]. There is no house or interior without a door or windows. The monad of

home has to be hospitable in order to be ipse, itself at home, habitable at-home in the
relation of the self to itself. (Derrida 2000, 61)
In the end, there is this endless paradox that hospitality and inhospitality exclude
and at the same time need each other in order to take shape.
In a certain sense, a ship can be regarded as antagonistic to a house. Houses are
stable, firm, and unalterable—literally immobiles; they stand for the locus habitat,
Heimat, or home, and they are emblematic of the idea of native soil and fatherland.
On the other hand, in the ship, these properties are absent. Rather than dwelling, the
ship stands for traveling. Inhabitants of a ship are—at least for the duration of the
journey—homeless voyagers in between two places.
Archer, as the captain of a star ship, is undisputedly such a voyager. And yet
he simultaneously functions in a certain way as a maître de maison, or a patron,
because he is employed by the Government of United Earth and authorized by the
Federation of Planets to represent “the law,” including the law of hospitality. No mat-
ter how many light years away from home Archer may be, being aboard the star ship
literally situates him at the threshold of his home planet, which he continues to orbit
to the extent that wherever he may be physically located in the universe, he contin-
ues to be Earth’s official representative. As such, his mission is to engage in the
enterprise of travel through space and time and to bring foreign worlds into the poli-
tical orbit of his home world, to anchor or moor future encounters in past traditions.
In this sense, any centrifugal movement of the ship transporting its crew away from
home always includes a centripetal counter-movement. Along with this oscillation,
the promise of an incompromisable hospitality is at once asserted and delimited by
this double logic of place. The laws of hospitality, particularly with respect to the ability
to transgress the border, at once dislocate and stabilize the borders of the house,
viewed as the territory or location where power, rules, and commands reside. The law
of the ship as a locus mobile is based on the logic of the house, and vice versa. At all
times, the house, as a stable and immobile locus habitat, is a “migratory space,” of
which the ship as a non-place is emblematic.
Universal Translation
As a topographic concept, I have analyzed interstellar hospitality so far in this paper
in relation to futuristic propulsion technologies. In what follows, I will concentrate on
yet another problem that comes up in interstellar encounters: the problem of commu-
nication and the aporia of a globalized language, which is also addressed in Mireille
Rosello’s and Cornelia Gräbner’s papers elsewhere in this volume. In Star Trek, the
primeval scene of cosmic communication takes place some time after the launch of
starship Enterprise. It is set in the ship’s sickbay at the moment when the Klingon
patient is regaining consciousness. Captain Archer tries to interrogate his passenger
with the help of his communication officer, Hoshi Sato. The foreigner repeatedly roars
288 | Sonja Neef

something at Hoshi but, as he speaks in his native, Klingon, language, she cannot
understand what he is saying. Even though his speech remains incomprehensible,
it sounds hard and aggressive, in keeping with one’s expectation of how a stereo-
typical “warrior’s tongue” would sound. Hoshi is nervously pressing buttons on her
“Universal Translator,” a technical device the size of a mobile phone that is used to
decipher and interpret alien languages into the language of the user.
Hoshi (desperately looking at the The translator, it’s not locking

Universal Translator): onto his dialect. The syntax won’t align.
Klingon (bawling at Hoshi): [Klingon]
Archer: Tell him we’re taking him home.
Hoshi (now with a scowl): [Klingon]
Klingon (angry): [Klingon]
Hoshi (to Archer): He wants to know who we are.
(to the Klingon): [Klingon]
Hoshi: Ship, he’s asking for his ship back.
Archer: Say it was destroyed.
Hoshi: [Klingon]
Hoshi: I’m not sure, but I think he said something
about eating afterlife?
Archer: Try that translator again.
Hoshi: I’m gonna need to run what we’ve got
through the phonetic processor.
Hoshi: He says his wife has grown ugly? I’m sorry,
captain, I’m doing the best I can.
Phlox: Excuse me. His prefrontal cortex is
hyperstimulated. I doubt he has any
idea what he’s saying.
Hoshi: I think the doctor’s right, captain, unless
“stinky boots” has something to do with
all this.13
This scene provides ample material for a detailed critique of the possibilities and
risks inherent in communication in general and globalized, or cosmic, speech in par-
ticular. Indeed, this dialogue emblematically reveals the racisms laid in as a subtext
by the show’s conceivers and writers, a racism heralded by the Klingon’s more easily
perceived sexism.14 After all, the cues that inform what is played out here as a

humorous conversation are grounded in a tacit cooptation of the other as belligerent
and sexist. At the same time, however, this dialogue, while filled with resistances and
misunderstandings, is formulated on what would be, if real, a true communication
miracle. After all, the linguistic conventions that form the basis of the humor in this
exchange, the effects of unsuccessful communication based on uncertain meanings,
are in turn dependent on the premise of the possibility of successful communication.
In this light, the comic not only undermines successful communication, it presup-
poses it as a defining structure from which it deviates as an intricate exception, a
mistake, or, as Paul de Man has put it, a “misfire.” The misfire is identifiable only as
funny, or “rhetorical,” or “ironic,” because of this phantasmatic—or utopian—idea of
successful communication (De Man 1979, 9–10).15 Likewise, sexism and racism are
only identifiable as misfires because they are rhetorical in the sense of Paul de Man:
deviations from what Star Trek portrays as a utopian cosmos. At this point, the comic
appears cosmic.
With regard to the question of hospitality, it is interesting to take a closer look at
the rupture that generates the humoristic effect in this scene. After all, hospitality,
even when viewed as a juridical problem, is in migratory contexts primarily discussed
in cultural terms; it depends to a great degree on ethical, religious, and linguistic
norms. In the conversation between Archer and his Klingon guest, the rupture that
assures misunderstanding is multilayered. It is caused as much by cultural and lin-
guistic interspecies otherness as by the process of translation. The process as
enacted is highly technical because it is generated by a machine, a computer pro-
grammed with a so-called “linguacode matrix”—software that enables its user to
analyze any other language in the universe after monitoring only a few exemplary
utterances, to scan its vocabulary and its grammar in its totality and to translate it
into the language of globalized humanity: in casu (as in reality) Anglo-American.16
In his essay, “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin sets forth his notion of
translation in philosophical terms. Benjamin puts forward the idea of a universal
“pure language,” or “true language” in which anything can be said without loss. In this
somewhat mystical—or utopian—conception of an ultimate “pure language,” which
results in “the totality of intentions” of all languages, translation, for Benjamin,
achieves its final shape. The translation performed by the universal translator aboard
the Enterprise, whereby the speech of a human is uttered in one language and is
simultaneously heard by its addressee (the Klingon) in his mother tongue, has a
miraculous quality. It resembles the event of the biblical Pentecost, when the fiery
tongues of the apostles speak to the multicultural, polyglot residents of Jerusalem in
their mother tongues and—miraculously enough—are heard in the languages of their
audience (Acts 2, 1–13). Such a biblical concept of a “Universal Translator” lies also
at the basis of some new media digital translation machines, among which the most
well-known is the online language transmitter “Babelfish.” As in the Pentecostal
290 | Sonja Neef

miracle, these devices aim to decipher the speech of the other instantaneously with-
out bothering too much with her or his otherness.
Hoshi’s universal translator also works instantaneously. Only in cases when the
language to be deciphered has never been recorded before a delay may occur until
the translator can work out a proper translation. This delay is noteworthy because
it demonstrates that even the high-tech translation performed by the Universal
Translator still allows the possibility of a mistranslation, misunderstanding, a “mis-
step,” so to speak, in the sense of a risky, supplemental meaning through which the
foreign guest persists in his alterity. Already, Benjamin warns of “the enormous
danger inherent in all translations” (Benjamin 1968, 81).
In this light, the cosmic and comic dimension of Star Trek’s translation scene is
highly dramatic. After all, the reason this conversation is so senseless remains—at
least for a while—impossible to decide, or indecidable: is it because of insufficient
technical capacity in the translation device, because of the extent of the cultural
difference, or—as we finally discover—because of the lack of seriousness of one of
the speakers (which is also Austin’s favorite solution)? It is precisely this indecidability
that, I will argue, following Walter Benjamin’s theory on translation, lies at the basis
of any attempt at translating. For Benjamin, the work of translation must aim to
achieve an ultimate translation in a pure, true, or universal language, which—I will
add to this—can be achieved only in cosmic times. This work of translation,
however—and here the deconstructive dimension of Benjamin’s concept, which is so
urgent and which is so often misjudged in critical theory—is an endless “Aufgabe”—
a task and an injunction as much as a surrender and a giving up. The mother tongue,
as that which is traditionally understood as an unmistakable signifier of genealogy,
offspring, blood, and soil, is for Benjamin always already marked by this split; that the
native language is always originally foreign (Wetzel 2003, 147). It is not by accident
that Benjamin insists on talking about “the kinship of languages,” a kinship that is
not intended to be understood in a comparative or a historical sense, but which
rather concerns an enigmatic affinity of languages (Derrida 1985, 186). At this point,
Benjamin’s concept of Universal Language comes close to the Derridean concept of
monolingualism, which Derrida formulates in comparably paradoxical terms, and in
which a monadic self and alterity are expressed at the same time: “I only have one
language; it is not mine” (Derrida 1998, 1). Benjamin describes a similar in-betweenness
within his concept of a “Universal Language,” with the concept of a so-called
“interlinear version” embodying the ideal of all translation:
[T]he translation must be one with the original in the form of the interlinear
version . . . . For to some degree all great texts contain their potential translation
between the lines; this is true to the highest degree of sacred writings. The interlinear
version of the Scriptures is the prototype or ideal of all translation. (Benjamin 1968,
82; emphasis added)

However sovereign, or monadic a language may appear to be, be it in terms of geneal-
ogy and offspring (mother tongue) or in the juridical terms of nationality (patria)17—
here Derrida and Benjamin come together—it is always already in itself split by
the intervention of the other (or “alien”) toward whom it is directed. Derrida, as
Benjamin’s most careful reader (or translator), sums up the inherent alterity
expressed in the notion of the interlinear version with the comment that “the native
tongue of the translator . . . is altered as well” (Derrida 1985, 191). Within this con-
text, the tool of the Universal Translator, even if it takes the shape of a pop-cultural
enactment of interstellar communication, rather than Benjamin’s sacral discourse,
can be regarded as the technical fulfillment of a phantasmatic, or utopian, universal
language. It translates contents from one language into another language to the
same extent that it refuses translation in the enigmatic sense Benjamin ascribes to
universal language. For this reason, I would call the Universal Translator a “second
hand technology” in the sense laid out by Hernández-Navarro: it generates the phan-
tasm of an absolute future technology and at the same time resists it.
In the End: Arche

A powerful engine will be built . . . an engine that will someday help us to travel a
hundred times faster than we can today. Imagine it: thousands of inhabited planets at
our fingertips. And we’ll be able to explore those strange new worlds . . . and seek out
new life and new civilizations. This engine will let us go boldly . . . where no man has
gone before.18
With these words, Zephram Cochrane, the “Great Creator” of the warp five reactor,
spoke to the Congress of United Earth decades before the launch of the Enterprise
in a historic speech that initiated humanity’s cosmo-technological future. As the “law-
ful” or genealogical heir of the “Great Creator” of warp five, Captain Jonathan Archer
fulfills the prophecy of the primeval, literally, the “archi,” fathers and the obligation
encrypted in the proper name of his father: Archer. The Greek noun archós means the
“first,” the “leader,” or “commander,” and derives from the verb árchein’: to be the
first. And truly, Archer became the first to go “where no man had gone before,” and
the one authorized by the fathers to assume the role of a universal patron, author-
ized by his patria to ask the first, outrageous question, the question of alterity and
hospitality. Archer is given the patriarchal authority to define the point from which
cosmic space and cosmic time is to be measured, and the first to master universal
language. Thus the prophecy, or the injunction, of the proper name “Archer” is
fulfilled—at least in Star Trek’s diegetic Cosmos.
This Cosmos, I will conclude, does not make any “true,” cosmic, or universalistic
claims. Rather, the intervention with the other, or of the other (or alien) takes place
by means of the medial transmission of the television itself. Drawing again on
Benjamin, I would call this an “interlinear version,” as the cosmic originality of medial
292 | Sonja Neef

technology is both structured and generated by the medium itself, with a tiny, almost
invisible resistance at the mise en abyme of the television screen. The future in Star
Trek is as much generated by medial technology as it itself produces it; it is, so to
speak, always already in between the lines of “the original.”
The Universal Translator, as a technical device, thus belongs to the area of cosmic
times, and yet, as a cosmic technology, it remains the result of the medium that it
itself constitutes. Within this epi-metheic anachronism, the reflection on translation
appears as a media-philosophical aporia in which the television itself becomes the
subject of translation. And vice versa: the Universal Translator, as a television image,
becomes literally tele-visual. The key characteristics of the television as a dispositive
of medial transmission lie in the suitcase word “Co(s)mic,” in which it is indicated,
that all this, the entire utopic future, is a mediated, rhetorical, or unserious, “co(s)mic”
play, or game, of the medium.

Notes
1. See also Julia Kristeva, Strangers to 5. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the
Ourselves, transl. Leon S. Roudiez, 1991, Other, p. 61. See also Of Hospitality, p. 27–29.
p. 171. When Kant relates his concepts of
cosmopolitism and of universal history to 6. “Broken Bow” (Star Trek Enterprise, 5th
the stars, this astronomic terminology is Generation, season 1, episode 1), Chapter 2,
metaphorical as much as it refers to Kant’s 0:04–05.
astronomic theory entitled, “Allgemeine
Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels,” 7. Cf. J.-M. Rabaté and Michael Wetzel (eds.),
published in 1755. L’éthique du don. Jacques Derrida et la pensée
du don.
2. These are:
a. The Original Star Trek, created by Gene 8. See also Georges Didi-Huberman,
Roddenberry, 1966–1969, Episodes: 79 Ähnlichkeit und Berührung: Archäologie,
(3 seasons), Time span: 2265–2269 Anachronismus und Modernität des Abdrucks,
b. The Animated Series, created by Gene p. 14ff; Sonja Neef, Abdruck und Spur.
Roddenberry, 1973–1974, Episodes: 22 Handschrift im Zeitalter ihrer technischen
(2 seasons), Time span: 2269–2270 Reproduzierbarkeit, p. 95–96.
c. Star Trek: The Next Generation, created
by: Gene Roddenberry, 1987–1994, 9. “ . . . l’avance prométhéenne et le retard
Episodes: 176 (7 seasons), Time span: épiméthéen (qui est aussi la faute d’Épiméthée
2364–2370 comme oubli) trament ensemble la prométheia
d. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, created by: comme prévoyance et l’épimétheia comme
Rick Berman and Michael Piller, distraction insouciante et médiation après
1993–1999, Episodes: 173 (7 coup.” Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le
seasons), Time span: 2369–2375 temps. 1. La faute d’Épiméthée, p. 30;
e. Star Trek: Voyager, created by: Rick translation SN.
Berman, Michael Piller, and Jeri Taylor,
1995–2001, Episodes: 168 (7 10. http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/
seasons), Time span: 2371–2378 Broken_Bow
f. Star Trek Enterprise, created by: Rick
Berman and Brannon Braga, 11. “Broken Bow,” Chapter 2, 0:07:40–50.
2001–2005, Episodes: 97 (4 seasons),
time span: 2151–2155, 2161. 12. In the third definitive article in “Toward
Eternal Peace,” Kant claims that the
3. For example, whereas Archer’s crew is still “cosmopolitan law shall be restricted to
very leery of the “transporter,” a device that conditions of general hospitality”:
dematerializes an object at one location and “hospitality (neighborliness [Wirtbarkeit])
transmits and reassembles it at another, means a foreigner’s right not to be treated
Captain Kirk and his crew regularly use this inimically because of his arrival on another
device, also known as the “beamer,” for person’s ground.” p. 83. Kant stresses that
travelling. During the century that separates hospitality “is not philanthropy but right and
Archer and Kirk, transporter technology has law,” and that it also needs to be distinguished
evolved from an experimental stage to become from the concept of “tolerance,” which he
a common means of transport. defines as the political tool for mutual foreign
policy to be used for international communities
4. Memory Alpha, online encyclopaedia on Star in which law does not take effect.
Trek, (since November 2003), http://memory-
alpha.org/en/wiki/Portal:Star_Trek. 13. “Broken Bow,” Chapter 5, 0:26:09–27:21.
294 | Sonja Neef

14. See e.g. Daniel Leonard Bernardi, Star Trek 17. See Sonja Neef, Vatersprache Mutterland.
and History. Race-ing toward a White Future. Medien der Übersetzung. Lecture series at
Bauhaus University Weimar, 2006, http://
15. See also Jacques Derrida’s discussion of www.uni-weimar.de/medien/europa/
“irony” in “Signature Event Context,” pp. 16–17. lehre/vatersprache_mutterland.htm.
16. See Memory Alpha, the free Star Trek 18. “Broken Bow,” Chapter 5.
reference; http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/
Universal_translator.
Works Cited
Bal, Mieke. Double Exposures: The Subject of Hollender. Cologne, Germany: Dumont, 1999
Cultural Analysis. New York and London: (French edition: L’Empreinte. Paris: Centre
Routledge, 1996. Pompidou, 1997).
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator: Heidegger, Martin. “Bauen Wohnen Denken.”
An Introduction to the Translation of 1951. Vorträge und Aufsätze. Pfullingen,
Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens.” Illuminations. Germany: Neske, 1978. 139–156.
Ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. New
York: Schocken Books, 1968. 69–82. Hernández-Navarro, Miguel A. “Second Hand
Technologies: Migratory Time, Politics of
Bernardi, Daniel Leonard. Star Trek and History: Resistance.” Lecture at the Second Migratory
Race-ing toward a White Future. New Brunswick, Politics Encuentro, Amsterdam, September 20,
NJ, and London: Rutgers, 1998. 2007.
De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural

Kant, Immanuel. Allgemeine Naturgeschichte
Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and
und Theorie des Himmels. 1755. Ed. Fritz
Proust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
Krafft. Munich: Kindler, 1971.
1979.
———. “Toward Eternal Peace.” 1795.
Derrida, Jacques. “Des Tours de Babel.”
Principles of Lawful Politics: Immanuel Kant’s
Difference in Translation. Ed. Joseph F. Graham.
Philosophic Draft toward Eternal Peace. Ed.
Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University
and trans. Wolfgang Schwarz. Aalen,
Press, 1985. 165–208.
Germany: Scientia Verlag, 1988.
———. “Signature Event Context.” Limited Inc. 41–135.
Trans. Samuel Weber. Evanston, IL:
———. “Idea for a Universal History with a
Northwestern University Press, 1988. 1–24.
Cosmopolitan Purpose.” 1784. Political
———. Monolingualism of the Other, or, the Writings. Ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet.
Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. 41–53.
———. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans.

Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia
Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Memory Alpha. Online Encyclopedia on
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Ähnlichkeit und Star Trek, (since November 2003), ⬍http://
Berührung: Archäologie, Anachronismus und memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Portal:Star_Trek⬎
Modernität des Abdrucks. Trans. Christoph (February 2008).

Neef, Sonja. “Vatersprache Mutterland: Medien Star Trek: Enterprise (The Fifth Generation)
der Übersetzung.” Lecture series at Bauhaus 2001–05, Season 1–4. Created by Rick
University Weimar. 2006. ⬍http://www. Berman and Brannon Braga. Television series.
uni-weimar.de/medien/europa/lehre/ Paramount Pictures.
vatersprache_mutterland.htm⬎ (February
2008). Stiegler, Bernard. La technique et le temps,
vol. 1, “La faute d’Épiméthée.” Paris: Galilée,
———. Abdruck und Spur: Handschrift im 1996.
Zeitalter ihrer technischen Reproduzierbarkeit.
Berlin: Kadmos, 2008. Wetzel, Michael. “Alienationen: Jacques
Derridas Dekonstruktion der Muttersprache.”
Rabaté, Jean-Michel, and Michael Wetzel Jacques Derrida, Die Einsprachigkeit des
(eds.) L’éthique du don: Jacques Derrida et la Anderen. Munich: Fink, 2003. 141–54.
pensée du don. Paris: Métalié-Transition,
1992.
296 | Sonja Neef

Opacity and Openness:

Creating New Senses
of Dutchness 1
Isabel Hoving
ABSTRACT
Until the turn of the century, one of the main causes of the presumed success of
the Dutch immigration policy was believed to be its formally delineated tolerance of
cultural difference. Since the beginning of the century, the Dutch perception of its
own policy has radically changed: it is now considered to have been a complete
failure, mainly because it would have been founded in the wrong kind of tolerance.
This essay unravels the rather baffling knot of national values and characteristics,
in which tolerance can carry opposite meanings, through a consideration of the work
of environmental activist and immigrant authors (Kader Abdolah, Hafid Bouazza, and
Ellen Ombre). Their work allows for a consideration of the way in which the Dutch
discourse of openness, transparence, and tolerance works as an aesthetics. How
would this aesthetics of openness and tolerance relate to what, in this collection,
we call migratory aesthetics? The question is all the more relevant, as in Dutch
public debate, the common assumption is still that an emphasis on openness and/or
tolerance would facilitate integration, though there is fierce dissent about the political
implementation of these values. The essay shows that, even before conservative
voices began to dominate the debate, the discourse of tolerance has not led to the
acceptance of difference, but to evasion, and the institutionalization of difference.
Dutchness: Openness and Tolerance

Time and again, people who come to the Netherlands are struck by the
pronounced openness of the Dutch landscape and the Dutch people. The hero in
Opacity and Openness: Creating New Senses of Dutchness | 297

a semiautobiographical novel by an Iranian in exile sighs:
I had to get accustomed . . . Thus, I had to get accustomed to the dominant color
green. A cow in the mist was new to me. Those bare legs, bellies, breasts, buttocks and
the language were all things to which I had to get accustomed. (Abdolah 1997, 13)2
But not only people bare themselves. The renowned Dutch landscape, with its wide
skies and flat meadows, is sometimes even seen as open to the point of being trans-
parent (Hoving 2003, 131). Nothing stays hidden in such a space. The author of the
above mentioned novel remarks, with irony, like many immigrants and visitors before
him, that Dutch people boast of having created this territory themselves; they live in
a transparent space that they think they know and control completely (Van Blerck and
Harsema 2008, 5).
Openness, a strong belief in visibility and directness—the need for, and the belief
in, control and regulation—these are a few of the characteristics that may be found
in many representations of the Dutch. They suggest a realistic, rational and sober
culture that sustains a general acceptance of things that would remain hidden else-
where. A 2004 survey showed that the Dutch still believe that soberness and com-
mon sense are their primary national characteristics, and that they characterize their
own individual identity as primarily tolerant. Dutch immigrants defined themselves in
the same way, disagreeing only slightly with regard to their soberness. Moreover, the
Dutch express the opinion that the rest of Europe should adopt these Dutch values
as well. The values of tolerance, love of freedom, and soberness have been men-
tioned repeatedly by the architects of Dutch national identity, such as Siegenbeek in
the early nineteenth century, Potgieter and Bakhuizen van den Brink in the 1840s,
and Huizinga and Romein in the 1930s and 1940s. Present-day public debates about
Dutch national identity reiterate these primary values of Dutch culture: tolerance,
consensus, egalitarianism (Scheffer 2001).
The Dutch tradition of tolerance has long been an inspiration to other European
countries in search of an effective immigration policy, perhaps most especially to
Germany, with which the Netherlands shares kindred problems in their transition to
a multicultural society. However, in contrast with Germany, the Netherlands has had
an integration policy in place since the beginning of the 1980s. In 1994, the Dutch
government praised its own immigration policy as exemplary; it was regarded as
successful and in advance of other European nations (Böcker and Tränhardt 2003, 3).
One of the main causes of the success of the immigration policy was believed to be
its formally delineated tolerance of cultural difference—while this encoded respect
for cultural identity might be deemed the main element lacking in the German man-
agement of immigration.
Ten years later, however, the Dutch success is being seriously questioned, the
debate about immigration and multiculturalization has soured, and there is ample
reason to (re)consider the nature and effect of this renowned Dutch tolerance for
298 | Isabel Hoving

cultural difference. In the following, I will unravel the rather baffling knot of national
values and characteristics, in which tolerance can carry opposite meanings, through
a consideration of the work of environmental activist and immigrant authors. Their
work also allows me to consider how the Dutch discourse of openness, trans-
parence, and tolerance works as an aesthetics—how would this presumed aesthet-
ics relate to what, in this collection, we call migratory aesthetics? The question is all
the more relevant as, in Dutch public debate, the common assumption is that an
emphasis on openness and tolerance would facilitate integration. The fact that most
theories of migration, such as the influential work of Martinican writer Édouard
Glissant, emphasize the complexity and opacity in most immigrants’ artistic efforts
at connecting to their new cultural surroundings, should lead us to question that alle-
gation. If openness and tolerance are sufficient conditions for immigrants to inscribe
themselves in a new cultural space, how can it be that the essays by Mieke Bal and
Patricia Pisters in this volume, to name just two, emphasize the heterochronicity and
the mosaic-like structure in immigrant art?
Immigration Policies in the Netherlands

Up until 2001, most of the autochthonous Dutch certainly believed that the Dutch
integration policy was a success. The break came with two sets of events that
occurred in 2001, 2002, and 2004: first, 9/11; second, two political murders. The
first murder was the shocking slaying of Pim Fortuyn, a flamboyant, gay, right-wing
politician, who had been questioning the multicultural society in unusually sharp,
populist terms. The second was the brutal killing of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a
young fundamentalist Moroccan-Dutch Muslim in 2004. Van Gogh was the director of
Somalian-Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s film Submission, an incisive critique of
Muslim attitudes toward women. The response to the first murder in 2002 (by a white
animal rights activist) was without precedent. Overnight, the whole nation seemed
to change its opinion about the successes of the Dutch policy of immigration and
multiculturalization. The new consensus among white people seemed to be that the
much-praised policy of the eighties, that is “integration while retaining one’s cultural
identity,” had encouraged immigrants to stay within their own communities, unem-
ployed, engaging in criminal and antisocial activities, and clinging to their cultural
values, which now appeared deadly. The second murder reinforced these sentiments.
In hindsight, the change is not really surprising. The positive evaluations of
the Dutch policy were often based on a consideration of only the formal legal status
of immigrants, neglecting other aspects. As in France and England, it has been rela-
tively easy to obtain national status and equality before the law in the Netherlands—
especially when compared to her close neighbor Germany. In addition, the Dutch
antidiscrimination laws are strong, and minorities have been granted more cultural
group rights than anywhere else in Europe. These three characteristics all compared

favorably to German policies, especially those in effect before 2000 (Koopmans
2003, 46). A critical assessment of other indicators of the success of immigrant
integration, however, should also take immigrants’ position in the labor market into
account. Detailed comparative studies and discussions between researchers lead
one to conclude that, in this respect, the position of immigrants has since long been
worse in the Netherlands than in Germany (Böcker and Tränhardt, Koopmans).3
The Dutch tolerance for cultural difference, which was the hallmark of its integra-
tion policy until the end of the eighties, appeared to fail as a motor for integration. So
did the policy that followed in the nineties, which replaced the respect for cultural
identity with the pursuit of diversity, but which entailed a comparable reification of cul-
tural identity. This does not mean that the multicultural society has irrevocably failed.
The official governmental reports on multiculturalization argue that many immigrants
have done well for themselves. Remarkably, they also argue that this was in spite of,
rather than with the help of, Dutch immigration policy, which in their eyes has been
incoherent and rather unsuccessful, especially in the social and cultural domain. A
study by Tom Duyvené de Wit and Ruud Koopmans suggests that Dutch immigrants
tend to identify more strongly with their new nation than German immigrants (2001).
At the time, these nuances were lost on those who expressed their criticism of the
dominant Dutch immigration policy in the harshest terms—and who set the tone for
the debate in the years to follow.
Tolerance Revisited
Let us take a closer look at this Dutch tolerance, which is at the heart of the Dutch inte-
gration policy. Where does it come from? What has it done, and what does it do now,
within the multicultural society? Can it function as a strong motor for integration?
From its beginnings as a republic onward, the Dutch nation has chosen a strategy
of nonintervention to regulate the differences between its large minorities. This strat-
egy is built on the Dutch plea for freedom of conscience and religion, which, in the
sixteenth century, was directed toward the Spanish occupier, Philip II. Because the
religious minorities grew large enough to prevent their marginalization during the cen-
turies that followed, and none developed into the dominant minority, the government
of the Dutch consociation (as political scientist Lijphart calls it) allowed its minorities
to create its own institutions. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a further step was
taken: all citizens were granted formal civil rights. This did not mean that their reli-
gious identities were acknowledged, but that the differences between their religious
and political ideologies were regulated in a pillar-like structure, where each pillar was
granted full sovereignty.
Dutch sociologist Van Ginkel concludes that (from 1780–1790 onward) Dutch
national identity did not come into being “through state intervention, by the repres-
sion of national differences,” but by the “networking and ‘consensual practices’ . . . of
300 | Isabel Hoving

the political-cultural elites who emphasized and institutionalized differences”

(Van Ginkel 1999, 33). That is why one could say tolerance is not a consistent Dutch
value, but that it exists, first and foremost, as an institutionalized structure.
Since the sixteenth century, many debates and studies have addressed this
renowned Dutch tolerance (Gijswijt 1989). The first major debates were a reaction to
the violent religious intolerance of the Spanish occupiers in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth century; in the twentieth century the debates were in response to the Holocaust.
In the latter debates, the ambivalences inherent to the concept of tolerance received
more and more critical attention (Rogier 1965, Bovenkerk 1976, Kossmann 1984, Van
Doorn 1985, Dubbelman and Tanja 1987; see Gijswijt 1989, 16–24). At the beginning
of the twenty-first century, in the harsher debates in the wake of 2002, one is struck by
a curious consensus between the right-wing and left-wing critiques of the concept.
Right-wing speakers, the so-called “new-realists” (Prins 2004), interpret Dutch
tolerance as a national silence around the severe problems of immigration, and as the
cowardly, politically correct evasion of difference, as opposed to an openness toward
difference (see, e.g., Scheffer 2001, Schoo 2000). More progressive commentators
offer a comparable analysis. The Dutch sociologist and historian Hondius, for example,
argues that the passive form of tolerance dominant in the Netherlands and known as
“gedogen,” which means “to put up with, to tolerate a practice one disagrees with, or
which is against the law,” is close to the passive form of intolerance, evasion, which is
one of the most prevalent forms of discrimination (Hondius 1999, 9). Another sociolo-
gist, Cas Wouters, emphasizes that the strategy of evasion in general is a Dutch
characteristic (1990). Both strategies, tolerance and evasion, are considered to be
based on the radical differentiation between self and other, and they both testify to a
strong sense of superiority, from which stems the authority to tolerate or evade others.4
The two groups, however, differ in their opinions about the remedy. The new-realists
propose active intolerance as a remedy: the reaffirmation of Dutch national identity,
assimilation, and exclusion of those who do not conform (Scheffer, Vuijsje, see Prins
2004, 37). One is reminded of a speech by the European statesman, Frits Bolkestein,
at Humboldt University in Berlin in October 2004, praising the celebration of a German
Leitkultur as a remedy. The statements of the new-realists are made in the name of
that other strong Dutch tradition—openness, freedom of speech, and clarity. Their
opponents, however, often opt for a strategy of active tolerance—the path of negotia-
tion and interaction. Hondius offers the following helpful overview:
Active tolerance—acceptance after active argumentation
Passive tolerance—putting up with, overlooking
Passive intolerance—evasion, ignoring, keeping off
Active intolerance—exclusion, elimination (Hondius 1999, 9)
Traditionally, the Dutch seem to have only two main strategies at their disposal for
dealing with a variety of social, economic, political, and other differences: the passive

forms of tolerance and intolerance.5 A short example may help to illustrate these
Dutch ways of dealing with difference. It concerns a very curious debate that took
place in April of 2004. A government-supported environmental foundation found that
immigrants seldom visit the Dutch forests for leisure. After consulting a few immi-
grants, the foundation decided to create a forest in which, contrary to Dutch habit,
people were allowed to stray from the paths, pick fruits and nuts, etc. In this way the
project would avoid the logic of exclusion that structures Dutch forests: the exclusion
of culture (and people) from the domain of the natural, and the exclusion of immi-
grants. One initial reaction was a neutral report in a populist newspaper (De
Telegraaf), which coined the word “smulbos” (yum-yum forest). In the wake of that
article, an unexpectedly large number of people seemed to respond to the project in
a completely different way than intended. It was immediately read as an ethnic (or, by
that Dutch synonym, cultural) project. In an extended exercise in new-realist open-
ness, people protested that tax money was once again being wasted on a ridiculous
project that favored immigrants over the autochthonous population. White people
routinely assumed that the immigrant’s culture (here imagined as a homogeneous
entity) dictated that “the” immigrants must enjoy nature in a culturally specific way
that would be irreconcilable with that of the natives. The binary oppositions
“them/us,” “body/mind,” “smell and taste/look” and “primitive/modern” were
revived.6 The effort to create cultural diversity within the Dutch landscape was
met with aggressive protest, and with an actively intolerant plea for exclusionary
homogeneity.
Another project put into effect by the same hapless inventor of the forest project
might seem to be its logical counterpart. The essential aspect of this project, the
Empty Spot, can be described by saying that its director dispossessed a piece of the
Netherlands. By entwining an impenetrable thorny hedge, he closed off an area from
the Dutch landscape, which is otherwise governed by an endless series of rules and
prescriptions. There was no other way to formally liberate a piece of Dutch land-
scape: “For a tree it is impossible not to be owned by someone” (Volkskrant July 28,
2004).
The second case, despite its poetic resonance, does not represent a form of
tolerance entirely different from the first case. The effort to remove a piece of
nature from the Dutch landscape is, in a way, a testament to the culture’s inability to
engage with difference. Instead of thinking through the complexities of what a non-
destructive interaction between human beings and a partly natural, partly cultural
landscape would look like, the imaginative inventor opts for radical differentiation.
In this, he adheres to the first-mentioned Dutch strategy of representing difference
as absolute. “Inclusion, purification, branching off, exclusion—these are tenacious
tendencies within Dutch culture,” sociologist Gowricharn comments somewhat
sarcastically (1998, 103).
302 | Isabel Hoving

It would seem that Dutch history does not offer many solutions to the very real
need to acknowledge differences. The tenacious habit, of which one already finds
examples in the nineteenth century, of understanding differences between citizens
(in personal conduct, in art) as defined by culture and therefore as absolute and
unchangeable, is not very effective. It leads to evasion, and the institutionalization of
difference.
Against Tolerance: Three Proposals for a Multicultural Nation

Several renowned Dutch immigrant writers have questioned this reification of cultural
difference. At the same time, they question two other assumptions: 1. that Dutch
tolerance has created an open, egalitarian society, and 2. that integration is therefore
predicated on minorities’ knowledge and adoption of Dutch cultural history and
values. In their responses, they open up a new discursive space in which issues of
difference, openness, tolerance, and knowledge play completely different roles. Their
migratory aesthetics produce a new sense of space, which is characterized by some
of the qualities that mark the immigrants’ art discussed in the other contributions to
this section: notably, a certain thickness, stickiness, layeredness, or opacity, produced
by an inventive manipulation of time, memory, and fictional intertextuality. Thus, they
create new possibilities for belonging within a nation at odds with its own plurality.
Kader Abdolah
The quotation with which I started my essay is taken from De reis van de lege flessen
(The Journey of the Empty Bottles) (1997), the first novel by the Iranian writer Kader
Abdolah, who, in meticulous, sparse, almost transparent prose, narrates the story
of an Iranian refugee, Bolfazl, who tries to relate to the open and permissive Dutch
society in which he has landed. His closest acquaintance is his neighbor René, a gay,
unemployed painter, whom he one day espies lying naked in his inadequately fenced
back garden. In Bolfazl’s effort to find a place in a society, which, in spite of its
openness, does not offer many opportunities for socializing, he decides to let René
be his guide and mediator. “René was like a bead in a string of beads that has been
broken” (51).7
When Bolfazl understands that René is suffering from severe psychological prob-
lems, and that he has always been a stranger to society, as Bolfazl is now, he begins
to see René as his double. “Me? I went there to see everything. To track the process.
To find out how it could go when one is exiled” (59).8 A curious game of voyeurism,
imitation, and doubling ensues. “When I saw that René could no longer adequately
remember his past, that he no longer knew that I was Bolfazl, I suddenly realized that
I could no longer summon up that scent [of his past, IH] either” (74).9 No less than
Bolfazl’s, René’s life can be understood as a coherent narrative with a stable plot, ener-
gized by a strong desire. René’s desire for men, far from being an acknowledgement

or fulfillment of his identity, is ultimately empty, as it is frustrated by his much more
fundamental, painful alienation from life. However, the refugee can take René as his
guide precisely because he does not seek identity or agency. It would be a mistake to
suppose that Bolfazl models his identity on René’s. What he seeks is understanding—
not of Dutch society, but of exile, an experience that, he realizes, is also at the heart
of Dutch society. “I had to look properly, listen well, and remember everything. One
day I would be able to explain what it means to be exiled” (91).10
Instead of surrendering to the logic of the Dutch multicultural nation, with its
demand for a recognizable, fixed cultural identity, Bolfazl seeks to adopt the logic of
the flight, as he calls it, or, in other words, the logic of a life in exile, and he recog-
nizes this same logic in the life of some of the Dutch. Bolfazl creates meaning by
creating a multiple referential network, in which Dutch events are understood by
comparing them with Persian stories, and vice versa, while knowing full well that all
those stories and insights are partial and provisional, partly true, and partly fictional.
“I am looking for a correspondence between events . . . To be honest, I do not really
trust my own memories anymore. I invent those stories myself” (55).11 “For an exile,
fantasy and reality are intermingled” (108).12 This semiotics is based on the index
rather than the symbol. From this radically comparative perspective, transparency,
directness, control, and realism become less relevant qualities in Bolfazl’s aesthetics.
“Stories have their own laws. One is not able to change the course of stories” (106).13
Meaning is produced in the overlapping and mingling of stories.
With reference to a concept of the Martinican writer and theorist Edouard
Glissant, one might see that Abdolah is creating an opaque sense of place, by a
feverish calling forth of the many memories and fictions that seem somehow con-
nected to the events in his new surroundings. In Mieke Bal’s account of migratory
aesthetics, the “now-time” becomes sticky; in Abdolah’s work, the space of the pres-
ent is an opaque, sticky cluster of ever-expanding associations with both past and
present events, either remembered or fictional. For Glissant, who opposes the “right
to opacity” to the Western quest for transparence in the name of appropriation and
control, opacity stands for the irreducible density of the cultural other, a density which
resists all efforts of appropriation (1997, 189–94). Opacity would result from the irre-
ducible diversity of the world: “Transparency no longer seems like the bottom of
the mirror in which Western humanity reflected the world in its own image. There is
opacity now at the bottom of the mirror, a whole alluvium deposited by populations”
(1997, 111). Abdolah also understands the past’s presence in the present as an
unrepresentable opacity. His sticky, intimate, even erotic relational aesthetics finds
that meaning can only be produced by intimate interrelations with people who will,
perhaps unwittingly, unveil part of a meaning they do not possess and which cannot
be anticipated. Remarkably, it is the proverbial Dutch openness of women and gay
men, such as René, that make this interaction possible.
304 | Isabel Hoving

Abdolah builds the story of his hero upon the Dutch characteristics of openness,
though he refuses the realism and the notions of independent identity that
come with it, and the related notion of tolerance that depends on a sense of
hierarchy. Abdolah’s semiotics does not lead to an insight into cultural difference.
His story is about the phenomenon of difference itself (of being excluded, of being
in-between) and, as he narrates from the very location of difference, its semiotics
cannot be frustrated by Dutch absolutist definitions of difference as either presence
or absence.
Ellen Ombre
Surinamese-Dutch writer Ellen Ombre also questions the assumption that the prob-
lems of integration will be solved if immigrants learn about Dutch culture, its history
and its values. Not unlike Abdolah’s perception of knowledge as the product of inter-
action, Ombre argues that the multiplicity of Dutch culture makes it impossible to
know from the dominant perspective only.
In a collection of stories from 2000, Valse verlangens (False Desires) Ombre ques-
tions the possibility of knowing in a more fundamental way. She focuses on the Dutch
perception of the easy, open verbal exchange as a means of sharing and producing
knowledge—a perception only seemingly proximate to her own.
They spoke as if they exhaled, effortlessly. We are made out of words, but I fall short.
To converse is an art form. In that sense, I have not learnt how to speak, not about “the”
this and “the” that. Not by birth. (14)14
The pleasure I had imagined taking from my education failed to materialize.
Knowledge seemed to be restrained. One did nothing but but talk. About one’s own feel-
ings and those of others . . . My supervisor, a bald creep with hairy hands, judged my
language too posh. (30)15
Openness is here unmasked as a specific rhetorical skill, a skill with which the
author’s Surinamese community may have scant acquaintance. They are therefore
excluded from public debates and the production of knowledge. The rhetorical tradi-
tion of openness is also highly evasive—within different institutions and social
circles different modes of speech are demanded, or dismissed as not open enough,
a practice that effectively silences and excludes those on the outside.
But Dutch speech habits are also inadequate in addressing this reality. This is not
just because the Dutch do not know their own colonial history, but also because they
do not address the meaning of the hidden perversities in their present—perversities
that maintain earlier colonial practices of abuse. The stories in this collection all
address the present-day manifestations of the destructive colonial desires that have
been analyzed by many, from Frantz Fanon, to Laura Ann Stoler and Robert Young. In
one story, a Dutch pedophile, a member of progressive multiculturalist circles, takes
it completely for granted that his Surinamese female acquaintance sympathizes with

his sexual obsession for an Asian child. Elsewhere, such openness in matters of
sexuality is linked to the Dutch lack of shame.
Thus, Ombre offers a devastating critique of the Dutch values of tolerance and
openness, as rearticulated within its current permissive society. To the extent that
inherent bias relating to race, colonization, and slavery continue to have an unac-
knowledged impact on the Dutch conception of a multicultural society, they reinforce
exploitative power hierarchies and suppress critical counter-discourses. Finally, the
tenacious Dutch habit of reducing all sexual and relational conflicts to cultural differ-
ence makes it impossible to address these complex issues of power and exploita-
tion. Ombre attacks this habit in very explicit ways:
”Your problem [relational problems within an interracial marriage] should really be
reduced to the difference in cultures.” . . .
“You are just saying something,” Humphrey said. He felt duped by this false
observation.
“Cultural difference can lead to serious relational problems.”
He reminded Humphrey of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. (126)16
Instead of assuming that the conflicts that trouble present-day Dutch society are
rooted in cultural differences, Ombre focuses on political differences. Imposing a
knowledge of Dutch cultural habits and values on immigrant communities will not
bring a clear understanding of these political differences any closer.
Ombre’s stories address these issues explicitly, while also experimenting with the
stylistic means that best conveys a certain sense of social multiplicity that cannot be
easily resolved because of the potential conflicts that shape it. In some of Ombre’s
richest stories (for example “Teveel tegelijk” or “Verbinding”), she evokes a layered,
pluralistic image of a community of people whose lives intersect and intermingle for
specific historical or social reasons, their aims and interests often lacking any com-
mon ground. Often, the meetings between these characters with conflicting social and
sexual aims are characterized by obliviousness and miscomprehension; they are,
essentially, wrong. Thus, Ombre describes the small community of an immigrant fam-
ily with a hapless, insecure daughter who wants to marry at all costs, within the con-
text of a society of raw commodification. Or she suggests, in a few sparse descriptions
and portraits, masterfully, the transnational, (post)colonial time-space of both Surinam
and the Netherlands as a context for an understanding of the migratory dilemma
(Hoving 2005). Her migratory aesthetics is meaningful not primarily because of its
alternative imagining of space and time, but because it is a well-defined social and
political critique, responding to a well-defined dominant discourse of openness.
Hafid Bouazza
Where will this literary unmasking of Dutch practices of tolerance and openness lead
us? One possible answer lies within the sardonic, energetic, irresistibly irreverent
306 | Isabel Hoving

work of Hafid Bouazza, the much praised linguistic virtuoso, a Dutch writer of
Moroccan descent, who abhors being categorized as such. Bouazza’s topics are (sex-
ual) openness and the mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion. Quite in contrast to
Ellen Ombre’s distrust of desire and openness, he fondly imagines the erotic aspects
of the loss of boundaries and differentiations. In the mesmerizing descriptions that
fill his two most recent novels, he pictures the multicultural summer parks of the
Dutch capital, Amsterdam, not as yumyum-forests to feast on, but as gardens of
sexual delight. These parks are brimming with sensuality and intercultural confusion.
For Bouazza, sexuality is the domain in which intercultural differences are fought.
Mamette assured him that there would not be a wide cultural gap between them, as
she understood him and his culture, but the nature of the insurmountable problem did
not appear to be cultural, but sexual—in the widest sense of the word. (2003, 164)17
Whereas, for Abdolah, the fragmentation of identity is somewhat dangerous, it can
also lead to an intense eroticism, which, in turn, encourages semiosis. Bouazza’s
language reveals the sexual pleasure that lurks within the anxiety of fragmentation
and dissolution. In his own writing, this sexual pleasure is indistinguishable from
the poetic pleasure to be derived from his intense, sensual play with language. For
Bouazza, sexual difference rather than cultural difference lies at the heart of multicul-
turalization. If the Dutch preoccupation with difference testifies to a well-researched
anxiety about national dissolution, these authors suggest a different point of view:
immigrants and natives both share an anxiety about, an informed critical distrust of,
and a desire for openness.
This desired openness has nothing to do with a tolerance that is founded on an
ingrained sense of superiority—that is a notion they unmask, reject, or declare irrel-
evant. Nor do these authors celebrate the exclusionary rhetorical traditions that go
by the name of openness. Their desire for openness cannot be answered by merely
acknowledging an approach to diversity that reifies cultural difference.
Here lies perhaps one of the most important problems in assessing the nature of
their aesthetics. Though it is productive to recognize these immigrant artists’ inter-
est in the representation of space and time as heterogeneous, multiple, opaque,
mosaic-like, sticky, so that it can appear as a shared, though conflicted transnational
space (as a continuation of Benedict Anderson’s national space), in my view it is
paramount to analyze the exact historical and political nature of that multiplicity. For
every imagining of multiplicity is historically, socially, and politically defined. To under-
stand its nature, it is necessary to analyze the specific discursive field, or the spe-
cific situation of address, in which this imagining unfolds. For example, which of the
host nation’s inclusionary and exclusionary strategies are diagnosed and criticized in
the art work? Which of the nation’s specific words, insults, laws, policies, or ideals
interfere with immigrants’ endeavors? These will serve as their aesthetic points of
reference, as motives and discourses that the art work needs to question, mock,

subvert, translate. If film and video are the media par excellence for creating a sense
of flow, interruption and intensity, literature is eminently capable of conveying the
madness, violence, and sensuality of language—first and foremost, it is a discursive
art. To understand a writer’s migratory aesthetics, then, we need to grasp not merely
the level of the narrative (where images of space and time are shaped), but also the
level of the text itself, the level on which the text can be read as an intervention in a
concrete historical discursive field.
Culture Is Not the Answer

It seems to me that these writers, instead of being exclusively engaged in the creation
of an alternative imagining of multiplicity, can also be considered cultural activists.
As such, they demand an acknowledgement of the mechanisms of exclusion at
work on many levels and within many domains within Dutch society. Responding
to that demand, however, is no easy task.
Tolerance may be regarded as the central value of Dutch national culture but, as
it is a strategy of institutionalization rather than a consistent value; it does not lead
to a shared practice of openness to difference, which would stimulate multicultural-
ization and creolization. The prohibition on discrimination, imposed by law, receives a
different form within every specific domain and institution, with its own “fine-meshed
constructions of symbolic boundaries, [and, IH] processes of in- and exclusion” (Van
Ginkel 1999, 306). The scope of a national policy is simply too general to effectuate
the desired changes involving integration and diversity in all those cultural contexts,
which do not comprise one homogeneous national culture (Van Ginkel 1999, 306).
When we look at the strategies adopted by young Dutch immigrants, as did three
scientists, including myself, in a research project on immigrant influences on Dutch
everyday culture, we see that they do not merely try to find a place in society by
emphasizing their ethnic cultural identity (Hoving, Dibbits, and Schrover 2005). In
this, they resemble the immigrant writers I have discussed. In response to an identi-
tarian discourse that tries to categorize and situate young immigrants in ways they
find confining, they take recourse in a variety of strategies of identification.18 It is
tempting to see this, also, as an effort at creating opacity—by refusing to self-identify
in terms of only one or two dominant axes of categorization (nation, ethnicity).
Whether these literary and everyday counter-strategies of identification, which evade and
critique the regulating mechanisms of cultural tolerance and integration, will be
acknowledged, and result in a strong counter-discourse, depends on whether these
voices will be heard in public and political debates. In this it seems that the oft-criticized
neighboring nation of Germany is ahead of the Netherlands; immigrants are repre-
sented to a much larger extent in trade unions and work councils. The sense of being
represented within the domain of politics, and therefore of enjoying “a shared
engagement with the political society,” may be a more important factor for one’s
308 | Isabel Hoving

sense of being included in society than shared cultural values, as Bhikhu Parekh
argues in a Dutch immigrant journal (2003, 10).
Within the Netherlands, the notion of tolerance implies that the acknowledgement
of cultural rights is the main key to integration. But in a nation with a tenacious tradi-
tion of reducing power differences to cultural differences, and a tradition of regulat-
ing cultural difference into a segregated structure with its own unspoken hierarchies,
neither the celebration of cultural identity, nor the plea for multiculturalization based
on a reified sense of identity will bring about change toward a genuinely plural soci-
ety. What is needed, both for a plural society and for a theory of migratory art prac-
tices, is a subtle understanding of the vexed, interdisciplinary, paradoxical issue of
representation: first, the insight that immigrants should have adequate social and
political representation in the dominant institutions; second, the insight that the
Dutch dominant discourses, organized around the notions of openness and toler-
ance, do not offer immigrants much space for cultural representation; third, the
insight that the notion of representation needs to be, and is, problematized to the
point of embracing notions such as opacity; fourth, the insight that this problemati-
zation may lead to an artistic and theoretical move away from representation to
antirepresentational and anti-identitarian explorations of flows and multiplicities;
fifth, the insight that, if we want to understand such migratory aesthetic practices,
such artistic moves must always be understood in relation to the social (but no less
intense) desire for representation in the curiously, irrationally exclusionary, but
inevitable Dutch institutions.

Notes
1. An earlier version of this essay, which was 7. All translations of the Dutch literary texts
first published electronically as a Transit are mine.
publication, was based on a lecture at the
University of California, Berkeley. http:/german. 8. Ik? Ik ging om alles te zien. Het proces te
berkeley.edu/transit/2005/TRANSIT50909.pdf. volgen. Om erachter te komen hoe het zou
kunnen verlopen als je verbannen bent.
2. My translation of: Ik moest wennen . . . Ook
moest ik aan die overheersende kleur groen 9. Toen ik zag dat René zich zijn verleden niet
wennen. Een koe in de mist was nieuw voor mij. goed meer herinnerde en dat hij niet meer wist
Aan die blote benen, buiken, borsten, billen en dat ik Bolfazl was, besefte ik ineens dat ik ook
aan de taal moest ik wennen. die geur niet meer kon terugroepen.
3. During the economic boom in the 10. Ik moest goed kijken, goed luisteren en
Netherlands at the end of the nineties, the alles onthouden. Ik zou ooit kunnen vertellen
unemployment of immigrants was still three wat verbannen zijn betekent.
times as high as that of the autochthonous
population, whereas in recent years, during 11. . . . ik zoek een overeenkomst tussen
an economic crisis in Germany, their gebeurtenissen . . . Eerlijk gezegd vertrouw ik
unemployment there has been only twice as mijn herinneringen niet meer zo. Ik verzin al die
high as that of the autochthonous population verhalen zelf.
(Koopmans 2003). Around the turn of the
century, 35% of the Turkish pupils in the 12. Fantasie en werkelijkheid lopen door elkaar
Netherlands left secondary school without a bij een banneling.
certificate, compared to 21–23% in Germany
(boys-girls). 13. Verhalen hebben hun eigen wetten. Men is
niet in staat om de loop van de verhalen te
4. In the case of “gedogen,” the veranderen.
acknowledgement is arbitrary; offenders can be
prosecuted whenever the law finds it necessary, 14. Zij praatten alsof ze lucht uitbliezen,
without having to motivate the prosecution of the moeiteloos. We hangen van woorden aan elkaar,
one and not the other. “Gedogen” leads to maar ik schiet tekort. Converseren is een kunst.
inequality before the law. Ik heb in die zin niet leren praten, niet over “de”
dit en “de” dat. Van huis uit niet.
5. The impulse to institutionalize difference is
one way to deal with a variety of differences, 15. Het plezier dat ik me van de opleiding
which are, reductively, interpreted as absolute had voorgesteld, bleef uit. Kennis leek aan
differences in culture. This approach is, in fact, banden te worden gelegd. Men deed daar niets
a form of passive tolerance. Conversely, the anders dan praten. Over eigen en elkaars
tendency to deny difference, to refuse to deal gevoelens . . . Mijn scriptiebegeleider, een
with it and to look the other way, is a passive kale creep met haar op zijn handen, vond
form of intolerance. Seeing difference as mijn taal te hoogdravend.
merely a form of deprivation or backwardness
can also be understood as a form of evasion 16. “Jullie probleem moet werkelijk worden
(see Koenis 2002, 74). teruggebracht tot het cultuurverschil!”
“U zegt maar wat,” zei Humphrey . . . Hij voelde
6. Some immigrants also felt discriminated zich de dupe van die valse waarneming . . .
against and insulted by the project (“I am “Cultuurverschillen kunnen tot ernstige
not an ape,” a Cape Verdian politician said). relationele problemen leiden.”
310 | Isabel Hoving

Hij deed Humphrey denken aan Marlon Brando 18. Some may define themselves alternately as
in Apocalypse Now. town dwellers (Amsterdammer instead of Dutch),
as Muslim, as professional; some may lie about
17. Mamette stelde hem gerust dat er geen their ethnic identity, sometimes by way of play,
culturele kloof tussen hen zou gapen, omdat zij sometimes in order to escape discrimination;
hem en zijn cultuur begreep, maar het some may refuse to define their mixed descent.
onoverkomelijke probleem bleek niet cultureel They will often identify with professional role
van aard, maar seksueel, in de ruimste zin van models (see also Prins), or with a certain music
het woord. scene.
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312 | Isabel Hoving

Global Art and the Politics

of Mobility: (Trans)Cultural
Shifts in the International
Contemporary Art-System
Joaquín Barriendos
Rodríguez
Translated by Anke van Wijck
ABSTRACT
This article addresses the relevance of politics of mobility in an analysis of the inter-
national contemporary art system. Apart from considering the mobility of all those
agents who take part in this system (artists, gallery managers, curators, collectors,
etc.), it chiefly focuses on the symbolic mobility of subjectivities, the displacements
of imaginaries, and the transcultural negotiations emerging from the inclusion of
the politics of identity and multiculturalist points of view within the global art system.
The geopolitics of subjectivity, the representational systems, and the aesthetic
legitimizing strategies play an important role in this research. This article focuses on
transcultural conflicts caused by the internationalization of contemporary art as well
as on epistemological debates raised by the affirmative use of concepts such as
hybridization, periphery, marginality, and subalterity within globalizing discourses.
Why isotopologics? The questioned ideas are not temporary ones here, but ones to be
questioned from the view of temporality. Because racism, sexism, chauvinism and many
other forms of the domination are not emerging issues, but they are endlessly discovered
in the areas which one cannot imagine. If it is so, then for an artist there is a role of
negotiating these issues and to invent ‘non-fascistic ways of existence’. The first step to
it is producing the recognition of the connectivity between the dominant and dominated
and considering inequality from this perspective. Isotopologics is the methodological
critique of the existence in equal space by non-equal means.
(Azizov 2002c)
Global Art and the Politics of Mobility | 313

Numerous studies and a wide variety of disciplines have addressed the displace-
ments of individuals all over the face of the earth, and the transcultural interactions
that derive from migratory encounters and disencounters. Despite the fact that they
feed off of each other, we can divide these studies into two large disciplinary groups.
On the one hand, these issues have been the object of study of disciplines such as
historical demography, sociology and migration ecology, human geography, historical
consumer sociology, area studies, international relations, social anthropology,
evolutionary psychology, and bio-sociology; on the other hand, they have been the
focus of economic-statistical disciplines like marketing, geography of work, economic
impact studies, international social capital administration, transcultural organiza-
tional studies, or the geo-economy of migration. Instead of analyzing the different
cross-pollinations and mutual indebtedness between them I would like to emphasize
the fact that such a division reveals the interdisciplinary restructuring process,
as well as a geopolitical and geocultural “opening” of the social sciences, as referred
to by Immanuel Wallerstein and the world-system analysts (1996, 10; 1997, 94;
1998, 141).
The positivist, sociological, economist, dialectical-materialist, or structuralist
matrix of most of the mentioned studies has contributed to the fact that the study of
human mobility has systematically centered on a set of descriptive categories. These
categories aim at providing representation for the different social groups and their
respective movements. Based on physico-mathematic principles, these categories
intend to scientifically and objectively represent the geographic distribution of soci-
eties, to statistically differentiate different groups from one another, and to establish
among them a set of certain relations according to their spatial-temporal disposition
and adscription; that is to say, according to their physico-geographic condition and
their geo-identitary enunciation (Barriendos 2006, 162; 2010, 245; Mignolo 2002,
60). In other words, these disciplines carry the weight of the scientificist and univer-
salist matrix that shaped geographic thought and geopolitical imagination in Western
colonial modernity.
Therefore, the systematic abstraction and pretended “objective” representation of
subjects and their movements are at the root of what could be defined (in allusion to
the positivist sociology of August Comte and the social determinism of Adolph
Quetelet) as the sociophysics of human displacement; that is, a means of inter-
preting mobility and its cultural implications by limiting them to the accumulation of
quantifiable data, mathematically visualizable sequences, and objectivated descrip-
tions of changes in people’s geographical position.1 These objectivations of mobility,
being anchored in the beholder’s congealed, transparent, and bare vision, that is to
say, framed in a Cartesian epistemology that conceals and dilutes the very locus of
topographic observation, paraphrasing the Colombian philosopher Castro-Gómez,
can be described as the hubris of point zero geographical knowledge (Castro-Gómez
314 | Joaquín Barriendos Rodríguez

2004, 1.2). As a result of such abstract and visually colonized readings of mobility,
we perceive a sort of naturalization and universalization of social space-time. Strongly
linked to Newtonian physics, quantitative demography, and social determinism,
these physico-social representations of mobility have also contributed to the fact
that the symbolic and intersubjective sphere of identities in transit experienced a
lack of consideration in the social sciences dealing with displacement and cultural
interaction.
If we are, then, concerned with conferring a central position to the politics of mobil-
ity, it is to trace recent fractures within the epistemological systems on which the
physico-sociological matrix is grounded. In this sense, the perspective from which we
intend to undertake the study of the politics of mobility is strongly linked to what is
known as geo-epistemology and the production of “border thinking,” as well as to the
reintroduction of the symbolic sphere and the transcultural dimension of mobility
(Mignolo 1999a, 13; 1999b, III; 2002, 60). Beginning with the appearance of a sup-
posedly global art within the international contemporary art system, this essay will
deal with the appearance of those epistemological perspectives that have been
questioning the physico-sociological matrix of mobility, the Westernist universaliza-
tion of knowledge, and the depoliticization of mobility through the objectivation of
movement.
The decomposition of capitalism—as a production system pivoting on the econ-
omy of time and the organization of the workplace (Fordist capitalism)—and its
obvious mutation toward more flexible, transmigratory, and dislocated forms of
(post-Fordist) production have pushed the social sciences into expanding their focal
points when studying mobility, time perception, and spatial construction.2 The cul-
tural turn in poststructural anthropology also introduced some questioning as to the
relationship between modernity, mobility, and late capitalism. Consequently, several
interdisciplinary fields, such as globality studies, hemispheric studies, global visual
studies, or the field of translocal anthropology have increasingly incorporated an
approach that we could tentatively define as the symbolic dimension of human mobility.
Therefore, today it is easy (perhaps too easy) to find allusions to the relationship
between imaginaries and the globalization processes of cultural diversity.
Geographer Tim Cresswell has referred to the presence of this symbolic dimen-
sion of mobility as the metaphysics of contemporary nomadism (Cresswell 2006, 25).
Consequently, in order to tackle the construction and global legitimization processes
of cultural imaginaries resulting from the present migratory processes, it is neces-
sary to do something more than simply describe the way in which subjects migrate
taking their imaginaries with them; it is also necessary to comprehend the way in
which transcultural negotiations, international labor redistributions, and colonial lega-
cies operate on a symbolic and epistemic level (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2010). To suc-
ceed in such an objective, it is essential to set out from a decolonizing rather than

from a postcolonialist reading of mobility study (Mignolo and Tlostanova 2006, 205;
Grosfoguel and Cervantes-Rodriguez 2002); if not, it would be easy to succumb
repeatedly to multiculturalist visions of global society and its planetary flows, and to
the mythification of transnational migratory reality.
Therefore, the symbolic dimension of individuals in movement that we intend to
study now has nothing to do with the vindication of an originary identity-territory or an
unmovable and univocal subjectivity of subjects in transit, or with the processes of
alienation, or the reconstruction of an identity fractured by displacement. On the con-
trary, the symbolic dimension of mobility we are interested in is that which shapes
the cultural processes and contexts where—from a geo-epistemological point of
view—new subjectivities are being negotiated; other subjectivities that were not
inscribed either in the body or in the memory of individuals prior to displacement;
other subjectivities that could not have been imagined as future identities or as iden-
titary perspectives before being embodied through movement. Consequently, what
we are interested in is the subjective agency of other knowledge; an agency derived
from the politico-performative nature of human mobility, that is to say, from the insti-
tuting power of mobility politics and from what Ramón Grosfoguel has called the
body-politics of knowledge. As he has pointed out, instead of talking about “immi-
grants” we must speak of colonized/racialized subjects (2008, 22).
In this sense, there is a tight relationship between the symbolic dimension of
human displacement and the construction of a new political space in which trans-
cultural interaction as a result of global movements operates as a critical tool with
regard to citizenship, and migratory and identity politics. Therefore, symbolic mobility
not only concerns the positional change of bodies in space, but also the displace-
ment of social representations and the very power of individual self-representation.
The symbolic dimension of mobility, then, comes into direct confrontation with the
decentering of a number of elements that, earlier, seemed to be both fixed, and inher-
ent to the subject and to his/her conscription to a certain territory, elements such as
identity, nationality, race, gender, belonging, neighborhood, etc. This is why, at pres-
ent, the transdisciplinary study of mobility has become an essential tool not simply
with regard to the development of social knowledge and the critique of transnational
cultural institutions, but also for what Walter Mignolo calls the geo-politics of
knowledge (Mignolo 2002, 58), that is, for power relations based on the location and
transmission of knowledge and subjectivities.
In consonance with the questioning of the aforementioned physico-social matrix of
mobility—and also as a result of the interactions of global migratory flows and the
construction of new transnational public spheres—mobility politics turns out to be a
venue from which to progress in the study of the present transcultural and intersub-
jective conflicts. Therefore, today, the politics of mobility constitutes a field in which
the claim for the right to free movement of individuals goes hand in hand with the

debate on the negotiation between differential subjectivities rather than differential

identities; that is, between subjectivities that coexist and make sense thanks to (or
in spite of) their relation of proximity to a specific cultural context or their synchronic-
ity with a given moment-space. These differential subjectivities, therefore, change
and are modified over time and, in doing so, also modify the contexts in which they
achieve political power. According to Ernesto Laclau, the central problem of differen-
tial identity is that one “cannot validate a differential identity without distinguishing it
from a context; however in the process of making this distinction, one simultaneously
validates that very context. But the contrary is also true: one cannot destroy a con-
text without simultaneously destroying the identity of that particular individual who
carries out the destruction” (Laclau 1996, 27). For that same reason, relations of
proximity between subjects and contexts with a differential cultural burden are, as we
see it, a matter that always concerns the broad geo-identitary and transcultural
dimension of subjectivity, meaning the dimension by which subjectivation processes
imply the construction of a new transcultural instituent locus. This, in our opinion, is
the deep sense of the present global dimension of transitory subjectivities.
This text then aims at problematizing the way in which mobility politics operates
within what is known as the international contemporary art-system; that is, within
the context of the economic, symbolic, and transcultural fabric devised by the new
international biennials; the translocal net of galleries; the new geography of cultural
institutions, museums, foundations, and boards of trustees; as well as through the
internationalization process in contemporary art that took place from the 1980s
onward. Thus, the core objective of this article is to describe, on one hand, the most
relevant consequences of the epistemological turn that mobility has taken in the
processes of production, circulation, and reception of contemporary art on a global
level, and, on the other, to criticize the multiculturalist and internationalist discourse
of the global exhibition systems. In order to deepen into the subject, I will attempt
to provide a detailed description of the perceptions implicit within these exhibition
systems regarding international mobility (about art works, exhibitions, artists,
audiences, curators, etc.), by problematizing the immediate sources from which
contemporary international and postcolonial art discourse derives. I will also put to
the fore some of the questioning through which the politics of mobility exposes the
transcultural cartography of globalized art. And finally, I will analyze the desire for
internationality of this new global art in the light of border thinking (Mignolo 1999a),
and will put it in the context of the globalizing function of a number of concepts,
including hybridization, marginality, frontier, and periphery.
The Mobility Turn and the Decolonization of Geographical Thought

Echoing the anthropological turn—and its impact on cultural tourism, the new tech-
nologies of bio-political control, or the new ethnology of urban imaginaries, as well as

on theoretical approaches like spatio-temporal “compression,” and on what Tim
Unwin refers to as the critique on the social production of space—mobility politics
have favored a profound decentering of the way we may geopolitically think about
subjectivity (Jameson 1988, 347; Harvey 1990, 284; Unwin 2000, 11).3 If we value
the impact of such transformations in its broad dimension, then it is legitimate to
think that a genuine change is taking place these days: a mobility turn.
In consonance with CeMoRe (Center for Mobilities Research) at Lancaster
University, the magazine Mobilities, and its director John Urry’s research lines, Pete
Adey and Paul Bevan have asserted the presence of this mobility turn and have
attempted to point out two elements that prove to be of utmost relevance for
the analysis of mobility politics and transcultural subjectivity in the field of contemporary
art: on the one hand, the overlap between humanistic and scientificist perspectives
when tackling problems traditionally associated with the “natural” and physical
dimension of movement, and, on the other hand, the deep imbrications of mobility
of individuals throughout space with the economic, symbolic, and political elements
that most define today’s cognitive capitalism, such as the new international labor
division, ethno-tourism, the global economy of creativity, the politicization of global
public spheres, the transnationalization of talent, and the translocal circulation of
individuals and subjectivities. In a text engaged with the Earth Sciences and entitled
“Connected Mobility?,” Adey states,
Following the current ‘mobility turn our subjects of study have widened to include
anything that can be conceived of as mobile: from people to things, from animals to
data packets . . . This mobilisation of research seems to have spawned great interest
in the transnational migration of immigrants and refugees, the drifting nomadism of
tramps and vagabonds . . . Recent trends have also seen the exploration of virtual
spaces and the seemingly ‘disembodied’ mobility of travel through the cyberspaces of
the World Wide Web or Computer Simulations.4 (Adey and Bevan 2004)
Given that this is a highly generic and schematic description, it might be useful to
state that the cultural dimension of the mobility turn consists in offering a clear epis-
temic distinction between the study of mobility and that of movement. The emer-
gence of the mobility turn prompts an evaluation from a different angle of the
implications of the presence of mobility politics on contemporary subjectivity.
Consequently, critical understanding of the mobility turn postulates allows the emer-
gence of the following inquires: 1) the radical questioning of physico-social remnants
in the study of mobility, and 2) the use of mobility politics to deconstruct the smooth-
ness of the postcolonial map. In this way, while movement can still be understood as
the repeatable and abstract displacement of an object (or a subject) in any given
quantifiable circumstance—and therefore circumscribed within the radius of percep-
tion in Euclidean geometry and the radius of visualization in the Cartesian system—
after the appearance of the mobility turn, mobility must be conceived as the set of

symbolic-social variables of each single displacement (therefore, we are talking

about unique and unrepeatable displacements). These variables would not be rele-
vant simply because all displacements are always inscribed within a certain social
context on which they depend, but rather because such displacements transform the
mentioned context, thereby modifying the complex web of levels of meaning woven
between the movement of bodies, cultural representation of space, and politicization
of transitory subjectivities.
Mobility in this sense is something completely different from movement. As
Adey says,
Mobility is understood within social contexts. Rather than a blank canvas upon
which mobility takes place, space is understood to be striated by social relationships
and practices. Here, mobility is given meaning. Mobility without meaning and signifi-
cance is simply movement, a point-to-point abstraction. We can see mobility not just in
terms of consumption, but also importantly in terms of production; how movement is
given meaning in economic, social, cultural contexts—which can become ideologically
bound to place. (Adey and Bevan 2004, II)
Seen from this perspective, although the emigration of a group of Cubans to Miami
in a makeshift boat, the phenomenon of thousands of workers yearly crossing the
border between Mexico and the United States, or that of a community of Tchechenians
crossing the Caucasian mountains toward Georgia constitute a certain set of move-
ments, the true cultural meaning therein lies in the symbolic framework of their
mobility, or rather in the racial, territorial, transcultural, ethical, economic, political,
historical, and epistemological implications of such displacements.
The new theoretical contiguities of mobility politics involve, then, an important
change in the conceptual relation between geographical thought and the—voluntary
or involuntary—displacement of individuals over a territory, and also in the relation
between the processes of hybridization and cultural representation and the transna-
tional structures pertaining to the production, circulation, exhibition, and meaning of
contemporary art. Elsewhere I have attempted to define these new epistemological
contiguities as the geo-aesthetic dimension of contemporary art (Barriendos 2007,
178), and the symbolic transformations of the new geographic coloniality of global art
as a process of strategic art market translocation (Barriendos 2006, IV). From such a
geo-aesthetic perspective, cultural imaginaries, art works, global exhibition circuits,
artist residencies, curatorial attitudes, new international contemporary art institu-
tions, etc. reveal not only knowledges that can be placed within the cartography of
global culture; they are also knowledges—and this proves to be crucial in the
construction, resignification, and repositioning of subjectivities in transit—that
are culturally and symbolically located. The recognition of the strategic processes
of translocation of all these elements also implies the recognition that such
elements have been historically and epistemologically built on a set of geographical

representations laden with frictions, disqualifications, disauthorizations, and other
forms of hierarchization and cultural transgression. As it is, the geo-aesthetic analy-
sis of contemporary art is not only strongly linked to cartographic systems of repre-
sentation, but also to colonial and postcolonial technologies (visual, material, and
discursive) for controlling mobility politics.5
In this sense, the arena for debate on aesthetic transcultural representations and
geo-aesthetic interaction can be seen as a complex negotiation and cultural transla-
tion ground, with little space for consensus and transparent intercultural debate.
Within the international and internationalizing contemporary art system—besides
identity politics—aspects such as transnational management of global imaginaries
and transcultural politics of diversity representation are at play. Therefore, when
it comes to analyzing the international contemporary art system, the relevance
of mobility politics lies in its capacity to criticize and decenter the foundations of
multiculturalist discourse and to remap the net of geo-aesthetic tensions and the
coloniality of knowledge of so-called “global art.”
Among many other theoreticians, Román de la Campa (1996), Graham Huggan
(1991), Arthur Robinson (1989), and Homi Bhabha (1997) have each attempted to
demonstrate that the field of cultural translation as well as that of the politics of
representation in which the art world operates are not only strongly linked to the full
anthropologizing effort of modern colonial cartography, but also to strategies of
symbolic representation of cultural diversity through the social production of geo-
graphical thought. However, before we start analyzing the field of transcultural nego-
tiations within the international contemporary art system, it is well worth taking note
of the radical understanding of Walter Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova’s words on the
subjective dimension of epistemic borders:
‘Borders’ will be in the twenty-first century what ‘frontiers’ where in the nineteenth.
Frontiers were conceived as the line indicating the last point in the relentless march of
civilization. On the one side of the frontiers was civilization; on the other, nothing; just
barbarism or emptiness. The march of civilization and the idea of the frontiers created
a geographic and bodygraphic divide. Certain areas of the planet were designated as
the location of the barbarians, and since the eighteenth century, of the primitives. In
one stroke, bodies were classified and assigned a given place on the planet. But who
had the authority to enact such a classification, and what was the logic of that classifi-
cation? Furthermore, the classification of the world by region, and the link established
between regions and people inhabiting them, was parallel to the march of civilization
and companions of it: on the other side of the epistemic frontiers, people do not think
or theorize; hence, one of the reasons they were considered barbarians. (Mignolo and
Tlostanova 2006, 205)
It is, then, in the framework of decolonization of the modern geographical
imagination—rather than from the simple recognition of hybridity and the

“in-between”—that we attempt to problematize the geo-aesthetic dimension of

the new international contemporary art system. And it is within the framework of
the coloniality of geographic knowledge that we intend to question the global role
of new translocal contemporary artists and curators. As there are only a limited
number of curators and artists moving worldwide throughout the physical geography
of the international contemporary art-system, we are forced to put into circulation
new ways of reflecting about the colonialist geographies of art and hierarchical forms
of transcultural representation, and to rediscover the decolonizing power of mobility
politics.
With such objectives in mind, the following questions arise: What type of carto-
graphy of transcultural relations does the international contemporary art system
provide? What are the operating politics of inclusion or exclusion? What is the role of
the symbolic dimension of mobility put into circulation by the agents partaking in the
global modern art exhibition processes? What substantiates the international and
universal nature of the new global art?
Global Art: Symbolic Violence, and Periphery

From what we have seen, it should be obvious that the international contemporary art
system is far from being a smooth space articulated by the free confluence of equi-
distant global mobilities. The contrary is true: the present global art circuits consti-
tute a complex net of geo-aesthetic tensions that exert power over the politics of
transcultural representation, as well as over the very politics of transcultural mobility.
As earlier stated, the globalization of cultural diversity has rendered inoperative any
approach to the international contemporary art system that—in a deep sense—fails
to take into account the geo-aesthetic dimension of global art. And it is in this dimen-
sion that the mechanisms of global circulation of art intersect with the geopolitical
negotiations of subjectivity. Therefore, the geo-aesthetic approach to translocal con-
temporary art is strongly linked to symbolic displacements and subjective mobilities,
in the sense that these displacements affect the way in which symbolic, immaterial,
and cognitive assets circulate at present. In this way, the mobility of this kind of asset
is directly or indirectly refracted in the internationalization processes of art and the
universalization of knowledge.
In the framework of global curatorial activities, and within the international con-
temporary art exhibition systems, the globalization of diversity has recently material-
ized in a theoretical and exhibitional attitude known as the new internationalism.6
In order to position ourselves, this new internationalism defends the notion of the
juxtaposition of the local and the global, the peripheral and the central, the legitimate
and the subordinate, thereby turning the international artistic language into a kind of
new Esperanto. If we consider the ways in which the transcultural politics of represen-
tation and mobility politics within the international contemporary art system operate,

then the idea of a new internationalism not only risks idealizing the global nature of
art, but also re-essentializing the very autonomy of the artistic.
Only a few decades ago, contemporary art was taken to be international when
it was primarily composed of work produced by Western or Westernized artists. The
organizers of international exhibitions—strange as it may sound, curators did not
exist in the terms in which this profession is considered today—all belonged in one
way or another to the Western mainstream. Indeed, the vast majority of cultural insti-
tutions that brought about the production, creation, and international diffusion of con-
temporary art were in the hands of Western or Westernized managers. Non-Western
or “peripheral” art more often than not was spurned or deflected to historical or
ethnographic museums, as though the development of the contemporary and the
postmodern were located in a restricted area on the map of global contemporary art
production. Labels of primitive, fantastic, or naïf, affixed by Westernized institutions
to those artistic productions considered historically retrograde with respect to the
modernizing process, became stigmas that the artistic peripheries gradually incorpo-
rated as constitutive elements of their own marginality; as a result, the supposedly
incompletely realized modernity, epistemic immaturity, and naturalized economic
underdevelopment of the non-Western geographies were globally accepted. Behind
the idea that artistic peripheries had insistently imitated the Western avant-gardes
or neo-avant-gardes lurked a Westernized premise of geo-cultural progress. In this
scenario, the periphery’s profitability within the contemporary exhibition circuit was
not a condition to be adequately accounted for and, with regard to the marketplace,
efficiently exploited.
However, the present situation is decidedly different. In only two-and-a-half
decades, the geography of contemporary art has gone from being exclusive and
centralized to omnivorously all-embracing and self-revisionist. At every turn, we see
biennials, fairs, round-tables, and exhibitions materializing. Each and every one of
them is explicitly international and asserts a “harmonious” coexistence between artists
from the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa, south and central Asia, South and Central
America, the Mexican-American border, eastern Europe, and (apparently) elsewhere
with artists from North America and central Europe. In a very short space of time, the
mainstream has given up its limited territory and gone in search of the periphery. As
in the old days of colonial expansionism, alterity, the exotic, the diverse, or, in one
word, the Other, have aroused the interest of museums, galleries, macro-exhibitions,
and commercial contemporary art fairs. Even a group territorially and culturally as far
removed as the Innuits was represented in the new arena of contemporary art as
articulated by Documenta 11 in Kassel. In the blink of an eye, the scenification of
the multicultural has turned into the raw material of every international exhibition.
The West was avid for alterity and, at its call, the emerging cultures “replied most
positively with new peripheral experiences, at all levels” (De la Nuez 2002, VI).

Through this absorption, the marginal, the hybrid, and the peripheral turned into pow-
erful assets of the cultural economy. By generating an added value to global contem-
porary art, they reanimated the market and the circulation of contemporary goods
that were legitimately exotic, yet potentially international. The most characteristic
and stigmatized traits of global art, that is, the epistemic marginality and the geo-
graphical peripherality of the non-Western art, underwent an accelerated and surpris-
ing process of symbolic recapitalization.
With regard to the inevitable integration of the periphery within the international-
ization process and the biennializational trends in contemporary art, the study of the
symbolic dimension of mobility and the resulting theoretical understanding of con-
cepts such as “aesthetic proximity” or “cultural translatability” should therefore be
useful in bringing to the fore the identitary frictions and geopolitical marks that are
woven and unwoven around the postcolonial discourse of the international contem-
porary art-system. Consequently, it is the role of mobility politics to remap new
forms of coloniality that operate through transcultural aesthetics and subjectivities
(Mignolo 2007, III). Paraphrasing Anibal Quijano’s posit, this kind of coloniality of the
power of representation no longer explicitly operates on the physical territory of
cultural identity, but rather surreptitiously and within the sign, meaning infra-
topographically. Therefore, the openly pluralistic and compulsory “balanced” fitting
together of all cultures within macro-exhibitions is far from being—as Okwui Enwezor
has put it—a wholesome compendium of voices (2002, II).
Accordingly, the fetishization of alterity and the aesthetization of what is subordi-
nate or at the frontier are probably the most misleading and contradictory forms of
the multicultural. Moreover, they are both among the forms of epistemic violence
most difficult to offset, as they operate within the very discourse of vindication and
global recognition that is being recreated in the very core of the international contem-
porary art exhibitions. Multiculturalism and its strategies of representational integra-
tion are therefore liable to generate conditions that enable the coercion of cultural
diversity through the aesthetic discourse of diversity itself, by substituting the a priori
disqualification of minorities for a stereotypifying aesthetic (museographic) represen-
tation of the subordinate (Barriendos 2010, 250).
Geo-Aesthetics and Cultural Hybridization

Today, purity—be it cultural, gender, racial, or disciplinary—tends to be understood
as an irreconcilable artificial and academist construction with respect to the hetero-
glossia of the multiple epistemes of today’s world. The rise of identity politics and
cultural essentialism in the early nineties motivated numerous epistemological
battles, political antagonisms, and performative claims within the progressive
academic arena and social movements. Semiotic racism and gender discrimination,
which seemed to be implicit aspects of white-patriarchal-capitalist Western colonial

modernity, were hardly questioned. It was primarily chicanas and black feminist
theoreticians, who, through their critiques of the multiple and paradoxical forms of
alterity, alienation, and misrepresentation confronted the instituting power of hybridity
as a political, visual, literary, and performative strategy.7
Consequently, pureness tends to be perceived as an anthropologized interpretation
of identity and difference. Its opposite, all that is mestizo, hybrid, heterogeneous,
in-between, or contaminated has been reinterpreted, through the reification of alterity
and the celebration of globalized difference, as something positive and operative, as
a principle of subsistence and the natural strength of interculturality. As Amaryll
Chanady reminds us, “In most contemporary discourse, the paradigm of hybridity is
presented as closer to our reality (in all spheres of human life, but more importantly
in cultural practices), while its opposite, purity, is considered an ideological and anthro-
pological construction. The French anthropologist Jean-Loup Amselle, for example,
considers what he calls ‘mestizo logic’ (logique métisse) not in the sense of racial
mixture, but rather in the sense of cultural hybridity, as the sole paradigm that meets
the complexity of human cultures. He criticizes what he calls ‘the ethnological
reason’ because of its ‘discontinuist’ procedures, meaning its extraction, purifica-
tion, and classification of ethnic groups and cultural practices” (Chanady 1997, 5).
However, the pragmatic politics of identity and the functionalist and proselytizist
usage of multiculturalism that we see effervescing in border zones and in places with
dense cultural traffic on the one hand, and the aesthetization of one’s own cultural
fringes through the museification of diversity and of the subordinate on the other,
make us think that, both outside the art institution and inside its international scene,
migration and mobility continue to be seen as trans-border conflicts between national
states; that is between containers within and among which fixed cultural groups and
categories circulate (Pries 2004, 17). These new polarizations (in most cases, very
close to the old ideas of “culture clash”) not only formulate mobility in the light of
the logic of the physico-social that we referred to at the beginning of this article, but
turn what is hybrid into a new hierarchizing category.8 This re-essentialization of the
hybrid, then, establishes a pattern in which some cultures are distinguished as more
hybrid than others, from which, as is obvious, springs a new fetishization of what is
mestizo: a new objectified and aestheticized anthropologization of alterity. “In this
sense,” states Leslie Bary, “the discourse of contemporary multiculturalism repeats
the gesture of official miscegenation that functions hegemonically by co-opting the
opposition and by creating a new superior being: the hybrid. And if any culture is orig-
inally hybrid and if we all breath hybridly, then hybridity is a tautology that as a suppo-
sition is more valuable as a starting than as a finishing point in political and cultural
analyses” (Bary 1997, I).
Therefore, the ambivalent reinvention of the hybrid is strongly related to the very
politics of mobility and to the processes of stereotypification of borders within the art

world.9 Some art pieces, such as Francis Alÿs’s work for InSite 97 called The Loop,
which documents the artist’s journey from Tijuana to San Diego without crossing the
border, emphasize the representational dimension of cultural borders. The strategies
of resistance and denouncement operated by collectives like NoBorder, Border Arts
Workshop, or the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) question the transnational
oppositionalities of political frontiers.
In consonance with fetishization/depolitization of the hybrid, migratory aesthetics
concerning the international art system tends to be used as an argument to justify
internationalization processes of subordinate cultures, as well as the very globaliza-
tion of peripheral and marginal aesthetics. As Gerardo Mosquera puts it,
Supposedly, we live in a world of global exchanges and communications. Each time
the word “globalisation” is mentioned, one tends to imagine a planet in which all points
are interconnected in a reticular network. In fact, connections only happen inside a
radial and hegemonic pattern around the centers of power, where the peripheral coun-
tries (most of the world) remain disconnected from one other, or are only connected
indirectly via—and under the control of—the centers. I proved this by experience dur-
ing the years I travelled around Africa, where the best way to travel, even between adja-
cent countries, was by way of Europe. As I did not have enough money to do this, I was
disconnected from the system, detained in a zone of silence and precariousness. This
structure of axial globalisation and zones of silence is the basis of the economic, polit-
ical and cultural network that shapes, at a macro level, the whole planet. The to-ing and
fro-ing globalisation is really a globalisation from and for the centers, with limited
South-South connections. Such globalisation, despite its limitation and controls, has
undoubtedly improved communication and has facilitated a more pluralistic conscious-
ness. It has however, introduced the illusion of a trans-territorial world of multicultural
dialogue with currents that flow in all directions. (Mosquera 1994, 105)
International peripheral art, then, complies, wherever one sees it, with the interna-
tionality profile established by the centralized institutions of the international con-
temporary art scene. This profile responds to a need to be politically correct with
regard to postcolonialism and the claims for alterity within the Western circuits. Thus
Asian, African, or Latin-American art is international to the extent that a portion of
those categories is taken metonymically as representing all of the artistic production
of this symbolic-cultural territory, which in turn is determined by geographically and
symbolically located institutions. The part is taken for the whole. Thus, the stereo-
typification works as a domestication of alterity and of the subordinate. And with it,
the aesthetization of diversity yields its fruits in the global art marketplace.
As we can see, what persists here is a sort of permanent metaphorization of post-
colonial geopolitical tensions. In accordance with Zeigam Azizov’s inquiries, these
isotopological descriptions of global mobility develop into fetishized forms of subjec-
tivity that find their basis in geographical, cultural, and identitary stereotypes.

“Metaphor is indeed,” states Irit Rogoff, “a very limited and comfortable way of
understanding sets of conditions and their articulations through the similar which is
by definition also the familiar. It is far more on the relations between structures of
metaphor and metonymy that a complexly elaborated perception of ‘geography’ can
be played out. The duality of relating both objectivities and subjectivities within one
order of knowledge can be found in this twofold concept” (Rogoff 2000, 15). In a
different way, for authors like Kaja Silverman, metonymy is more operative than
metaphor, as it deals with contiguities rather than with similarities: “While metaphor
exploits relationships of similarity between things, not words, metonymy exploits rela-
tions of contiguity between things, not words; between a thing and its attributes, its
environments and its adjuncts . . . since things are only available to us cognitively,
metaphor is in essence the exploitation of conceptual similarity, and metonymy the
exploitation of conceptual contiguity” (Silverman 1983, 112). However (and despite
the interest both positions and their respective nuances arouse), when considering
the symbolic dimension of mobility as a trope, we should not lose sight of the way in
which the mentioned linguistic movement or semiotic displacement resolves, perpet-
uates, and conceals the transcultural tensions that are the result of the link between
geography, subjectivity, mobility politics, and the location of differential knowledges
(Moreiras 2001, 127).
If we apply this critique to the area of geographic-curatorial discourse, we will
observe how Hou Hanru himself, when discussing the African artist Pascale Martin-
Tayou, mentions his transmigratory condition in the following terms:
Pascale Martin-Tayou is one hundred percent African and at the same time one
hundred percent non-African. Born and raised in Cameroon, he is doubtlessly one of
the most African of all. At present, he lives and works mostly in Europe, and therefore
somehow also remains “excluded” from the most African aspects of his origin. He, how-
ever, regularly visits his native land. And this migratory experience, this going to and fro
that makes up his everyday life, is in and of itself a phenomenon that increasingly more
Africans share in this era of economic and cultural globalization and of transcontinen-
tal migration. In this sense, Pascale Martin-Tayou is a typical African of our times. As I
have said earlier, Pascale Martin-Tayou is an artist who is simultaneously one hundred
percent African and non-African. His work is focused on this aspect of how to be an
African, both in regard to everyday life and to what affects memory, fantasy, and happi-
ness, while living between the West and Africa. In any case, his artistic language is
absolutely “global” and resorts to the most contemporary forms of expression,
from drawings, installations and performances to cinematography and even poetry.
(Hanru 2001)
From any angle, this ontological consideration of the artist seeks, through metaphor
and metonymy, the purity of both what is African (and non-African), and what is inter-
national under the label of hybridity. In this narrative operation, the in-between

becomes something powerful, hyper-resistant, geographically solid, and therefore

excessively stable. This stability, as can be deduced, would deny the very resistant
capacity of the hybrid as a nonsubstance, meaning that it would annul the political
capacity of the impure by placing itself in line with geographically and culturally
located contexts. The question is then: in view of the new contiguities between con-
temporary art and the globalization of cultural diversity, can mobility politics be linked
to transcultural subjectivities so as to function as a critical tool of the postcolonial
essentialization of the hybrid within the international contemporary art system?
While it is by no means my purpose to exhaust the possible answers that may
arise from such questioning, I would like to conclude this text by exemplifying the way
in which, on the one hand, internationalizing discourse and, on the other, the strate-
gic translocation of contemporary art operate; to achieve this, it is essential to
analyze them in the light of specific global hybridizations and racial/colonial global
configurations rather than that of the universalization of the postcolonial regime. Let
us take, for example, the internationalization process of the Mexican artist Gabriel
Orozco. From the point of view of the earlier noted decolonialist point of departure of
mobility politics, it seems obvious that the global absorption of his work has less to
do with the supposed overcoming of Latin Americanist localism (consciously under-
taken by the artist), or with the achieving of an international reputation as neoconcep-
tualist poetic artist (allegedly at the level of Duchamp’s ready-mades), than with the
postcolonial interplays in art that allowed his work to be in demand and assimilated
(desired, as Baudrillard would say) by the international mainstream. This operation
allows his work (and at the same time conditions it) to be seen as legitimate global
art with a strategic local touch; let us say that this neo-internationalist absorption
has universalized his work and his name in a strategic “marketological” way.
With regard to this type of heterarchic conditioning of universalizing discourse in
global contemporary art, Gerardo Mosquera has stated the following: “A strange
stratigraphy is established that classifies works by assessing its value as being
either ‘local,’ ‘regional,’ or ’universal.’ It is said that an artist is important at a ‘con-
tinental’ scale, and another one at a ‘Caribbean’ level. It goes without saying that if
they are successful in New York they will immediately be universal. The elitary produc-
tion of the centers is automatically considered ‘international’ and ‘universal’ and one
can only gain access to these categories when one can make it there” (Mosquera
1995, 139).
In our opinion, the critical force or theoretic expediency that we may infer from the
internationalization processes of works like Orozco’s do not lie in the art works them-
selves, as universal works of the global culture, nor in the fact that they underscore
the global nature of the international contemporary art circuits. Quite on the contrary,
the processes of strategic translocation by which these works have become legiti-
mate global objects, concepts, and assets rather give way to the possibility that, in

view of such phenomena, a rebellious, critical, and reflexive geo-aesthetic mentality
might arise. So much so that, given the appropriation of the hybrid, the absorption of
the marginal, the internationalization of the peripheral, and the universalization of
the impure, new subjectivities and new knowledge about transcultural representa-
tions are being articulated. In this sense, the geo-aesthetic and decolonizing poten-
tial of art that is strategically translocated within the international contemporary art
system should stem from the fact that, through such a process, not only are interests
revealed that support the paradox of simultaneously being heroically and messiani-
cally localist, but politics of representation, circulation, and commercialization also
become evident that keep the following oxymoron alive: “Orozco: the new interna-
tional Latin-American art.” If this were to become true, the globalization of diversity
through the new internationalism in art might not automatically come to satisfy
aesthetic exoticism under the label of multiculturality; it might not systematically
turn into an amor perro for the peripheral; it might cease to be a fetishization of alter-
ity, and it might open up before the symbolic and decolonial dimension of mobility
politics.10

Notes
1. The physico-social dimension that I here approach and their theory on the society of the
refer to is related to scientific-cartographical spectacle. For a critical reading of the theoretical
proposals like those put to the fore by the vicissitudes proposed by Lefebvre see Tim
British geographer Ernest G. Ravenstein, who, in Unwin’s article, 2000, “A waste of space?
the nineteenth century, maintained that there Towards a Critique of the Social Production of
was a relationship of mathematic proportionality Space” in Transactions, The Institute of British
between distances, migratory frequency, Geographers, 25 (1), 11–29.
demographic growth, and permanence of the
migrated groups. From these scientific 4. With regard to the so-called mobility turn see
typologies emerged the association between Pete Adey, Paul Bevan, “Connected Mobility?”
social space and physico-geographic space that in International Conference: Alternative mobility
turned out to be so costly for the social sciences futures, Centre for Mobilities Research,
and twentieth-century nationalisms. For a study Lancaster University, January 9–11, 2004;
on nation states as physical containers of this article strongly links to a field of research
identity and of the migratory flows of culturally known as earth sciences.
homogenous groups, I refer to the 2002 article
by Ludger Pries, “Transnational migration and 5. On this issue vid. Gogia, Nupur, “Bodies on
the perforation of nation-state containers” the Move: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeal
in Estudios Demográficos y Urbanos (El Colegio Mobility” in: International Conference: Alternative
de Mexico), Vol. 17, nbr. 3, S pp. 571–597. mobility futures, Centre for Mobilities Research,
Lancaster University, January 9–11, 2004;
2. Jameson, 1988, “Cognitive Mapping” in: Noyes, John, “Theorising Mobility: Itineraries,
Nelson, Grossberg, (eds.), Marxism and the Nomadism, and the Writing of History” in:
Interpretation of Culture, Urbana, University of Trade Routes, History and Geography. 2nd
Illinoils Press; Soja, 1989, Postmodern Johannesburg Biennale catalogue, 1997; Blamey,
Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical D., Here, There, Elsewhere: Dialogues on Location
Social Theory, Verso; Unwin, 2000, “A Waste of and Mobility, London, Open Editions, 2002;
Space? Towards a Critique of the Social Sassen, Saskia Globalization and its Discontents:
Production of Space” in Transactions, The Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money,
Institute of British Geographers 25 (1), 11–29; New York, The New Press, 1998; Verstraete,
Pries, Ludger, 2002, “Migración transnacional y Ginette, Tim Cresswell, (eds.), Mobilizing Place,
la perforación de los contenedores de Estados- Placing Mobility: The Politics of Representation in
nación” in: Estudios Demográficos y Urbanos a Globalized World (Thamyris/Intersecting),
(El Colegio de México), Vol. 17, Núm. 3, S.pp. London, Editions Rodopi B.V., 2003; see also
571–597; Mezzadra, Sandro, Brett Neilson, “Né the minutes of the congress: Research and
qui, né altrove: Migration, Detention, Desertion: Training on Migration and Ethnic Minorities in the
A Dialogue” in: Anthony Burke, Borderlands/ Mediterranean Thematic Network on Migrants
e-jornal: Dance of the In-Between: Humans, and Minorities in European Cities, Centre for
Movement, Sites, Volume 2, Number 1, 2003; European Migration and Ethnic Studies, 1999;
http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu. in: http://www.cemes.org/; Place and Location:
au/issues/vol2no1.html (visited in January 2008). Culture, nature, semiotics: locations IV, Research
group of Cultural and Literary Theory, Dr. Virve
3. Since its publication, Henri Lefebvre’s book Sarap, Estonian Literary MuseumTallinn–Tartu,
The Production of Space 1974 (1999), has given Estonia, September 23–26, 2004, in:
rise to an endless array of interpretations in http://www.eki.ee/km/locations/news.htm;
such varied disciplines as urbanism or social and the International Conference: Alternative
psychology. In the field of social theory of mobility futures, Centre for Mobilities Research,
contemporary art, his ideas are strongly linked Lancaster University, January 9–11, 2004, in:
to two lines of French social thought, namely Guy http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/
Debord and Constant’s psycho-geographical cemore/altfutpapers.htm (visited in July 2007).

6. For the study of new internationalism in the University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989;
area of art theory and critique vid. Fisher, Jean Moraga, Cherrie y Anzaldúa, Gloria, (eds.), This
(Ed.), Global Visions: A New Internationalism in Bridge Called my Back: Writing by Radical Women
the Visual Art, London, Kala Press, 1994; of Color. Nueva York: Kitchen Table/Women
Grzinic, Marina Migrants, Hegemony, New of Color, 1983; Ramón Grosfoguel, “The
Internationalism, in: Stewart, Rogoff, et. al, Implications of Subaltern Epistemologies for
Strangers to Ourselves, Hastings Museum and Global Capitalism: Transmodernity, Border
Art Gallery, 2003; Mosquera, Gerardo Thinking and Global Coloniality” in: William I.
“¿Lenguaje internacional?” in: Lápiz, Madrid, Robinson y Richard Applebaum (eds.) Critical
num. 121, April de 1996, pp. 12–15; El mundo Globalization Studies. London: Routledge,
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diferencia cultural, in: http://www.universes-in-
universe.de/magazin/marco-polo/ 8. On this issue see the diatribes around the
s-mosquera.htm; Amor, “Cartographies: Exploring re-edition of Huntington’s polemic and prejudiced
the Limitations of a Curatorial Paradigm” in: book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking
Mosquera, (ed.), Beyond the Fantastic. of World Order, New York, Touchstone, 1997.
Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America,
Institute of International Visual Arts, Londres, 9. On this issue vid. Chaplin, “Postcolonial
Cambridge MIT Press, 1995; Amor, et al., Iconization Of Borders” in: 2002 Working Paper
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The Contributors
Paulina Aroch Fugellie obtained a Ph.D. as part of the Visual Culture Studies in
degree at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Europe network. At the University of
Analysis in 2010 with the support of the Barcelona he conducts a research project
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and entitled The Rise of Global Art: A Geopolitical
Sciences. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in View on the International Contemporary Art
English Literature and a Master’s degree in System. In 2007 he was awarded the Espais
African Studies. She has also studied and per l’Art prize for his book Geoaesthetics and
taught dramatic arts. She has published on Transculturality.
postcolonial criticism, as well as on literary
critique and fiction. She was born in Chile in Jill Bennett is Director of the Centre for
1973 and grew up in Latin America and Contemporary Art and Politics, University of
Africa. Currently, she is researching works in New South Wales, where her current
postcolonial theory as specifically situated projects include Construction, Connection
textual interventions within the culture of and Community on migration in the Asia
global capitalism. Pacific (with the Zendai Museum of Modern
Art, Shanghai). Her recent books include
Mieke Bal, a cultural theorist and critic, is Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Contemporary Art (2005) and T_Visionarium:
Sciences Professor (KNAW). She is based at A User’s Guide (2008). She is co-editor of
the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis World Memory: Personal Trajectories in
(ASCA), University of Amsterdam. Her areas Global Time (2003) and has curated a
of interest range from biblical and classical number of exhibitions including
antiquity to seventeenth-century and Prepossession (Sydney and Belfast, 2005).
contemporary art and modern literature,
feminism and migratory culture. Her many Maaike Bleeker is a Professor and chair of
books include A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Theater Studies at Utrecht University. She
Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002) likes to practice what she preaches and has
and Narratology (3rd. ed. 2009). Mieke Bal worked as a dramaturge for various theater
is also a video artist; her experimental directors, choreographers and visual artists.
documentaries on migration include She lectured at the School for New Dance
Separations, State of Suspension, Becoming Development, the Piet Zwart postgraduate
Vera, and the installation Nothing is Missing. programme in fine arts, performed in several
Her feature film Mère Folle, a theoretical lecture performances, ran her own theater
fiction about madness, premiered fall 2010. company and translated five plays that were
Her work is exhibited internationally. performed by major Dutch theater companies.
Occasionally she also acts as an She is the author of Visuality in the Theatre:
independent curator. More information on The Locus of Looking (2008) and editor of
www.miekebal.org. Anatomy Live: Performance and the Operating
Theatre (2008).
Joaquín Barriendos Rodríguez is currently
research fellow at the Institute National Sudeep Dasgupta is Associate Professor in
d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris and visiting Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam.
professor at the University of Barcelona. His research interests include the politics of
Between 2008 and 2009 he was research aesthetics in relation to art, visual culture,
fellow at New York University. He is founder and philosophy. He has published on
of the Global Visual Cultures platform as well migration and cinema, globalization and
The Contributors | 335

visual culture, queer and postcolonial She has worked extensively on performance
studies and on the work of Walter Benjamin poetry and the connections between poetic
and Jacques Rancière. He edited a critical language and the sonic, and on politically
overview of postcolonial studies in committed literature, on the construction of
Constellations of the Transnational (2007), subjectivity in literature in situations of
and has written the Introduction to the Dutch political oppression, on urban culture,
joint translation of Jacques Rancière’s Partage and on the political dimension of the
du sensible and L’inconscient ésthetique methodology of cultural analysis.
(2007). More information on: https://
home.medewerker.uva.nl/s.m.dasgupta/ Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro is Associate
Professor of Art History at the University of
Begüm Özden Firat works at the Mimar Murcia, Spain and formerly the director of
Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul, Turkey. the Centro de Documentación y Estudios
Recently, she finished her Ph.D. thesis at Avanzados de Arte Contemporáneo
the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (CENDEAC) in Murcia. He is author of Robert
(ASCA), entitled Disorienting Encounters: Morris (2010), 2MOVE: Video, Art, Migration
Re-reading Seventeenth- and Eighteenth- (2008, with Mieke Bal), El archivo
Century Ottoman Miniature Paintings. She escotómico de la Modernidad: pequeños
has co-edited books on intellectual pasos para una teoría de la visión (2007), La
commitment and complicity and on cultural so(m)bra de lo Real: el arte como vomitorio
activism. Her areas of research include (2006), Impurezas: el híbrido pintura-
culture(s) of migration, cultural activism, fotografía (2004, with Pedro A. Cruz), and
radical arts, and politics. editor of Mary Kelly: La balada de Kastriot
Rexhepi (2008, with Isabel Tejeda).
Néstor García Canclini is Distinguished
Professor at Universidad Autónoma Isabel Hoving is currently affiliated with the
Metropolitana in Mexico and Emeritus Department of Literary Studies of Leiden
Researcher of the National System of University, where she teaches postcolonial
Researchers. He has been professor at theory, cultural analysis, Dutch
Austin, Duke, Stanford, Barcelona, Buenos multiculturalism, literary theory, gender
Aires, and São Paulo universities. His studies, and queer studies. Her study on
awards include the Guggenheim scholarship, Caribbean migrant women writers, In Praise
Premio Casa de las Américas, and the Book of New Travellers, was published in 2001 by
Award of Latin American Studies Association Stanford University Press. She has co-edited
for Hybrid Cultures as the best book of Latin several books on migration, Caribbean
America in 1992. His most notable literatures, African literature and art, and
publications are Consumers and Citizens, is now completing a monograph on the
edited by Minnesota University Press intersections of postcolonial theory,
(2001), Hybrid Cultures, edited by Minnesota ecocriticism, and queer theory. She is a
University Press (1995), and Diferentes, member of the editorial board of the
desiguales y desconectados: mapas de la international book series Thamyris:
interculturalidad, edited by Gedisa (2006). Intersecting. In addition to her academic
The Imagined Globalization, edited by Duke work, she is an awarded youth writer.
University Press, is forthcoming.
Niamh Ann Kelly is an art writer, researcher,
Cornelia Gräbner is lecturer in Hispanic and lecturer. She is Programme Chair of the
Studies at Lancaster University. Her work BA in Visual and Critical Studies at the
focuses on comparative literature and Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland. Her
cultural analysis in the European and Latin research interests include the role of art in
American context and, more specifically, on the collective memory of troubled histories
the connections between the social, the and the development of pedagogical
political, the literary, and social imaginaries. strategies in teaching Critical Theory. Kelly
336 | The Contributors

regularly contributes art criticism to cultural program “Desert Generation in

publications in Ireland and the UK, including Amsterdam,” which centered on a digital
Art Monthly and CIRCA, and to radio political protest composed of the works of
programmes on RTE and BBC. She has over seven hundred artists (http://www.
recently co-published a creative art book, desert-generation.nl). Noa Roei’s previous
called Art-Watching (2007), and also publications include “Framing Art as Action”
co-produced the 2MOVE: Ireland exhibitions in Afterimage and “A Treatise on Political
in Northern Ireland and Ireland in May 2008. Vision” in Image and Narrative (e-journal).
Sonja Neef is a cultural and media scholar Mireille Rosello is Professor of Literary
and Junior Professor of European Media and Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her
Culture at Bauhaus University in Weimar, research can be described as comparative
Germany. Her current research project is on and interdisciplinary cultural analysis of
the politics of cosmography. Publications contemporary objects and visual or textual
include Abdruck und Spur. Handschrift im narratives (20th- and 21st-century literatures,
Zeitalter ihrer technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. popular culture, cinema, television and new
(2008), and her dissertation entitled media). She focuses more specifically on
Kalligramme: Zur Medialität einer Schrift. two areas of inquiry: transnational studies
(2000). She has also co-edited Sign Here! (especially European, North African, and
Handwriting in the Age of New Media (2006), Caribbean voices) and gender constructions
Mieke Bal’s Essays zur Kulturanalyse (2002) (queer theories and performativity). Her most
and Travelling Concepts I: Text, Subjectivity, recent publications are France and the
Hybridity (2001). Maghreb: Performative Encounters (2005), its
French version Encontres Méditerranéennes:
Patricia Pisters is Professor of Film Studies Littératures et cultures France-Maghreb
at the department of Media Studies of the (2006) and Postcolonial Hospitality: the
University of Amsterdam. Her teaching and Immigrant as Guest (2001). She is
research interests focus on questions completing a book on “The Reparative in
related to multiculturalism, interculturality, Narratives” and is involved in a project on
political cinema and media activism, mainly “Europeanizing Spaces” (with specific focus
looking at North African cinema and Arab on “Queer Europe”).
media. Another focus is on film-philosophical
questions on the nature of perception, the Astrid van Weyenberg will defend her Ph.D.
ontology of the image and the idea of thesis at the Amsterdam School for Cultural
the ‘brain as screen’ in connection to Analysis (University of Amsterdam) in 2011.
neuroscience. Her publications include The She earned her MA in English Literature
Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze from the University of Amsterdam, and took
in Film Theory (2003) and Shooting the the MSc course Nation, Writing, Culture at
Family: Transnational Media and Intercultural the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. She
Values (ed. with Wim Staat; 2005). has written on language and textuality in
contemporary Scottish fiction and on the
Noa Roei holds a BA in Art History and Field Day Theatre Company from Northern
Psychology from the Hebrew University, Ireland. Her current research at the
Jerusalem, and an MA in Cultural Analysis University of Amsterdam focuses on the
from the University of Amsterdam. Her complex implications and meanings of
nearly-finished Ph.D. project examines the African reworkings of Greek tragedies,
ways in which artworks and exhibitions challenging the widespread notion that
attempt to undermine dominant conceptions postcolonial playwrights primarily draw on
within Israeli social and political discourse. canonical texts to ‘write back’ to the
As part of this project Roei organized the Western canon.
The Contributors | 337

Index
A Baldwin, James, 30
Abdolah, Kader, 297, 298, 303–305, 307 Balibar, Etienne, 140n6
Abu-Rahmeh, Abdullah, 243 Ballanche, Pierre-Simon, 131
Acker, Kathy, 110 Ballester, Gonzalo, 196, 197, 198, 199,
Adelson, Leslie A., 130 205, 207, 212, 216, 220, 229
Adorno, Theodor W., 138 Banerjee, Haimanti, 104n5
Agacinski, Sylviane, 193 Barber, Fionna, 164
Agamben, Giorgio, 112, 113, 119 Barish, Jonas, 149
Aires, Carlos, 144, 145 Barriendos Rodriguez, Joaquín, 19
Akhenaton, 273 Barthes, Roland, 274n10
Allouache, Merzak, 259 Bartra, Roger, 31
Althusser, Louis, 255 Bary, Leslie, 324
Altman, Akira, 176, 177 Baudelaire, Charles, 260
Alÿs, Francis, 28 Baudrillard, Jean, 49
Amselle, Jean-Loup, 324 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 158n5
Anderson, Benedict, 180, 307 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 119,
Arafat, Yasser, 242 125n4
Arizpe, Lourdes, 25 Begag, Azouz, 273
Armstrong, Isobel, 119 Ben-David, Anat, 255n1
Aroch Fugellie, Paulina, 13, 15, 37, 335 Benjamin, Walter, 38, 104n6, 129, 206,
Atlas Group, 207, 226 231, 233, 249, 290, 291, 292
Attridge, Derek, 223 Bennett, Jill, 15, 109, 115, 117, 121,
Aubarell, Gemma, 202 123, 124
Augé, Marc, 203 Bensaidi, Faouzi, 175, 178, 186
Austin, J.L., 104 Bensalah, Djamel, 273
Azizov, Zeigam, 325 Benveniste, Emile, 224
Benzien, Jeffrey, 81, 87n8
B Beom, Kim, 123
Bachar, 226, 229 Berger, John, 30, 127, 128, 129,
Baier, Lothar, 193, 198 131, 132
Bal, Mieke, 9, 11, 17, 33, 71, 85, 118, 192, Berman, Rick, 278, 294
196, 200, 201, 211, 284, 335 Bernardi, Daniel Leonard, 295n14
Index | 339
Besserer, Federico, 25 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 224
Bevan, Paul, 318, 319, 329n4 Carleton, William, 172n9
Bhabha, Homi, 13, 37–40, 42–48, 50, 127, Casarino, Cesare, 235n16
129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 136, 137, Cassin, Barbara, 73
193, 320 Castro-Gómez, Santiago, 314
Bhreathnach-Lynch, Síghle, 165 Chanady, Amaryll, 324
Biemann, Ursula, 207n2, 223, 224 Chaplin, Charlie, 192, 330
Biko, Steve, 88 Charles, Sebastien, 192
Blassnigg, Martha, 190n16 Chesebro, James, 51n10
Bleeker, Maaike, 15–16, 143, 144, 145, Chibane, Malik, 273n3
152, 156, 158n4, 252, 335 Chirac, Jacques, 145
Blommaert, Jan, 74 Ciolek, Mathiew, 51n10
Bock, Mary, 74 Cirella-Urutia, Anne, 273n7
Boer, Inge E., 11 Cleary, Anne, 207n2
Bogaert, Maurice, 152 Clifford, James, 26
Bolkestein, Frits, 301 Cmielewski, Leon, 113
Booth, James, 85 Codina, Conce, 207
Bordwell, David, 176, 234n7 Cole, Catherine M., 75, 81
Borges, Jorge Luis, 33 Collins, Phil, 161, 162, 167, 168, 169, 170,
Borgoyne, Robert, 158n5 171, 172n10, 172n11, 173n11
Bottomley, Gillian, 191 Comte, August, 314
Bouazza, Hafid, 297, 306–308 Confiant, Raphaël, 273n9
Bradshaw, Peter, 265 Connolly, Denis, 207n2
Braga, Brannon, 278, 294 Courbet, Gustave, 145, 146, 147
Braga, Célio, 207n2 Cresswell, Tim, 315, 329n5
Brecht, Bertolt, 44, 95, 100, 101, 222 Crewe, Jonathan, 71, 85, 234n2, 234n12,
Bredekamp, Horst, 38–40, 47–48, 50 235n19
Brennan, Timothy, 54, 55, 61–63, 65–66 Cruz-Sánchez, Pedro A., 48
Bresson, Robert, 100 Cubitt, Sean, 26, 234n4
Brett, Guy, 26 Cytter, Keren, 207n2
Brown, Wendy, 10, 110, 119, 122
Buck-Morss, Susan, 144, 157 D
Bush Sr., George, 145 Dahlhaus, Carl, 158n6
Butler, Judith, 92, 133, 135, 136 Daraghmeh, Mohammad, 243
Dasgupta, Anshuman, 104n1
C Dasgupta, Sudeep, 14, 91, 335–336
Cameron, James, 242 Davis, Tracy, 149, 150, 158n4
Campbell, Stephen J., 172n2 Deepwell, Katy, 164, 165, 172n5
Camus, Albert, 30 De Klerk, F.W., 70
Capurro, Rafael, 203 De la Campa, Román, 320
340 | Index
Deleuze, Gilles, 117, 119, 181–182, 183, Ferroukhi, Ismaël, 18, 257–272
185, 186, 187, 188, 189n14 Fiad, Salam, 243
De Man, Paul, 290 Finlayson, James Gordon, 85
Deranty, Jean-Philippe, 245, 250 Firat, Begüm Özden, 15, 127, 336
Derrida, Jacques, 18, 80, 104n3, 134, Fisher, Jean, 163, 164, 172n3
235n14, 267, 279, 283, 285, 287, 288, Fleishman, Mark, 69, 70, 71, 77, 78, 81,
291, 292, 294n5, 295n15 85, 86, 87n2, 87n13
De Saint Victor, Hugo, 31 Flitterman Lewis, Sandy, 158n5
De Saussure, Ferdinand, 42 Foucault, Michel, 234n5
De Sica, Vittorio, 100 Fraga, Manuel, 64, 67n3
Diderot, Denis, 150, 158n4 Franco, Fransisco, 59, 67n3
Dikeç, Mustafa, 260, 263 Freedman, Barbara, 150, 151
Diserens, Corinne, 28 Freud, Sigmund, 41, 130, 203
Dittborn, Eugenio, 26 Fried, Michael, 149, 150, 158n4
Doane, Mary Ann, 192, 195, 234n2,
235n14, 235n20 G
Dodds, E.R., 88n20 Gaghan, Stephen, 177
Doillon, Jacques, 273n3 Ganguly, Keya, 104n2, 104n7
Doroszuk, Wojtek, 207n2 García Canclini, Néstor, 13, 23, 194, 199,
Driver, Dorothy, 74 336
Dubois, Laurent, 135 Gardiner, Kevin, 172n7
Duchamp, Marcel, 327 Gell, Alfred, 234n13
Durrant, Sam, 191 Genestal, Fabrice, 273n3
Duyvené de Wit, Tom, 300 Ghatak, Ritwik, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97,
98, 99, 100, 104n5
E Ghosh, Biswati, 94
Eco, Umberto, 207n7 Gilerman, Dana, 243, 250, 251, 252
Edgeworth, Maria, 165 Gillies, John, 115
Eisenstein, Sergei, 98 Gioni, Massimiliano, 167, 168, 170
Electronic Disturbance Theater, 325 Giorgione, 152, 155
Eliasson, Olafur, 207n2 Glissant, Édouard, 272, 274n11, 299, 304
Elizabeth II, Queen of England, 145 Gögüs, Serap, 156
El País, 27 Göktürk, Deniz, 130
Enwezor, Okwui, 323 Goldhill, Simon, 88n22
González Iñárritu, Alejandro, 175, 178,
F 189n8, 259, 330n10
Fabian, Johannes, 173n16, 213 Gowricharn, Ruben, 302
Farber, Yael, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, Goya, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, 222,
78, 79, 80, 85, 86, 87n9 235n17
Faucon, Philippe, 273n3 Gräbner, Cornelia, 13, 53, 288, 336
Index | 341
Griffith, D.W., 175, 176 J
Grosfoguel, Ramón, 316, 330n7 Jackson, Michael, 71, 72
Guattari, Félix, 117, 119, 187, 188, James, C.L.R., 104n8
189n14 James, Henry, 165
Guénoun, Solange, 249, 250 Jameson, Fredric, 93, 104n4, 318, 329n2
Gupta, Shilpa, 122 Jamouchi, Samira, 207
Janover, Michael, 80
H Jenkins, Henry, 203
Haggis, Paul, 179 Johnson, Liza, 207
Hall, Stuart, 110, 111, 113 Jolly, Rosemary Jane, 71, 73
Hallward, Peter, 183 Joselit, David, 207n3
Hannerz, Ulf, 202 Julien, Isaac, 113
Hanru, Hou, 138, 139, 141n9, 326 Jung, Carl, 94
Hardwick, Louise, 274
Hargreaves, Alec, 258, 273n1 K
Harris, Brent, 87n6 Kalantary, Farhad, 207n2
Hatoum, Mona, 207n2, 216, 217, 222, Kalidasa, 96
232, 234n9 Kant, Immanuel, 278
Haughey, Anthony, 207n2 Kapur, Geeta, 100, 102
Hayes, Grahame, 76 Kassovitz, Mathieu, 273n3
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 91, 92, 93, Kavanagh, James H., 249, 250
95, 97, 102, 104n6 Kearney, Michael, 25
Heidegger, Martin, 18, 150, 287 Kelleher, Margaret, 165, 172n9
Henderson, Willie, 81 Kelley, Jeff, 172n4
Hendrix, Wim, 158n3 Kelly, Liam, 173n12
Hernández-Navarro, Miguel Á., 9, 11, 16, 17, Kelly, Niamh Ann, 16, 161, 336
118, 181, 191, 287, 336 Kentridge, William, 207n2, 222, 227, 228,
Higbee, Will, 260 235n20
Highmore, Ben, 138 Khatib, Mohammed, 243, 250, 251
Hirsch, Marianne, 234n3 Khatibi, Abdelkebir, 267
Hirsi Ali, Ayaan, 299 Kiberd, Declan, 172n8
Holiday, Anthony, 74 Kinealy, Christine, 172n2
Holly, Michael Ann, 169, 173n14 Kitto, H.D.F., 88n20
Hondius, Dienke, 301 Kim, Yeon-Soo, 58–59
Hope, Wayne, 48, 49 Klein, Naomi, 243
Hoving, Isabel, 297, 298, 306, 308, 336 Kline, Scott, 87n4
Huggan, Graham, 320 Komar, Kathleen L., 78
Koopmans, Ruud, 300, 310n3
I Koselleck, Reinhard, 207n6
Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 155 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, 115, 122
342 | Index
Kristeva, Julia, 172n8, 220 McNevin, Anne, 140n6

Krog, Antjie, 84 Medici, eX de, 114
Kubler, George, 225 Medina, Cuauhtémoc, 28
Kurosawa, Akira, 176 Memmi, Albert, 91, 93
Mercer, Kobena, 196
L Merleau Ponty, Maurice, 30
Lacan, Jacques, 40, 41, 42, 45, 51n5, Meyer, Eva, 158n2
194, 195 Mignolo, Walter, 314, 315, 316, 317,
Laclau, Ernesto, 194, 207n1, 317 320, 323
Laronde, Michel, 273n1 Miller, Philip, 227
Levi, Carlo, 30 Milovanovic, Dragan, 195
Lijphart, Arend, 300 Minow, Martha, 88n17
Lipovetsky, Gilles, 192, 198 Mistry, Jyoti, 87n4
Long, Richard, 116 Mitrovic, Sinisa, 168, 173n13
Loraux, Nicole, 83 Mohr, Jean, 127, 128, 129
Lord, Catherine M., 75 Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat),
Lupión, Daniel, 203–204, 205 260
Moon, Claire, 77
M Moravia, Alberto, 30
Mac Giolla Léith, Caoimhín, 173 Mosquera, Gerardo, 325, 327
Makhene, Motsumi, 227 Moti, Melvin, 207n2, 231, 232
Mandela, Nelson, 70 Mouffe, Chantal, 9, 207n1
Mangafas, Nick, 156 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 16, 147–149,
Manovich, Lev, 234 152, 154, 156, 157
Margaroni, Maria, 51 Munn, Nancy, 220
Marie, Zen, 207n2 Muntadas, Antoni, 33
Marrati, Paola, 187, 188 Murray, Peter, 172n4
Martin, Jean-Hubert, 116
Martin, Stewart, 132 N
Martin-Tayou, Pascale, 326 Naficy, Hamid, 234n1
Martín Barbero, Jesús, 33 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 112, 121, 220
Marx, Karl, 48, 94 Nasr, Ramsey, 158n3
Marzo, Jorge Luis, 202 Neef, Sonja, 18, 277, 337
Massey, Doreen, 193, 199 Negri, Antonio, 192
Massumi, Brian, 112 Nesbitt, John, 265
May, Jon, 192 Neumann, Erich, 94
Mbeki, Thabo, 86, 88n23 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 77, 122, 123
McAvera, Brian, 173n12 NoBorder, 325
McCormick, Kay, 74 Nqoko Cultural Group, 75
McLoughlin, Michael, 207n2 Nyers, Peter, 136, 140
Index | 343
O Richet, Jean-François, 273
Ockhuysen, Ronald, 189n2 Ricoeur, Paul, 33, 73, 87n5
O’Kelly, Alanna, 161–171 Rivas, Manuel, 53–66, 67n3
Ombre, Ellen, 297, 305–306 Robecchi, Michele, 167, 168, 170
Ören, Aras, 140n2 Robecchi, Michele, 167, 168, 170
Orozco, Gabriel, 327 Robinson, Arthur, 320
Ortuño, Pedro, 207n2 Roca, Albert, 202
Ostojic, Tanja, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, Roca Parés, Albert, 202
148, 149 Rocco, Christopher, 83, 84
Özdamar, Emine Sevgi, 140n2 Roddenberry, Gene, 294n2
Rodowick, David N., 234n11
P Rodríguez, Nora, 202
Papamichael, Stella, 264 Roei, Noa, 18, 148, 239, 337
Parks, Rosa, 136, 137 Rogers, Richard, 255n1
Parry, Benita, 74, 76, 81, 86 Rogoff, Irit, 326
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 30 Rosello, Mireille, 18, 133, 257, 288, 337
Pazarkaya, Yüksel, 140 Rosen, Philip, 158
Perl, Benjamin, 158n2 Ross, Fiona C., 87n7
Pisters, Patricia, 16, 18, 175, 299, 337 Rushdie, Salman, 61, 62, 66, 130, 137
Pividal, Javier, 207n2
Plato, 149 S
Prabhu, Anjali, 267 Said, Edward W., 31, 91, 93, 148
Salgado, Sebastião, 27
Q Sanders, Mark, 72
Quetelet, Adolph, 314 Sarkin, Jeremy, 77
Quijano, Anibal, 323 Sassen, Saskia, 234n2
Quraishi, Ibrahim, 147, 148, 149, 152, 154, Schaap, Andrea, 81
155, 156, 157 Scheffer, Paul, 298, 301
Schmidt, Karl, 38
R Searle, Bernie, 113
Raad, Walid, 207n2, 226, 230 Segura, Jesús, 207n2
Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 294n7 Şenocak, Zafer, 140n2
Ragland, Ellie, 195 Shonibare, Yinka, 113, 114, 116, 124,
Ramírez, Jacques P., 202 125n1
Rancière, Jacques, 10, 18, 24, 117, 119, Shore, Megan, 73, 79, 87n4
131, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, Silverman, Kaja, 143, 149, 326
139, 140n7, 168, 169, 173n15, 195, Simon, Gildas, 26
239, 242, 244, 245, 246, 248, 249, Smart, Sally, 113, 114
250, 252, 253 Smith, Terry, 196
Ray, Satyajit, 100, 104n2 Soderbergh, Steven, 177
344 | Index
Soyinka, Wole, 81 Van Alphen, Ernst, 234n3

Soysal, Levent, 128 Van Ginkel, Rob, 300, 301, 308
Speranza, Graciela, 30, 31 Van Gogh, Theo, 299
Spitzer, Leo, 71, 85, 234n2, 234n12, Van Weyenberg, Astrid, 13, 69, 337
235n19 Van Wolde, Ellen, 77
Staiger, Janet, 176 Venuti, Lawrence, 235n22
Stam, Robert, 158n5 Verstraten, Peter, 234n7
Starrs, Josephine, 113 Virilio, Paul, 192, 198
Stewart, Garrett, 234n4 Virno, Paolo, 124
Steyerl, Hito, 138, 139
Stiegler, Bernard, 281, 294n9 W
Straub, Jean-Marie, 100 Walder, Dennis, 72
Sykora, Thomas, 207n2 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 314
Ward, Gary, 200, 201, 207n2, 220, 221,
T 222, 235n15
Tadjer, Akli, 273n7 Watson, Grant, 104n1
Tagore, Rabindranath, 94, 95, 101, 102 Weigel, Sigrid, 231
Tarr, Carrie, 258, 273n4, 273n5 Welles, Orson, 176
Tati, Jacques, 100, 182 Wetzel, Michael, 291, 294n7
Tayler, Timothy, 54, 61 Whelan, Kevin, 169
Téchiné, André, 178 Williams Gamaker, Michelle, 207n2
Ter Heerdt, Albert, 175, 189n1 Wilson, Richard A., 75–76, 79, 82, 84,
Theuws, Roos, 207n2, 214, 215, 216, 217, 88n19
223, 232, 234n9 Winocur, Rosalía, 29
Thompson, Kristin, 176, 234n7 Wuthnow, Julie, 182
Thrift, Nigel, 192
Titian, 152, 155 Y
Tlostanova, Madina, 316, 320 Yacine, Kateb, 266
Tóibín, Colm, 165, 166 Yaghamanian, Behzad, 140n5
Toufic, Jalal, 234n13 Yalcin, Serdan, 143, 147, 148, 154, 157
Trollope, Anthony, 172n9 Yang, Jun, 125n2
Tutu, Desmond, 79, 86, 87n12, 88n18 Yedaya, Oded, 250, 251, 255n8
Tzur, Uzi, 248
Z
U Zaimoğlu, Feridun, 140
Unwin, Tim, 318 Zeitlin, Froma I., 83, 84
Urry, John, 196, 318 Ziolkowski, Theodore, 70
Zuma, Jacob, 86
V
Valencia, Guadalupe, 192
Index | 345

(Thamyris_Intersecting_ Place, Sex and Race) Mieke Bal, Miguel Hern Ndez-Navarro, Miguel A. Hernandez-Navarro - Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture_ Conflict, Resistance, and Agency-Rodopi (2012)

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Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture

© Editions Rodopi B.V.,Amsterdam – New York, NY 2011

Intersecting: Place, Sex, and Race

Intersecting is a new series of edited volumes with a critical, interdisciplinary focus.

9 Introduction Mieke Bal and Miguel Á.

21 I. Art Matters: Metaphor, Materiality, and Knowledge

23 Migrants: Workers of Metaphors Néstor García Canclini

37 The Place of Metaphor in a Metonymic World: Paulina Aroch Fugellie

53 Immigrants and Castaways: Smuggling Genres in Cornelia Gräbner

91 The Aesthetics of Displacement and the Performance of Sudeep Dasgupta

107 II. Becoming Visible: Display as Tactics

143 Limited Visibility Maaike Bleeker

161 Transgressing Time: Imagining an Exhibition of Works by Niamh Ann Kelly

209 III. Tension: Intention, Contention

239 Molding Resistance: Aesthetics and Politics in the Noa Roei

257 Ismaël Ferroukhi’s Babelized Road Movie Mireille Rosello

277 Interstellar Hospitality: Missions of Star House Enterprise Sonja Neef

335 The Contributors

Mieke Bal and Miguel Á.

10 | Mieke Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro

Art Matters: Metaphor, Materiality, and Knowledge

12 | Mieke Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro

desynchronized from reality, art, in its reception, its performance, is synchronized

Becoming Visible: Display as Tactic

14 | Mieke Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro

display, they examine the tactics—small acts of resistance in contemporary art

16 | Mieke Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro

collisions that occur between communication regimes, especially in relation to the

Tension: Intention, Contention

18 | Mieke Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro

20 | Mieke Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro

Néstor García Canclini

Migrants: Workers of Metaphors | 23

Migrations and Metaphors

24 | Néstor García Canclini

Migrants: Workers of Metaphors | 25

26 | Néstor García Canclini

In 2006, tourism-related travel involved 842 million people, a higher percentage

Migrants: Workers of Metaphors | 27

28 | Néstor García Canclini

1. Within advanced communication technology studies, there is a discussion about

The testimonials of exiles often document these experiences. In evoking the

Migrants: Workers of Metaphors | 29

30 | Néstor García Canclini

3. The opposition “native/foreigner” can be metaphorically applied to other reorder-

Migrants: Workers of Metaphors | 31

32 | Néstor García Canclini

Migrants: Workers of Metaphors | 33

34 | Néstor García Canclini

———. “Mexicanidad, migración y global- Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics.

Migrants: Workers of Metaphors | 35

The Place of Metaphor

In this article I present a cultural analysis of “Democracy De-Realized” by post-

House of World Cultures, Berlin, 2001

The Place of Metaphor in a Metonymic World: On Homi Bhabha’s “Democracy De-Realized” | 37

38 | Paulina Aroch Fugellie

The Place of Metaphor in a Metonymic World: On Homi Bhabha’s “Democracy De-Realized” | 39

Sixteenth International Congress of Psychoanalysis, Zurich, 1949

40 | Paulina Aroch Fugellie

Descartes Amphitheater, Paris-Sorbonne, 1957

The Place of Metaphor in a Metonymic World: On Homi Bhabha’s “Democracy De-Realized” | 41

“Democracy De-Realized,” RealPlayer, Any Given Day

42 | Paulina Aroch Fugellie

The Place of Metaphor in a Metonymic World: On Homi Bhabha’s “Democracy De-Realized” | 43