Hirtler Talking:Havingsex

parallax, 2002, vol. 8, no.
4, 13
Introduction: talking/having sex

Kurt Hirtler, Ola Stahl & Ika Willis
Downloaded By: [Lund University Libraries] At: 15:32 18 November 2009
In issue 17 of the Vertigo comic Transmetropolitan, Spider Jerusalem wakes up in bed with his assistant, Yelena: What happened? he asks himself. Well, obviously, I know what happened. But when she wakes up, Yelena insists repeatedly that nothing happened. Im sticky, Spider argues; Something must have happened to make me sticky. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. Nothing. Nothing! Yelena reiterates, though, in increasingly large and messy lettering.1 If sex is not had, then, nothing happens, it would seem. This commonplace enough formulation nonetheless perhaps demonstrates the potential enormity of the task which this issue of parallax has set itself in taking on the title having sex a word which should be read here both in the Butlerian sense of biological sex as a dimorphism produced as the eVect of compulsory heterosexuality and enforced by being cast as prediscursive in relation to gender, and in the sense of sexual intercourse as an activity similarly circumscribed by heteronormative presumptions about what it is to have sex. (These preliminary and tentative de nitions will, of course, be fucked with in the course of having sex.) Nothing happened, as a synonym for sex was not had, begins to make visible the intricate conjunctions of desire, signi cation, reproduction, evolution, technology, familial structures, nature..., which can always be summoned when the term sex is deployed; it hints at a particular understanding of sex as that which makes it possible for something, anything, everything to happen. Here we move from Transmetropolitans Yelena to The Ballad of Halo Joness Glyph, a character who has changed sex so many times that ze (it?) no longer registers as human: I remember I started oV as a girl. That much Im certain of. Or maybe I started out as a boy. Never mind it doesnt really matter. The thing is, I wasnt happy as a girl... uh... or maybe I wasnt happy as a boy... So I had a total body remould that turned me into a boy... or possibly a girl [...] 6 months after the treatment I started regretting my decision. So I had another remould to turn me back to whatever I started out as. Over the next ve years, I changed my mind about whether I wanted to be a boy or a girl forty-seven times [...] Eventually, I wasnt a boy or a girl. I wasnt anything. I couldnt even remember what Id been originally. The doctors were equally confused. Also, my personality had been completely erased [...] I wasnt a boy, I wasnt
parallax ISSN 1353-4645 print/ISSN 1460-700X online 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1353464022000027902
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a girl... I was just a cypher, a sort of glyph [...] I walked through the crowded streets and nobody even looked at me... They just stared straight through me. It was as if Id somehow slipped beneath the threshold of human awareness.2 A. Gargetts essay marks out some lines of ight from this use of sex as de ning and circumscribing the human, in its exploration of the posthuman erotics of Natacha Merritt. Any understanding of sex as the condition of possibility of humanness with an eye to the Freudian-Lacanian tradition within which being human must be being sexed risks operating, as Drucilla Cornell puts it in this volume, according to the need to protect the law of sexual diVerence as a matter of making civilization safe for heterosexuality. According to one all-too-familiar consequence of such a con guration, a strict regulation of sex technological if necessary, but only insofar as such technological intervention brings sex into closer alignment with nature is necessary to secure the future of humanity: to ensure that nothing will not happen. The outcry over the recent designer baby case in which two deaf women chose a deaf sperm donor to increase the odds that their second child together would also be deaf need only be mentioned, I think, in order to suggest that such deployments of sex are by no means yet defunct. Myra Hirds careful attention to biological models begins to solicit in the Derridean sense of at once evoking and shaking in its foundations one of the couplings which underpins this progressivist-evolutionary assumption that nature will, through sex, regulate the reproduction of the species in the direction of ever better and better organisms: the couple sex and reproduction. Some crucial groundwork for a psychic and legal decoupling of these terms has, of course, been laid by Drucilla Cornell, who continues to think the relation between psychoanalysis and legal and political discourse, and to develop strategies for understanding and respecting the sexuate being of individuals within a democratic political-legal system, in an interview in this volume. Mary Conway, too, turns our attention to the diYculties with which submitting sex to the law and/or having sex as a legal subject are fraught in her reading of Eight Bullets, a survivors account of homophobic violence. Which brings us to the question of whether and how sex, once had or if had, a question of conjunction left open in the punctuation of Alex Garca Duttmans essay, precisely where Spider sought to close it down (something must have happened= sex was had=obviously I know what happened) can be spoken. It is clear in Transmetropolitan 17 that we are, of course, to understand that the opposite of Elenas words (that is, the opposite of nothing; that is, sex) did occur in the space between issues, and it takes only a cursory glance at The Psychopathology of Everyday Life to warn us not to believe what a speaker tells us about his, her or hir sex nor, on the other hand, to believe that a speaker is not telling us about sex, even if he, she or ze appears to be speaking about something else entirely. As in The Ballad of Halo Jones, it is having sex that makes communication possible; but as in Transmetropolitan it is sex, also, that can make communication impossible, by inverting and undermining the meanings of words.
Introduction 2
If we are not to repeat the gesture of consigning sex to a prediscursive domain, then, we may have to wonder whether and how language has sex: whether and how sex has language: whether, in short, sex and language can cohabit, and how sex plays through a speaker, or through writing how sex is reproduced phono/graphically.3 Steven Shaviro gives us a peep at a phonographic erotic in his Deleuzean reading of Bjorks and Chris Cunninghams video collaboration, All is Full of Love. Stephen Mueckes oral topography of sex in The Fall, Dimitrios Efstratious reading of the Baudelairean lesbian as a site of somatic-semiotic resistance to sex as a normaldeviant binary, Adrian Rif kins porno-theory and Calvin Thomass exploration of metaphoricity, all couple sex with writing in diVerent, but equally stimulating, ways. Lynn Turner, on the other hand, while no less sexually graphic/graphically sexual, examines the functioning of already-established relations, asking whether the couple must submit to the logic of marriage in her examination of the translation contract between Derrida and Benjamin. The reference I have made to Transmetropolitan and The Ballad of Halo Jones leads me to conclude by remarking on the appearance of a panel from Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist on our front cover. In a medium comics often associated with the production and reproduction of heterocentric hypermasculinity, Hothead Paisans creative and repeated interventions around, precisely, the notion of having sex in all its meanings make her the ideal (anti-)cover girl for this issue of parallax. We are grateful to Diane DiMassa for permission to reproduce her here.
Notes
1
Warren Ellis, Darick Robertson & Rodney Ramos, Year of the Bastard 5, Transmetropolitan 17 (New York: DC Comics/Vertigo, November 1998), pp.12. 2 Alan Moore & Ian Gibson, Ill Never Forget Whatsizname, Book 2, prog 3, The Complete Ballad
of Halo Jones (London: Titan, 2001 [1986]) (no page numbers). 3 This formulation indicates our debt to the work of Barbara Engh.
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parallax, 2002, vol. 8, no. 4, 47
A Roman Holiday 1
Adrian Rifkin
David and his companion had strolled up the hill to the Church of San Pietro al Montorio, it was a bright but chilly morning, Rome in the early spring time, the usual, ambient smell of wisteria not yet released by the warming sun. They were curious to note an elderly couple, very bourgeois, elegantly dressed, camel hair and tweed, stooping at the roadside with scissors and a plastic bag. On closer inspection they saw that this distinguished, carefully begloved pair were cutting nettles and other fresh spring weeds, no doubt to make some exquisite soup quite alien to a northern palate. The idea of a bourgeois scavenger was already something of a shock, preparing them a little for the other, expected but always rather shocking contrasts of the church itself. They would once again see the high serious decorations of the Renaissance chiming with the brash, blue velvet draped over the seating and covering the central aisle, left permanently in place for the stream of upper class marriages which the church of San Pietro al Montorio makes its speciality. There is no doubt, David thinks pompously to himself, that marriages make it even more diYcult to look at art than do tourists. And the art historian, of course, is nowhere a tourist, everywhere a worker. As David and his friend enter the Church they see that one wedding had just nished and that there will be a full half hour of grace before the next one would begin. David makes straight for the Sebastiano, his friend to gaze up into the little chapel on the other aisle, the one with the complex ceiling by some followers of Bernini. David can never look long enough at this particular work though I doubt that he really sees deeper into it each time he takes up his position in the church. His attachment seems more of a minor fetish than a major aVair. Yet today he does notice how close Christs calf and foot come to the viewers face, a melting, lightly scented intimacy for all the straining of the passion. He also thinks about a poem that Michelangelo had written to Cavalieri on the back of a letter sent to him by his friend and student Sebastiano one of those agonized little verses that presents desire as pure suVering, and suVering as the only reasonable clothing for desire. It would be more interesting to know what Sebastiano himself had had to say in the text he wrote, as really it makes no sense, now, these days, David re ects, to feel like that, as Michelangelo had done. Mercifully its more and more of a lost experience, like any healing after holocaust. But now he remembers about the plague, the anxieties of sex that have risen up to ll the vacuum left by the defeat of the old abjection. Another kind of labour, has safe sex become a labour of love, and love in its turn a labour of safety?
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And what desire is there at the back of this fresco, written behind it, within the blandly frozen professionalism of the scene? The beaters beat; Christ ful ls his role which is to suVer and redeem; the column, it doesnt take much to read it, the column reminds us of the fathers law to which and by which we are bound, it surely is the phallus to the castrated crotch of divine salvation, and it doesnt take a whole apparatus of language theory, pre- or post-Lacanian, to track the slippage of this metonymy. David nds the image fascinating, but not sublime, for there is no systematic excess, no tension in imagination, nothing more surprising than that eshy calf; just the grim nality of the endgame of the Passion, the dreary work of obedience to an extrinsic and a hostile law that regulates human aVectivity. The rules are made up before the scene, rather like the rules of a good workout the trainers voice barks the breathless grunts 31 32 cmon, tighten those butts, just one more, 33 34 just one more, for the perfect industrial body, the perfect industrial salvation, for those who agree to the rules, that is. So it also reminds him of the most grizzly bits of Sade, those terrible mutilations as the 120 Journe es draw to their orgiastic close and the axioms of libertinage exhaust themselves in the comprehensive realization of their law a law under whose rule the division of the body becomes the most complete, prophetic expression of the division of labour, executed for the ratio of a system which produces pleasure only as a strategically necessary excess to ensure its own free function. Three commodities are produced as rewards in these three scenarios of production, and they are named salvation, health and annihilation... And then a new awareness; that the image may not even be beautiful, not as Kant might allow, Forms which by their combination of unity and heterogeneity serve as it were to strengthen and entertain the mental powers... No, he half regrets the conclusion, but it makes good sense. The Passion belongs with Sade. Sades atheism is nothing if not skin deep, and like the theology of the passion, it confounds agency with (active) obedience. (Wedding guests are ltering into the chute now, cosseting their knees on velvet stools, breaking the two mens absorption in their respective object) As he tries to ll the fresco with desire, David is aware of the slight discomfort that will sometimes come upon the conscientiously trained historian who tries to pull some material so rudely out its past, to distort it and bloat it with his own longing the more so when it is not even his period. But this unease accidentally sharpens his relation to the image. Desires now slip through the membrane of his caution, ll the space between him and the concave wall. Quietly, unnoticed, the sublime is brewing in this hollow space. Now the two of them are walking back down the hill, for a late second breakfast or an early lunch. Without speaking to one another they wonder if this will be in one of the chic cafes near Santa Maria or one of the more popular restaurants of the Viale Trastevere. David is pleased with himself, quite smug; he feels that the time in San Pietro has somehow increased his credibility as an art historian, and between the imagined menus, he is trying to frame the title for an article. Then he falls: suddenly, at on his face, facing downhill, his elbows by his side, and his palms rasp
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along the crumbling, gritty asphalt. It is not his life that ashes before him right now just these few ideas: in Caravaggios Conversion of Saint Paul I would have fallen on my back and why have I fallen, anyway; then is it the fault of the painting or should I not have worn these new shoes today, with their too stiV soles and solid heels? and, in consequence do I need Freud or just a cobbler? did I renew my tetanus injection? So, as he pushes himself up his friend (who knows the answer to all these questions) is rather annoyed by the spectacle, and does not move to help him he realizes the sharp pain in his ankles and his hands. He stares at his palms intently, now like St Francis receiving the stigmata, and wriggles his feet one by one. A little blood oozes through the tarry skin, and, quite unbidden, another image springs before his eyes. (A bare butted muscle boy, his hands chained to a beam above his head, his leather jeans tight around his ankles, is being ogged by two leatherclad, masked bikers in a tightening rhythm of exchange and pleasure.) This is the moment of sublimity, where the discord between pain and pleasure transcends the reason of the everyday, an immeasurable emotion of pure space, of the void concavity of the chapel in its rhyming with his own unnamed desire, an image of the extension of desire surpassing the imagination yet miraculously present. For a moment he tries to cling to this intensity, but the super-ego voice of hygiene calls and rules. Find a fountain to wash the wounds, which after all are only skin deep, a coVee to get the adrenaline back to level. Sitting in the cafe there is now nothing left of Davids episode, but a little sense of fatigue, an already lost satisfaction, a residual epiphany, which formulates itself out of the fragments of the moment. Urgently, he must remember to buy the whole strip-cartoon by Tom of Finland, of which his vision was only a single page. Years later the episode takes the form of print, a short article about the profanity of the Passion and Sades eschatology. It begins like this: David and his companion had strolled up the hill to the Church of San Pietro al Montorio, it was a bright but chilly morning, Rome in the early spring time...
Note
1
This short piece is one of a series that I wrote some years ago to solve a number of problems concerning how cultural theorists might write about sex and its experience. I invented a character called David, who, while his life would resemble my own, would also act out where I would fear to tread. Especially he would be free to have experiences without suVering fear of essentialism, but each time he did so, theory would take centre stage as the uncanny other of experience and disrupt the clarity of his actions. The reader will note that the sentiments David here gives himself up to predate the days of triple-therapies for HIV, hence the remark on work, love and safety. Davids deeply ambivalent love of Sade and unlimited love of Pasolini, had they been glossed, would have needed the space of a short book, but the relation Rif kin 6
between them underlies his confusion. The fall on the mount did take place, but the immediate vision of the Tom of Finland cartoon was introduced to give it a teleology, so that the Passion of Christ would, as it were, become the deferred action of gay pleasure another HIV reference. It seemed inappropriate to write and publish too many pieces in this genre, that I called porno-theories, but another appears in Sue Golding [ed], The Eight Technologies of Otherness (London, Routledge, 1997). It is entitled Slavery/Sublimity, pp.146 151, and there David gets into Kant in a Berlin sex-club. The serious version of A Roman Holiday appears in Versus 2:1, 1995, under the title of Do not touch: Tom with Sebastiano, Kant and others, but was written at the request of the late Stephan Germer for Texte zur Kunst, where it rst appeared.
Despite my anxieties, the collected porno-theories will appear in their entirety as soon as my website, www.gai-savoir.com, is up and working. Only last year I saw a copy of the Flagellation, a life-size oil
painting in Bamberg, of all places, and hung on some staircase there; all shiny and at, it had to be pointed out to me!!
Adrian Rif kin is Professor of Visual Culture & Media at Middlesex University, the author of Street Noises: Parisian Pleasures 19001940 (Manchester University Press, 1993) and Ingres then, and now (Re Visions: Critical Studies in the History and Theory of Art) (Routledge, 2000).
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parallax, 2002, vol. 8, no. 4, 820
From Flesh to Matter: Anti-Essentialist Circumscriptions of Sexuality in Charles Baudelaires Poetry

Dimitrios Efstratiou
Baroque allegory sees the corpse only from the outside. Baudelaire sees it also from the inside. Walter Benjamin, Central Park
Materiality, Rei cation and the Non-Reciprocating Gaze This article elaborates the working hypothesis that patterns of sexual behaviour in Baudelaire acquire their particular signi cance in the context of a broader radical engagement with physical, semiotic and mnemonic materiality. Within the latters terrain conceptual and physical acts are cast into relief against the backdrop of a peculiar dialectic of postural sexual reciprocality and cognitive asymbolia. I argue that Baudelairean sexuality, especially that of the female characters, accommodates a dimension of physical materiality that resists its transcendence into the realm where drives and/or socio-symbolic imperatives are inscribed. One of the traits this materiality translates into is a gaze that does not acknowledge the human speci city of the (male) other; another is the disturbingly asexual character that the minimally corpuscular female body repeatedly assumes. The unsettling sensuousness that the textual characters exude shapes up antagonistically vis-a-vis the resolution of desire ` into the cognitively and morally domesticated territory of gender normativity while exceeding at the same time the protocols of sexual deviance. The materialist problematic that Baudelaires oeuvre articulates betrays a profound engagement with the incursion of rei cation into the zone of corporeal interiority. As such, his work enhances the semiotic/somatic layers that subtend and immanently undermine the essentialist behavioural mapping of the sexual realm while maximising through its allegorical lens the material/performative dimension slurred over in the resolution of experiential fragmentation into cognitive integrity. After Walter Benjamins seminal work on Baudelaire a certain critical consensus has been reached concerning the reality of socio-economic rei cation beaching in on the poets narratives.1 What remains to be seen is the particular in ections that it assumes in the realm of sexuality, apart from those that determine the privileged, and
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eminently traceable, image of the prostitute.2 Textual depictions of the oversexed, yet unsettlingly asexual female body typically revolve around the bipolar axis of the seraphic-versus-the whore.3 This should not, however, be taken to mean that Baudelaires angle replicates androcentric con gurations of woman. The stiV bodies of the narratorss female partners exhibit a monumental sexual intransitivity that cannot be contained within the perimeters of lesbian non-reciprocality. Their postural minimal responsiveness merely serves to sustain the decorum of sexual rapport while simultaneously making a mockery of the economy of possessor and possessed that Baudelaire ostensibly endorses only to subsequently reverse, and thus deconstruct, the sexual protocols that support it. Baudelaires anti-naturalism exceeds the essentially re-integrateable and cognitively soothing logic of sexual deviance and comes to undermine the essentialist foundations that monitor perceptions of human sexuality and their zeugmatic arrangements. Two of the ways in which his latent anti-essentialism vis-a -vis sexuality shapes up are the erosion of the auratic, reciprocal ` gaze that constitutes a sine qua non for the cementing of a reciprocally de ned sexual identity, and the construal of the female body in terms that enhance its corporeal materiality and preclude its non-residual yielding to the matter-transcending realm of signi cation and understanding. There is a battle between constatation and performance raging in the Baudelairean female body, and therefore much more is at stake therein than just the voiding of an essentially sanctioned perception of women and sexuality. The dissolution of the reciprocal gaze that most poems in Les Epaves [Flotsam] implicitly negotiate impacts the narratival subjects capacity to have his desire recognised and socially mediated. Ideally, ocular complementarity implicates the eroticized subjects in a specular symmetry of mutually recognizable subjectivities. The parties concerned are expected to respond to each others ocular call. In this case, the opposite holds true. The non-reciprocity of the gaze is an explicit given of the poetry, and a factor seriously contributive to an overall erotic and auratic loss. The male textual narrators covet the female body while construing it in terms of rei cation of the organic life within. It is within this construal that one of the pervasive concerns that renders Baudelaires poetry paradigmatic for our ( post-)modernity, viz. the rift between perception and cognition, materializes. The narratorss gaze rei es the female other, objecti es her and aims to act out the recognition of self that the staring protagonist seeks while at the same time retaining the distance that is requisite to the preservation of aura. The female partnerss eyes, though, have lost the ability to reciprocate a gaze of recognition.4 In Benjamins words, sexus [has] detached itself from eros.5 This loss and detachment, however, are not passively accepted. Benjamins multivalent address of the issue of rei cation in its various rami cations has enhanced the fragile equilibrium between its hellish and redemptive dimensions. Within the parameters of melancholy allegory foundational to Baudelaires endeavour, a position is carved out wherein the rei ed human body is both acknowledged in its fragmentary material speci city and treated as harbouring a politically transformative potential. Benjamin writes in Konvolut J that The unique importance of Baudelaire resides in his being the rst and the most un inching to have taken the measure of the self-estranged human being, in the double sense of acknowledging this being and fortifying it with armor against the rei ed world.6 Acknowledging, and doing justice to, the rei cation immanent to the human
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dimension means a lot more than unilaterally demoting it to an epiphenomenon of socio-economic exigencies. The melancholic-allegorical xation on the creaturely and, by extension, the bodily realm subtends both Baudelaire and Benjamins work and relates to both writers determination to redeem the forsaken object, the commodity, the human body, immanently. It is not only the historical continuum with its progressivist mythologies that, both writers agree, must be blasted apart,7 but also the synecdochic continuum of the natural human body that Baudelaires allegorical rage rips apart in the interest of micrologically upholding the corporeal monads potential to deplete the devolution of the body into a soothing metaphor of social organicity.8 The politically transformative potential indwelling in the redemption of corporeal rei cation is, however, more poignant in Benjamin.9 In Baudelaire rei cation encompasses a suprahistorical component that protrudes into the sublation of performative exigencies into the zone of historical mindfulness (Eingedenken). Benjamins palinodes over Baudelaires lack of political awareness may in part be attributed to this situation.1 0 ` In the following poem, A celle qui est trop gaie [To Her Who is too Gay], from paves [Flotsam],1 1 the preservation of erotic aura is staked upon the the section Les E salvaging of a minimal ceremonial distance. This is supposed to transpire through the transformation of the female body into a somatic ciaroscuro landscape. In a stunning reversal of established values, however, the qualities of this natural realm are presented as inimical to the speaker, who ultimately voices his hatred of nature as much as his forced admission of it as a category constitutive of his perception of the other.12 From the initial conception of the woman in natural terms, Ta tete, ton geste, ton air Sont beaux comme un beau paysage; Le rire joue en ton visage Comme un vent frais dans un ciel clair. Your head, your gestures, and bearing Are as lovely as a beautiful landscape; Laughter plays over your face Like a cool wind in a clear sky. one passes to repulsion towards nature, and aggressivity towards the woman who is seen to embody its qualities: Pour cha tier ta chair joyeuse, Pour meurtrir ton sein pardonne, Et faire a ton anc etonne ` Une blessure large et creuse,1 3 So as to chastise your happy esh, To bruise your pardoned breast, And cleave into your astounded side A wide deep wound. The chastisement in question re ects a sadomasochistic logic which is present throughout Baudelaires work, sadomasochism signalling primarily a complication of
Efstratiou 10
the reciprocal mediation and objecti cation of self and other. Punishing the other amounts empathetically in this poetry to punishing oneself 14 since there is a constant palindromic movement between empathetic identi cation with, and aversion to, the female presences. The motif of the aborted gaze is clearer in Les Bijoux: Les yeux xe s sur moi, comme un tigre dompte, / Dun air vague et reveur elle essayait des poses, / Et la candeur unie a la lubricite / Donnait un charme neuf a ses metamorphoses; ` ` [Her eyes xed on me, like a tame tigress, / With a vague and dreamy look striking various poses, / And candour together with wantonness / Gave a novel charm to her metamorphoses;].1 5 It is a unity based on antitheses that prevails here: eyes xed yet with a dreamy and vague look, candour and wantonness, continuous metamorphoses. The xed eyes do not denote an identity-acknowledging gaze, but bear the qualities of a senseless beast (a tigress) whose appeal to humans emanates from its threatening nature, self-suYciency, and behavioural intransitivity.1 6 The topos of the woman as lurking and self-transforming presence serves as the organising principle. The look emanates from a source that does not hail the others speci city. The narrators excitation rises in proportion to the specular mutability of the woman: Je croyais voir par un nouveau dessin / Les hanches de lAntiope au buste dun imberbe [I thought I saw by virtue of a transformation/The hips of Antiope and a striplings bust ]. The French bust translates as either bosom, chest or, most signi cantly, sculpture (depicting the upper part of ones body). The latter de nition may serve as a semantic foil for the enhancement of the passage from nature to the rei cation of the human dimension implied in the monumentality of sculpture, a persistent theme throughout this poetry. Baudelaire tries to defend the aura and remoteness of the given (ergo the beastly, intransitive quality of the woman) against the encroachment of volitional and distance-reducing gaze. Yet, his enterprise leads to the morti cation of the physical dimension, to the gradual rei cation of the human body. The body turns to funereal monument 1 7 repeatedly in his oeuvre, and through the concrete reality of his dialectical corpuscular images. Corporeal Materiality, Cognitive and Sexual Rei cation The sexual economy regulating the narratival subjects interaction is a pointer to the wider retreat of ones capacity to absorb and process experience. The transformation of the female body into a space of contention where the physical and mental capacities of the male narrator(s) are put to the test, testi es to this retreat. The characters bodies serve as the vessel wherein sexuality undermines identity instead of serving as a channel wherein the subjects truth can be consolidated. The distress over sexual orientation and ful lment experienced by the Baudelairean subjects symptomizes an incisive disarray of identity layers that fail to coalesce into unassailable subjectivity. Baudelaires sexed-up characters exude a crossover appeal. A subversive aversion to the feminine realm coupled with the encoding of postcoital melancholia into virtually every characters social gestures overwhelms any expectation of psychosexual equilibrium. Baudelaire manages to feed an amazing amount of coded behaviour, decoy manoeuvres and sexual innuendo into his character pro les. Visible alienation eVects accompany the hectic erotic allure of his
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characters and counterbalance a pervasive sense of sexual entitlement partially responsible for their unsettling aura. Baudelaires sexual lingua franca is replete with instances of frustrated sexual grati cation, a condition that exceeds the intensity and periodicity of a mere deviation from a natural form, and is therefore immanently inscribed. The texts are full of attempts of lovers manque to attain some form of ful lment, sometimes via recourse to empathetic memory. All they end up with is consumption of sex devoid of any lining up of the cores of sexual experience into univalent sexuality. The mannequin puissant has already turned into debris de squelette18 by the time the male narrator struggles to distil a modicum of meaning from the experience he has had. The narratival subject leases himself out as a psychotic grappling with the metamorphoses of perceptional givens. The uidity of perception in this case marks the overwhelming of conceptual equilibrium due to the non-commensurability of the perceived scenes with meaning-imbuing cognitive and moral frameworks. Les Metamorphoses du vampire literalizes the inundation of perception by a specular mobility that deprives the seeing subject from any cognitive and sexual anchoring. Again, the Baudelairean topos of the woman/beast turning into soulless rei ed object (skeleton in this case) via the path of waning naturality oVers a profound comment on the inherently rei ed character of all erotic and, by extension, conceptual experience: LES ME TAMORPHOSES DU VAMPIRE La femme cependant, de sa bouche de fraise, En se tordant ainsi quun serpent sur la braise, Et pe trissant ses seins sur le fer de son busk, Laissait couler les mots tout impregnes de musk: [...] Je remplace [...] La lune, le soleil, le ciel et les etoiles! [...] [...] je ne vis plus Quune outre aux ancs gluants, toute pleines de pus! Je fermai les deux yeux, dans ma froide epouvante, Et quand je les rouvris a la clarte vivante, ` ` A mes cotes, au lieu du mannequin puissant Qui semblait avoir fait provision de sang, Tremblaient confusement des de bris de squelette, Qui deux-memes rendaient le cri dune girouette Ou dune enseigne, au bout dune tringle de fer, Que balance le vent pendant les nuits dhiver.1 9 THE METAMORPHOSES OF THE VAMPIRE Meanwhile the woman, uttered these words From her strawberry mouth, writhing like a snake On a brazier, and cha ng her breasts on the steel of her corset, Musk-penetrated words: [...] I will replace [...] The moon, the sun, the sky and the stars! [...]
Efstratiou 12
[...] I saw but A slimy gourd dripping with pus! I closed my eyes in a t of horror, And when I reopened them to the strong light, I found next to me, instead of the powerful mannequin Which had satiated herself with blood, The rattling bones of a skeleton, Rasping like a weathercock Or a sign-board dangling from its iron frame, Which the wind swings on a winter night. The passage from serpent to skeleton via the intermediate mannequin puissant teases out the hypothetical essence of the female partner through successive layers of repugnant naturality. The condition that is revealed underneath the natural overlay is not deviational, but typical and exemplary. The natural stratum covers up the emblem-corpse in an attempt to prolong the defensive motion of understanding and sexual accountability.20 The corpse as model of erotic partnership strikes at the core of a supra-historical phenomenon. The meaningless yet allegorical female body enhances the rei cation that complicates the transition from material given to the concept, the diremption of physis into petri ed fragment. With respect to the females body reduction to allegorical emblem and the complication of specular symmetry that this metamorphosis entails, Christine BuciGlucksmann seems to insinuate this impossible dialectic of perceptual xations and de-auraticized, cognitively silent and non-reciprocating objects of ocular desire: Now, the ubiquitous metaphors of the eye and the petrifying dual look (divine/ infernal), like all the correlates exhibited by the image, de ne the Baudelairean theatre of the modern and of the feminine. Or rather, modernity is this theatricality which is constantly eroticising the new. For if the eye functions here as the organ of the passions and of their aggravation, the theatre for its part is unreal and lacking in aVect.21 The petri cation of the female body and the non-aVective dimension of the theatre where non-reciprocality is staged point up the recalcitrance of the physical sensorium to the imperatives of essence. It also oVers a critical purchase on the shading oV of physical matter into a sexuality-ridden body that is coerced into obeying the dictates of confessional sex regimes.22 It is the very constitution of sex, the deployment of sexuality enjoined with its commensurate injunction to know it, to reveal its law and its power2 3 that is at stake in the gradual corporeal emaciation of the female body in Baudelaires poetry. From the regimented sexual esh one moves not to the essence fundaments ideally underpinning it, but to the in exible solidity of matter-rich but sense-void corporeal armature that is a pointer to a radically other economy of pleasure, or rather challenges the very logic of economy as such. This physical minimalism allegorically rehearses in reverse form the process of the morti cation of the material dimension inherent in the formation of concept, and thus undercuts any attempt to transcribe the Baudelairean morti cation of the human body in exclusively historicist terms as the eVect of the market commodi cation of the human body.24 This does not mean, however, that there are no distinct historical responses to the latter. Baroque allegory is most relevant here since it was deployed in order to grapple with the meaning of this transformation. Baudelaire diVers from
parallax 13
his baroque predecessors, however, in that he resisted the ultimate salvational leap into transcendentalism that they undertook.25 In broader terms, the non-integration of sexual experience within sexuality-stabilizing cognitive-moral ensembles that the above poem engages is symptomatic of a profound withering of experiential certainties and sexual normativity. One can hardly speak of an experience in the proper sense of the word here. Also, the narratorss obsessive zooming in on parts of the womens bodies in a way that shatters their synecdochic organicity, plus the specular uidity vis-a-vis the female body, are entwined with a ` wider complication of analogical representation that cannot leave organicist accounts of sexuality intact. I contend that they ensue on, and allegorically corroborate, the diVraction of the substantial unity and homogeneity of the represented eld, which unity is indispensable for stable representation and the ultimate containment of sexual deviance, say female homosexuality, within a cognitively assuaging zone.
The enhanced awareness of the material dimension of reality givens exhibited in Baudelaires poetry, with the human body being the predominant paradigm, responds to the textss engagement with the contingent character of cognitive/semantic and sexual positivism. The montage of isolated and often petri ed human fragments, of the parts of the female anatomy that the narrators close up on as if in seeming oblivion to the whole person, points to a hollowing of human nature that is not, however, mourned for. Une Martyre with its Delacroix-esque dissection of an eroticized even if bartered body, exhibits the uncanny attribution of esh-like qualities to the womans accessories while her mutilated body is void of any vestige of corporeality: Un bas rosatre, orne de coins dor, a la jambe, / Comme un souvenir ` est reste; / La jarretiere, ainsi quun oeil secret qui ambe, / Darde un regard ` diamante [A esh-coloured stocking, adored with gold clocks, / rests on her leg like a memory; / Her garters, just like a secret eye that glints, / Give oV a gemlike glare].26 The corpse-like qualities of the female body inscribe rei cation and materiality within the core of putative fertility. The whole picture is accentuated in counterpoint to the poetrys self-understanding in dialogical, conjunctural terms. However, it is the contiguity of two facets of bodily rei cation that is evident: rei cation as both the outcome of a concrete historical arrangement of forces and the permeation of history and memory by the materiality of semiotic inscriptions, whether they be understood as language or as pure sense-less physicality. There are numerous examples of the marmoreal aura of the female body in the examined texts. All testify to the rei cation of naturality that is endemic in the deepest layers of naturality, in the sexed up and yet ultimately frigid body that should ideally be the site of unimpeded vitality instead of the supporting chora of gender-erasing transgression. A perennial agon over the possibility of the rehabilitation of sex along cognitively integral lines is played out in numerous textual instances where the female body is both volatile and sculpturally solid. Indicatively, in Le Lethe [Forgetfulness] one reads: Viens sur mon coeur, [...] / Tigre adore, monstre aux airs indolents; // Je veux dormir! // Jetalerai mes baisers sans remords / Sur ton beau corps poli comme le cuivre [Come upon my heart, [...] / Adorable tigress, monster in your indolent airs; // I want to sleep, ... // I will lavish my kisses without remorse / On your beautiful body that is polished like bronze] (emphasis added).2 7 The stressed materiality of the
Efstratiou 14
female body translates a new economy of jouissance beyond the male symbolic sovereignty, as well as the material dimension of the human body that does not yield to sense and sovereign sexuality. The aggressively augmented material in ections of the body betray the rupture of modernist self-conception with sexual binomialism and radically preempt the dialectical anamorphosis of the transgression of sex and sense. Representational motions puri ed of testimonial import and a sexual mobility deprived of essentialist moorings impregnate the Baudelairean text with its instances of cognitive and moral black-outs and qualify the spasmodic somatic rapports of his protagonists as instances of a performative and material love. This latter encompasses various tropes of inherently aborted sexual perception that still retain the graceful decorum of self-re exive consciousness. The ambivalent reciprocal enhancement and undermining of attributes that partake of materiality and plasticity in the above mentioned poem, (tigress and indolent airs on one hand, and a body polished like bronze on the other) corroborates the gestural character of sexual understanding. What emerges throughout is the very origin of the [ physical] text, the material trace or the material inscription that would be the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of the text itself .28 Baudelaires insistence on the nonsensical materiality of the sexually rei ed human body bears down upon the possibility of conceptually capturing human sexuality in terms of underlying essence fundaments. Also, his avoidance of a lexicon of unconscious-begotten forces allows reading into his work a most promising resistance to rendering desire answerable to transcendent laws in the service of psychogenetic immanence or to the sexual caveats that are legitimated in the interest of sanctioning the cultural/political imperatives of the social eld.2 9 The predicament of the Baudelairean characters is nowhere banalised into the frustration of their eVorts to access the true nature or referent of their desire that hypothetically would be glimpsed negatively through the veil of repression. The poetry teases out the socially asymmetrical formations of desire and sexuality, and showcases this asymmetry as the cause of this predicaments genesis. The social twist given to desire, however, is never reduced to a historicist determinism that would replicate the teleology of biogenetic essentialism on the level of social interaction. The parallel erosion of naturality and sexuality, and the melancholia it triggers, point to the in ltration of human sexuality by a material, semiotic logic. The female body, as the privileged terrain whereupon the corpuscular voiding of nature is made to transpire, is gradually divested of its symbolic, aesthetic and natural qualities only to transform into a sense and sex-void sign whose signi ed is the trace left behind by the disappearance of its meaning. The disintegration of subjectivity that the internal colonization of desire by sense-less materiality solicits, radicalizes psychogenesis to such an extent that the extraction of homocentric contents turns into ctional pursuit. This radicalization hinders the smooth internalization of man by/into man via the bridge of sexual and/or linguistic communication. My usage of the term material has throughout resonated with the Kristevian sense of the semiotic, pre-symbolic arrangement of the somatic forces before they are invested in signi cation.30 Semiotic processes, which include displacement, condensation, alliterations, vocal and gestural rhythms,31 nd a subtle echo in Baudelaires cadaverization of the female body and his narratorss witnessing of their
parallax 15
female partnerss autarky and intransitivity in terms that point to another economy of female jouissance beyond the competition with the male partners symbolic power. Baudelaires female presences resist hermeneutic assimilation to the extent that they point to a wholly diVerent economy of desire. With regard to the woman-turnedskeleton or bronze sculpture a lot more is at stake than the corporeal surface whereupon the historical conjuncture has inscribed its parcelling and prostituting commodi cation of the human dimension. This female gure shapes up as the realm wherein the feminine interior (meaning the psychic space and, at the level of the bodily experience, the vagina-anus combination) can then cease being the crypt that enclosed the dead woman and conditions frigidity.3 2 The tense dialectic of corporeal opulence and somatic emaciation in Baudelaires poetry obeys the necessity to hollow out any pockets of inwardness wherein fundaments of essence can be ingrained.33 The female corpse-emblem, additionally, is an eVect of the abject dimension that inheres in Baudelaires poetry. The corpse that is revealed underneath layers of covering esh as the deepest truth of the other signi es the supervalence of the body, the bodys recalcitrance to consciousness, reason or will.34 The corpse signi es the excess of sensuous physicality vis-a-vis cognition and reference and the bodys ` recalcitrance to its annexation by the sexual, viz. cognitive, realm. Baudelaires radicalization of the rei ed character of human experience and sexuality and his allegorical belabouring of it are not, however, impenetrable to the dimension of the social production of individuals and desire.3 5 Baudelaires poetry con gures sexuality neither in terms of an infrastructure36 nor as an epiphenomenon of socioeconomic determinations, but as a behavioural ensemble that shapes up in the crossroads between social injunctions and the collapse of vaulting cognitive and moral frameworks that necessarily brackets the former. On the oversexed yet stiV Baudelairean body one can read the inscription of socio-moral imperatives. Beyond that, however, this body exhibits an uncanny materiality that does not simply translate the reifying parcelling imposed by market conditions, but also the material dimension of human experience and sexuality that cannot be transcended into an organon of sense, instinctual drives, or instrumental reason. The hardly legible primal inscriptions underneath the sex-rati ed superscripts in the Baudelairean palimpsest cry out a resistance to compulsive sex understood in terms of essence. Baudelaire refused to dumb down the societal dimensions of sexual and social privation and chronicled the intertwining of lack qua desire and its social fabrication. In the corporeality of his images and the unsettling physicality of his characters he gives oV the notion that history is inscribed on the human body not only in the form of socially imposed drills but also in the way individuals relate to themselves, to their physicality, to their desire.37 However, the aggressive voiding of sexual normativity and its eroding spilling over beyond the cognitively secure site of prostitution into more habitable spaces constitutes one of the primary axes of Baudelaires engagement with the body and sexuality that disrupts both essentialist and reductively historicist accounts of human sexuality. What is more, it puts in abeyance the perpetually embattled cognitive caveats that sustain both angles and imperils their spurious legitimation on the basis of covertly natural and/or overtly social determinations. The non-conjunctural dimensions of rei cation are equally pressing and are inserted by Baudelaire within the deeper layers of human sexuality where they are seen to
Efstratiou 16
subtend the passage from perceived scene to concept. This voiding of naturality, which the metamorphosis of the female body into senseless physical matter comes to translate, responds to concerns that are subsumed under a broader problematic of subjectivity and cognition vs. linguistic performance that exceeds the topicality of the sexual angle. His allegorical cynicism violates the scene of pleasure, ripping apart the myth of sexual love.38 It is a sign of Baudelaires inexhaustible actuality that he laboured under a radical construal of somatic performativity that would not be catharized into either sexual normativity or deviance. In his poetry one sets oV with the imperatives of the esh, the injunctions of sex and the excitement they provoke in order to gradually gain purchase on the contingencies of the performative. In Warminskis words, There is no direct, immediate, royal road to the performative, to action and the act, political or otherwise. Pretending that one can go directly is sheer delusion and a guarantee that nothing can happen, nothing will ever happen.39
Notes
1
Two seminal studies that address the issue of rei cation in Walter Benjamins treatment of Baudelaire are Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, 1989) and Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Sage Publications, 1994). Indicatively, on rei cation and sexuality see Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, pp.18890. Susan Buck-Morss, The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering, New German Critique, no. 39 (1986), pp.99141 contains relevant insights on this issue. 2 Benjamin observes that Baudelaire never once wrote a whore-poem from the perspective of the whore [Central Park, New German Critique, no. 34 (1985), p.42]. This should not be read as implying that Baudelaire was caught up within an androcentric self-serving perspective assigning the prostitute the socially convenient space of the pathetic human commodity. The poet in Baudelaire knowingly prostitutes himself to the market. His angle is that of the poet as commodity. See Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1997), p.34 where Benjamin focuses on an early poem in which market-oriented writing is explicitly aligned with prostitution: Moi qui vends ma pensee et qui veut etre auteur/I who sell my thought and want to be an author!. Political mindfulness must concentrate on the encased potential indwelling in the human commodity as whore calling out for redemptive allegorical understanding: In the allegorical the deceptive trans guration of the world of the commodity resists its distortion. The commodity attempts to look itself in the face. It celebrates its
becoming human in the whore [Central Park, p.42]. The implication is that there is a socially transformative potential inherent in the allegorical enhancement of the rei ed, commodi ed body. 3 With [Baudelaire] the fetishistic and the angelic element almost never come together [Benjamin, Central Park, p.37]. The commodity dimension inherent in the human realm is radicalized in the poetry in congruence with the allegorical eye zooming in on the female body. 4 See Benjamin, Baudelaire, p.149: The expectation aroused by the look of the human eye is not ful lled. Baudelaire described eyes of which one is inclined to say that they have lost the ability to look. 5 Benjamin, Baudelaire, p.148. 6 Walter, Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge (MA) and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), p.322; emphasis added. 7 Benjamin repeatedly characterizes Baudelaires enterprise in terms that directly derive from his own agenda: To the notion of progress in the history of art, Baudelaire opposes a monadological conception [The Arcades Project, p.298]. 8 Relevant insights on the material dimension in Benjamin are oVered in Gerhard Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 2000). 9 With respect to the role forgetting plays in the retention of unconscious impressions in Freuds theory and Benjamins appropriation of it in his distinguishing between Erfahrung (collectively mediated experience corresponding to me moire involontaire) and Erlebnis (sensory experience and memory obeying the imperatives of a more conscious emergence), Theodor Adorno voices his parallax 17
concern over Benjamin not having formulated a proper distinction between good and bad rei cation [Henri Lonitz (ed.), Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence 19281940, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p.321]. One could transpose Adornos question as to how far this forgetting [viz. rei cation] is one that is capable of shaping experience onto the realm of corporeal performativity and bodily rei cation, that is, to what degree the material sensorium can be sublated into the substratum upon which sexual and historical experience can be gauged. The extent to which the morti cation of the female body in Baudelaires work harbours a transformative potential on the level of the social constitutes the real anxiety here and must be embedded within the broader problematic of whether the immanent redemption of the somatic qua semiotic ever transcends the plane of allegorico-melancholic cathexis. 10 Compare indicatively Konvolut J [J42a, 10] on Baudelaires fatalism and resignation with [J56a, 5] where Baudelaires refusal to align himself with the ethos of journalism is seen as an indication of his betraying his own bourgeois class. There is a tense counterpoint of avowed admiration for, and empathy with, Baudelaire and inhibitions relating to the poets alleged aestheticism and political incapacitation. Benjamins preoccupation with Baudelaire bears the traits of a perennial agon through which he struggled to crystallize his own concerns most of which he saw as being encased in the French poets work. Verdicts such as the one voiced in Paris The Capital of the Nineteenth Century to the eVect that Baudelaire succumbs to the infatuation of Wagner [Benjamin, Baudelaire, p.172] must always be contextualized within a diVuse empathetic appreciation of the archetypally modern poet. 11 Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres Completes, 2 vols. ed. ` Claude Pichois (Paris: Bibliotheque de la Ple iade, ` 1975). 12 In the opposition to nature announced by Baudelaire there lies primarily a deep-seated protest against the organic [Benjamin, Central Park, p.45]. 13 Baudelaire, Oeuvres Completes, vol. 1, p.156. ` Translation in Charles Baudelaire, The Complete Verse, 2 vols., ed. and trans. Francis Scarfe (London: Anvil Press, 1986), pp.27980. 14 On the connection between this sadomasochistic logic and Baudelaires allegorical dismantling of the organic dimension, see Walter Benjamin, Konvolut J: Baudelaire, in The Arcades Project, p.354: Sadism and fetishism intertwine in those imaginations that seek to annex all organic life to the sphere of the inorganic (emphasis added). Efstratiou 18
15 16
Baudelaire, Oeuvres Completes, vol. 1, p.158. ` See Benjamin, Baudelaire, p.150: The deeper the remoteness which a glance has to overcome, the stronger will be the spell that is apt to emanate from the gaze. 17 On the funereal monumentality characterizing Baudelaires poetry and the paranoid fear mobilized in order to confront it, see Paul de Man, Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p.259. 18 See Les Metamorphoses du vampire, Baudelaire, Oeuvres Completes, vol. 1, p.159. ` 19 Baudelaire, Oeuvres Completes, vol. 1, p.159; ` emphasis added. 20 See Walter Benjamin, Central Park, p.51: Baroque allegory sees the corpse only from the outside. Baudelaire sees it also from the inside. See also Benjamin, Konvolut J: Baudelaire, p.329. 21 Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason, p.166. 22 See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Allen Lane, 1979), p.58. 23 Foucault, History of Sexuality, p.157. 24 See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1997), p.281: One of the models of art may be the corpse in its trans xed and imperishable form. The rei cation of the deceased dating back to primordial times lies behind aesthetic duration, according to this hypothesis. The historical forms that this rei cation assumes, from mummi cation to preservation in verbal signi cation, translate a societys broader self-understanding. 25 See the crucial passage on the transcendental twist of the German baroque in Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), p.232. On this leap, Baudelaires resistance to metaphysical transcendentalism and Benjamins stance see Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst (MA): University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), esp. pp.15183. BuckMorss stresses Baudelaires refusal of the Christian solution of spiritual resurrection and his knowing no recourse but to hold onto the ruins [Benjamin, ( J56,1)], yet ascribes to Benjamin the programmatic intention to move beyond Baudelaires political resignation [...] which ultimately ontologizes the emptiness of the historical experience of the commodity (The Dialectics of Seeing, p.197, p.201). Beyond the sphere of intentions, however, Benjamin remained substantially caught up within the logic of the allegorical immanent redemption of the commodity; a logic that was instantiated in both his choice
of preferred themes (the German baroque and Baudelaire) and the speci cs of his Grubler methodology. The reciprocal mediation of melancholy and the allegorical enhancement of the object that Benjamin will nd in Baudelaires poetry was already there in the German baroque drama. Despite the disconsolate everyday countenance of the banal object and the disappointed abandonment of the exhausted emblem [...] the amorphous details which can only be understood allegorically keep coming up. In a sentence that sums up traits that can be seen to relate both to Baudelaire and his own work, Benjamin declares that the only pleasure the melancholic permits himself, and it is a powerful one, is allegory [Origin, p.185]. 26 Baudelaire, Oeuvres Completes, vol. 1, p.111. ` 27 Baudelaire, Oeuvres Completes, vol. 1, p.155. ` 28 Andrzej Warminski, As the Poets Do It: On the Material Sublime, in Tom Cohen et al. (eds), Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory (Minneapolis (MN): University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p.28. 29 See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone Press, 1984), p.74. They write: Castration and oedipalisation beget a basic illusion that makes us believe that real desire-production is answerable to higher formations that integrate it, subject it to transcendent laws, and make it serve a higher social and cultural production; there then appears a kind of unsticking of the social eld with regard to the production of desire, in whose name all resignations are justi ed in advance. 30 See Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp.39, 41, 42, 65, 66. It is essential to clarify that the primal object behind mourning and melancholia the loss of which is negated in and through language and the passage from semiosis to signi cation, the ultimate cause of conveyability, exists only for and through discourse and the already constituted subject. Positing the existence of that other language [the semiotic in this case] and even of an other of language, indeed of an outside-oflanguage, is not necessarily setting up a preserve for metaphysics or theology. The postulate corresponds to a psychic requirement that Western metaphysics and theory have had, perhaps, the good luck and audacity to represent. That psychic requirement is certainly not universal; Chinese civilization, for instance, is not a civilization of the conveyability of the thing in itself; it is rather one of sign repetition and variation, that is to say, of transcription [ pp.667; emphasis added].
31 32
Kristeva, Black Sun, p.65. Kristeva, Black Sun, p.79. 33 I am fully aware of the potentially selfundermining aspects of Kristevas agenda. The semiotic chora must necessarily be approached within the broader terrain that the symbolic, the Law, demarcates. The latter is not only prohibitive, but also generative. See Judith Butlers cogent critique of a latent essentialism underlying Kristevas schemas in The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva, in Kelly Oliver (ed.), Ethics, Politics, and Di erence in Julia Kristevas Writing (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), pp.16478: The female body that is freed from the shackles of the paternal law may well prove to be yet another incarnation of that law, posing as subversive, but operating in the service of that laws self-ampli cation and proliferation [ p.178]. Kristevian signi ance has not exhaustively addressed the possibility that the semiotic and the symbolic are not ontologically disjunct. I nd the transgression of the symbolic by the semiotic particularly relevant to rephrasing the constitutive crisis of reason and evidentiality that I engage in the examined texts, but always within the framework Foucault demarcated when he criticized sex as a causal principle. See Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p.154. For a more comprehensive appraisal of Kristevas project and its relevance to a transgressive politics see Suzanne Guerlac, Transgression in Theory: Genius and the Subject of La Re volution du langage poe tique, in Ethics, Politics, and Di erence in Julia Kristevas Writing, pp.23857. 34 Elizabeth Gross, The Body of Signi cation, in John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin (eds), Abjection, Melancholia and Love: the Work of Julia Kristeva (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p.92. 35 See Eugene Holland, Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 36 See Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p.101: We do not believe in general that sexuality has the role of an infrastructure in the assemblages of desire, nor that it constitutes an energy capable of transformation or of neutralization and sublimation. Sexuality can only be thought as one ux among others, entering into conjunction with other uxes [...] But psychoanalysis has produced everything except exits. 37 See Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p.112: History is constantly being remade, but conversely it is constantly being made by each of us, on his own body. Jacques Lacans admission of the linguistic parameter as formative of desire and the subject in distinction to notions of genetic and parallax 19
immanent psychogenesis, also, does not potentially preclude the eVects of collectives on humans. His contention that what we are faced with [...] is the increasing absence of all those saturations of the superego and ego ideal that are realised in all kinds of organic forms in traditional societies, forms that extend from the rituals of everyday
intimacy to the periodical festivals in which the community manifests itself reads like Benjamin. See Jacques Lacan, Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis, in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1989), p.26. 38 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p.188. 39 Warminski, As the Poets Do it, p.28.
Dimitrios Efstratiou has recently obtained a PhD on the poetry of Charles Baudelaire from the University of Warwick with the support of the British Academy. He is currently working on Walter Benjamins concept of memory and experience. defstratiou@hotmail.com
Efstratiou 20
parallax, 2002, vol. 8, no. 4, 2131
The Erotic Life of Machines

Steven Shaviro
What is it like to be a cyborg? What does it mean to be a virtual, posthuman being? What does it look like? How does it feel?
I want to approach these questions by looking at a music video. Chris Cunninghams video for Bjorks song All Is Full Of Love was made in 1999. The song rst appeared on Bjorks 1997 album Homogenic; what we hear in the video is not the album version of the song, but a later remix by Mark Stent.1 Questions of virtuality, and of posthumanity, are much in the air today. We live in a time of massive technological, as well as social and political, change. Much of this change has to do with globalization, that is to say, with an economy that networks itself ubiquitously across the planet, thanks to the instantaneous transnational communication of ows of information and money. Concomitant with this transformation is a devaluing of the material and the local. This is often expressed in terms of a switch from physical reality to virtual reality. To use the terms of Manuel Castells, we are moving in the direction of a culture founded on a space of ows that replaces the old space of places, and a timeless time that replaces the time of history and memory, as well as the time of daily routine under industrial capitalism.2 In line with these transformations, the dominant narratives of the new technological culture are cyber ctions of disembodiment. We ourselves are said to be made out of information, rather than bodies and physicality, or even atoms and forces. And this information is generally seen as being a pattern that can be incarnated indiVerently in any number of material substrates: carbon, silicon, whatever. The mind, supposedly, is software that can be run on many diVerent kinds of hardware. Some computer scientists (for instance, Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil3 ) even wax rhapsodical about the prospect of abandoning our archaic, fallible organic bodies, and downloading our minds into computers or robots, sometime in the foreseeable future. In line with this, imaginative cyber ctions science ction novels and lms have often expressed an extreme ambivalence regarding the body. That is how William Gibson presents the problematic of virtual reality in Neuromancer, the canonical text of cyberpunk science ction. At the very start of the novel, Gibson describes how his protagonist Case lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace. Case had a certain relaxed contempt for the esh. The body was meat. When his nervous system
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was hacked, so that he couldnt jack in to cyberspace any more, it was the Fall. Case fell into the prison of his own esh.4 A similar ambivalence can be found in the Wachowski Brothers immensely popular 1999 lm The Matrix.5 In this movie, all of physical reality as we know it turns out to be a mere virtual simulation, run by evil machines in order to confuse and exploit us. The lms fantasy of redemption involves rejecting the constraints of physicality, thus allowing the hero to negotiate the world with all the uidity and power that video-game special eVects are able to provide. Neo (Keanu Reeves) can manipulate a spoon, making it oat in the air or do whatever else he wants, precisely because he knows that there is no spoon. The lm thus tries to have it both ways: it denounces virtual reality as a prison, but oVers salvation in the form of an even greater immersion in virtuality.
Many critical thinkers have responded with fear and alarm to the apparent virtualization of human existence. Theorists as diVerent as Arthur Kroker, Albert Borgmann, and Hubert L. Dreyfus have warned us, in apocalyptic terms, about the dangers of the virtual.6 I am inclined to think, however, that all such warnings are futile: they have already come too late. For as Katherine Hayles argues in How We Became Posthuman, a transformation along these lines has already happened. There is no going back. We can no longer think of ourselves in terms of the old-fashioned, centred liberal humanist subject. We are already posthuman. What remains open to contestation, according to Hayles, is what sort of posthuman we are turning into. She expresses the hope that we can reject fantasies of disembodiment and mental omnipotence, and instead nd a more embodied form of posthuman existence.7 It is in this spirit that I am interested in Bjork and Cunninghams All Is Full of Love video. I will argue that the video provides a counter- ction to these more main stream narratives of virtual disembodiment. Bjork and Cunningham do not critique virtualization, so much as they open up its potentials. They (re-) nd or rediscover the body at the very heart of virtual reality and cyborg-being. The video is a miniature science ction narrative. Its about robots. But Cunningham poses the question of virtuality largely in formal and perceptual terms. Indeed, he disclaims any deep thematic content to his videos: Theres no intelligence behind them, he says in an interview. Im not trying to make a social statement or let people know what I think about things. The videos that I do are pure manipulation of sound and picture, and most decisions are made on a re ex action.8 Indeed, Cunningham edits his videos more for eVects of time and rhythm than he does for narrative or meaning. All Is Full of Love is best understood in terms of this re ex action, this synaesthetic manipulation of sound and picture. Chris Cunningham has a synaesthetic sensibility. He is unusually attentive to the interplay of images and sounds. In his work, we never get the impression (so common in mainstream music videos) that the image track is just an illustration of the music on the sound track. Nor do we get the opposite impression (familiar from Hollywood lms) that the sound tracks sole purpose is to ground and validate the action on the image track. But Cunninghams strategy is also not the classically modernist one
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such as we get in Godards lms, most notably of a radical disjunction between sound and image. There is no alienation-eVect in Cunninghams videos. Rather, we get an ongoing, dynamic give and take between the senses. Sounds and images continually relay one another, respond to one another, and metamorphose into each other. Marshall McLuhan famously argues that each change in the media we use corresponds to a change in the ratio of our senses. Cunninghams videos articulate a very diVerent logic of sensation than those that dominated most of the twentieth century. They exemplify and explore a new regime of perception and of aVect, one that is just starting to take shape in this new world of global capitalism, genetic manipulation, virtual reality, and electronic, digital media. I mean this not only in terms of the obvious relevance of what the video is about, but much more importantly, in terms of Cunninghams manipulation of the digital medium.
Another way to put this is to say that, whereas Godard radicalized the form of cinema, Cunningham is radicalizing that of video. Michel Chion, the leading theorist of lm sound, says that the biggest diVerence between lm and television is that the former is anchored by images, and the latter is anchored by sound. But in music videos, he suggests, the music videos image is fully liberated from the linearity normally imposed by sound; and the relation of sound and image tracks is often limited to points of synchronization[...] the rest of the time each goes its separate way.9 Cunningham pushes these formal tendencies as far as he can: partly by elaborate sound/image counterpoint, and partly by making these points of synchronization central foci, around which all the other elements of both sound and image tracks circulate. Its cold, ice cold, and all the more seductive for that. Bjork has always been the palest of the Ice People. But here she is whiter than ever. For in this four-minute video, she is an android. She is being put together on an assembly line, even as we watch. In place of skin, a smooth white breglass shell ts over her frame. This shell is composed of many separate plates. Some of them havent been attached yet. In Bjorks neck, in her arms, and on the side of her head, we still see the underlying circuitry. There are plastic tubes, and wires, and knots of metal and black vinyl. The video is mostly a study in diVerent shades of white. Everything is streamlined, minimal, sleek, and elegant. Everything is clean, almost sterile. This highly stylized look recalls the bastardized modernist design of certain science ction lms. I think particularly of Stanley Kubrick and George Lucas. In fact, before he started making music videos, Cunningham worked for a year and a half on set design for Kubricks long-planned but never-realized science ction lm AI (the lm has now been made, alas, after Kubricks death, by Steven Spielberg). As for Lucas, Cunningham says in an interview: Star Wars is such a fucking fundamental in uence in my work. Its all white costumes against black walls everythings very classy.1 0 It is typical of Cunninghams sensibility that he praises Lucas for the classy abstractions of his visual design, while deliberately ignoring his cheesy, self-consciously retro, feel-good narratives and characters.
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Whats most notable about the visual design of All Is Full Of Love is what it excludes. In following cues from Kubrick and Lucas, and reverting to cool shades of white, Cunningham goes against nearly everything else that has characterized science ction lm and video for the last twenty years. In particular, he eschews the dominant visual style of recent science ction lms: the dystopian postmodern clutter pioneered by Ridley Scott in Blade Runner.11 Scott transposes the look (oblique lighting, shadows, chiaroscuro, oV-kilter camera angles) and feel (urban paranoia, exoticism, the femme fatale) of lm noir into futuristic terms. A world in which the real has been entirely penetrated by technologies of simulation is gured by Scott in the form of a dark, grimy, rainy, overcrowded night-time cityscape. The darkness implies negativity, as a backdrop against which the excessively perfect forms of simulation (the icy blonde beauty of the replicants, or the alluring smiles of the womens faces on the enormous video billboards that loom over the city) are projected. The result is a doubly distanced nostalgia for a lost real. Scotts invocation of lm noir stirs up feelings of alienation and vacancy. And these feelings are doubled by our oppressive awareness that this invocation is itself not authentic, but only a simulation. Scotts approach has become the standard way to gure simulation and virtual reality in science ction lms, up to and including such recent works as The Matrix. (Even though The Matrix is also evidently in uenced by the look and feel of American and especially Hong Kong action lms, a noir sensibility still shines through in numerous formal details, like the set design of its grim non-virtual world, as well as in its overall paranoid sensibility.) But Cunningham moves in a totally diVerent direction. He works with gentle modulations of light, degrees of whiteness and luminosity. I can best describe this in terms of a distinction made by Gilles Deleuze. Discussing silent lm of the 1920s, Deleuze distinguishes between French impressionist cinema lighting in which darkness is simply the absence of light, or light at degree zero and German expressionist cinema lighting, in which darkness is a contrasting, negative principle, always engaged in a dialectical battle against light.1 2 The German expressionist tradition is more familiar to us today, in large part because the same use of lighting, with the same metaphysical connotations, is carried over into the lm noir of the 1940s and 1950s. Scotts accomplishment in Blade Runner is to adapt the lighting of expressionism and lm noir for colour lm; he and all his imitators in science ction lmmaking have thereby extended a legacy that goes back at least as far as Langs Metropolis: a radically dualistic, even Manichean, vision of the world, that gains added power from being projected into an imagined future. Cunningham, however, moves in an entirely diVerent direction. He is trying to make a color version, not of expressionism and noir, but of something entirely diVerent and less well known. By impressionism, Deleuze is mostly referring to the French lyrical realism of the 1920s and 1930s: the lms of such directors as Jean Epstein, Marcel LHerbier, Jean Gre millon, and (the best known today) the early Jean Renoir. While Cunningham is evidently more Kubrickian than Renoiresque, he is far more lyrical, and less obsessed with symmetry and rigidity, than Kubrick was. In any case, his videos espouse what can best be called a pluralistic monism, in sharp contrast to the radical dualism of the expressionist tradition.
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All this is played out in formal terms, especially in the nature of the lighting. In All Is Full Of Love, there is no duality between white and black, and therefore none between real and virtual. There are few colours to be seen. Nearly everything is a shade of white. The videos lighting ranges from a harsh white, to a muted bluewhite glow, to a few white lines gleaming in the darkness. And also there are no fast camera movements, and no shock cuts or jump cuts. Its as if the world had been bleached and rare ed, and chilled to nearly absolute zero. And in the midst of this, we have a persistent focus upon Bjorks android body, as well as with her face and her voice. Bjorks face is blank and impassive, a perfect mask. Her eyes, nose, and mouth are delicately modelled. Otherwise, the surface of her face is entirely smooth. Bjorks eyes utter, and her mouth moves slowly and precisely, as she sings of endless love: Twist your head around, / Its all around you. / All is full of love, / All around you. Bjork speaks English almost without an accent. But her pronunciation is oddly toneless. She sings the way I imagine an alien would, or a mutant. Her voice is ethereal, almost disembodied. It seems to oat in mid-air, as if it had come from a vast distance. I want to dwell for a moment on Bjorks face and voice, because they are the only things that distinguish her. They are the sole features that allow the machine to be Bjork, rather than anybody-at-all and nobody-in-particular. Everything else about her is wholly anonymous, and tends to dissolve back into the blank walls behind her. The Bjork androids eyes, nose, and mouth are exquisitely modelled. They are slits in the mask, holes in what is otherwise an absolutely smooth expanse of whiteness. This Bjork-mask might be understood in contrast to what Deleuze and Guattari call faciality: The inhuman in human beings: that is what the face is from the start. It is by nature a close-up, with its inanimate white surfaces, its shining black holes, its emptiness and boredom.13 Deleuze and Guattari are referring here, of course, to the close-up in classic lm: the way a face lls the screen, establishing an emotional reference point, and creating a powerful bond of identi cation for the audience. This close-up corresponds to the xed form of bourgeois or Cartesian subjectivity, at the very heart of modern Oedipal narrative. Faciality is not in itself subjective, Deleuze and Guattari say, because it is what actually produces subjectivity. As such, faciality is the abstract, dominant standard that brands us with identity, and transforms us into a certain kind of willing, obedient subjects. And one more thing: Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the image of black holes on a white surface, because this dominating face is by de nition white. They nd a primordial horror in this white face, this mask that historically de nes the power, authority, and privilege of white people. It is not by accident that I bring up questions of race here. The history of popular music in the last fty years, predominantly in the United States, but also in Europe and throughout the world, is a history of interchanges between black people and white people ( primarily; of course, other groups have also played their parts). Or, to put it less idealistically, this history has been one of repeated appropriations by whites of innovations by people of colour. Its a recurrent event, from Elvis relation
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to rhythm and blues, all the way to how, today, white American suburban teenagers have adopted black urban hiphop as their rebellious music of choice. The recent history of technology is fraught with racial issues as well. There has been a lot of talk in America recently about the digital divide. White people and to some extent Asians as well have had a disproportionate share of access to the World Wide Web, compared to blacks, Latinos, and other groups. But I think it is less a question of access than it is one of invisibility: an issue that has been raised in recent years in the work in whiteness studies by David Roediger and others.14 We are often told, for instance, that the World Wide Web transcends colour, and that in virtual reality it doesnt matter what race you are. But what this really turns out to mean, in practice, is that everyone on the Web is presumed to be white. Whiteness is the unmarked, or default, term of racial identi cation in America and Europe today; so when race is not explicitly mentioned, whiteness is there by unconscious assumption. It remains to be seen whether the increasingly massive presence of Asia on the Web will change this dynamic. But in a Euro-American context, at least, it is extremely important that, in All Is Full Of Love, Bjork is insistently marked as being white. (This is something that Bjork has also explored in some of her other work, such as her musical collaborations with Tricky.) The invisible, unmarked, taken-for-granted term loses its dominance, when it is made visible and pointed out as such. Bjork is so pale in this video, and her features are so tenuous, that they seem to capture whiteness at the very point of its emergence. Which is also to say, of course, at the point of its vanishing. Indeed, despite their prominence, these white features are scarcely there. They give the Bjork android just a bare minimum of presence. But this bare minimum, this tiny sliver of whiteness, is precisely the point. Bjork deploys her whiteness as something that is rare and singular, and even perverse. Whiteness is an alien mutation. Which means that it is no longer the norm. The same thing can be stated in the terms of Deleuze and Guattaris faciality: if the face of domination emerges out of blankness and negativity, then in the Bjork android the face is being deprivileged. Bjorks features are so barely there, that faciality nds itself on the verge of returning back to the nothingness whence it came. Something similar happens with Bjorks voice. Shimmering washes of sound accompany the songs vocals. Densely layered strings play a thick, dissonant drone. Ghostly harp arpeggios rise out of the murk. The original, album version of All Is Full of Love has no percussion. The video remix adds a slow, synthesized beat. This steady rhythm grounds the song somewhat. But Bjork pays it no mind. Her voice drifts away from any xed pulse. She phrases the notes unevenly, now stretching them out, and now shortening them. She hovers around the beat, without ever landing precisely on it. In Bjorks singing, time becomes elastic. It seems to have lost its forward thrust. It no longer moves at a xed rate. It dilates and contracts irregularly, following the contours of the voice. In Western culture, as the deconstructionists have taught us, the voice is generally taken to be a sign of interiority, authority, and authenticity. It is supposed to come from deep within, or from on high. Think of the voice of God, or the authority we
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unre ectively grant to voice-overs in lm; as well as the usual cinematic emphasis on the speaker or singer. But Bjork undoes this dominance, thanks to the exible, oating, unanchored quality of her singing. Purpose and linearity are undone. Theres no more hierarchy of higher and lower, inner and outer, soul and body, melody and accompaniment. There are only modulations of sound and image and feeling. It is a double movement, a double seduction. On the one hand, Bjorks voice is dehumanized. It sheds the richness of texture and timbre that individuates a singing voice. Instead, it tends toward the anonymity and neutrality of digital, synthesized sound. It becomes less analogue, less vital, and less embodied. The living person moves closer to being a machine. But on the other hand, and at the same time, the nature of the machine is also transformed. At the heart of this digital blankness, a new sort of life emerges. Precisely because Bjorks voice has lost its humanistic depth, it is now able to oat free. Spare and without qualities, it is open to the minutest uctuations of rhythm and tone. The voice wavers and hovers, on the very edge of perception. In this way, it weaves itself a new, tenuous body. At the same time that Bjork herself is recast as a digitally programmed android, the digital machine itself becomes more analogue, and more nearly alive. This process is evident throughout All Is Full Of Love. At the start of the video, the camera pans upward, through cables and wires, to where the Bjork android is splayed out upon a long platform; at the end, it slowly pans down again, revealing the operating room to be a sort of machinic set. Behind Bjork, the walls are an antiseptic white. Other machines are busy working on her. Their exible arms poke and pry into her. They attach a panel here, and tighten a bolt there. A cylinder turns, emitting a shower of sparks. A light ashes under an open hinge. Water gushes backwards, seeping out of the drain and leaping into the spout. Nothing is inert. Everything has a cool, sensuous presence. Every mechanical object in the video turns on its axis, or glistens, or thrusts and withdraws. Every material substance ows, or splashes, or sputters, or spurts. This all takes place in counterpoint to the ow of the music. We see all these processes in extreme close-up. The video thus reveals the erotic life of machines. Usually, we think of machines as being uniform in their motions. They are supposed to be more rigid than living beings, less open to change. But All Is Full of Love systematically reverses this mythology. It suggests that robots and cyborgs might well be more sensitive than we are. They might have more exquisite perceptions than we do. They might respond, more delicately, to subtler gradations of change. Its just a matter of giving them the proper capacities, and then programming them correctly. This is the utopian prospect of the cyborg, the boundary-crossing fusion of human and machine famously described by Donna Haraway; she says that cyborgs cut across all three of the leaky distinctions whose permeability is a feature of postmodern existence: 1) between human and animal; 2) between human/animal (organism) and machine; 3) between physical and non-physical. 15 In fact, Bjork has explored some of these boundary crossings in other videos: particularly the metamorphoses and boundary crossings between human and animal. All Is Full of Love, of course, concentrates on the second and the third of these leaky distinctions. All in all, it
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marks Bjorks most radical crossing-over, justifying Haraways exuberant claim that cyborgs are ether, quintessence.16 Haraways sense of leaky distinctions applies equally to the machines portrayed in All Is Full of Love, and to the machine that the video itself is. As McLuhan says, machines are rst of all extensions of ourselves. We project them outwards from our bodies, and then they take on a life of their own. All machines, and all media, are our projections in this sense: not just in fantasy, but literally and physically. Just as the wheel is an extension of the foot, and the book is an extension of the eye, so too, McLuhan says, electronic circuitry [is] an extension of the central nervous system.17 Film spectatorship has traditionally been understood in terms of fantasy: as a sort of imaginary identi cation. But even if the movies work this way (or used to work this way), the new digitally processed videos do not. Rather than using traditional cinematic concepts to understand music videos like Cunninghams, we would do better to see them in McLuhanesque, non-psychological terms: as sensorial relays, as modulators and ampli ers of emotion, or even as prosthetic extensions of our brains. The spectator of All Is Full Of Love is very diVerent from the normative lm spectator, as understood by classical lm theory. The usual polarities of cinematic vision (between subject and object, between active looking and passive being-lookedat, or between identi cation with and objecti cation of the image) no longer function in the digital realm. (Of course, this is not to deny that, for instance, many music videos still objectify womens bodies in traditional ways. But the forms have changed, even when the content has not.) In the more intimate medium of digital video, the opposed poles of cinematic perception collapse into a single self-aVecting, selfre exive circuit. The viewer is included in the autoerotic feedback loop by means of which Bjork caresses herself. And also, the video spectator is more directly a listener rather than just a viewer than is the case with classical lm spectatorship. For the music envelops and caresses the video spectator, all the more so in that its source cannot be located. Sound suVuses the entire space of All Is Full Of Love, in the same way that uorescent lighting does. The digital medium is thus fully audiovisual. It is even tactile, in the way it aVects the spectator. At the same time, it keeps a certain reserve. It remains enigmatically distant and cool. This seeming paradox, the conjunction of distance with a high degree of tactile involvement, is central to McLuhans notion of cool, as opposed to hot, media.1 8 The frenzied feedback loops of audiovisual perception go together with a special kind of detachment: that cold, ironic vision that is both Bjorks and Cunninghams. Such a seductive, sensuous impassivity, as I argue elsewhere, is not unrelated to the aesthetic stance of disinterest in Kants Analytic of the Beautiful, in the rst part of The Critique of Judgment.1 9 Its part of what I see as a new, postmodern aestheticism: a disaVected, ironically erotic pursuit of beauty, in striking contrast to modernisms heroic quest for the sublime. As Cunningham wonderfully says in an interview: My aim is to make images that are style-less but beautiful.20 If all the machines in the video have an erotic life, why should Bjork herself be any diVerent? Soon, we see that there are two Bjork androids, instead of one. They face
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each other, singing by turns in shot and reverse-shot. One of them holds out her arms in an imploring gesture. The other lowers her head bashfully. A moment later, the Bjork androids are together in the frame, making love. We view them from a distance, in silhouette. They kiss, and slowly caress each others thighs and legs and buttocks. All the while, the other machines keep on making adjustments to their bodies. Sexuality and reproduction are entirely separate activities, though they both go on simultaneously. Are the Bjork androids so enraptured with each other, that they are oblivious to their own construction? Or does the process somehow enhance their bliss? In either case, their motions are so slow and formal, and yet entirely uid (in contrast to our usual associations with the mechanical) as to suggest a superhuman state of grace. The tenderness of this scene deserves extended comment. Cunningham says in an interview that the video is a combination of several fetishes: industrial robotics, female anatomy and uorescent light in that order [...] I got to play around with the two things I was into as a teenager: robots and porn.21 Nonetheless, despite this deliberate cynicism, the video does not come across as your typical adolescent male sex-and-power fantasy. Maybe it is thanks to Bjorks guiding in uence. Or maybe its the happy result of Cunninghams uorescent light fetish. But in any case, All Is Full Of Love has quite a diVerent feel than do the obligatory pseudo-lesbian scenes in porno lms aimed at an audience of heterosexual men. There are none of those close-ups of legs and thighs and jiggling breasts, none of those rapid cuts, and none of those fake orgasmic moans. More, the video does not come to any sort of (sexual or narrative) climax. Instead, it maintains a sustained pitch of calmly distanced rapture. Everything about the video furthers this impression of ecstatic quietude. The video conveys, or manufactures, or transmits, a certain aVective tone (what Deleuze and Guattari call a non-climaxing plateau). And I think that this tone is more important than any psychological questions we might raise. Indeed, one can plausibly read the video both as lesbian (aYrming a non-phallic female sexuality), and as auto-erotic and auto-aVecting (displaying a narcissism that is also present elsewhere in Bjorks persona as a pop icon). But all such readings are strangely unsatisfying. Human psychology somehow seems beside the point, when the video points so powerfully to a posthuman reinvention of both mind and body. Psychoanalysis is most often taken as a deconstruction of the supposedly unitary bourgeois subject, and as a liberation of the forces repressed within it. I want to suggest that this is far too limited a view; the decentred psychoanalytic subject is not something that comes after the Cartesian, bourgeois subject, but something that is strictly correlative with it. In contrast, a new, posthuman subject will have to point away from Freudian and Lacanian conceptions of decentred subjects, as much as from the unitary Cartesian one. The whole frame of reference has to be diVerent. We have to understand the body/mind in other terms, according to the play of other structurations and other forces. The current computer-based analogies to the mind, common among cognitive scientists, are as desperately simplistic as the old Cartesianism was; but it needs to be answered and complexi ed by something that responds to the new digital models as intimately as psychoanalysis responded to the
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Cartesian notion of a uni ed ego. I dont really know what form this new theorization will take; I nd the promising beginnings to such an approach in the Bergson- and Deleuze-in uenced work of such recent theorists as Keith Ansell-Pearson, Barbara Kennedy, and especially Brian Massumi (who has deeply in uenced the current essay). 2 2 But in any case, All Is Full of Love is one of those works that doesnt illustrate theory, but precedes it and provokes it. In this video, Bjork and Cunningham are inventing and developing new forms of sensibility, ones that are potentially appropriate to our cyborg future. The theorists job as in the present essay is to follow up on their hints, trying to explain, formulate, and systematize these singular inventions. Perhaps the digital is not the opposite of the analogue. It is rather the analogue at degree zero. The world of continuities and colours that we incipient posthumans know has not disappeared. In All Is Full Of Love it has just been chilled, and cut into tiny separate pieces. These pieces have then been recombined, according to strange new rules of organization. They have congealed into new emotions, and new forms of desire. In its own way, the machine is also a sort of esh. It moves; and as it moves, it feels. As Bjork embraces Bjork, the digital celebrates its nuptials with the organic. And that is why I dont buy the fantasies and fears of those who say that virtual reality will liberate us or alienate us from our bodies. I think that current technological changes can be correlated with changes in the ways we sense and feel our increasingly media-saturated world. And in the longer run, these changes will increasingly aVect the actual matter of our bodies, as well as the ways we think about our bodies. Our bodies may well become more mechanized, and at the same time, more ethereal and more diVuse. Yet for that very reason, we need not to think about the changes reactively, in terms of what we will have supposedly lost in comparison with our present suppositions. For even in that cool virtual realm, even when we have become posthuman cyborgs, we will still have some sort of bodies. We will still have tenderness and yearning, and still need to make love.
Notes
1
Chris Cunningham and Bjork, All Is Full of Love (Elektra DVD, 1999). 2 See Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society: Volume 1 of The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000 [Second Edition]). 3 See Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000); and Hans Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 4 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), p.6. 5 Wachowski Brothers, The Matrix (Warner Brothers, 1999). 6 See Arthur Kroker, Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Music and Electric Flesh (New York: St. Martins Press, 1993); Albert Borgmann, Holding on to Reality: Shaviro 30
The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Hubert L. Dreyfus, On the Internet (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). 7 See N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 8 Cunningham, quoted in Kevin Holly and Matt Fretwell, Director File: Chris Cunningham (http://www.director- le.com/cunningham/, accessed 7/13/2001). 9 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p.167. 10 Peter Relic, Chris Cunningham (Interview), RES 1:4 (fall 1998).
11
Ridley Scott, Blade Runner (The Ladd Company, 1982) 12 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp.4055. 13 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p.171 14 See David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (London: Verso, 1994). 15 Donna J. Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp.149181, here pp.151154. 16 Haraway, Manifesto, p.153. 17 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (New York: Bantam, 1967), pp.2640.
18
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), pp.2232. 19 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), pp.4395. 20 Sarah Kent, The Beauty of Stylelessness, Time Out UK (September 2000). 21 Anonymous, Caution: The lm you are about to watch deals with adult themes and contains startling originality from the outset, Dazed and Confused 55 ( June 1999). 22 See Keith Ansell-Pearson, Germinal Life: The Di erence and Repetition of Deleuze (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); Barbara Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); and Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, A ect Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
Steven Shaviro teaches in the Cinema Studies Program at the University of Washington. He is the author of The Cinematic Body (Minnesota, 1993), Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism (Serpents Tail, 1997), and articles about cyberculture and recent North American lm.
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parallax, 2002, vol. 8, no. 4, 3245
Eternal Feminine: Natacha Merritt Digital Diaries; Postfeminist Deleuzean Figurations

A. Gargett
Digital-Diaries is a new kind of book, de ning a new kind of expression: digital, sexual, personal, private, public, raw, erotic, bold, self-conscious ... from an artist who thrives on contradiction and de es all stereotyping. (Manifesto www.digitaldiaries.com)
The armature structuring the project locates various conjunctions between feminist notions and those of Deleuze and Guattari: primarily, the conceptualization of diVerence that is not subordinated to identity or the same, and which facilitates the being of becoming and a radical form of multiplicity de ned by an outside the abstract line/the line of ight/deterritorialization. In this scheme the feminine is unrepresentable, she is the site of an-other system of representation. In the work of Natacha Merritt one discovers a Deleuzean impetus at work. Like Deleuze, Merritt is interested in rethinking the unity of feminine identity without resorting to humanism. Merritts cyber-images, like Deleuzes mechanic couplings, are a gure of inter-relationality/receptivity that deliberately negates categorical distinctions. Ultimately the process is expanded through Merritts images, a working through of the feminine historical condition, speci cally the mass images/concepts/ representations of women, before woman can emerge into diVerence and particularly into the diVerence of becoming-woman. The body or the embodiment of the subject, is a key component in the feminist struggle for a rede nition of subjectivity; it is to be understood as neither a biological nor a sociological category, but rather a point of overlap between the physical, the symbolic and the material social conditions. The starting point for a feminist rede nition of female subjectivity is paradoxical. In feminist theory one is articulated via the feminine, but this is not a stable essence/ de nition but rather the site of multiple, complex and potentially contradictory sets of experience, de ned by overlapping variables. The female subject thus presented is one of the terms in a process that should not/cannot be streamlined into a linear,
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teleological form of subjectivity it is alternatively the site of the intersections of subjective desire and wilful social transformation. This de nition of the female subject as a multiple, complex process is an attempt to rethink the unity of the subject, without reference to humanistic beliefs and without dualistic oppositions, linking instead body and mind in a new ux of self. The implications are far-reaching. What counts as human in a posthuman world? What is at stake is the question of how to evolve forms of representation for alternative female/feminist subjectivity. The challenge is how to reassemble a vision of subjectivity after the certainties of gender dualism and sexual polarization have collapsed, replaced by notions of process, complexity, and the multi-layered neo-technology of the self.
This text animates a Deleuzo-feminist program by applying it to an investigation of the digital/photographic work of Natacha Merritt. This process aims to illuminate advances the various feminist gurations of a new female subjectivity gain by an intersection with the Deleuzean project of transforming the image of thinking and the vision of subjectivity as an intensive, multiple, and discontinuous process of interrelations. The concern to think diVerently about the contemporary condition draws together Deleuzean critical philosophy with feminist theory the necessity to rede ne/ re gure/reinvent theoretical practice and philosophy within it, in a mode that is not molar/reactive/sedentary, but rather molecular/active/nomadic. The central imperative that unites these lines is the crisis of the philosophical logos and the need to invent new images of thought to replace the classical systems of representation of theoretical discourse. The challenge for philosophy and feminism is how to think about/account for changing conditions/living processes of transformation.1 Connecting Deleuzes critique of the language of metaphysics to feminist theory, Deleuze is relevant not only for what he says about women (the positivity of desire and sexuality and embodied sexed identities), but also for the rede nition of thinking, and speci cally of the theoretical processes as a non-reactive mode, that complements a Deleuzean conception of subjectivity.2 The embodiment of the subject is for Deleuze a form of bodily materiality. The body is con gured as the complex interplay of highly constructed social and symbolic forces. It is a play of forces, a surface of intensities pure simulacra without originals. Deleuzean theories connect to feminist strategies because of the de-essentialism of the body/sexuality/sexed identities. The embodied subject is a term in a process of intersecting forces/aVects, spatiotemporal variables that are characterized by their mobility/changeability/transitory nature. Accordingly, for Deleuze, thinking is not the expression of in-depth interiority or the enactment of transcendental models it is a way of establishing connections among a multiplicity of impersonal forces. The feminist intersection with Deleuzean thought is the necessity to image the activity of thinking diVerently.
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Your body is the vehicle for your wildest adventures (Emily Jenkins) The primary theorem of Natacha Merritts work is the convexity of her sense of self and sexuality. She wants to be able to discuss it, debate it, expose it and enjoy it. What if a young girl decided to document her personal life with her digital camera? And what if the most important aspect of her personal life was her sexual experimentation?3 Natacha Merritt displays a distinctive predilection towards bondage, p.v.c. and Arab straps. She likes to have sex in hotels with men and/or women. And particularly she chooses to record it on a Nikon Coolpix 900 Digital Video Camera. Merritt likes to deliberate over the images she produces, after which she selects those which have a certain beauty or meaning it could be the signi cance of the other she was with or the lighting in the room or the visual afterglow of a certain moment in time after which, she downloads them onto her website where explicit edits of her sex life are forever preserved in cyberspace. 4 The trajectory of Merritts radical sexual self-discovery, obsession and expression, is located in an autonomous zone constructed from the blank spaces of hotel rooms, the abstractions of cyber-space and ultimately her own imagination. In this space, the illicit becomes explicit beyond the parameters of denial and dismissal the notions of a validity of what women do and dont like, should and should not do, are invalidated. Merritt addresses the invisibility of the feminine both in life and art the con nement of a female inner life into convenient outlines. It is a strategy to subvert a value-system that inferiorizes a female perspective. In this respect she adopts a language of conceptualism but transforms it into something more personal. Body, gender, sex this is the thematic complex that motivates Merritt. This physical art sets out to question/re-position traditional images of the body in the posthuman condition. She appears as one of the most inner-directed of contemporary artists totally fearless and original. It is an art, primarily visual, but ultimately of the interior life into which vision leads. Merritts art is directly based on her sexual experiences. Her favourite motif is herself. She wants to open secrets and disintegrate their power by explicit communication. The images she produces are hedonistic, immediately intimate, self-obsessed, impetuous and vehement. She draws on extreme situations, but the manner in which she communicates is resolute and homogeneous.5 I intend to scream, shout, race the engine, throw tantrums in Bloomingdales if I feel like it, and confess intimate details about my life to complete strangers... I intend to do what I want to do and be whom I want to be and answer only to myself, that is, quite simply, the bitch philosophy.6 Im just doing what I want to do. Thats how the whole thing happened. And Im gonna keep on doing it tomorrow, whether people like it or not, Im still gonna do it.7 The central thematic that Merritts art/porn erotic docu-soap investigates is an acknowledging of a womans sexual experience/desires/fantasies an aYrmation of
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being and sexuality. In addition it is the idea of connection; connection with herself, with others and with the meaning behind things which is integral to her project.8 The more in love I am with a person, the better the photos I take because thats how my eyes work. I start seeing things that are more beautiful.9 The key to interpreting Merritts Digital Diaries is her understanding of the relationship between the camera and the contemporary media-scape, and more speci cally between women and cameras. 10 The camera has become her perpetual silent partner, transforming Merritts relationships into a perverse post-structuralist menage a trois, serving both to displace and intensify her sexual experiences. While ` the camera lens has traditionally been associated with the objecti cation of woman, Merritt re-claims it as a tool of self-reinvention. Hence the hotel sex, the clean sheets, anonymous rooms, blank personas. There is no narrative, no past each new room a new identity, a new set of possibilities, a new Merritt. Its about being able to constantly adapt and change and that itself is an art, she elaborates. I try not to hold onto the past because thats what it is the past, thats why I document it. I let things go, its an easier way of living. I try to move forward, to push myself, to be in a constant state of change because I think life is healthier that way.1 1 Sex permanently structures our cultural perceptions, but it is apparent that between the image and the actuality there exists a distorting mirror of con icting agenda and expectation. Therefore when women initiate a new narrative/perspective, what primarily appears straightforward becomes problematic. Women enjoying sex and displaying an alternative itinerary. The explicit expression of female sexual desire is noticeably forever absent. Positive sexual desire is based on seeking self-aYrmation through connection, in all its multifarious forms. It is cogently appropriate that the Internet should be Merritts principal medium of presentation: the ultimate construct for web-cam culture, with its convergence of narcissism and voyeurism and all the contradictions that unleashes. The Internet is a particularly apposite location for Merritts self-exploration.1 2 Merritts artistic venture, in digital-imaging is no longer just a matter-form relation. What is signi cant in the event of this process is a material-force relationship. Sensation, according to Deleuze in What is Philosophy?, is not realized in the material without the material passing completely into the sensation, into the percept or aVect. So long as the material lasts, the sensation enjoys an eternity in those very moments. The artist takes a speci c type of material, which has energetic elements, or molecular elements, and synthesizes the disparate elements in such a way that the form captures these intensities. Merritts images may equally capture this modulation of material-force. Sensation comes from a pure power that over- ows all domains and traverses them. This power is that of rhythm, which is deeper than vision, a logic of the senses that is non-rational and non-cerebral.1 3 It is a condition of delirious viewing, with a detachment beyond shock that formulates the psychological plateau upon which Merritt has constructed her art. This notion
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makes sense of her arts unfailing psychological intensity. The quality of aroused vision that is engendered. Merritt produces ecstatic visions that obliterate time and imaginative distance. Merritt is an artist because her work aims beyond mere sensations of the erotic. Her works initial impact is the rst stage in a three-stage progression. After the primary impact of the image comes the realization of its blatant arti ciality that is, a consciousness of the work as a self-disclosed rhetorical construction. Then the integration of this knowledge with the eVect of the image, entering into a complicity with the artist to create a meaning with the work. This is succeeded by an awareness of a pleasure in the beauty of the image as a made thing. Merritts work functions aesthetically as painting-like art, not as a simple extension of popular-porno/cultural forms. However, we must not negate her acknowledgement of the forms, notably pornography/erotica, that inspire her. She does indeed extend the pop forms, adapting their rhetoric of extreme experience. She distils for prolonged examination, in still images, some of the frenzied truths that are generated in ashing montage across the media-scape. It is a matter not of surface imitation but of profound analogy, as between the intentions of art, which causes pleasure, and of sex, which creates sensation. The common term of Merritts operations is an essential-de nitive, vital-detachment. The sense of ones body is shaped by various social institutions. This does not however imply that one has to accept regulation without protest, and it does not mean that there are not many micro-institutions that can oVer alternatives. What this does mean is that one is taught to live by a multitude of invisible institutional rules, and whether one rebels against them or adheres to them, one de nes oneself in relation to them. Everyone is living in and negotiating through a network of these rules. We travel a twisted passage between extremes that both frighten and fascinate. Merritts work concerns a reconception of the ways in which sexed subjects are understood, opening up the terrain for exploration. If bodies are to be recon gured not only must their matter and form be rethought, but so too must their situation and spatio/temporal location. Via Merritts images it is possible to initiate a preliminary investigation of the space-time of the feminine body.1 4 The female body-subjects relation to space and time is not passive. Space is not simply an empty receptacle, independent of its contents rather, the ways in which space is perceived and represented depends on the nature of the objects positioned within it, and additionally, the kind of relations that the subject eVects with those objects. Space makes possible diVerent types of relations but in turn is transformed according to the subjects aVective/instrumental relations with it. The spatiality of space has to be theorized using the objects as its indices. It is the subjects positioning within space both as the point of perspectival access to space, and also as an object for others in space, that gives the subject a coherent identity and an ability to manipulate things, including its own body parts, in space. However, space does not become comprehensible to the subject by its being the
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space of movement; rather, it becomes space through movement, and as such, it acquires speci c properties from the subjects constitutive functioning in it. Deleuzo-feminist strategies connect in questions of diVerence, diVerence capable of being appreciated/conceptualized in opposition to the dominance/regime of the One/the Self-same/structure of binary pairs. In conceptualizing a diVerence in and of itself, a diVerence that is not subordinated to identity or the same, Deleuze invokes two forms of energy and alignment: the process of becoming and the notion of multiplicity a becoming beyond the logic/constraints/con nes of being, and a multiplicity beyond a multi-centring of proliferating subjects. A multiplicity is not a pluralized notion of identity, but rather an ever changing/ non-totalizable collectivity, an assemblage de ned through its capacity to undergo permutations/transformations its dimensionality.
Multiplicities are de ned by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of ight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connections with other multiplicities.15 The notion of becoming functions to provide non-teleological notions of direction, movement and process. Becomings are always becoming-something. Becomings are always speci c movements, speci c forms of motion and rest, speeds and slowness points and ows of intensity they are always a multiplicity, the movement of transformation from one thing to another that in no way resembles it.16 Deleuze and Guattari suggest that becomings involve a mediating third term, a relation to something else to which the subject relates, and through which relation it enters into connections. If the division, the binary opposition, between sexes can be considered a molar line of segmentation, then the process of becoming-woman consists in the releasing of minoritarian fragments/particles of sexuality (sexuality no longer functioning on the level of the uni ed, genitalized organization of the sexed body); lines of ight which break down and slip into binary aggregation. The process of becoming-woman is a destabilization of molar-feminine-identity. This process of the multiplication of sexualities is a stage in the creation of a nomadic line/a line of becoming towards an imperceptibility which disintigrates molar structures. Although all becomings are already molecular, including becomingwoman, it must be said that all becomings begin with and pass through becoming-woman. It is the key to all other becomings.17 Becoming-woman disengages the segments/constraints of the molar identity in order to re-invent and be able to use other particles, ows, speeds and intensities. Becomingwoman involves a series of processes/movements, outside/beyond the xity of subjectivity and the structure of stable unities, it means going beyond identity and subjectivity, fragmenting and freeing up lines of ight, releasing multiple sexes that identity has subsumed under the One.1 8
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A woman has to become-woman, but in a becoming-woman of all man ... A becoming-minoritarian exists only by virtue of a deterritorialized medium and subject that are like its elements. There is no subject of becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of a majority: there is no medium of becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of a minority.1 9 Becoming-woman is the medium through which all becomings pass: a point in a trajectory/movement towards a microscopic fragmenting of processes which Deleuze and Guattari describe as becoming-imperceptible. This becoming is the disintegration of all identities (molar/molecular, major/minor), the release of in nitely microscopic lines, a process of passage/motion to complete dissolution, an immanent direction/internal impetus, the freeing of absolutely minuscule microintensities of the nth degree.
The system or line of becomings follows a scienti c chain or order of being from the most complex organic forms to inorganic matter, down to the smallest point/ quantum of energy/subatomic particle. Deleuzean thought is one of movement, of diVerence, a cartography of force rather than form that aims to produce a certain quality of stuttering. In this regard his work provides a point of mobilization in the ongoing movement to destabilize and re-think space. The Deleuzean project is to free thought from that which captures/ captivates it, to free thought from the transcendental illusions of representation, to give it back its capacity to eVect transformations or metamorphosis, to make things scatter and realign.2 0 Thought is primarily trespass and violence, the enemy, and nothing presupposes philosophy: everything begins with misosophy. Do not count upon thought to ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks. Rather, count upon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think. The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself.2 1 Deleuze proposes a new understanding of diVerence, in which thought asserts its full force as event, as material modi cation, as movement beyond. In a certain sense Deleuzes work is about the unthought to exterior, the outside. Deleuze does not abandon binarized thought; rather, binarized categories are played oV against each other, they are rendered molecular and analyzed in their molar particularities, so that the possibilities of their reconnections, their re-alignment in diVerent systems, is established, the outside is the transmutability of the inside, a virtual condition of the inside, as equally real, as time is the virtual of space.2 2 The outside insinuates itself into thought, drawing material outside of itself, outside of what is expected, producing a space it can then inhabit an outside within/as the inside.
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Far from restoring knowledge, or the internal certainty that it lacks, to thought, the problematic deduction puts the unthought into thought, because it takes away all its interiority to excavate an outside in it, an irreducible reverse-side, which consumes its substance. Thought nds itself taken over by the exterior of a belief , outside any interiority of a belief , outside any interiority of a mode of knowledge.2 3 It is in the disjunction of series that the outside is active in the production of an inside. In consequence, for Deleuze, the middle is always the privileged point of initiation, why thought is best captured in between. Thought starts in the middle, at the point of intersection of two series/events/processes that temporarily share a milieu. Becoming is bodily thought, the means via which thought/force invent new series, metamorphosing new bodies from interactions. It is an interaction between bodies which releases something from each, and in that encounter, makes real a virtuality a series of enabling/transforming possibilities. Thought is what enacts between a cause and its habitual eVect between being and another. It is a ssure between strata that awaits something new to emerge. It is an unhinging, a derangement, a re-ordering. The Deleuzean process evacuates the inside of the subject, forcing it to confront its outside, evacuating it, and in that action destablishing its systematicity/organization/ functioning, allowing a part/feature to mutate into a new arrangement/system to endlessly de ect/become. What Deleuze aims at is the aYrmation of diVerence in terms of a multiplicity of possible diVerences diVerence as the positivity of diVerences. Deleuzes scheme prioritizes the aVective foundations of the thinking process. Therefore ideas are rede ned as nomadic forms of thought, oVering a theoretical resistance to all mental/theoretical codi cations. In the Deleuzo-Nietzschean feminist model the body is not a xed essence or a natural given. The body is viewed as theoretical topos, an attempt to overcome the classical mind-body dualism of Cartesian origins, in order to think anew about the structure of the thinking subject. The body, therefore, is an interface, a eld of intersecting material and symbolic forces. The body is a surface where multiple codes are inscribed it is a linguistic construction that capitalizes on energies of the heterogeneous/ discontinuous/unconscious complexion. The body is a situated self, an embodied positioning of the self.24 This can be visualized through Natacha Merrits digital photographs which present the unrepresentable aspects of female subjectivity/sexuality, an aYrmation of a de-essentialized body mutating into a eld of alternative signi cation. This theory of sexual diVerence is based on the belief that the feminine is that which is excluded in masculine space/systems of representation, because she is in excess of it/unrepresentable. The feminine therefore delineates the possibility of an-other system of representation.
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In Merritts work this theory is turned into a visual strategy of becoming-woman.25 This pragmatic, post-feminist account considers wider questions of abstract machines, assemblages and perspectival thinking. Woman thus might be perceived as part of a molecular process, within a machinic assemblage of technological, material, social and other forces, not just cultural or biological. This means that the search for an exitpoint from phallo-logocentric de nitions of feminine requires a process of working through the images and representations that the masculine knowing subject has created of woman as other. Merritts becoming-woman is a way of re-tracing/reversing the multi-layered levels of signi cation/representations of women. The feminine is a focal point via which strategically motivated repetitions, new de nitions and representations may emerge. It is an active process of becoming, a neo-pragmatic turn on subjectivity subjectless subjectivity the becoming-woman is the realm of the aVective, the transitivist and the fusional. The aim is to re-wire and deploy the concept of becoming woman as particles or as bres, as an element within a critical neo-pragmatics. It transforms concepts of femaleness into new sets of relations, into material ows of molecularity. This rewiring of processes is immanent to material ows; such ows are not conceptually driven but aVectively driven. Natacha Merritts work takes this idea into thinking of the art/photographic image, and therefore here we have a new set of vocabularies, where aVectivity/feeling/intensity become pertinent as processes of molecular, and material ows. Such vocabularies enable diVerent ways of thinking, outside the conceptual, or representational, of the visual experience.26 In eVect this catalyses as radically other the female/sexed/thinking subject, who is positioned in an asymmetrical relationship to phallocentric logic. The repetition/ reassertion of feminine positions is a disruptive strategy that engenders diVerence. Merritt advances a strategy of extreme sexualization through embodied female subjectivity. Frustrated by the categorizations of an art world still framed in terms of originators and originals, creative moments and authoritative claims, the digital zone appealed to her. The pixeled windows caught her eye. She had never been able to accept the boundaries between media, the borders between senses, the blueprints of authenticity to which her work was supposed to conform. Cameras had given her the chance to explore the technical potential of imaging machines, but she wanted her pictures to dance and scream, taste and smell, touch and contact senses still to come. It seemed to her that computers were already melting and multiplying the senses and the channels on which they were transmitted and received. The computer-generated image in the virtual world provides a space where the unspeakable can be spoken. On the computer monitor, any change to the image is also a change to the program: any change to the programming brings another image to the screen. This is the continuity of product and process at work in the textiles produced on the loom. The program, the image, the process, and the product: these are all the softwares of the loom. Digital fabrications can be endlessly copied without fading into inferiority; patterns can be pleated and repeat, replicated folds across a screen. Like all textiles, the new softwares have no essence, no authenticity. Just as weavings and their patterns are repeatable without detracting from the value of the rst one made, digital images
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complicate the questions of origin and originality, authorship and authority with which Western conceptions of art have been preoccupied ... Women were among the rst of the artists and photographers, video artists and lm-makers to pick up on the potential of the digital arts.27 There is a further level as Merritts work intersects with Deleuzo-feminist processes, which intensi es its amplitude. It is a line of ight that operates in between diVerent discursive areas, moving through diverse spheres of discourse. The female artist today can eVectively function only in a transitory mode, moving forward/passing through, creating connections with/where things were previously disconnected or apparently unrelated. In the feminist context this epistematic nomadism works if it is eVectively situated/located in in-between zones. 2 8
In terms of Natacha Merritts work with her pixel- xated visions from the no-place of hotel bedrooms to the evacuated zone of cyber space, the question becomes: What represents human in a posthuman condition? What is the view of the self that is operational, in the zones of media-scape and information ows?29 The body in the cybernetic model/ guration is neither physical nor mechanical, nor only visual. It is alternatively a counterparadigm for the interaction between an inside/outside continuum. It is an analysis of not only just the body or technology, but what occurs between them. The images that Merritt produces constitute a postmetaphysical construct. This cybernetic feminine guration illuminates the intersection between feminist theory and Deleuzean lines of thought.30 Feminist gurations refer to the multiple/many, heterogeneous images feminists adopt to designate the project of becoming-subject of women: a view of feminist subjectivity as multiplicity and process. The cybernetic guration is one attempt to come to terms with the new nomadism characterizing the feminine position.3 1 The strategy of rede ning female subjectivity requires primarily a method of working through the catalogue of images/concepts/ representations of women and female identity as they have been codi ed in the contemporary media-scape. As a consequence of the way in which phallo-logocentric language designates female subjectivity/identity, before feminists can discard the signi er Woman it needs to be re-de ned/re-animated, reviewing its multifarious complexities, because these complexities come to de ne the feminine. Tracing a Deleuzean trajectory changes/transforms. A new symbolic system of the feminine cannot be eVected by straightforward violation. Rather a new direction/ metamorphosis can only be achieved through de-essentialized embodiment a re-orientation of the multi-layered structures of ones embodied self. In this regard, in Natacha Merritts work, a continued investigation of the feminine as the female feminist subjects of sexual diVerence requires a deconstruction and a re-aYrmation. As with Deleuze there cannot be social change without the construction of new forms/con gurations of desiring subjects as molecular/nomadic/
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multiple. The stratagem of the female artist is to resist the recoding of the subject in another self-representational system and animate open spaces of experimentation, of exploration and transit. The cartography of the feminine can be established from following lines of ight through the existing structures enacting disruptive actions. In this repetition resides the potential for opening up new angles of vision, new itineraries.
Notes
1
Further see Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). 2 See Ross Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance (Cambridge: Polity Press/New York: Routledge, 1991). Deleuzes rede nition of ideas as nomadic forms of thought oVers a theoretical defence against all mental and theoretical codi cation. Deleuze sees the philosophical text as the term in an intensive process of fundamentally extratextual practices. These practices have to do with displacing the subject through ows of intensity or forces. An important implication of this new conceptual scheme is the way in which it alters the terms of the conventional pact between the artist and his/her viewers. If the philosophical text is the act of reading on the model of connection, the text is relinquished into the intensive elements that both sustain the connections and are generated by them. The artist/viewer binary couple is split up accordingly, and a new impersonal mode is required as an appropriate way of proceeding. The impersonal or postpersonal style allows for a web of connections to be drawn, not only in terms of the artists intentions and the viewers reception but rather in a much wider, more complicated set of possible interconnections that blur established/ hegemonic distinctions of class, culture, race, sexual practice, etc. This philosophical stance imposes not only the conventional academic requirements of passionless truth, but also the passionate engagement in the recognition of the theoretical and discursive implications of rethinking the subject. This choice of a theoretical style leaves an energized space for the exploration of subjectivity, calling for a passionate detachment in theory making. (This expression, originally developed by Laura Mulvey in lm criticism, has been taken up and adapted by Donna Haraway in Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partical Perspective and in A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, both in Simians, Cyborgs and Women (London: Free Association Press, 1991). Deleuzes rede nition of the image/the practice/textual Gargett 42
structure of philosophy as an activity can be of use and inspiration to the aims of feminist theory. 3 Natacha Merritt, Digital Diaries: see www.digital-diaries.com 4 In a sense Merritt is encouraging an engagement with a material awareness of the image, returning the spectator/observer to an awareness of the materiality of the image, to its molecular structure, in connection with the molecularity of those bodies which view. What a Deleuzean approach oVers is a theory of the image as becoming woman in sensation, which conceptualizes new structures of desire outside structuralism and psychoanalytic paradigms. New interventions in lm theory have begun to discover the signi cance of the material, matter, the machinic and embodied eye of vision. (See C. Gledhill and L. Williams, Re-inventing Film Studies [London and New York: Arnold, 2000] and L. Williams (ed.), Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994]) A Deleuzean trajectory extends these ideas to account for newly recognized structures of experience emanating from becoming and the aesthetics of sensation, the movements and energies of the lmic experience. The current concern with bodies, and what they constitute, has resonance for new theories outside of those located within psychoanalytic or semiotic paradigms. It is necessary to move away from a concern with the role of subjectivity, or the de ned positionality of a viewing subjectivity, in relation to constructions of desire. 5 Natacha Merritt grew up in San Francisco. She went to Paris to study law but after three months abandoned her studies for a much more exciting part-time job; taking digital photographs of herself and models with her Casio, at a time when digital cameras were rare and expensive in Europe. Merritt quickly discovered the advantages of this technology. On her return to San Francisco she showed her work on the Internet. Progressing chronologically from the days of her rst Casio QV 110 digital camera to her newer, more sophisticated Nikon Coolpix 900, Digital-Diaries charts countless stories of unfamiliar spaces, unknown faces and chance encounters. See also:
Emily Jenkins, Tongue First (Adventures In Physical Culture) (London: Virago Press, 1999); Pat Cali a, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex (Pittsburgh, PA: Cleis Press, 1994); Susie Bright, Sexwise (Pittsburgh, PA: Cleis Press, 1995). 6 Elizabeth Wurtzel, Bitch: In Praise of Di cult Women (London: Quartet Books, 1998). 7 See Natacha Merritt, Bedtime Stories (interview by Rachel Newsome), Dazed and Confused 66 ( June 2001), pp.15657. 8 Further see Teresa de Lauretis, Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness, Feminist Studies 16:1 (1990) and Upping the Anti (sic) in Feminist Theory, in Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (eds), Con icts in Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1990); Marianne Macy, Working Sex: An Odyssey into Our Cultural Underworld (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1996). 9 Merritt, Bedtime Stories 10 D. Tuer, Pleasures in the Dark: Sexual DiVerence and Erotic Deviance in an Articulation of Female Desire, Cineaction 10 (1987). 11 See Merritt, Bedtime Stories. Also see Sallie Tisdale, Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (New York: Anchor, 1994). 12 See Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986) and Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). 13 See Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. G. Burchill and H. Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1991), pp.16768 and Dana Polan, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, in Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), pp.22954. 14 Elizabeth Grosz, Space Time and Perversion (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), pp.2543. Bodies speak, without necessarily talking, because they become coded with and as signs. They speak social codes. They become intextuated, narrativized; simultaneously, social codes, laws, norms and ideas become incarnated. If bodies are traversed and in ltrated by knowledges, meanings, and power, they can also under certain circumstances, become sites of struggle and resistance, actively exhibiting themselves on social practices. The inscriptive approach to theorizing the body via Nietzsche, Foucault and Deleuze is concerned with the processes by which the subject is marked, transformed, constructed or exhibited/ positioned within various regimes of institutional, discursive, and nondiscursive power as a particular kind of body. 15 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2: A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p.9. 16 The Deleuzo-Guattarian explanation of the velocity of becoming constantly emphasizes the way becoming-other refuses imitation/analogy, refuses to represent itself as like anything/ something else, alternatively, becoming is the catalysation of lines/forces/intensities from the boundaries and constraints of xed identity to the transformations and problematization of identity: an Eskimo-becoming[...] does not consist in playing the Eskimo, in imitating or identifying yourself with him or taking the Eskimo upon yourself, but in assembling something between you and him, for you can only become Eskimo if the Eskimo himself becomes something else. The same goes for lunatics, drug addicts, and alcoholics[...] We are trying to extract from madness the life, which it contains, while hating lunatics who constantly kill life, turn it against itself. We are trying to extract from alcohol the life which it contains, without drinking. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p.53. 17 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.279. 18 Elizabeth Grosz, A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics in Boundas and Olkowski (eds), Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, pp.187210. 19 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.292. 20 This term Deleuze utilizes in rethinking transgression not how to stutter language but make language itself stutter: It is when the language system overstrains itself that it begins to stutter, to murmur, or to mumble, then the entire language reaches the limit that sketches the outside and confronts silence. When the language system is so much strained, language suVers a pressure that delivers it to silence. Gilles Deleuze, He Stuttered, in Boundas and Olkawski (eds.), Gilles Deleuze and The Theatre of Philosophy, pp.2329. parallax 43
21
Gilles Deleuze, Di erence et Repetition (Paris: PUF, 1968), p.139, and Di erence and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 22 The Virtual is the unsaid of a statement/the unthought of thought. It is real and apparent, but must be forgotten momentarily for a clear statement to be produced as a transitory surface eVect. The task of philosophy is to explore that inevitable forgetting instant, to re-engage statements to their conditions of appearance. See Deleuze & Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp.15657 and 160. 23 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p.175. 24 Deleuze suggests the outside of thought as life itself, as impetus and resistance of life to categories and to push beyond them. In Cinema 2: The TimeImage Deleuze links the unthought to the body, which can no longer be conceived in terms of being a medium of thought or a resistance to it (Plato/Descartes): instead, the body is the motive of thought, its energizing point. (Deleuze, Cinema 2, p.189.) 25 Using the term woman then in Deleuze is not to maintain essentialist de nitions of the term woman, but is used in new ways to rewire the term in molecular rhizomatic assemblage, not as a literal de nition of the molar woman. Camilla Griggers provides an example of the social and machinic assemblages of becoming woman when she describes how womens lived experiences of the 1990s are rewired as assemblages of body/ mind/matter and the molecular. (Camilla Griggers, Preface, Becoming-Woman in BecomingWoman: Theory Out of Bounds [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1997], p. ix.) In terms of a molar politics for feminist theory, it is no longer possible to de ne the concept woman as having any universal value, or having any essential values. If we are to take on board the philosophical premise of assemblage, of molecularity, then the term woman can no longer be conceived through binary terminology. Woman cannot merely be described as part of a binary, but a part of an assemblage of processes connecting and forming in new alignments within culture, across the social, the libidinal, the material, the psychological, the biological, and personal spaces of our existences, as Griggers exempli es. 26 There almost appears to be a contradiction in terms. Deleuze suggests that the body is not a phenomenological, corporeal lived body, but is an assemblage of forces, intensities etc. And yet with Merritts work we conceive the body being the space where the felt and unthought are Gargett 44
experienced. This apparent contradiction is an exempli cation of Deleuzes ideas of the interstitial or the in-between. So that this de nition of body is really no longer seen in either singular categorisation, but a complex of both and more. The body is the unknown space of the molecular. It is not de nable as a single entity. It cannot be constrained to the individuated body of esh and blood, as opposed to mind. Rather it is an amalgam, but not necessarily a whole notion of all these. Body in this sense has a new and uid dimension, which encompasses all individuated, social, cultural and aVective spaces. This is a reformulation of life as body body as life. It is intensity and aVect which molecularly constitute this body of life. 27 See Sadie Plant, Zeros +Ones: Digital Women+The New Technoculture (London: Fourth Estate, 1997), pp.18990. 28 See: Ross Braidotti, From She-Self to She Other, in Gisela Bock and Susan James (eds.), Beyond Equality and Di erence (London: Routledge, 1992), outlining a new theoretical structure of general universalism. 29 Dismemberment: countermemory. Forget what its for, and learn what it does. Dont concentrate on orgasm, the means by which sex remains enslaved to teleology and its reproduction. A new generation has forgotten what its organs were supposed to be doing for their sense of self or the reproduction of the species, and have learned instead to let their bodies learn what they can do without preprogramming desire, to make of ones body a place for the production of extraordinary polymorphic pleasures, while simultaneously detaching it from valorization of the genitalia. This is only the beginning of a process which abandons the model of a uni ed and centralized organism, the organic body, organized with survival as its goal, in favour of a diagram of uid sex. Flows of intensity, their uids, their bres, their continuums and conjunctions of aVects, microperceptions, have replaced the world of the subject. Now there are acentred systems, nite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neighbour to any other. Once it loses the reproductive point, sex explodes beyond the human and its proper desires. Coded into two discrete sexes and de ned by their reproductive organs, human bodies also imply a multiplicity of molecular combinations bringing into play not only the man in the woman and the woman in the man, but the
relation of each to the animal, the plant, etc.: a thousand tiny sexes. Every uni ed body conceals a crowd: inside every solitary living creature is a swarm of non-creature things. Even the most uni ed of individuals is intimately bound up with networks which take it past its own borderlines, seething with vast populations of inorganic life whose replications disrupt even the most perverse anthropocentric notions of what it is to have either a sex or sex itself.
its object persons or things, but the entire surroundings that it traverses ... an always nomadic and migrant desire ... [Her body] had refused to go along with mans de nitions of organic life. On the learning curves of her body, she discovered that it simply had too many and too uid zones to count as one. (Plant, Zeros +Ones, p.206.) 31 See Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs, Socialist Review 15:2 (1985). The cyborg as a feminist guration is an illuminating example of the intersection between feminist theory and Deleuzean lines of thought in their common attempt to come to terms with the posthuman condition. The body in the cyborg model is neither physical nor mechanical nor only textual. It is rather a counterparadigm for the interaction between the inner and the external reality. It is an ultra-modern reading not only of the body, not only of machines, but rather of what goes on between them. As a new powerful replacement of the mind/body debate, the cyborg is a postmetaphysical construct. The guration of the cyborg reminds us that metaphysics is not an abstract construction it is practical ontology. An important moment in Haraways cybernetic imagery is the notion of situated knowledges. Answering implicitly the standard humanistic accusation that emphasis on multiplicity leads to relativism, Haraway argues for a multifaceted foundational theory and an antirelativistic acceptance of diVerences emphasizing a network of diVerences, especially the diVerences organic/inorganic and human/ machine, in opposition to the primacy granted to the binary opposition of masculine to feminine in sexual diVerence theories. Haraway proposes a kind of de-essentialized, embodied genealogy as the strategy to undo the dualism.
(Plant, Zeros +Ones, pp.20405.) 30 To explore what the female/cybernetic body can do is no longer a question of liberating sex, of sexual freedom, or authenticity. It is not a matter of remembering herself but instead of dismembering the one sex which has maintained continuity, a matter of making bits of bodies, its parts or particular surfaces throb/intensify, for their own sake and not for the bene t of the entity or organism as a whole. She never believed in the disguises she wore, the cover stories she wrote to conceal the rhythms and speeds of nonhuman sex, the molecular machinic elements, their arrangements and their syntheses which composed the thing they called herself. Instead she is in touch with the microprocesses which turn her on, tapping into the plane of impersonal desire which lies in wait for human sex, a desire which does not take as
Natacha Merritt is currently working on exhibitions of her work and continues to work on her website www.digitalgirly.com A.Gargett received a PhD in philosophy from the University of Warwick and an MA in Art History from Londons Courtauld Institute. Research interests include philosophy/art/ lm/cultural theory. Notable publications include The Matrix: What is Bullet Time? Doppleganger: Exploded States of Consciousness in Fight Club (www.disinfo.com/) Strange Days (Virtual Spaces) ( Journal of Cognitive Liberties 2:3)and Symmetry of Death(Variaciones Borges 13/2002) Film criticism appears on <kamera.co.uk> and <talking pictures>. Other work available 3AM magazine/Left Curve/Nasty/Azimute/RichmondReview
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parallax, 2002, vol. 8, no. 4, 4656
Must Desire Be Taken Literally?

Calvin Thomas
The world must be made to mean. Stuart Hall

It is much harder for man to let the other come through him. Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me. Helene Cixous ` My booty-hole got a sign say exit only . from conversation unavoidably overheard on an Atlanta subway.
The writer of these words is a forty-something year old man who has never been fucked in the ass. Indeed, for a variety of reasons, this writer may very well go to his grave without ever having been fucked in the ass.1 Not utterly a stranger to some relatively thin and shallow forms of receptive anal eroticism, this writer has nonetheless never known exactly, physically, literally, truly, madly, deeply what it feels like, much less what it means (to the extent that meaning must be assigned to it), to be ass-fucked, has never experienced what Leo Bersani has ironically described as the seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman.2 That is to say, I myself, personally, in my own personhood, in my own body, have never negotiated with the seductive and intolerable image of being fucked in the ass as anything other than image, as anything more (or less) than metaphor. Of course, the extent to which I nd this image seductive only as image, merely as metaphor, may well indicate the extent to which I must nd it intolerable as embodied fact, since I have, in fact, never tolerated it. And yet, as those who have encountered my work on masculinity and the male body may know, this writer has indeed been unable to refuse Bersanis various elaborations of anal sex as metaphor for branlement, for self-shattering, for e the abdication of phallic power, for the exuberant discard of hyperbolic subjectivity, for a bene cent crisis in and of the masculinist self.3 I have allowed myself to be seduced by the thrust of Bersanis arguments, by the cold intimacy, the anal battery, if you will, of his words. Ass safely covered, legs not raised high in the air but tucked demurely beneath a writers desk, I have nonetheless taken in those words, those
parallax 46
letters (inevitably emblems of an others desire), even if, literally, physically, I have taken in, and apparently desire to take in, nothing (or little) else. And therein lies a question ( posed in my title) as well as a tension, if not a tale: a tension between the ass-fuck taken literally and the ass-fuck taken as literature, between anal sex as bodily experience and anal sex as a metaphor both available and attractive to a writer who has never really had (much) anal sex but who discerns a bene ciently anal and transformatively sexual relationship not only between himself and his own and others words, but between himself and the social reality that he inhabits and that inhabits him, the world whose meanings he helps make and unmake, and by whose meanings he is made and unmade. It is this tension that I would like to explore brie y, but maintain inde nitely, here. What prompts the above disclosure about my signal lack of experience not a sorrowful confession of transgressing limits but an admission of the rather sorry limits of my transgressions, of my failure to have been transgressed is, speci cally, a sweet invitation from the editors of parallax to write for this special issue on Having Sex. As I understand, the invitation itself was issued as a consequence of someones having heard a keynote talk I recently gave at a masculinity studies conference in the UK.4 In this talk, called How Male Bodies Matter to Feminist Theory, I attempt to demonstrate the value of critical masculinity studies to both queer theory and the feminist political project.5 The discussion begins by visiting a debate between Judith Butler and Rosi Braidotti about gender vs. sexual diVerence, takes its cue from Braidottis call for a feminist dirty-minded thinking, proceeds to think dirtily about some writings on straight male subjectivity by Catherine Waldby and Brian Pronger, and, after a consideration of Lee Edelmans notion of homographesis, ends with a critique of what I take to be some homophobic manoeuvers in a poem by the American poet Galway Kinnell called Holy Shit, a work that I read as overly holy and insuYciently shitty. 6 For my purposes here, I would like to touch on Waldbys and Prongers comments, brie y revisit what I made of them in my talk, address how my audience seemed to respond to what I made, and to situate their responses within the problematic of the literal/literary tension with which I opened. In separate essays, both Catherine Waldby and Brian Pronger posit anal receptivity, rather than castration anxiety, as the more destabilizing spectre of the hyperbolically phallic subject. Both view psychic resistance to anal reception as part of the motivating force behind misogynist and homophobic projective violence, and, correspondingly, both see feminist and queer political potential in attempts to dephallicize the straight male body by openly celebrating, or celebratively opening, the heterosexual male anus. Waldby, in Destruction: Boundary Erotics and Re gurations of the Heterosexual Male Body, describes erotic destruction as desubjectivation, as the temporary ecstatic confusions wrought upon the everyday sense of self by sexual pleasure.7 She suggests that while the rituals of heterosexual sex can and often do enact [a] nonreciprocity of [erotic] destruction [...] they can also play out disturbances and secret reciprocities in this erotic economy.8 Because conventional heterosexual nonreciprocity depends upon a hegemonic bodily imago of masculinity that conforms with an understanding of the male body as phallic and impenetrable, the
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heterosexual male anus can become a site of signi cant disturbances in, and destructions of, the rituals of straight sex. 9 The ass, writes Waldby, is soft and sensitive, and associated with pollution and shame, like the vagina. It is non-speci c with regard to genital diVerence in that everybody has one. It allows access into the body, when after all only women are supposed to have a vulnerable interior space. All this makes anal eroticism a suasive point for the displacement or erasure of purely phallic boundaries.1 0 It also makes for Waldbys nicely concluding quip that what theoretical feminism needs now is a strap-on.1 1 Correspondingly, in On Your Knees: Carnal Knowledge, Masculine Dissolution, Doing Feminism, Pronger suggests that what is at issue is not men doing feminism but feminism doing men, or rather, that the masculine aversion to being done, being penetrated, is what speci cally prevents men from embodying feminist insights.1 2 The point of masculinity, Pronger suggests, is
to become larger, to take up more space, and yield less of it. It is the opposite of feminine anorexic desire [...] The expanding phallus is protected by the other side of this desire: the closed anus. Just as the phallus realizes its masculinity by taking space, so the tight anus protects masculine space by repelling invasion. Masculine desire protects its own phallic production by closing ori ces, both anus and mouth, to the phallic expansion of others. Rendered impenetrable, the masculine body diVerentiates itself as distinct and unconnected. It is conquering and inviolable [...] The discourse of gender territorializes mens bodies by constructing this form of desire, simultaneously channeling it and damming it up [...] through metaphorically generalized or sexually speci c phallic expansions and anal contractions. 1 3 In my talk, I dwelt at greater length on Waldbys and Prongers interventions, which I nd quite attractive and productive, but I also voiced reservations about what could be taken as their apparent literalism, about the impression they might leave that only literally ass-fucked men are in the position to recon gure heterosexuality or embody feminist insights. The problem here is not only that some men who lack the literal experience may yet be able somehow to enact the desired political agenda, but also that other men who have the experience regularly, perhaps on a daily basis, may yet do little or nothing for that agenda and may otherwise actively work against it. If we do consider the ass-fuck as a form of so-called radical sex, then the problem, as Bersani puts it, is the assumption that radical sex means or leads to radical politics1 4 when in fact there is no necessary, natural, or even particularly clear connection or translation between one and the other. It isnt that there is no conceivable connection whatsoever, but that, in Bersanis words, the ways in which having sex politicizes are highly problematical;1 5 the process by which sexual pleasure generates politics is extremely obscure.1 6 The fact that this generative process is at best obscure, if even existent, means that, unless we are content to let it rest in obscurity as an unspoken article of faith, that process must be brought to meaning, must, as Stuart Hall puts it, be made to mean.17 Like everything else in the world, it must be articulated if it is to be realized
Thomas 48
at all. There is, perhaps, as Samuel Beckett puts it, an obligation to express even if nally or foundationally there is nothing to express.18 In my talk, I ended up turning to expression, to articulation to the metaphor of writing and the writing of metaphor as a way of disturbing the problematic residual literalism of Waldbys and Prongers essays. More to the point, I turned to writing as a metaphorical means of branlement, of self-shattering, of exploding the ideological body of straight e masculinity itself. I turned to writing as what Helene Cixous calls the passageway, ` the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me, to writing as that which does not nally express, aYrm, or convey me but which ceaselessly carries me away, disperses me, tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me.1 9 Quite obviously, the writing in and of Cixous ecstatic writing is, for me, highly sexually charged. But in the turn to that writing, I seemingly charged away from the sexually speci c in the literal sense and towards what Pronger calls the metaphorically generalized, the generation of metaphor. Having made that turn, however, I then focused, and will presently focus in greater detail here, on what might be called the anti-generative in writing, not on its expressivity, nor on any creativity traditionally linked to paternity, maternity, or any other imperative of the successful heterosexual reproduction of life, but rather on writings intimately sexual connection, its degeneratively metonymic connection, to murderous or suicidal ecstasy, to failure, to death its connection, in other words, to the rectum, to the grave in which the masculine ideal [...] of proud subjectivity is buried.20 I suggested writing as Durchfall, as the general metaphorical/metonymical economy in which cultural monuments collapse into cultural droppings, in which phallic expansions and anal contractions may be inverted and subverted into anal expansions and phallic contractions (contractions, that is, of the hyperbolic subject, not of the tumescent penis: theres neither anything wrong with erections nor anything particularly salutary about shrinkage per se, it seems to me), and I oVered this metaphorically generalized rectal expansion as a perverse sort of ethical method of preventing straight men from being the villains the great big assholes of feminist and queer politics. In short, positing successful normative hetero-masculinity as unconscionable, I submitted, and resubmit here, conscientiously failed writing as a model of conscientiously failed masculinity, anti-generative but potentially politically productive. Before expanding this theme any further, however, I would like to comment brie y on what I took to be my audiences response to these writerly elaborations. On the one hand, unless I only imagine, a palpable sense of unease seemed to hover over the fact that I was speaking so profusely about anal and fecal matters at all. Even though abject artists and theorists of the body (not to mention producers of hyper-stupid, scatological Hollywood lm) have been engaged in rudely corporeal performative discourse for some years now, that discourse can still provoke discomfort when it explicitly brings the private to a public. As Tim Dean puts it, excrement remains an extraordinarily diYcult topic for sustained discourse.2 1 Coupled with the audiences anxiety, however, unless my imagination runs wild, was a sense of relief that I was, in the end, engaged only at the level of discourse: I was, after all, only talking and, bringing even more relief, I was only talking about only talking. I dont mean to suggest that anyone in the audience actually feared that I was likely, in a
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moment of performative excess, to confront them with the true subject of my discourse by literally dropping my trousers, spreading my butt-cheeks, or doing anything unspeakably worse in the way of letting the solar anus shine. I do mean that I sensed a bit of anxiety-assuagement over the fact that, though I seemed to be talking in a discomforting way about anal sex and defecatory eZorescence, I wasnt really addressing these matters directly at all but merely employing them as metaphors for writing. On the other hand, I de nitely sensed among some members of the audience a more political unease, suspicion, or disappointment in regard to exactly what had relieved the others: the fact that I was only writing about only writing, only talking about only talking. That is to say, some in the audience wondered (aloud, during q&a) about what might be called the political use-value of the metaphor (as mere metaphor) of anal expansion. If the anus, or more speci cally the ass-fuck, does entail some sort of transformative potential as an avenue for exploding the ideological body of straight masculinity, then what happens to that potential, isnt it really squandered, through the recourse to metaphor, the privileging of the metaphorically general over the sexually speci c? If the ass-fuck as radical sex is thought or spoken or written of merely as metaphor, what then becomes of the possibility of real change the point, as words inscribed in stone at Londons Highgate Cemetery have it, being not merely to interpret the world but to change it? As the old boy interred beneath those words might have put it, in order to abolish the idea of hegemonic masculinity, the idea of the ass-fuck is suYcient. It takes actual ass-fucking to abolish actual hegemonic masculinity.2 2 Although I understand and even share both the imputed relief of the rst group and the announced suspicions of the second, I believe that neither is ultimately warranted. To explain why, and to further expand my general theme, let me turn to the title of this essay, which oVers as a question what Jacques Lacan issues as an imperative. I refer to the Ecrits, to Section V of The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power, which bears the title Desire must be taken literally.2 3 Imperatives themselves are usually meant to be taken literally: one hears of rhetorical questions, but rarely of a rhetorical imperative. For Lacan, however, the imperative to take desire literally neither means nor impels us to take it literally if we take the latter instance of the word to refer to the directly physical, corporeal, instinctual, nonsymbolic, or non-social. Much rather, for Lacan, to take desire quite simply, literally means to take it, not simply at all, to the letter, a la lettre:24 the literal in the letter ly sense is what divides us from the literal in the physical sense, and that very division is what endlessly opens up desire. Desire, Lacan insists, not the drives,25 and Lacans insistence here is nothing less than the insistence of the letter itself, its insistency rather than its consistency: For the signi er, by its very nature, always anticipates meaning by unfolding its dimension before it [...] From which we can say that it is in the chain of the signi er that the meaning insists but that none of its elements consists in the signi cation of which it is at the moment capable.26 What originally prompted Lacans insistence on the letters insistence in its relation to desire was Alexandre Kojeves description of desire itself as the revelation of an ` emptiness, the presence of the absence of a reality.2 7 In Lacan, this revelation is
Thomas 50
coupled with an understanding of language in which the word, as Maurice Blanchot puts it, is not the expression of a thing but rather the absence of this thing [...] The word, writes Blanchot, makes the things disappear and imposes upon us the feeling of a universal want and even of its own want.2 8 Taking this con ation of desire with language, in which the two are revealed as virtually the same no-thing, and compounding it with Saussures designation of language as an arbitrary, conventional, di erential system without positive terms, Lacan then introduces Freudian sexual di erence understood (or arbitrarily and conventionally imposed ) in terms of castration. In eVect, Lacan lets the mothers castration, her no-thing, her putative lack of/desire for the phallus (and our paternally prohibited but always already impossible desire to be the phallus for her) stand in as metaphors for the universal want that is inscribed in every speaking subject qua speaking subject. Her speci cally sexual lack metaphorizes our generally linguistic dehiscence. In Lacanian terms, then, we speaking subjects are all castrated in language and by language, are all separated from the literal (the mothers real body) by the literal (the fathers name and no, nom et non), and this understanding of linguistic separation as both castration and universal want has the eVect as many of Lacans critics point out of universally phallicizing and hence heterosexualizing the desire for all meaning and the meaning of all desire. So much for (overly) rudimentary Lacan. 29 But there are complications, the most salutary of which I can best foreground by pointing out that among Lacans in uences we nd not only Freud, Hegel, Kojeve, Saussure, Jakobson, Levi-Strauss, and (alas) ` Heidegger, but also Georges Bataille.3 0 For it is with Bataille that the rock of castration can be said to crumble. It is with Bataille that we get a revelation of language not as the singularity of castration (and hence the sacri ce of variety) but rather as one of the varieties of sacri cial experience: language not only as emptiness but also as excess, not as lack but as expenditure. If for Lacan the symbol is the murder of the thing, for Bataille that murder is never a transparently clean kill but rather a fundamentally messier aVair.31 To rephrase Lacan and Blanchot by way of Bataille, one might say that the word particularly as it always inevitably passes through a body is not only a presence made of absence 3 2 but also a presence made of abjection. The word neither fully expresses things nor makes them completely disappear but rather soils and saturates them, and us, drawing us (down? back? out?) into a general feeling of abjection and even of its own abjection. Following Bataille, and Julia Kristeva, one can say that to speak, to signify oneself, to put into play the essence of self, which is that it is itself an anti-essential eVect of the signi er, is not only to split oneself along the lines of enunciation/enounced, or of subject/ object: it is also to expel oneself, to spit oneself out, to abject oneself within the very motion that one claims to establish oneself. Or, to quote Kristeva directly, one can ask: Does one write under any other condition than being possessed by abjection?3 3 Possessed or not, I myself am drawn (down? back? out? in any case, repetitively) to the moments in Lacan that seem most to bear the trace, the stain, of Bataillean expenditure, particularly as those moments always conspicuously pertain to the movement of writing. Lacan refers, for example, to his own publications as poubellications, playing on the French word for waste basket and assigning his writing the status of waste.3 4 He suggests in Seminar XI that The creator will never participate in anything other than the creation of a small dirty deposit, a succession of small
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dirty deposits juxtaposed.35 Also in Seminar XI, Lacan writes of that vertigo [...] of the white page, which, for a particular character [...] is like the centre of the symptomatic barrage which blocks oV for him every access to the Other. If, quite literally, he cannot touch this white page at which his ineVable intellectual eVusions come to a stop, it is because he apprehends it only as a piece of lavatory paper.36 Finally (and Im embarrassed to think how many times Ive cited these two sentences, but they initiated so much of what I call my thinking that I really cant help myself ), Lacan writes, For this subject, who thinks he can accede to himself by designating himself in the statement, is no more than such an object. Ask the writer about the anxiety he experiences when faced by the blank sheet of paper, and he will tell you who is the turd of his phantasy.37 What strikes me about these passages is how little they seem to concern castration or castration anxiety. Whether Lacan is writing of his own poubellications, the dirty deposits of the creator, the eVusions of a particular character, or the vertiginous anxiety of the writer in general, these passages all suggest a more formless sort of anxiety of abjection, what I have called a scatontological anxiety (note Lacans emphasis on the copula in the last quoted sentence), underlying and perhaps anteceding castration anxiety. Castration anxiety itself, as I have argued, can function to formalize and contain an earlier, more fundamental, more amorphous anxiety, paving the way, as it were, for the installation of its possessor on one side or the other of the binary of symmetrical sexual diVerence. 3 8 Abjection, on the other hand, like the Bataillean informe, is never so cleanly or decisively contained. Thus, to bring abjection into play by foregrounding the corporeal in the production of language (my project, in a nutshell) is to cast the scene of writing otherwise than as an emptiness yearning to be literally lled ( perhaps by the big dick of real change). Rather, the scene of writing the blank page, the expectant silence of an audience waiting for a speaker to begin is revealed as another sort of opening, a passageway, both an entrance and an exit, for the other(s) in me and for me in the other(s): an oracular ori ce, if you will, that is to be linguistically massaged and relaxed and lubricated in the interests of communication, to use no blander word, but communication in Batailles double sense not only of the restricted economic exchange of meanings between subjects but as another name for general economy, for that ecstatic space of impossible community in which solidi ed subjectivities dissolve and erected meaning collapses. 39 Or rather, in which subjectivities are said to dissolve and meaning is said to collapse. After all, even in Bataillean communication, the dissolution of linguistically constituted subjects takes place in language; the collapse of meaning is laid down in writing. Certainly Bataille in real life participated in all sorts of orgies, but fortunately he and his acephalic cohorts never actually brought oV their plan for a literal human sacri ce: jouissance perhaps abounded, but no one really ever really lost a head, and acephalia (headlessness) itself thus remains a metaphor.4 0 Or, to put it another way, if the corpse is the utmost of abjection,4 1 it isnt that, or anything else, to the corpse itself. If, as Nietzsche tells us, truths are metaphors that have forgotten that they are metaphors, and the will to truth is a concealed will to death, then acephalia is a metaphor that, like any other, stays alive by forgetting to forget itself as metaphor.4 2 As Foucault suggests, the theoretical legacy of Nietzsche, Freud, and
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Marx is the interpretative realization that there is nothing to interpret that is not itself already an interpretation, and interpretative activity stays alive by situating itself within that endlessly interpretative frame. Foucault writes: If interpretation can never be completed, this is quite simply because there is nothing to interpret. There is nothing absolutely primary to interpret, for after all everything is already interpretation, each sign is in itself not the thing that oVers itself to interpretation but an interpretation of other signs. Foucault goes on to suggest that the death of interpretation is to believe that there are signs, signs that exist primarily, originally, actually, as coherent, pertinent, and systematic marks. The life of interpretation, on the contrary, is to believe that there are only interpretations.4 3 We can situate Foucaults interpretation in Lacanian terms, and bring the question of desire back into the mix, by juxtaposing two remarks in Seminar XI. In one, Lacan suggests that not to want to desire and to desire are the same thing:44 that is, desire, as the presence of the absence of a reality, desires to cancel itself out as desire by appropriating that absent reality. In the other remark, Lacan states bluntly that Desire, in fact, is interpretation itself ,4 5 which remark I desire to interpret as meaning that interpretation, as the desire for a factual truth, desires to cancel itself out as interpretation by the nal appropriation of that truth. What we are left with, then, after Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, and in the wake of Bataille, Foucault, and Lacan, is a social reality from which reality is terminally missing, a world in which interpretation only interprets interpretation, metaphor merely metaphorizes metaphor, and desire desires nothing but desire a world, in other words, that, to the extent that we remain in it, must literally be made to mean. It was with this fundamentally but non-foundationally dirty business of wor(l)d making that I attempted to engage my audience (to return now to them) with my little acephalic tale of the ass-fuck as a metaphor for the collapse or discard of a certain sort of straight male subjectivity. What I will say here, as I tumble towards a conclusion, is that the particular form of subjectivity under question is, like all others, written: it is itself an assemblage of metaphors, is made out of words and images that are themselves made, socially and historically produced, however viscously they may circulate through that instance of materiality we call the body. Since the self to be transformed is itself a metaphor, the metaphor of the ass-fuck pace our buried friend at Highgate may be suYcient to do the trick. After all, what are acephalia, the ass-fuck, radical sex, and radical politics if not metaphors for the possibility of change? And just as hetero-masculine domination has always depended on the denial of receptive anal eroticism, hasnt it also always depended on being closed to the possibility of change, on metaphors that forget their metaphoricity, on the naturalization of history, on what Bourdieu in his recent Masculine Domination has referred to as the eternalization of the arbitrary?46 For the hetero-masculine subject, who apparently thinks that he can not only accede to himself but keep his ass covered by designating himself in the statement, being open to change means not only the recognition that the meaning of desire is the desire of meaning, but that the metaphor of the ass-fuck is the ass-fuck of metaphor, and that that recognition literally is the ass-fuck itself. Just ask the writer. What this writer would like to end up saying to his audience is that those members who are relieved to think that my talk is only talk are mistaken: to the extent that
parallax 53
we communicate at all, we really are having sex. To those disappointed that my cock-assed metaphors remain merely metaphorical, I would oVer the reminder that the historical struggles we are engaged in will never cease to be struggles over meaning in a semiotically fabricated world. In the course of those struggles, some of us have discovered a strange strategic political value in the metaphors of dissolution, failure, and collapse, more so than we have in those of agency, solidarity, and success. We like to linger insistently over, rather than to redeem or repair, the productive tears in the social, psychic, and corporeal fabric. Foucault once declared that he wrote in order to have no face.4 7 Some, I have argued, write in order to have no feces. I write to tear myself a new asshole, to have myself torn a new asshole, though I fail, most likely, even at that. And if I close this essay now by professing that abject failure to fail, it is only a way of reminding myself, and any audience I might have, that the writer of these words, by virtue of being the writer, by virtue of writing these words, has always been fucked in the ass.
Notes
1
Among these reasons I perhaps atter myself by not including the condition of the ass itself, which, despite my advancing age, I like to think of as still fuck-worthy, even if I dont like to think of its being fucked. 2 Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave?, October 43 (Winter 1987), p.212. 3 These Bersanian tropes proliferate not only from his Rectum but also from The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986);The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Homos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); and from Tim Dean, Hal Foster, and Kaja Silverman, A Conversation with Leo Bersani, October 82 (Fall 1997), pp.316. For my misappropriations of Bersani, see Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); my title essay in Calvin Thomas, Joseph O. Aimone, and Catherine A. F. MacGillivray [eds], Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); and Cultural Droppings: Bersanis Beckett, Twentieth Century Literature 47:2 (Summer 2001), pp.16996. 4 The conference, on Posting the Male: Representations of Masculinity in the Twentieth Century, organized by Daniel Lea and Berthold Schoene-Harwood, was held at the Research Centre for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University in August of 2000, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank the organizers for inviting me to speak at this event. 5 The talk has since been published as Reen eshing the Bright Boys: or, How Male Bodies Thomas 54
Matter to Feminist Theory, in Judith Kegan Gardiner [ed], Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp.6089. 6 Rosi Braidotti, with Judith Butler, Feminism by Any Other Name, di erences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6.2 & 3 (1994), pp.6299; Lee Edelman, Tearooms and Sympathy, or, the Epistemology of the Water Closet, in Henry ` Abelove, Miche le Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin [eds], The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge 1993), pp.55376; Galway Kinnell, Imperfect Thirst (Boston: Houghton MiZin, 1994). References for Waldby and Pronger are given below. 7 Catherine Waldby, Destruction: Boundary Erotics and the Re gurations of the Heterosexual Male Body, in Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn [eds], Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1995), p.266. 8 Catherine Waldby, Destruction: Boundary Erotics and the Re gurations of the Heterosexual Male Body, p.267. 9 Catherine Waldby, Destruction: Boundary Erotics and the Re gurations of the Heterosexual Male Body, p.268. 10 Catherine Waldby, Destruction: Boundary Erotics and the Re gurations of the Heterosexual Male Body, p.272. 11 Catherine Waldby, Destruction: Boundary Erotics and the Re gurations of the Heterosexual Male Body, p.275. 12 Brian Pronger, On Your Knees: Carnal Knowledge, Masculine Dissolution, Doing Feminism, in Tom Digby [ed], Men Doing Feminism, (New York: Routledge, 1998), p.69.
13
Brian Pronger, On Your Knees: Carnal Knowledge, Masculine Dissolution, Doing Feminism, pp.7273 [emphases added]. 14 Brian Pronger, On Your Knees: Carnal Knowledge, Masculine Dissolution, Doing Feminism, p.205. 15 Brian Pronger, On Your Knees: Carnal Knowledge, Masculine Dissolution, Doing Feminism, p.206. 16 Brian Pronger, On Your Knees: Carnal Knowledge, Masculine Dissolution, Doing Feminism, p.208. 17 Stuart Hall, The Rediscovery of Ideology, in Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan [eds], Literary Theory: An Anthology, (New York: Blackwell, 1998), p.1050. 18 Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, Ruby Cohn. [ed], (New York: Grove, 1984), p.145. 19 Helene Cixous, Sorties, in Julie Rivkin and ` Michael Ryan [eds], Literary Theory: An Anthology, (New York: Blackwell, 1998), p.583. 20 Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave?, p.222. 21 Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p.267. 22 My allusion here is to Marxs In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is completely suYcient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in Robert C. Tucker [ed], The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition, (New York: Norton, 1978), p.99. 23 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York: Norton, 1977), p.256. 24 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, pp.146, 176n5. 25 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, p.256. 26 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, p.153. 27 Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of ` Hegel: Lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit, Allan Bloom [ed], trans. James H. Nichols, Jr., (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), p.5. This text collects the lectures on Hegel that Kojeve delivered, ` and Lacan attended, at the E cole des Hautes E tudes from 1933 to 1939. 28 Maurice Blanchot, Le Paradoxe dAytre, Les Temps Modernes ( June 1946): 1580. Cited in Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, (Boston: Beacon, 1960), p.xi. 29 For a much less rudimentary, and much more queer-friendly, Lacan, see Tim Deans important Beyond Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), particularly the chapter Lacan Meets Queer Theory, p.215268. In eVect, Dean queers Lacan by privileging the Lacan of the real and the objet a over and against the Lacan (and the Lacanians) who stand(s) behind and support(s) the symbolic order.
30
For Lacan and Bataille, see Elizabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bay, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Carolyn Dean, The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentred Subject (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); and Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, Bataille, (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 31 For an example of such messiness, consider the section called The Sacri ce of the Gibbon in The Pineal Eye, in Allan Stoekl [ed], Visions of Excess: Selected Writing, 19271939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp.7990. 32 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, p.65. 33 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p.208. My earlier sentence also tropes Kristeva: I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which I claim to establish myself, p.3. 34 In Elizabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bay, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), Roudinesco writes of the anxiety that aZicted Lacan whenever the terrible question of publication arose. Poubellication, he was to call it later, a pun on poubelle (trash can), perhaps referring to the residue or waste that might in his view be the object of his dearest desire, p.319. 35 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York: Norton, 1981), p.117. Further references cited in the text. I have to admit that Im cheating a bit here, since in this passage Lacan is speci cally talking about painting rather than writing, but I think that his comments about the painter as creator can be applied to, or perhaps deposited on, the poubellished writer as well. 36 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, pp.268269. 37 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, p.315. 38 For scatontology vs. castration anxiety, see my Male Matters. On castration anxiety and heteronormativity, consider D. A. Miller, Anal Rope, in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss, (New York: Routledge, 1991), p.13536: Aligned with [the] subjects heterosexualization (as what most brutally enforces it), castration anxiety may not nally be all that anxiogenic. For while such anxiety no doubt occasions considerable psychic distress, neither in the long run can it fail to be determined by the knowledge that it enjoys the highest social utility in tending to con rm heterosexual male identity in a world where, if this precious, but precarious identity is not exactly parallax 55
rewarded, the failure to assume it is less ambiguously punished. At the point where castration anxiety is taught to anticipate its redeeming social value, it immediately carries ultimate reassurance; its normalizing function allows it to be not just thought, but even lived, as normal itself . 39 See Bataille, Two Fragments on Laughter, Guilty, trans. Bruce Boone, (Venice, CA: Lapis Press, 1988), p.139. We have to distinguish: Communication linking up two beings (laughter of a child to its mother, tickling, etc.) Communication, through death, with our beyond (essentially in sacri ce) not with nothingness, still less with a supernatural being, but with a inde nite reality (which I sometimes call the impossible, that is: what cant be grasped (begreift) in any way, what we cant reach without dissolving ourselves, whats slavishly called God). If we need to we can de ne this reality (provisionally associating it with a nite element) at a higher (higher than the individual on a scale of composition of beings) social level as the sacred, God or created reality. Or else it can remain in an unde ned state (in ordinary laughter, in nite laughter, or ecstasy in which the divine form melts like sugar in water). For my comments on the scatontological aspects of Bataillean laughter, see Male Matters. 40 For details of Batailles sacri cial plans, see Stoekls introduction to Visions of Excess. See also Paul Hegary, Georges Bataille: Core Cultural Theorist (London: Sage, 2000).
41
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, p.9. 42 Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lying in an Non-Moral Sense, in Raymond Guess and Ronald Speirs [eds], Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 146. Actually the exact wording is truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour. For the will to truth as a will to death, see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (New York: Vintage, 1974), p.282. 43 Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, in James D. Faubion [ed], Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 19541984: Volume Two: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp.275, 278. Foucaults nothing to interpret reminds me of Becketts nothing to express, and, though it remains unexpressed, I think that there is implied in Foucault an obligation to interpret that corresponds to Becketts obligation to express. For Becketts in uence on Foucault, see James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 44 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p.235. 45 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p.176. 46 Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford University Press, 2001). 47 Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: 1972), p.17.
Calvin Thomas (enghct@langate.gsu.edu) is associate professor of English at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He is the author of Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line and the editor of Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality. He is currently working on a book that he wants to call More Male Matters: Adventures in Abjection.
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parallax, 2002, vol. 8, no. 4, 5770
Translation Reading Sex

Lynn Turner
Fragments of a vessel, in order to be articulated together must follow one another in the smallest detail, although they need not be like one another. So, instead of making itself similar to the meaning, to the Sinn of the original, the translation must rather, lovingly and in detail, in its own language, form itself according to the manner of meaning of the original, to make both recognizable as the broken parts of the greater language, just as fragments are the broken parts of a vessel. For this very reason translation must in large measure refrain from wanting to communicate...1
In the following passages I begin to articulate an eroticization of the text without prescription and without end. This is partly from within the terms of what Alice Jardine once called Jacques Derridas pornosophy.2 Yet it also breaks with the letter of that pornosophy and comes to nd a greater radicality available via Walter Benjamins work on translation. Although Benjamin may not immediately spring to mind to ground an emerging politics and poetics of queer sexuality, certainly Gayatri Spivak has named translation as an erotic relation bound to undo the translators (selv)edges.3 Here, however, I appropriate Benjamin speci cally for his uprooting of metaphor as it attempts to root kinship and reproduction in nature rather than language. While Derridas work is frequently hospitable to that of Benjamin, Des Tours de Babel risks reinscribing the seminal logic that Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers arguably displaces. Even though Derrida is, of course, sympathetic to the translation of the site of reproduction from nature to language, my concern is that the hymeneal discourse eVecting this turn hampers the style of translation as intercourse.4 Rather than seek to correct, or to discipline, the translation of The Task of the Translator, this paper contributes to its afterlife bearing in mind the somewhat divergent readings oVered by Derrida, Carol Jacobs, and Paul de Man.5 Tessellate this Benjamin insists that nature should be read from the perspective of history and not the reverse. This is closely linked to the resistance to metaphor in so far as it claims
parallax 57
to function through natural resemblance.6 De Man, Derrida and Jacobs all alight on the guration of guration enacted by Benjamin. All at rst glance agree that a complex operation is at work that can be brie y summarized as the displacement of metaphor even as compelling metaphors are called upon. That a particular (metaphysical) imaginary leashes language to sexual reproduction has been addressed by Derrida often; hence it is unsurprising that he focuses on this connection here. Speaking of the use of naturalistic tropes by Benjamin, he writes: The allusion to the maturation of a seed could resemble a vitalist or geneticist metaphor; it would come then, in support of the genealogical and parental code which seems to dominate this text. In fact it seems necessary here to invert this order and recognize what I have elsewhere proposed to call the metaphoric catastrophe: far from knowing rst what life or family mean whenever we use these familiar values to talk about language and translation; it is rather starting from the notion of a language and its sur-vival in translation that we could have access to the notion of what life and family mean.7 This seems to support the kind of linguistic somersaults that I believe Benjamin to be making. I am happy to agree that the meaning that we ascribe to such terms as life and family derives from language rather than the other way around: this could well support the dissemination of such terms. However, the cautionary conditionals that appear when Derrida wishes to indicate doubt as to whether Benjamin really is supporting a genealogical and parental code also crop up in the sentence locating the inversion of this code. This contrasts with Jacobss assertion that the unfamiliarity of The Task of the Translator is nowhere more intensely sensed than when the essay turns to the familial relations between languages.8 Rather than state that this inversion is necessary, Derrida says that it seems necessary. This is not an early indication of something that will be found to be undecidable. Nor is it an isolated instance of ambiguity. At several junctures in Des Tours de Babel Derrida expresses concern regarding the status of his own reading of Benjamin (not least that he ought to have read one of Benjamins overly enigmatic other texts, On Language as Such and on the Language of Man).9 Indeed, Derrida himself has frequent recourse to familial tropes. This stems partly from his use of Maurice de Gandillacs translation, and partly from the persuasive force of these very tropes. If family is an instance of metaphoric catastrophe that obscures itself as such, posing itself as the condition of ( generation of ) metaphor, rather than being one among others, does the Tower of Babel turn out to be its ruin?1 0 In reading across the German original and the French and English translations (and having absorbed Jacobss commentary), de Man clearly sees the ironic ful lment of Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers when that Aufgabe is understood as a failure. He details some of the various ways both Harry Zohn and Gandillac run aground in their eVorts to match Benjamin: matching Benjamin would be an index of their resistance to the foreign language that they translate. My epigraph pieces together a quotation comparing the piecing together of a translation with the broken parts of a vessel. Assembled from Zohn, Jacobs and de Man, it awkwardly restores the crucial passage
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relaying the relation between the fragments as metonymical without implying that these broken fragments could ever make up a totality. As de Man insists: What we have here is an initial fragmentation; any work is totally fragmented in relation to this reine Sprache, with which it has nothing in common, and every translation is totally fragmented in relation to the original. The translation is the fragment of a fragment, is breaking the fragment so the vessel keeps breaking, constantly and never reconstitutes. 11 That these fragments fragment is crucial for my appropriation of this material. And, although de Man only remarks upon Zohns misleading attachment to the reassemblage of this vessel, it is also the hinge of Derridas reading. Derrida, as de Man takes some delight in reporting, reads Benjamin in French.
Prior to detailing the relationship between two fragments that Derrida conjures, I want to remark upon the tropology that makes sense of their union. The task of the translator is rstly the [de nite not inde nite article] commitment, duty, debt, responsibility to which one is destined (always by the other).12 From the beginning then a law [inde nite article] is at stake.1 3 Being responsible to this law of translation implies the possibility, that one must guard against, of a fall, an error and perhaps a crime.1 4 The horizon (evoking both distance and the future, the to come) of the task in hand is a reconciliation.1 5 And all that in a discourse multiplying genealogical motifs and allusions more or less than metaphorical to the transmission of a family seed.1 6 Immediately succeeding the paragraph in which le traducteur, der Ubersetzer, is identi ed as masculine and as an heir, Derrida questions the prosopopeia at work: the bond or obligation of the debt does not pass between a donor and a donee but between two texts.1 7 Again I concur with the foregrounding of text over empirical donor or donee. Yet, if we are to understand the original and the translation as the relation of text to text (since, Benjamin asserts, no work of art is intended for its reader) must this relation remain indebted to the transmission of a family seed through the gure of a translator, in the masculine? For there remains a debtor the person of the translator whose commitment is to respond to the struggle for the sur-vival of the name, the tongue or the lips.18 From this invocation of Babel, of the name of God that also names confusion (of tongues, of lips) Derrida makes an important move. Benjamin, as is familiar, compares translation to literary criticism: Derrida makes a metaphorical equivalence of his reading supervised by Babel and translation.19 However this is not merely any translation to which he refers but the forbidden one the translation of translation. His reading translates Gandillacs translation of Benjamin (from French to French). There is an irony in play here, probably more than one. While Derrida gradually unravels the double bind of Babel (the proper name, Gods own name, the name that yet becomes common property and confuses property in being itself Confusion) along the lines of there must be no translation/there must be translation in which case Babel itself gures as the translation of translation or the (inaugurating) metaphor of metaphor he is also working with a translation that compounds reproductive tropology (to which I shall return). But then, although the original pleads for translation, there is no debtor: the double indebtedness passes between names; the mortal bodies
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disappear behind the sur-vival of the name.2 0 We have moved from the afterlife of the original to that of the name. The proper name is that which should not be translated, that which contracts the relation between the mortal subject and the name.21 Thinking this contract moves the reader into more recognizable Derridean territory marking a shift away from a language contract that supposes a single language and that supposes the transmission of language without remainder (the logic of communication) and towards one that supposes an a priori contract between two foreign languages as such which engage to allow every other subsequent contract. 2 2 The singularity of this contract is such that it occurs only as trace. As the condition of possibility of all other contracts this singular contract is transcendental. Derrida then re-poses the question of transcendentality: does kinship among languages require this contract or supply it with its rst instance? That he engages the language of (a particular model of ) kinship to discuss kinship between languages, or the origin of languages, is not irrelevant. Derrida recognizes that Benjamin does not fall into a geneticist account of the history (origin) of languages, but speaks of their aYnity only revealed by translation. But for Derrida the enigma of the kinship among languages is staked with particular resonance upon the name. The question of the name, and speci cally the proper names at the edge of the language arise as that which cannot but require to be translated.23 From this contract over the im/possibility of the transmission of the name which does not obey an a priori transcendental contract but instantiates it gives birth to it as quasi-transcendental, Derrida links this contract to the symbolon yet in a way in which Benjamin does not stipulate but no doubt suggests via the trope of the vessel.2 4 This vessel as amphora is marked as the metaphor that is not one and around which turns this shift in metaphoricity through being renamed in this text as an ammetaphor. Here the diVerences in translation of this mesmerizing image become apparent. The vessel caught only in fragmentation in Jacobss and de Mans reading is compared to the translation somewhat diVerently here. Derrida keeps the tropology of growth and describes the afterlife of the original in the translation as its growth. The translation is not the reproduction of the original but the extension of it. However, Derrida curtails his account of this afterlife to growth directed towards completion because a seminal logic must have imposed itself on Benjamin.2 5 Surely it is a seminal logic that Benjamins text sets adrift thereby lending itself to a counter-tropology of monstrosity? And, although Derrida, de Man, Jacobs, Benjamin and the argument towards which I move all agree that the origin is not a point present to itself, diVerent questions are posed by an origin satis ed by a complement and one which requires a supplement. Although the German Erga nzung can refer to both words, Derrida at rst refers to the relation between original and translation as complementary, by implication as the coming together of two parts which then complete each other, only later referring to Benjamins metaphors as supplements.26 Surely it is Derridas own disorienting sense of supplementarity that more ttingly characterizes Benjaminian translation? Clearly Derrida wishes to read Benjamin as eVecting a critique of a metaphysical notion of truth, exhorting his readers not to leap too hastily upon it, as, a couple of pages later, he will advise us not to immediately assume the presence of the phallus behind the veil of the royal robes and not to assume that the vessel composes a totality. Yet at this point in the circuitous detours of this text the persuasive force of
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a particular heterosexual economy nevertheless holds court. This metaphor, that is, this ammetaphor of the vessel which transports no presence, is recapitulated once more. This time the translation espouses the original. These two adjoined fragments would this espousal function as such if we saw the translation and the original as themselves fragmented? (this fragmentation facilitating the very possibility of translation, not to mention iteration) complete each other so as to form a larger tongue.27 Again, Derrida uses completion and his phrasing completes it further since here the fragments themselves form a larger tongue rather than make both recognizable as the broken parts of the greater language.28 And, immediately prior to announcing that the contract which he has read in Benjamin is the hymen or marriage contract with the promise to produce a child whose seed will give rise to history and growth, Derrida refers to this reading as at least my interpretation my translation, my task of the translator .2 9 The path from interpretation to translation may be smoothed by the similarity of interpreter to translator, but interpretation is directed towards the deciphering of meaning, a route which leads to bad translations according to Benjamin. And also, and ironically, in the very passage where Benjamin compares translation to the literary criticism of the Jena Romantics, this is where he says that there can be no translation of translation, since it can no longer be displaced by a secondary rendering.3 0 Arguably, as Jacobs suggests, the mode of Benjamins own text itself performs an exemplary act of translation in the sense of criticism. 3 1 Abyssally it does itself the thing it describes, bypassing any service to the readers comprehension, in fundamentally altering, or translating, every term we might expect to provide a clear de nition of the meaning of translation. Seemingly familiar words become defamiliarized. They relentlessly turn on their past meanings becoming incomprehensibly foreign.3 2 Is this also the case in Des Tours de Babel? Is it the same sort of comparison that is being made when Derrida compares translation with marriage and when Benjamin compares it with philosophy, literary criticism and history? Can marriage join in the same series of non-resemblances, produced as nonsensuous similarity? Marriage or hymen such quaint terminology arise in Derridas reading of Mallarme.3 3 Can they similarly arise from translation? In so far as the hymen, that is to say marriage these words that apparently substitute for each other are the locus of a linguistic dislocation, then yes, perhaps. But no in so far as this undecidability itself (inscribed through each word meaning the other, yet the presence of the one implying the absence of the other and vice versa) is only imaginable according to a particular model of marriage, a particular model of heterosexuality entailing a particular fantasy of female passivity.34 This also begs the question of how transferable, how translatable, Derridas names are. If the point of the several quasi-transcendentals is that they are quasi, they are contingent not universal operations, they operate similarly but not identically, they are not each others metaphor, they may breach the constitution of inside and outside but do not claim to actually be outside, then should we hastily read the task of translation as a marriage contract? Even as one which is only quasi-transcendental yet remains predicated upon the delivery of a (male) child whose seed generates history? Even if the possibility of this task is built upon failure? This is the narrative of insemination that Derrida knows very well, and anyway, Benjamin says as much: as the original grows in the translation, Derrida adds, like a child, telling us that he is adding
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(yet as a supplement or a complement?).35 It seems crucial to remark here that texts are not children: children are texts. Yet in what sense are we in the domain of childbirth? Admittedly, in a passage discussing the afterlife of the original in the translation Zohn translates Wehen by birth pangs, and Gandillac by douleurs obstetricales. De Man, by contrast, claims that this suVering is not necessarily reproductive or even connotative of the human.36 I stress the latter since the tropology of the human is something that marks a distinction between these three authors readings of Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers. This is not to frame Derrida himself as a humanist when his work diagnoses the conditions of metaphysics. Yet in diagnosing the metaphor of metaphor enabling the kinship of languages through a highly idealized kinship of men and women, there is little trace of a deconstruction of this heterocracy. De Mans anti-humanism is discussed most explicitly in relation to further infelicities of translation consequent upon Gandillacs indebtedness to phenomenology the overriding philosophical pressure in France when he made his translation.3 7 Where Benjamin speaks of das Gemeinte and the Art des Meinens, which de Man translates as the diVerence between what is meant and the way in which language crafts that meaning, Gandillac retains a notion of intentionality, and supports this with a footnote referring the reader to Edmund Husserl. Derrida reproduces Gandillac.3 8 However, de Man then points out that while the meaningfunction [of language] is certainly intentional we cannot say the same thing about the way in which we mean.3 9 Moreover, this additional yet crucial component of the making of any meaning at all is as such not made by us as historical beings, it is perhaps not even made by humans at all. To equate language with humanity at all [...] is in question.4 0 It is not that there is a phenomenology of language: this is precisely what is at stake. As he renames this discrepancy as that between grammar and meaning we can recognise the indebtedness lying between the work of de Man and that of Benjamin.41 Jacobs also singles out the passage in Benjamin discussing this discrepancy for a lengthy translation. Although she does so in order to demonstrate the trials of Benjamin for his translators, it is striking that the diVerence between a complement and a supplement also features here. Zohn, in attempting to make English sense of the diVerence between what we mean and how we mean, ends up shifting from supplementing to complementing; he translates: intention and object of intention complement each of the two languages from which they are derived; there the object is complementary to the intention. Whereas Jacobs writes [the manner of meaning] supplements itself in both languages from which they are derived. The manner of meaning in them supplements itself into what is meant.4 2 This disarticulation of meaning, this insinuation of the formal properties of language, is much more unsettling. Addressing gown Before committing himself to the gure of the child Derrida swerves and speaks of the growth of the child that is the original as its own child rather than the reproduction of itself in a new and separate existent. 4 3 If this swerve might lever us away from
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the implication of a mating between original and translation why incorporate the gure of marriage?4 4 Here the promise promises a kingdom (recalling Babel as the name, language and city of God) which is the reconciliation of languages. This kingdom of reconciliation however can never be reached. It remains untouchable.4 5 The promise remains unful lled. Musing upon the untouchable Derrida wonders why the ammetaphor of Benjamin reminds him of the hymen more visibly of the wedding gown.4 6 To follow his curious locution literally, in the spirit of translation, it would seem that it is the proper name of Benjamin hovering at the edges of Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers that recalls the hymen. Benjamin becomes the untouchable hymen that le traducteur wants to touch, Derrida says as much. And he knows that even after he labours behind another man, Gandillac, something intact and untouchable of Benjamin remains. After the translation has been made, after the marriage (hymen) contract has been consummated and the hymen broken, there is still hymen (marriage), an intact untouchable remaining intraduisable. But in what direction was that wedding dress heading? Reconsidering the ammetaphors of Benjamin this time clearly the idiosyncratic gures used by him Derrida focuses on those that appear organic. Signi cantly this devolves upon the impossibility of translating translation since, as Benjamin writes, If language and content constitute a certain unity in the original, like fruit and rind, the language of translation envelops its contents in vast folds like an emperors robes.4 7 Reminded of a (white) wedding gown, the emperors robes in Derridas hands become white ermine, scepter and majestic bearing.4 8 Aside from the invention of the colour of this fabric and the presence of a sceptre, the slippage from wedding gown to the royal cape is perhaps facilitated by une robe (a robe or a dress), while Konigsmantel literally oVers us a royal coat or cloak. However, these robes wed their metonymy that is the body of the emperor, this side of the symbolic contract in contrast to the naturalistic metaphor of fruit and rind (by implication, the other side of this contract). 4 9 This distinction of before and after is Derridas reading of Benjamin, although metaphors, including expressly naturalistic ones, as Benjamin remarked, turn upon themselves alone. The robe, like the sceptre, is posed by Derrida as the visible sign of the law (the wedding gown, remember, was the more visible metonymy of the hymen); however, what counts is what comes to pass under the cape.50 If we do not immediately assume the presence of the phallus under the cape and before the law, guaranteeing the law, if we consider the original from the perspective of the translation, consider that this fabric, this textile that is the Konigsmantel, is that which produces the law which it enfolds, rather than being itself informed by an a priori law guaranteed by the phallus, what comes under the cape?5 1 Why is it diYcult to separate the king from the royal couple, this couple of spouses (the body of the king and his gown, the tenor and the tongue, the king and the queen) that lays down the law and guarantees every contract from this rst contract?5 2 What is it that goes on underneath robes that are wedding gowns that are hymens? Both king and queen are covered by the same cape, the material metaphor of the white dress, metaphor of the white sheets, metonym of spilled blood. Is the making of a translation a mating after all? Are we destined to a narrative of origins after all? If nature is to be thought of in terms of history then sex is textual, and while the texts of deconstruction indeed
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proliferate sexual tropologies why should this one be couched in terms of the wedding night engagement of the king and queen? This critique diVers from the one anticipated in advance and generously named false decency by GeoVrey Bennington.53 I have no interest in reserving the hymen as and for the properly feminine. I question what virtue the hymen (marriage) serves and whether this necessarily results in coextension with translation. Does extending this particular feminine predicate to broader structures necessarily trouble the dominant discourse, as Bennington suggests, if it does not also refuse to take the construction of its place within a contingent (but read as universal) heterosexual hymeneal narrative as read? Need there be hymen (marriage)? And Benjamin, we know, does not push matters in the direction that I give to my translation.5 4 In adding to the text Derrida embroiders upon it.5 5 And adding is nothing other than giving to read; however, lest anyone should take this as a license to add any old thing under the pretence of reading:
it is not a question of embroidering upon a text, unless one considers that to know how to embroider still means to have the ability to follow the given thread.56 Do the many threads of this royal robe prescribe an embroidered image of (hetero)sexual union (to cement that union that is a vessel, that is a hymen)? Adding to the text, in this earlier formulation, is not simply a question of a needle piercing inert matter to which it contributes a new thread but is the aVective risk of getting a few ngers caught.5 7 Since all deconstructive activities are repetitive or iterative, I like to read this risk as also a repeated gesture: ngers catching in the text. Although the latter gure is not usually remarked on in the context of Derridean erotics, it has certainly caught my attention. Unlike the gure of the translation contract drawn up by the king and queen, these ngers deliriously weave an erotics without prescription and without end: whose ngers are these? Which/whose text is this? The articulation and multiplicity of ngers distinguishes them from both penis and the phallus, no matter to whom they belong, and this is at the level of techne not simply physis. What if absence of hymen [marriage] and absence of marriage [hymen] were thought together? This double negative might add up to a lesbian sexual gure, or a nonnormatively heterosexual sexual gure or, via a slightly tendentious appropriation of the work of Monique Wittig, the lesbian as the name for the destruction of the normative heterosexual organization of bodies. For what relevance could the hymen have in a lesbian sexual economy? Evidently, I have some sympathy with the Irigaray who wrote Between us, theres no rupture between virginal and nonvirginal. No event that makes us women.5 8 However, in my appropriation of Derridas de nition of reading as an erotic practice, the sex it produces is far from jealously non-penetrative, as these supplementary ngers imply. Irigarayan touching can then be intensi ed as friction. Friction interrupts the idyll of When our lips speak together. If Le Corps Lesbien59 names, lists, performs the destruction of the body and the [Baudelairean] motif of the androgyne, the lesbian or the barren woman is to be dealt with in relation to the destructive violence of the allegorical intention then Benjamin and
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Wittig come together associating the lesbian with the smashing of the organic and organization.60 It is hymeneal organization that must be shattered. First Contract Evidently this is not a matter of simply clearing up a misunderstanding and returning full authority to the word of Benjamin. All addresses to Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers can be framed as a return to origins only in so far as that Ursprung, as Benjamin says, although an entirely historical category, has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis but forcefully rips the material of emergence into its rhythm. 61 It is in this sense of the origin that is not one that Benjamin is read always and already in translation.62 Origin itself is in translation. This is not the same as granting his translators permission to cloak him in any old garment. Licence for expression in translation is granted in the legal texts that Derrida also cites. Expression, moreover, is what allows the formal attire of the translation to be copyrighted to have a degree of authority, of originality. The law, as Derrida indicates, cannot tolerate any breach of the boundary between original and translation and the exception which is expression is tightly demarcated. Likewise the law (which would bind bodies) can only proceed on the understanding that translation occurs between two distinct languages. Benjamins task however, requires the translators strictest delity at the level of the manner of meaning such that the target language allows itself to become aVected by that of the original. Hence it would be hard to describe this task as one soliciting freedom of expression when it is one of freedom from communication. If the target language gives itself up to the one that it translates by following the fragmented details of its form, this ironically threatens not only comprehension but also the distinctness of each language both between and within each one. For, To win back pure language formed in the ux of language is the violent and simple power of translation.63 This ambition, for Derrida, promises a kingdom to the reconciliation of languages, and for him this properly symbolic event is a marital union that appeals to a language of the truth.6 4 Marital rhetoric and its root in the law here becomes more apparent. To legislate, to regulate, the law must have distinct parties to whom it is addressed, indeed it produces those parties as distinct (with the promise of legally sanctioned reconciliation through coupling). Calls for the legalization of lesbian marriage are thereby torn between ending the economic and social privilege accorded to a heterosexuality wrapped in the recognition of the state6 5 and the assimilation of the lesbian as force to the only model of kinship recognized in law. For translation to promise a kingdom (the name, the tongue and the city of God) the gure of the vessel would have to add up to the same thing as the Tower of Babel. Is the vessel just another tour, in the sense of trope, of Babel? Lips service Babel marks the failure of the Shem to build a name for themselves, monumentalized in the form of an incomplete Tower. Called to a halt by God who instead imposes his own name, Babel, upon their Tower, the Shem likewise are barred from universalizing their own tongue. Babel becomes the sign of this bar in
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so far as t/His name marks both a singularity, the proper name of God, that cannot be translated, and a common noun, confusion, that needs to be translated while signalling the imperfection of any such translation. The Tower, like the Name, is destined to remain incomplete, to remain its own remains, its own ruin. The Tower of Babel is the translation of translation, then, in the sense that Derrida means when he elsewhere writes [I]t is necessary still to inhabit the [spatial] metaphor in ruins, to dress oneself in traditions shreds and the devils patches all this means, perhaps, that there is no philosophical logos which must not rst let itself be expatriated into the structure Inside-Outside. This deportation from its own site toward the Site, toward spatial locality is the metaphor congenital to the philosophical logos. Before being a rhetorical procedure within language, metaphor would be the emergence of language itself.6 6 Babel as the ( paternal) metaphor of metaphor allows the emergence of language. Like the Tower, the vessel is its own ruin. Does it also instate a name, a tongue and a city? Does Benjamins comparison of translation with the fragments of a vessel really have such grandiloquent designs? For it does not have a name, and it belongs to a rather less elevated art form than that of architecture, less inclined to aunt a signature. Perhaps it suVers from mechanical reproduction. Perhaps the vessel displaces the Tower as ornament (that which is assumed to be merely additional, inessential) displaces structure in deconstructive reading habits. A vessel is also rather more connotative of mobility than is a Tower; it posits the ground in a diVerent way, even as the liquid form of the sea. Yet it also has its own tongue if speech is translated as lip (as in some translations of Genesis). Is the lip of the vessel one when it is only ever fragmented/ing? Is it an assemblage of lips? Or is this lip a rim, to turn this metonymy in still another direction?6 7 To rejoin an earlier citation, if the power of translation lies in winning back pure language, then this reine Sprache no longer means anything and no longer expresses anything and as expressionless and productive word, is that which is meant in all languages all communication, all meaning, and all intention ultimately meet[ing] with a stratum in which they are destined to extinction. 6 8 De Man locates this pure language as the permanent disjunction which inhabits all languages as such, including and especially the languages one calls ones own,69 recalling his earlier commentary on the concept of irony which concluded that the latter is the possibility of permanent interruption, the permanent parabasis of the allegory of tropes.70 He further and this is vital links this essential disjuncture within language to history: As such, history is not human, because it pertains strictly to the order of language; it is not natural, for the same reason; it is not phenomenal,
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in the sense that no cognition, no knowledge about man, can be derived from a history which as such is purely a linguistic complication.71 And, since irony may always interrupt any narrative line, including any historical genealogical line history as genealogy or as patriliny is precisely what it interrupts history cannot be rei ed, shored up within a zone protected from textuality; neither can the subject, neither can the translator.7 2 Departing from commonsensical understandings of translation as the transport of meaning from one language into another and addressing itself to pure language, the task of the translator is not a priori exclusively referred to man.73 The productive word that destines meaning to extinction is the consequence of literality in translation. In both Jacobss and de Mans texts the word, in a word for word translation, is the key element not the sentence (the emphasis on the word leads Derrida to the name74 ). Since Holderlins translations of Sophocles constitute valuable monstrous examples of such literality in Benjamins eyes and since pursuing such literality is no oVspring of comprehension, Jacobs is not led to the familiar rhetoric of childbirth: instead of conventional, natural reproduction, what results [in translation] is a teratogenesis in which the limbs of the progeny are dismembered, all syntax dismantled.7 5 (So dissimilar to what we call nature is the production of this progeny the translation that both Zohn and Gandillac obscure it by reinstating the suVering of language as childbirth, as discussed above). This dismemberment is only brought to a halt by the holy text. And herewith turns the subtlest and most confounding ironic moment breaching Benjamin and Derridas texts. For what kind of a halt is this? Under the supervision of Babel, for Derrida, Gandillac wrote La ou le texte, immediatement, ` ` sans lentremise dun sens [...] releve de la ve rite ou de la doctrine, il est purement ` et simplement intraduisable.7 6 Apparently calling a halt to babble, Jacobs translates Where a text belongs to a truth or doctrine immediately, without the mediation of meaning, in its literalness of true language that text is absolutely translatable.77 This absolute translatability has nothing to do with the transportation of meaning the received understanding of translation but with history as an inhuman linguistic complication. Hence it could just as well be untranslatable. To return to the double bind of Des Tours de Babel; the kingdom promised by and as the reconciliation of languages in the translation contract is never ful lled as anything other than promise, for as Derrida wrote elsewhere, Not only is there no kingdom of di erance, but di rance instigates the subversion of every kingdom.7 8 The e law of translation is not a determined transcendental condition of possibility xing language from without: it grants a liberty to literality and ceases to oppress insofar as it is no longer the exterior body or the corset of meaning.79 A corset constrains in contrast to the voluminous folds of the kings robes. Yet, those robes are a wedding dress which is a hymen, and without this desire for virginity no desire whatsoever would be set moving.80 If all desire rests upon the desire for presence, for that which is proper, gured as a desire for virginity cathected as hymeneal, then all who desire are metaphysically bound heterosexual men: le traducteur reviens. Again, Irigaray: The advent of their desire, Not of ours.8 1 And while there may be other economies, even said to be feminine as Helene Cixous has suggested, this is the necessary one that `
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generates any others. On the one hand, clearly Derrida articulates the nature of this desire as phantasy, elsewhere writing that the desire or the phantasm of the intact kernel [of language] is irreducible despite the fact that there is no intact kernel. [...] and there never has been one. Thats what one wants to forget, and to forget that one has forgotten it.82 This is the mask of metaphysics that obscures the originary violence of spacing by violently assuming the possibility of space as place ( presence) via naming in and through the violent exclusion of an other, the fundamentally domestic inaugural division into Inside and Outside.83 Space as place as presence is further cathected as innocent and as intact (innocence as intactness) in order that any instance of invasion can be legislated as either the approved behaviour of a representative of the law or an assault performed by a criminal other. Yet on the other hand, faithfully following the structure of the Tower of Babel as the translation of translation in order to reveal the name of God as both incomplete and purely linguistic, doesnt this structure need to be solicited a little more, ruined a little more?84 If the translation contract as quasi-transcendental is meant to mediate Gods Word, even to make it less oppressive, yet it is still delimited as hymeneal and the prerequisite of all other desires and contracts, then has its institutional force been shaken very much at all?
Notes
1
Walter Benjamin, cited in Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1993), p.89, incorporating de Mans remarks about both his own and Carol Jacobss translation of this passage. 2 This remains one of the best readings, in English, of the sexual politics of Derridas work. Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Con gurations of Woman in Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 3 Gayatri Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (London & New York: Routledge, 1995), p.180. 4 Jacques Derrida, Des Tours de Babel, trans. Joseph Graham, in Joseph Graham (ed.), Di erences in Translation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992). 5 Carol Jacobs, The Monstrosity of Translation: The Task of the Translator, in In the Language of Walter Benjamin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p.126, n.1. Originally published in Modern Language Notes, December 1975. 6 As indeed is this simple sentence: whatever synonym I choose to suggest relation, the OED takes me home to genealogy. 7 Derrida, Tours, p.178 [emphasis added]. 8 Jacobs, Monstrosity, p.80. Turner 68
Derrida, Tours, p.175. He subsequently makes sporadic references to this text. 10 I arrive at the elementary ruins of kinship in a related paper: The course of a general displacement/The course of the choreographer, in Martin McQuillan & Ika Willis (eds.), The Origins of Deconstruction (Northwestern University Press, forthcoming). 11 De Man, Resistance, p.91. 12 Derrida, Tours, p.175. 13 Derrida, Tours, p.175. 14 Derrida, Tours, p.175. 15 Derrida, Tours, p.175. 16 Derrida, Tours, p.175. 17 Derrida, Tours, p.175. 18 Derrida, Tours, p.183. Irigarays use of the lips to gure feminine impropriety could usefully supplement this struggle. See her When our lips speak together, in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 19 Derrida, Tours, p.183. 20 Derrida, Tours, p.185. 21 Derrida, Tours, p.185. 22 Derrida, Tours, p.185. 23 Derrida, Tours, p.188. 24 Derrida, Tours, p.188.
25
Derrida, Tours, p.188 [emphasis added]. When Jacobs elsewhere writes of Benjamins substitution of the word conception by another term that will prove equally seminal in its excessive repetition translation, I read her as ironic. See In the Language of Walter Benjamin, p.107. 26 For complement see Derrida, Tours, p.188, and supplement p.189. 27 Derrida, Tours, p.191. 28 As in de Mans translation; de Man, Resistance, p.91. 29 Derrida, Tours, p.191. 30 Benjamin, Task, p.76. De Man discusses this point also, p.82. 31 Jacobs, Language of Walter Benjamin, p.76 [emphasis added]. 32 Jacobs, Language of Walter Benjamin, p.76. To diagnose this linguistic turn as negation, psychoanalytically speaking, would be to perform a further negation this time denying the textual status of psychoanalysis itself. To read it as an Auf hebung would be to miss the way that Benjamin refuses the resolution of dialectic. 33 See Jacques Derrida, The Double Session, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), and also, in reference to Blanchot, The Law of Genre in Derek Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature (New York & London: Routledge, 1992). 34 Commonsensically, she is completely passive in the sense that no accidental activity has stretched her hymen; her auto-aVection, if it is assumed to exist at all, is assumed to be non-penetrative; she is complete in the sense of sealed. Derridas insistence upon marriage occurring between two parties immediately elides religions which instate polygamy, as well as making an appeal to a heterocratic imaginary. 35 Derrida, Tours, p.191. 36 De Man, Resistance, p.85. 37 De Man, Resistance, p.86. 38 Derrida, Tours, p.200. 39 De Man, Resistance, p.87. 40 De Man, Resistance, p.87. 41 John Mowitt rst suggested to me that the relation between De Man and Benjamin can be seen as one of debt. 42 Jacobs, Language of Walter Benjamin, p.81. 43 To go with the ow, as it were, of a literary or poetic birth, we might listen to one particular resonance of Cixous and Clements book, La Jeune Nee, obscured in its translation (as The Newly Born Woman), namely La! Je une Nais (literally, There! I, a woman, am being born). La Jeune Nee as the title of a book, a proper name of sorts, has truly demanded an impossible translation. 44 While J. L. Austin cited marriage vows as a paradigmatic performative, Judith Butler asks to
what extent [...] has the performative queer operated alongside, as a deformation of, the I pronounce you... of the marriage ceremony? See her Bodies that Matter: on the discursive limits of sex (New York & London: Routledge, 1993), p.226. 45 Derrida, Tours, p.191. Neither de Man nor Jacobs nor Zohn use this word in either their commentary on or translations of Benjamin. It does however lend itself to Derridas own guration of the hymen. 46 Derrida, Tours, p.191. 47 Benjamin, cited in and translated by Jacobs, Language of Walter Benjamin, p.78. 48 Derrida, Tours, p.194. He does not provide any textual reference for this description. Zohn simply says royal robe, Jacobss uses emperors robe. 49 Derrida, Tours, p.194. 50 Derrida, Tours, p.194. 51 I revisit the subject of the Konigsmantel-piece in my Translating John Malkovich, Performance Research 7:2 (2001). 52 Derrida, Tours, p.194 [emphasis added]. 53 Bennington implies that the only objection to the formulation of the hymen could come from feminists wishing to defend it as belonging properly to a discrete female body, to protect it as untouchable from the advances of textuality. See his Derridabase in GeoVrey Bennington & Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. GeoVrey Bennington (Chicago, IL & London: Chicago University Press, 1993), p.227. 54 Derrida, Tours, p.195. 55 One can of course embroider on this cape... Derrida, Tours, p.194. 56 Derrida, Dissemination, pp.64 and 63. 57 Derrida, Dissemination, p.63. 58 Irigaray, This Sex, p.211. 59 Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body, trans. David le Vay (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1986). 60 Walter Benjamin, Central Park, New German Critique 34 (1985), p.35. 61 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1998), p.45. 62 Derrida, Tours, p.195. 63 Benjamin, cited in and translated by Jacobs, p.83. 64 Derrida, p.200. 65 Judith Butler precisely delineated the stakes of state recognition as the prescription of desire in her lecture Is kinship always already heterosexual?, CentreCATH, University of Leeds, 14 May, 2001. 66 Derrida, cited in Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derridas Haunt (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993), p.105. 67 Discussing Genet with John Mowitt earlier this year, he pointed out to me that the erotic parallax 69
metonymy of language tongue lip also evokes a rim. 68 Jacobs, Language of Walter Benjamin, p.83. 69 De Man, Resistance, p.92. 70 Paul De Man, The Concept of Irony, in Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1992), p.179. Here de Man stills sees Benjamin as oVering hope beyond the dialectic of destruction thereby raising dialectic to a higher stage in its cycle, continuing its ascent. His lecture on The Task of the Translator implies that he revised that opinion. 71 De Man, Resistance, p.92. 72 Jacobs sees the putting into question of the translator, in whose name the essay is written, as its opening irony. 73 Benjamin, cited in and translated by Jacobs, Language of Walter Benjamin, p.87. Zohns Benjamin says the reverse (Task, p.71). 74 Derrida, Tours, p.187. 75 Jacobs, Language of Walter Benjamin, p.83.
76
Gandillac, cited in de Man, Resistance, p.80 [emphasis original]. Seeing the irony, de Man says that he is quite sure that Derrida would be able to explain that translatable or untranslatable in this context makes no odds. 77 Benjamin, cited in and translated by Jacobs, Language of Walter Benjamin, p.89. 78 Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982), p.21. 79 Derrida, Tours, p.204. 80 Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), p.116. 81 Irigaray, This Sex, p.212. 82 Derrida, Ear, p.115. 83 See Wigley, Architecture, p.118. 84 Soliciting shaking in a way related to the whole (from sollus, in archaic Latin the whole, and from citare, to put in motion). Jacques Derrida, Writing & Di erence, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p.6.
Lynn Turner (l.j.turner@gold.ac.uk) is a Lecturer in Visual Culture at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Related articles considering the erotics, poetics and politics of cinematography, choreography, translation and the name can be found in The Origins of Deconstruction (eds. Martin McQuillan & Ika Willis, Northwestern) as well as Performance Research (7:2 and 8:1) and The Journal of Visual Culture (1:3).
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parallax, 2002, vol. 8, no. 4, 7185
Oral Sex With A Capital O: Sex, Violence And The Limits Of Representation
Mary T. Conway
In May 1988, on the Pennsylvania leg of the Appalachian Trail, Claudia Brenner and her lover Rebecca Wight were the targets of Stephen Roy Carrs ri e blasts. Brenner and Wight were having sex when the shooting began. Wight was murdered, but Brenner survived to experience the state-appointed defence attorneys attempts to justify the shooting on the grounds that the mere sight of two women having sex was suYcient cause for murder. Seven years later, Firebrand Books published Brenners account, Eight Bullets: One Womans Story of Surviving Anti-Gay Violence.1 Co-authored with Hannah Ashley, the explicit goals of the book are to draw attention to the increase in anti-gay violence, and to regain discursive control over the murder and shooting. In a narrow way, these aims are accomplished; the book tour drew media attention to the increase in homophobic hate crimes and Brenner seemed a courageous survivor retelling the tragedy on radio and in live appearances. Unfortunately, Eight Bullets also accomplishes the opposite of its intent, and often more convincingly. This is, in part, because the same discursive logic that Eight Bullets relies on to argue against hate crimes has a constitutive role in enabling if not producing hate crimes. By relying solely on rational, juridical logic, by conceding to the acceptable terms of current policy debates, Eight Bullets can not help but both celebrate and derogate the lesbian desire and the lesbian murder it witnesses. Both responses falsify the account, an act that perpetuates rather than ameliorates the problem. Eight Bullets is also the story of Brenners transformation into a political activist. As both victim and story-telling survivor, she has a dual aim: to apprehend the horror of the event, and describe her recovery from it. Occasionally we see glimpses of the former aim pulling her description away from juridical rational logic. One hospital scene depicts Brenner hallucinating the killers face after being unable to recall it for police. At other moments, Brenner recalls her night terrors and fear of strangers. But Brenners recounting is in the service of activism, and depicting the horror is overtaken by the need to present a recovered credible lesbian. Her irrational fears are part of her diagnosis (Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome) and recovery rather than of the trauma. At the end of the book (when we learn that her account was edited for use in National Lesbian and Gay Task Force speeches), Brenner writes, It amazes me that my reactions and feelings about the shooting can transform and slide into
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words.2 This essay recovers those moments where the transformation isnt seamless, and where the sliding is more of a crash. These arent celebrations of gay pride (like the moments of the communitys support) or details of derogations against queers ( like the moments with Carr). Instead, these moments are glossed over because they cant be tted into a political program for liberation; they are valuable however, because they hint at a larger system of meaning production that underwrites and therefore pre gures hate crime and our responses to it. Speaking in Tongues: Brenners Account In all the reports it always says that we were making love when the shooting happened. We werent really in the middle of heavy sex. We were playing kissing and rolling around. At some point I think Rebecca had said take oV your shorts, and we were having not oral sex with a capital O.S., but... we were... playing. It was all really nice, kind of idyllic. In fact, very idyllic... Why I mention that is that I was only partially dressed when the shooting happened. Rebecca was fully dressed. The image in the reports is that we were in the middle of a passionate sex act. I have always said making love because I am paranoid they will discredit our relationship by saying, Oh, they were only playing around.3 [ellipses original] When examined closely, what might pass simply as strangeness in this rst excerpt is revealing. The ellipsis, the dominant metaphor, and blatant contradictions are the three lucrative oddities of conventional realist writing that I will address in analyzing Brenners rst account of the shooting. Ellipses can be used to indicate either a hesitation or an omission from the passage. The ellipses in Eight Bullets work in both of these ways, but they also mutate into a new third function. The elliptical pause does signal the imminent location of the right words, but in contradistinction, it also serves to draw attention to the absence of the right word. Because the available words are inadequate (and, as I will argue later, contradictory), this silence marker also marks a more permanent silence, that is, a silence at the level of discourse. The ellipsis indicates not that the evasive words can be summoned, but that adequate words cant even be encouraged to come out when a temporal space is opened up for them in the sentence. 4 These two elliptical functions pervert into a third sort. The permanent hesitation, and the omission that is completed with the readers silence, must be recognized to work eVectively. But once recognized, the ellipses ask the reader to step outside of reason, temporarily: a hesitation that continues forever denies itself. A space is secured, through the perversion of the de nitions (something is also what it is not); but it is only a temporary space, and it threatens to disappear if looked at directly. This third ellipsis operates not at the level of the sentence ( pause) or the work (completion), but at the level of discourse. There is no resource from which to draw if one desired to eliminate this ellipsis, in the way most other ellipses may be
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eliminated; yet, this shortage of discursive resources is compensated for cleverly in what initially appears to be a ham-handed metaphorical choice. Metaphors for sexual activity have become naturalized to such an extent that they often pass as literal language. Not so with the metaphorical substitution used here, not oral sex with a capital O. S... With all the resources to describe many sorts of sex acts (metaphorically, clinically, pornographically), Brenner abandons sexual terminology altogether. She selects instead a metaphor about language and the rules governing expression through language. The metaphor invokes the rule for the punctuation of proper names. This terministic choice is synechdochic of a dilemma that goes beyond this passage and indeed this book: the proper name for what she and Rebecca were doing. This metaphorical choice begs the question of the proper name for unilateral, lesbian, oral sex performed with moderate intensity. 5 By describing sex as metaphorical for rules about proper names, Eight Bullets warns that an answer is not directly forthcoming. Embedded in the answer, the question (what is the proper name?) sets into motion a circuit of perpetual questioning. Like the ellipsis, this curious metaphor is symptomatic of the lesbians relationship to the heterosexual discursive regime. Brenner, like other deviants operating in a logic diVerent (in some ways) from their own, is structured by this system so eYciently that when she attempts to leave it, merely by naming her activity, she invokes the same constraining logic. This metaphor may be understood initially as artless. But the metaphor also argues for the books inability to be both liberatory and legitimate. That is, the books larger argument is miniaturized in this metaphor about the rules for proper names for deviant sex. In this battle over naming and meaning, ellipsis and metaphor are joined by the use of blatant contradictions. Reliable real life accounts avoid, minimize, or argue away contradictions. And, as Brenner is advised by her legal team, her credibility is key in prosecuting Carr. However, there are blatant contradictions, on the same page. In the excerpt that begins this section, Brenner starts by correcting all the reports which said they were making love. She writes that it was really play in which they were engaged. Five sentences later she returns to making love: The image in the reports is that we were in the middle of a passionate sex act. I have always said making love because I am paranoid they will discredit our relationship by saying, Oh, they were only playing around.6 Brenner performs and then argues against the same nominal manoeuvre. Concerned that the media is saying making love, she counters that they were really playing; then, worried that the relationship seems casual sex rather than monogamous (playing around) she returns to making love. The discursive resting-places seem already marked and limited to these two choices. As soon as the dominant logic arrives to determine the meaning, this queer nominalist-in-practice ees to the term newly vacant. And then back again. While potentially dizzying, this perpetual motion is a tactic to deal with limited resources without totally acquiescing to the dominant discursive system. 7
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Brenner cant invent her own words for lesbian sex or she would be largely unintelligible, speaking in tongues. Instead, she switches, contradicts herself, and so destabilizes the meanings of these words. If she can both adopt play and then renounce play when used by others, then what we, and she, and they, mean by play, is not consistently clear. When provided with inadequate resources to describe her sex, this illogical naming serves as a response that does make sense, given the books explicit goal of reclaiming control over these events through language. Brenners use of play stands out here, but she has at least one antecedent: consent in rape law. Legal scholar Carole Pateman reminds us that consent theories treated women as unreasonable and incapable of consent. But becoming capable of consent was no advance. Propriety holds that a woman can not indicate desire and be respectable; consenting must resemble resistance, or non-consent. Since the answer from respectable women is always No, the man must be able to read the Yes in what looks to be another No: rapists, then, are simply bad interpreters. The impossible contradictions are, Pateman argues, a sign that we lack a language for consensual relations. Brenners strange workings also indicate a lack. This lack registers by page twenty- ve, as the reader learns more about the limits of representation than about the events. A struggle seems underway, one that Brenner cannot win, at least not while working within this rational framework. While the signs of this struggle are interestingly nonsensical, later in the book Brenners blind faith makes her complicit in a shocking, violent blindsiding.
Ventriloquized Epithets: the Killers Account Now tell me the truth, the trooper asked, did you really see them kissing? Carr had mentioned earlier that he had seen the girls kissing. He had also talked distastefully of the Mennonites because he didnt like the fact that the men kissed the men and the women kissed the women. Carr laughed and said they were doing a lot more than that. After he settled himself in the brush on Friday afternoon, Carr said, he saw the girls eating each other out.8 Turning the page, after being subtly but surely disengaged from any stable terms to describe their activity, the reader runs smack into the same epithet that justi es queer bashing. Brenners evasion of concrete descriptions results, in part, from the fear of these common derogations. Attempts to subvert names for lesbian sex, to avoid any correspondence with a heterosexual logic, are made with the knowledge that any description (queer or not) bears the same characteristics as the killers description. Brenners description of their last moments before the murder can be used, unchanged, as an epithet. As evidence of his homophobia, and therefore his guilt, Brenner tries to use Carrs words against himself. Yet, Carrs words, maintaining a certain heterosexual logic, simultaneously bear the stamp of approval while they emanate from an admitted murderer. Carrs words, intended as his indictment, work equally as an indictment of lesbian sex.
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We know about Carrs homophobia, but confusion about addressees and addressors in sentences two and three triggers paranoia: maybe the trooper is homophobic, too. Although Brenner repeatedly commends the authorities so that we know these cops have been good, the fact that, as she points out often, the police and the state have been and still are part of the problem is underscored in this ambiguity. It seems that there is no way to describe what they were doing without indicting herself. Brenner is not alone in this conundrum: other representations of sexual acts meet similar limits. In terms that are by now familiar (if not notorious), legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon argues that patriarchy (and its most egregious and eYcient symptom, pornography), creates these discursive limits. In Only Words, she addresses women exclusively: You learn that language does not belong to you, that you can not use it to say what you know, that knowledge is not what you learned from your life, that information is not made from your experience.9 So patriarchy enforces and is maintained by language. She writes that Social inequality is substantially created and enforced that is, done through words and images. Social hierarchy cannot and does not exist without being embodied in meanings and expressed in communications.1 0 Anita Hills testimony at the Senate Con rmation hearings of Clarence Thomas illustrates this constraint. MacKinnon argues that when Hill is precise, rather than euphemistic, in representing Thomass harassment, the more pornographic is her testimony: Your testimony that you were sexually abused proves your abuse, which de nes you as sex, which makes it incredible and impossible that you were sexually abused.11 Hills testimony is a resonant example, with far-reaching consequences, but MacKinnons argument is limited by its political aim that brooks few quali cations. Her solution is substitution: place women in power. MacKinnons solution assumes that what makes language mis re in the testimony of victims is exclusive to patriarchy, rather than language.1 2 But Stewarts analysis of the Meese Commission Report on Pornography sees a diVerent culprit. The 1986 Report was commissioned by the Reagan Administration to nd the grounds to ban pornography. Its descriptions of porn, however, are indistinguishable from pornography: the Report reinscribes its target. Rather than indicting porn, it indicts our belief in transcendent language. The Report is a discourse on the very nature of discursiveness.1 3 In Stewarts light, the limits on sexual language are a quality of representation, rather than of patriarchy. Language is constrained, and constrains its users. Stewart and MacKinnons disagreement is palpable in the next example: Brenners criminalization under cross-examination. Making Sex Speak: the Cross-examination Brenners account resists through non-sense, and Carrs account exacts violence and paranoia. Both accounts are, as well, inaccurate. When Defence Attorney Michael George asks, What, actually, were you doing? Brenners reply anticipates the readers: I had been waiting for this. The reader is misled (Carrs and Brenners accounts are of a mutual sex act) until page 138 when the Defence Attorneys accusatory questioning reveals that she was the passive recipient. Why does Brenner
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allow the defence attorney the de nitive word? Not because the defence attorney is dastardly, however tempting this explanation. The answer is not an evil to eradicate, but is instead the very mechanism by which we possess self-consciousness. In short, Brenner allows George to corner the truth market because she has no other choice. And exercising this forced choice of visibility criminalizes her even as she testi es as victim. Foucaults account of subject production explains Brenners decisions. This courtroom scene, which doubles Brenners assault, reminds me of Foucaults cautionary: Visibility is a trap.1 4 Eight Bullets insists that exposing homophobic events help prevent their recurrence: detailing the worst derogations can not help but argue for equal rights for queers. Given how silence maintains homophobia, speaking out seems logical. However, willing visibility to be a solution does not make it so. Critic Peggy Phelan argues that simply increasing the number of minority images doesnt admit the complex relationship between visibility and political power.15 She writes: If representational visibility equals power, then almost-naked young white women should be running Western culture.16 Eight Bullets is driven by the need to be politically useful, and making-visible is an important part of that usefulness. Yet the strategy that underwrites the book is also the source of its demise, and produces the opposite of what it intends. Subjects are produced by knowledge systems (among them the juridical), which use diVerence to measure and normalize individuals. A new Power,1 7 called into being with the subjects invention, is not in opposition to knowledge, but coterminous with it. Attempting to check this Power ( proud lesbian counters pathologizing), but unable to be a juridical subject without this Power, Brenner submits her body/memory as evidence, but it is turned against her. Brenner and the defence attorney are occupying available subject positions on the grid of Power relations, and those in Brenners position often, unwittingly, extend their own domination. Foucault writes: In short this Power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the privilege, acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall eVect of its strategic positions an eVect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated.1 8 What is determinative here is the history of disciplining and punishing discourses about sex. Carrs epithets de-naturalize their sex, but he is merely drawing upon these scienti c-juridical discourses. Brenners strategy re ects this punishing discursive history: a suspect subject, she foregrounds their committed relationship in the attempt to legitimize the sex. She writes, What happened was, when we were laying down and as I said to you, we were involved in a relationship together, so we were aVectionate together.19 We learn less about the sex/shooting than we do about Brenners model East-coast community, whose depiction is a better lobbying tool for mainstream acceptance, than public sex. When the defence attorney uses common sense to accuse Brenner of instigating the attack (they were putting on a show for a normal guy pushed to the edge by the show so he shot them), we understand the futility of, and the necessity for, such a demonstration of relationality. Like many activist programs and
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Queer Studies approaches, Brenner sees salvation through the celebration of, not homoerotics, but homogeneity. Brenner de-eroticizes their sex, in an attempt to purchase a legitimate subject status, but pathologizing discourses limit her to threedollar bills. Despite Carrs pre-trial confession, Brenner is, unbelievably, sometimes construed as a perpetrator. Despite the judges exclusion, the defence argued that the womens sex act instigated the attack. Brenner lauds the systems fairness evident in the pre-trial exclusion. But the explanatory value of the defences logic is too powerful to be thoroughly excluded. Under cover of the cross-examination, it is smuggled back into respectability, without objection from the prosecution. Brenners status shifts, from victim to conspiratorial deviant, temporarily, but convincingly. In the cross-examination, we see Brenners dual identity through an ambivalent juridical apparatus. Was she unjusti ably and brutally attacked while making love in the context of a continuing romantic relationship? Or was she understandably2 0 riddled for a life of non-procreative, clitoral carnal satisfaction that exhibitionistically permeates and poisons the historic woods with its disregard for relationships and tradition? Victim or vixen? National Hate Crime Legislation would unequivocally declare Brenner and Wight victims, but that legislation is still pending, indicating the strength of oYcial pathologizing discourses.2 1 The cross-examination, intended to get at the truth of the event, produces instead two facts about the juridical system: juridical knowledge is inconsistent, contradictory and unreliable, and the State is ambivalent about prosecuting hate-crime. The shotriddled bloody corpse and Brenners scars indicate victims, but discretely assigning guilt becomes diYcult, given Brenners problematic status as victim and deviant. Even though they had the weapon, a confession, and DNA evidence, Brenner sees her credibility as central to the prosecutions success. Brenners predicament in the legal system can be better understood if we move away from the simple either/or designation of innocence or guilt, and if we focus instead on the competing clash of her multiple subjectivities. But political programs dont nd this refocus useful. As philosopher Wendy Brown points out (in the case of womens studies programs), the refusal to reckon with subject-production as multiple and necessary wreaks considerable havoc.2 2 Following Foucault, Brown argues that the various forms of discursive power arent merely additions to who we really are rather these discourses are how we are. She writes, We are not simply oppressed but produced through these discourses, a production that is historically complex, contingent, and occurs through formations that do not honor analytically distinct identity categories.23 Womens studies (and other identity-based elds) simplify how subjects come into being. Brown argues that diVerent subjectivities are not additive or interchangeable, as the top-down non-Foucauldian model implies. We can see the need for a complex model in the legal uses of privacy: Like rights themselves [...] privacy will sometimes be regarded as advancing emancipatory aims, sometimes deterring them; in some cases it will be seen to cloak the operation of inequality, while in others it will be seen as assisting in the elaboration of equality doctrine.2 4
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Subjects are produced along many dimensions, some of which contradict each other. Brenners prosecution team knew about her contradictory position vis-a -vis the law ` and so strategized to maximize her credibility. But initially Brenner jeopardized her credibility, when she desexualized their relationship to police, unsure if theyd be protectors or oppressors. Brenner cant help but be a divided subject her helpers are at the same time her oppressors but the book does its best to unify her. One cant simply add the victim to the criminal identity without forfeiting consistency. Womens studies additive notion of subject-production cant account for Brenners reluctance to divulge that shed been having sex (making her a criminal) while she was shot (making her a victim). Brown writes that we never appear publicly: as the complex, compound, internally diverse and divided subjects that we are. While this could be seen as a symptom of the laws de ciency, a sign of its ontological clumsiness and epistemological primitivism, more signi cant for purposes of this essay is what it suggests about the diYculty of analytically grasping the powers constitutive of subjection, a diYculty symptomatized by the laws inability either to express our complexity or to redress the injuries carried by this complexity.25 Brown suggests we investigate subjections complexity; for her, the inability to grasp identity contradictions is not as much laws de ciency, as it is an overall misunderstanding of the powers of subjection. I suggest that we can see both (subjections complexities and laws de ciency) when we look to other discursive forms. The democratizing of deviance we see in the text makes the search for other forms of discourse even more compelling. Democratizing Deviance While Brenners doubled assault at the hands of the juridical system is indeed tragic, we see a democratization of such punishment in the trials display of a more generalized notion of deviance. The defence attorney questioned Brenner: At any point during that afternoon, to your knowledge, did either you or Rebecca put on a show for my client? No. De nite. At any time during that day, did you, or to the best of your knowledge, Rebecca, intentionally tease my client? No. Firm. At any point during that entire day, did either you, or to the best of your knowledge, Rebecca, purposefully reveal any parts of your body to my client? No. Adamant.2 6 Pathologizing discourses are too rich and reliable a resource to be excluded from this trial; despite the judges pre-trial exclusion of this line of questioning, the defence attorney was not held in contempt. However, the line of questioning opens the
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deviant category, to re ect the ubiquitous character of the knowledge/power that orders and describes. Even as the cross-examination partly undoes Brenners aim, it also introduces a sort of generalized deviance that eventually includes all bodies seen as objects. The defence line of questioning begins with the idea that Brenner and Wight were performing for Carr, not interacting with each other. The idea that they were teasing Carr by having sex resituates lesbian sex as pathological and as a form of aggression towards the excluded male. Yet, the defences last question is diVerent: it disintricates the particular pathology (lesbian sex) from the general idea of a pathologized body/ object/subject. Simply revealing body parts (not even necessarily female body parts) might be cause for Carrs attack. Pathology, the production of diVerences among subjects, is not deployed simply and discretely in the cross-examination, because it isnt simple or discrete. Instead, the ubiquitous and dispersed workings of pathologizing/producing subjects creates a type of deviance that migrates out of the lesbian couple to a mixed gender logic. This mobility suggests an underlying characterization of sexuality in general as deviant, and a deviance of the object generally understood. All bodies at all times, by virtue of their being bodies, are pathological, a Freudian claim that Elisabeth Grosz updates.2 7 In Space, Time, and Perversion, Grosz points out the conceptual incoherence of sexual deviance.2 8 Sexuality is itself deviant, so claims to superior deviance are meaningless. She also refuses the romanticization of deviance, with its attendant sentimentality. For Grosz, unlike MacKinnon, there is no outside to patriarchy, where deviance becomes dominant. Grosz expands but does not domesticate lesbian desire. She understands the appeal of purely political approaches but points out that such investigations perpetuate a will to know lesbian desire that: may be part of the very taming and normalization (even if not heterosexualization) of that desire. This depends to a large extent on the status and eVects of the discourses one uses. Perhaps now is the time to rethink what discourses these should be.29 So far in this essay, Ive lamented the lack of resources to describe having lesbian sex and ri e blasts, and attributed that lack to a heterosexual discursive regime; then I broadened the source of the lack to include systems of knowledge production and their need to order all subjects, in order to produce them. But I would be dissatis ed with simply democratizing the x were in: Hate Crime contests such democratic impulses, and should be eradicated. Instead I think that trauma (a topic strangely absent from an essay that deals with lovers being gunned down during sex), has something to say. The question is, how to say it? Reasoning About Trauma: Traumatic Reasoning The inadequacies of the three accounts (Brenners, Carrs, and the defence attorneys) prompt the question: what really happened? This question will not answer any of
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the problematics analyzed here. Indeed, the question is part of the problem. What framework would provide the sort of question that would not further the problem of homophobia, the limits on language, and the participation of the dominated in the systems that dominate them? Brenners story traumatic, sad and terri c should be told, especially since the silence about sexual perversion is complicitious in the limits imposed on her recounting. But through what means, then, if what appears to suggest itself as the answer (the pen is mightier than the ri e, isnt it?), instead furthers the system she argues against? There is a clue in the books cliche d depictions. During the trial, she recalls the day of the shooting as a spring afternoons hike with annoying insects. She writes It was as if any couple was enjoying an afternoon together by a stream.3 0 Any couple, any afternoon, any stream. In her understandable reluctance to divulge herself (she was, after all, shot at for being seen), Brenner retreats into the safety of everyones understanding. Yet, recourse to the universal creates many problems. First, the generalizations might not be general enough; many readers will not have had these idyllic experiences. Then, some of those who have had these experiences might reject being grouped with the deviant Brenner. Appeals to universals of sex and love are in contradistinction to a discursive history that has produced her as deviant, and therefore incapable of such claims. But most importantly, Brenners is a particular experience, and it is violated once again, when she universalizes. The two noun phrases of the books subtitle, One Womans Story of Surviving Anti-Gay Violence, exemplify the diYculty of negotiating the competing demands of the particular and the universal. Anti-gay violence is a social phenomenon, scienti cally studied, and statistically tracked. What happened to Brenner and Rebecca Wight is indeed an example of the larger phenomenon, but it is much more than that. The experience has excess that cant be subsumed into the universal, and this excess is made apparent in the storys refusal to be neatly contained in the language of larger social phenomena. In Eight Bullets, the over-reliance on the rational forms of discourse creates uncontrollable, migrating, and mutating prose. Unwanted behaviours, unless one shifts discursive and epistemological frames. Forms of representation not governed by such strict rules ( logic, correspondence to an observable world, and delity to actual events) have a diVerent set of constraints. But these alternative forms also have a diVerent set of options. Moira Gatens examines how the exclusion of other options in rape discourses victimizes anew.3 1 Gatens calls on the anti-juridical tradition, from Spinoza to Deleuze, to challenge reasons transcendence over oYcial discourses; reasons tyranny lies in its transcendence. In Eight Bullets, reason constrains to produce, alternately, a story that is inaccurate and the very violence it tries to eliminate. Gatens resituates reason so that it is among, rather than above, other forms of thought: Reason, or the power of thought, thus cannot be seen as a transcendent or disembodied quality of the soul or mind, but rather, reason, desire,
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and knowledge are embodied and express, at least in the rst instance, the quality and complexity of the corporeal aVects. 32 My suggestion here is akin to Gatenss: one discursive genre narrative succeeds without reason and its totalizing impulse. It is to the strengths of poetic expression I now turn. Poetic expression can acknowledge the slippage between intention and reception, and can not only accommodate, but also encourage, contingency and paradox. The diYculty in suggesting poetic expression (besides charges of pollyannaism3 3 ) is the impossibility of supplying formulas that would guide such expression. Yet, this resistance to the formulaic is one of the valuable characteristics of poetic (rather than rhetorical) strategies. If the poetic form of expression is not anticipated, it also wont be as eVectively thwarted. No counter-arguments rise fully formed with the poetic form. Instead, the poetic form is rst apprehended in forms of thought sometimes logical but also empathic, associative and identi catory. Representations that dwell on the particularity of a circumstance, that dont rely on audiences recognizing accepted modes of argument, require the auditor to hear them out; because of this particularity, auditors are denied the opportunity to abbreviate the telling with a dismissively comprehending universal. Understanding in terms of universals, those forms of reasoning held in highest esteem by the system Brenner was working within, prohibits the same understanding for which she aimed. In her haste to demonstrate the fully formed scab, and perhaps the noble scar, Brenner elides her very particular wound. And despite the detours, the wound is what the book is about, or more precisely, the wounding. Because of the shootings trauma (eVects which she can not acknowledge and remain the reliable narrator), Brenner writes about some surrogate universalized experience. Yet, We should remember that the very rst de ning trait of the trauma is, as Stewart writes, its intensity, the degree to which it resists incorporation into the economy of the subject and so incapacitates that subject.34 And since the wounding itself cannot and should not be redeployed, perhaps the probing of the wound can articulate (if not an approximation) a yet-to-be-articulated form of understanding. Trauma and The Differend While the appeal to poetics might sound nave, Lyotard makes a brilliant argument for just such a move. Consider his less politically charged example: Suppose that an earthquake destroys not only lives, buildings, and objects but also the instruments used to measure earthquakes directly and indirectly. The impossibility of quantitatively measuring it does not prohibit, but rather inspires in the minds of the survivors the idea of a very great seismic force. The scholar claims to know nothing about it, but the common person has a complex feeling, the one aroused by the negative presentation of the indeterminate.3 5
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The immeasurable aspect does not negate the event; instead, it re ects its unfathomable depth. At times, Brenner struggles with the ineVable quality of her experience, but theres a political program to be supported, so the struggle is minimized. She understands implicitly which of her knowledge claims will be most highly regarded. In The Di erend, Lyotard takes the compelling example of justice for Holocaust victims. He writes: To have really seen with his own eyes a gas chamber would be the condition which gives one the authority to say that it exists and to persuade the unbeliever. Yet it is still necessary to prove that the gas chamber was used to kill at the time it was seen. The only acceptable proof it was used to kill is that one died from it. But if one is dead, one cannot testify that it is on account of the gas chamber.3 6 Logic and justice are at cross-purposes here, but since we depend exclusively on juridical discourse for justice, the problem (logic preventing justice) is not recognizable. A misrecognition occurs and continues the injury. What was a wrong (the attack) is compounded because it is translated in juridical language as a damage (Carrs sentence). Dispensation occurs and atrocities are equated with a measurable and tangible quantity. Both Brenner and Holocaust survivors are abused after their injury by the clash of competing phrase regimens. Lyotards description of Holocaust victims resembles Brenners circumstances as well: It is in the nature of a victim not to be able to prove that one has been done a wrong. A plaintiV is someone who has incurred damages and who disposes of the means to prove it. One becomes a victim if one loses these means. One loses them, for example, if the author of the damages turns out directly or indirectly to be ones judge.3 7 The Court is, at the same time, Brenners perpetrator and the source of her potential compensation. The culprit furthering Brenners abuse is not, as it would seem at rst, the homophobic defence attorney, or even the history of pathologizing discourses that preceded the defence. In Lyotards light, privileging rational systems of thought produces injustice: The victim does not have the legal means to bear witness to the wrong done to him or her. If he or she or his or her defender sees justice done, this can only be in spite of the law. The law reserves the authority to establish the crime, to pronounce the verdict and to determine the punishment before the tribunal which has heard the two parties expressing themselves in the same language, that of the law. The justice which the victim calls upon against the justice of the tribunal cannot be uttered in the genre of juridical or forensic discourse. But this is the genre in which the law is uttered.38
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Lyotard names a di erend the case where the plaintiV is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim, which takes place when the regulation of the con ict is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suVered by the other is not signi ed in that idiom.39 Unfathomable atrocities, by de nition, resist being put into juridical language. The diVerend results from our insistence that all legitimate knowledge must be scienti c/rational. Lyotard reverses the hierarchy, and argues that all discourse is dependent upon narrative (even mathematical formulas). Scienti c knowledge can describe and produce truths, but only narrative can prescribe and produce justice. The gap between truth and justice cant be bridged with the rules of scienti c truth; only narrative can bridge the gap. Queer analyses of derogations of queerness arrive at truth, but as we saw in Eight Bullets, the over-reliance on instrumental reason ensures that such analyses wont arrive at justice.
Lyotard suggests a solution: To give the diVerend its due is to institute new addressees, new addressors, new signi cations, and new referents in order for the wrong to nd expression and for the plaintiV to cease being a victim. This requires new rules for the formation and linking of phrases. No one doubts that language is capable of admitting these new phrase families or new genres of discourse. Every wrong ought to be able to be put into phrases. A new competence (or prudence) must be found.40 This new competence would take the form of bearing witness to diVerences (rather than glossing over them, as was done in the rst instance) by nding new idioms for them. The immeasurable aspect of the earthquake and the murder during sex creates in the witnesses a feeling, which is the recognition of a wrong that cant be phrased for lack of an ideolect. Deleuzes comparison of the writings of Sade and Masoch reveals an important relationship between having sex and representation. In Masochism, he writes Sexual modesty can not be related to biological fear, otherwise it would not be formulated as it is: I am less afraid of being touched and even of being seen than of being put into words .4 1 A new ideolect is necessary to reckon with such experiences. Rather than gloss over diVerends, narrative helps us reckon with the lack of an ideal speech situation.42 Narrative works in terms of particulars, not universals; and it helps us witness in regimen-appropriate ways. Eight Bullets doesnt use particulars, and doesnt provide an opportunity to witness in a regimen-appropriate way. Narrative fails by the standards of instrumental reason, but by relying on instrumental reason Eight Bullets fails and fails by its own standards (argue against Hate Crime by portraying trauma). Here, instrumental reason isnt simply a dead horse, but a rotting carcass, adding another wrong to the wrong of Wights corpse and Brenners trauma. At this point, a careful reader might wonder if justice was served and Carr found guilty. I want to resist providing that information, not to frustrate the reader, but
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because I believe that justice can not be served within the rational/juridical framework. I can try merely to report Carrs sentencing, but given the use to which such information has been put, how do I distinguish my reportage from other uses which celebrate and derogate? Carr was sentenced to life, but justice was not served. And the continued over-reliance on the legal system to provide justice (an overreliance which motivates the question about the sentencing) is, I am arguing, part of the problem, rather than a solution.
Notes
1
Claudia Brenner and Hannah Ashley, Eight Bullets: One Womans Story of Surviving Anti-Gay Violence (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1995). 2 Brenner, Eight Bullets, p.188. 3 Brenner, Eight Bullets, p.25. 4 Of course, non-queer speakers have similar problems with the ineVability of language when confronted with traumatic events. My point here, at this stage of the argument, is that deviant sex, whether interrupted by ri e blast or not, is rendered ineVable by legal, moral, criminological, and psychological proscription. Later, we will see how Brenners strange accounting forces a broadening of the deviant category to impose limits on all subjects speech. See Pierre Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); and Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 5 Here, Ive tried a clinical approach to description, after deciding against the pornographic, and the metaphorical. It is not satisfactory. I dont intend sarcasm, but detachment, as though the topic were rebuilding an engine. It does not work. 6 Brenner, Eight Bullets, p.25. 7 See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984). 8 Brenner, Eight Bullets, p.110. 9 Catherine A. MacKinnon, Only Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p.6. 10 MacKinnon, Only Words, p.13. 11 MacKinnon, Only Words, p.67. 12 MacKinnon overargues and invites dismissal. But the argument has some merit. Her arguments form matches its content. She denounces and objecti es penises, representing what she sees as porns power: humiliation and harassment of women. The readers objection is evidence for her major claim. Second, I believe her overargument is calculated and that she is aware of a subtler version of language, but believes she cant aVord the luxury of subtlety. I say this because she Conway 84
quali es her dismissal of deconstruction by referring to an exception: Lyotards essay that pre gures the book (The Di erend ) to which I tie my hopes on at the end of this essay (pp.114115). MacKinnon excepts Lyotard, but does not go into his theory. 13 Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (New York: Oxford Press, 1991), p.236. 14 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1979), p.200. 15 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993). 16 Phelan, Unmarked, p.10. 17 Foucault capitalizes Power to denote his more complex conceptualization of Power, and to distinguish it from previous ideas of power. I use upper case to denote Foucauldian power. 18 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp.2526. 19 Brenner, Eight Bullets, p.132. 20 Brenner notes that jury selection would have been diYcult given that it was both a capital case and involved lesbian victims. Indeed one of the reasons they decided to settle is the fear that a jury in rural Pennsylvania would include many who were sympathetic to Carrs revulsion. 21 Brenner cites numerous cases where the homosexual panic defence excuses murder of queers. 22 Wendy Brown, The Impossibility of Womens Studies, di erences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 9:3 (1997), p.79. 23 Brown, Impossibility, p.4. 24 Brown, Impossibility, p.79. 25 Brown, Impossibility, p.79. 26 Brenner, Eight Bullets, p.139. 27 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1965). 28 Elisabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995). 29 Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, p.171. 30 Brenner, Eight Bullets, p.132.
31
Moira Gatens, Feminism as Password: Re-thinking the Possible with Spinoza and Deleuze, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 15:2 (2000), p.59. 32 Gatens, Feminism as Password, p.59. 33 Naivete is a luxury, but an informed earnestness may be a necessity. Resistance to, and assaults against, poetic expression are long-standing and useful (Platonism; Enlightenment epistemology; Pragmatism; and capitalisms in uence in determining value). But untested strategies wait to be articulated through the poetic. 34 Stewart, Crimes of Writing, p.281. 35 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Di erend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p.56. 36 Lyotard, The Di erend, p.3. 37 Lyotard, The Di erend, p.8. 38 Lyotard, The Di erend, p.30. 39 Lyotard, The Di erend, p.9. 40 Lyotard, The Di erend, p.13. 41 Gilles Deleuze, Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp.1617. 42 The ideal speech situation is Habermas utopic vision of instrumental reason. Jurgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1979).
Mary T. Conway is Visiting Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA. Her work has been published in Camera Obscura, Wide Angle, Journal of Advanced Composition Theory, and RoadBike Magazine.
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parallax, 2002, vol. 8, no. 4, 8693
This swirling of images An Inter view with Drucilla Cornell
What follows is the transcript of an interview conducted by email between Drucilla Cornell and Ika Willis.
Ika Willis: In your work, you are careful to attend to the fundamental importance of gender identity to individuation in psychoanalytic theory. At the same time, you insist that as a moral and political matter, women must be left free. It seems that there is both a deep interrelation and a disjunction between the psychoanalytic account of gender identity and the philosophical (moral-political) ideal of freedom in your theory, and that much of the energy and force of your work proceeds from the ways in which each discourses account of sex in ects the others. Would you agree with this, and in what ways have you found the tension between psychoanalytic and legal-political discourse to be itself productive of new ways of thinking about sex and identity? Drucilla Cornell: I agree with you that there is a tension between traditional psychoanalytic accounts of gender identity and the way in which gender is understood as a kind of discursive category within the realms of law and politics. Indeed, this tension is at the heart of my understanding of the imaginary domain. I have recently written that an interpretation of Lacans work could be rendered consistent with the imaginary domain. But for this to happen with respect to Lacans account of sex and sexual identi cation, we must re-think the meaning of symbolic castration and extricate Lacan from his seeming endorsement of the need to protect the law of sexual diVerence as a matter of making civilization safe for heterosexuality. Conservative Lacanians in France notoriously fought against the bill for gay and lesbian parity. But I have argued strongly in Between Women and Generations: Legacies of Dignity that they are taking Lacan too literally when they try to make the law of sexual diVerence in Lacanian psychoanalysis coherent with actual political and legal reforms. Traditional notions of gender those part of Freudian ego psychology, for example which assume that there is a normal path of sexual development and that there is a psychic loss to the individual if that path isnt followed are certainly contrary to the imaginary domain. In any case, I think that what is productive about psychoanalysis for legal and political discourse is that it problematizes the overly simplistic notion of the individual that has dominated much political theory the idea that individuals simply are what they are and that we must take the preferences of such individuals literally; that, in other words, there is no way to get beneath the face value of who an individual is. Although I think psychoanalysis can help us understand more deeply the process of individuation that must be protected in order for us to be able to claim our person as a matter of right, I dont think we should
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use psychoanalysis as a corrective to peoples ostensibly false preferences, certainly when it comes to sex and sexual identi cation. That is to say, Lacan should not be enlisted in eVorts to develop a psychoanalytic theory of false consciousness with respect to sex and sexual identi cation. I disagree with the idea that we could use psychoanalytic theory to challenge the normalcy of someones sex or sexual identi cations. As I mentioned, this was the mistake of the conservative Lacanians who battled against gay and lesbian rights in France. Still, with this warning in place, many schools of psychoanalysis give us ways of conceptualizing individuation, sex, and sexual identi cation that help us rethink what sexual freedom might mean and how it might be translated into an actual legal and moral right. IW: In At The Heart Of Freedom you say that once the imaginary domain is protected, the psychic and ethical changes thus enabled will be left to us, and argue for the legal protection of the imaginary domain and the inclusion of women in the community of moral individuals as an initial matter. The imaginary domain thus appears to be somehow prior to the sorts of psychic, ethical, political and aesthetic changes you envisage in the present and for the future. Could you talk a little about this question of priority? Must the space of the imaginary domain be legally protected before psychic change can take place? DC: The space of the imaginary domain does not need to be legally protected before psychic change can take place. In order to see why, it is necessary to return to how I place the imaginary domain within the context of modern social contract theory, particularly the work of John Rawls. Rawls assumes the ideal representatives behind the veil of ignorance would be the heads of households, indeed patriarchs. But since these representatives are ideal, there is no reason in Rawlss theory to assume they would be men. But lets forgive Rawls as a man of his own time and say that in his political imaginary they were patriarchs who could represent the interests of their household. Traditionally, before women were given the right to vote, it was assumed in western democratic theory that women did not have the capacity to represent themselves; and so men should be the only ones representing themselves, their wives, their children, and everyone else. My solution to this problem in Rawls is not to turn the ideal representatives into actual people (as is done in what has recently been called open-eyed social contract theory by certain liberals) but to presume that such ideal representatives have already been given the moral and psychic space to self-represent their sexual diVerence through the imaginary domain. Thus, rather than heads of households being the ideal representatives, we would simply have representatives who were presumed to have claimed their imaginary domain and hence represented their sexual diVerence. At this level, sexual diVerence is not actual; it is something like a transcendental necessity that is presumed to be addressed by the idealized representative. There are no men, women, gays, lesbians, transsexuals, transvestites behind the veil of ignorance any more than there are blacks or Latinas. There are individuals who have claimed their imaginary domain and thus have the capacity to represent themselves as persons and perform the task demanded of them in the hypothetical experiment Rawls calls the veil of ignorance. Again, its not that these ideal representatives are sexless; its rather that what sex they might be in actuality is not relevant at this level of abstraction. What is relevant, though, is that despite the Real of sexual diVerence (I mean Real, of course, in Lacans sense), all the ideal representatives have the capacity for self-representation and thus would no longer be
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heads of households who assume the position of representatives. To put the same point diVerently, Rawls actually brought reality into his hypothetical experiment in the imagination by claiming that heads of households were the best representatives. He did so in part to justify why these representatives would be morally motivated to protect the savings principle; the principle that says a certain amount of resources must be guaranteed for the next generation. I think there is another solution to Rawlss problem that does not involve bringing reality into the imagined social contract. Within the social contract tradition, the priority of the imaginary domain must be understood structurally. Because Rawlss representatives are ideal, we must already presume the equality of all forms of sexual diVerence since these forms must be rendered irrelevant to ones capacity for self-representation. We cannot allow any arguments about why gays and lesbians are unable to represent themselves behind the veil of ignorance. As a moral and legal right no less than as a radical ideal, the imaginary domain is meant to protect the right of all of us to claim our sexual freedom both in the manner that we have sex (this issue of parallax, after all, is called having sex) and in the way in which we identify ourselves as having sex. I have sought in this conceptualization to avoid the theoretical snare of creating a right to sexual freedom that re-establishes what Wendy Brown has called the wounded attachments of gender identi cation. In this way, the right in question is universalizable to all human beings who must in one way or another represent their sexuate being. Once we come down from the level of the ideal, we realize, of course, that none of us can be transparent to ourselves and thus know that our self-representation is authentic. This brings me back to your rst question. Psychoanalysis always teaches us so much about what we cannot know about ourselves and that we must rely on others to know our limits and our creative powers. But the reality that no self-representation can be truly authentic in an existential sense does not mean that we shouldnt be given the right to pursue our own representability. In fact, we need the imaginary domain so desperately precisely because our selfrepresentations are always in ux as we engage with others and with our own unconscious stirrings, sexual and otherwise. The imaginary domain opens up the space in which we can begin to feel free to play with sexual personae that are inseparable from our self-representations. The pain of psychic closeting and the shame that accompanies it would no longer place such a heavy burden on sexual freedom. IW: In what ways and in what areas do you see the imaginary domain being claimed as a right today? What attempts to create more and other symbolizations of the feminine and sexual di erence do you see now or imagine for the future, and what e ects do you feel these projects are having, psychically, politically and/or legally? How do you understand the relation between psychic and legal claims here and should this last question be related to your use of the aesthetic and your readings of literary texts in Just Cause as a way of articulating the relationship between representation and ideals? DC: In the last twenty ve years, we have seen many gays, lesbians, transsexuals, transvestites, as well as feminists, claiming their moral, legal, and psychic right to what I have called the imaginary domain. If I had to oVer an image of the imaginary domain, it would be one of stepping out of the closet into a world of your own imagination in which visions of who you might be swirl around your head in a rich eld of possibility that no longer contains the cannots we associate with the closet. The psychic openness of this swirling of images is what I have tried to promote in
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the legal and moral right of the imaginary domain. The relationship among the aesthetic, my own attempt to articulate what I mean by representation, and how the imaginary domain gures as an ideal, is quite complex. This complexity stems from my use of the word of aesthetic in the sense in which Immanuel Kant understood it in The Critique of Judgment. To put this point as simply as I can, the aesthetic concerns the inevitable fact that our relationship to the world follows from the way we try to create it, live it, represent it to ourselves. I do not mean for the aesthetic to imply any given eld of art objects, whether painting or literature. And I do not mean to pit the aesthetic against the ethical. What I want to suggest is that the aesthetic way of grappling with and creating our own world is the very basis on which we can envision new ways of being in the world, the very foundation of our capacity to think critically and self-re ectively about ethical ideals. The aestheticization of ethics comes from Kants understanding that the transcendental imagination serves as a limit to reason. We can think ethically only through our imagination because our rationality inevitably runs up against the unthought of the imagination. But we never just re-imagine for the sake of re-imagining. It is always for the sake of a better and more just way of re-imagining. Imagining from the standpoint of an idealized humanity always demands an ethical imperative. IW: What is the importance of consciousness-raising to you? You have written about the importance of your own consciousness-raising group, Las Grenudas, in your own struggle and life. How does this relate to the imaginary domain? Could it be said that the imaginary domain ful ls some of the same functions as a CR group on a di erent level the protection of a space in which sex (for example) can be imagined di erently through the lifting of restraints on the appropriate meanings of sex(es)? DC: My experience of consciousness-raising is somewhat unusual for a white feminist of my generation. As I wrote in Las Grenudas, my consciousness-raising group was African-American and Latina with the exception of myself. I think the relationship between consciousness-raising and the imaginary domain could be put like this: if the imaginary domain is to open the gates of the psychic prisons in which so many of us live as far as our sexuality is concerned, then creating and committing ourselves to groups like Las Grenudas can help us actually explore with each other what we want to do collectively as well as individually to re-imagine who we can be. My consciousness-raising group helped me confront my whiteness by forcing me to engage with others whose experience of their sexual diVerence was completely diVerent from mine. People could have their moral and legal right to the imaginary domain protected and never actually push themselves to engage with others so as to be confronted with all the ways in which we live out our identi cations sexual, racial, ethnic, and so on through the innumerable hierarchies in our own society. By itself, then, the imaginary domain is simply never enough to ensure that people will actually make use of moral and psychic space to face who they are and who they might be in any actual society. IW: The use of the term family for the sorts of arrangements you envisage in Freedom for parenting and the registration of horizontal intimate associations entails a radical rethinking of the meaning of the term family as it is currently being used by the family values lobby to enforce heterosexual monogamy. What is the strategic or philosophical importance of retaining the terms family, marriage, etc?
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To some extent you use terms like sex and family, broadly de ned, as the basis for a possible/ future overlapping consensus, saying in Freedom: Sex and desire are common denominators, and by valuing them for themselves, people can see the freedom that should be given to all others in the name of the fundamental public values of a politically liberal culture. What work needs to be done on such terms in order that they can be valued for themselves, separated from their heteronormative functions as policing what counts as sex, family, etc? DC: As you rightly point out, I use the word family broadly to separate my own position from the one associated with early attempts (for example, in the Soviet Union) to hold in con ict investments in personal associations with social and public responsibility. From my childhood in the 1950s, I remember the red-baiting that argued that communism necessarily would do away with the family, communalizing women and children. But, as I argued in The Imaginary Domain, At the Heart of Freedom, and Just Cause, what was denied in the actually existing socialist states was the right to an imaginary domain in which people are allowed to play freely with their sexual personae, love aVairs, and personal aYliations. Ultimately, for me, this attempt to separate my understanding of the imaginary domain from the frankly foolish charge that Im obliterating love, romance, and its importance to people, was why I held on to terms like sex and family. Nevertheless, my point in At the Heart of Freedom is that these terms need to be freed from the stranglehold of heterosexual normativity. Feminists today must be resolute in their demand that particular kinds of families and what counts as a normal family can no longer be mandated by the state. IW: Your aim is to end heterosexual privilege and compulsory heterosexuality, not heterosexuality itself . While you would, of course, resist giving content to the kind of free heterosexuality that the imaginary domain would protect, it seems to me that the subtraction of privilege and normativity from heterosexuality would in itself entail even enforce a radical re-thinking and re-representation of their sexuate being and intimate associations on the part of heterosexual people. For example, you state that a lesbian couple taking on parenting does not in any way interfere with a heterosexual couples right to parenthood but it must interfere with the way that couples imagine their relationship to parenthood (as natural and privileged). Could you talk about this consequence of the protection of a lesbian couples right to parenthood? For another example, in Freedom you tackle the question of reimagining and resymbolizing prostitution and pornography through an emphasis on the right of female sex workers to choose the work they do. Does a (symmetrical?) task of reimagination have to take place from the point of view of the employer of sex workers or the consumer of pornography? How might this begin to happen? More broadly, then, how can, and how must, the investments in power and privilege which are seemingly almost inseparable from investments in the sexuate being of a white, heterosexual man (for example), be restricted and reshaped? What possibilities do you see for changing the ways in which whiteness, heterosexuality, masculinity are imagined by whites, heterosexuals, men? And nally, whilst I appreciate that it is in many ways an unhelpful concept, could you talk a little about the problem of false consciousness in this context, that is, as it relates to the ways in which power and privilege in ect the imagination and symbolization of identities? DC: My dream, I suppose, if the imaginary domain were ever truly recognized as a moral and legal right in any society, would be that the compulsion of rigid gender
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roles and, with them, sexual orientations would be attenuated as a horribly pervasive social force. Here Im with Jacques Derrida, the choreographer, in that my ultimate dream is a new dance of sexual diVerence in which heterosexuality and homosexuality would no longer be the neatly opposed categories they are now one natural, privileged; the other perverted, banned, sometimes tolerated, but never respected. So I think youre right that there are radical consequences to the protection of a lesbian couples right to parenthood. Lesbian parenting unavoidably separates the traditional tie between reproduction and sexuality. But it also challenges the idea, still prevalent in so much psychoanalytic theory, that an actual father is necessary for a normal couple. Part of what I hope to achieve through my defense of the imaginary domain is that the separation of reproduction and sexuality unavoidable in a lesbian couple is brought to a more radical conclusion: we would no longer deny three women friends who wish to adopt a child the chance to do so simply because there are no sexual partners in that family. As for the role of the employers of sex workers and the consumers of pornography, both would have to re-imagine what porn would look like if porn sets were unionized. My guess is that for an employer of sex workers to accept that his employees were unionized would considerably change his view of these workers. By opening up the space for diVerent kinds of erotic materials, we could bring into being a diVerent kind of consumer who would not turn to such lms simply to reassure white heterosexual men that they are still in power and that their potency is not being challenged by feminism or any of the other imaginary enemies of their sex. I agree that investments in power and privilege are integral to the way most white heterosexual men imagine themselves as heterosexual. But rather than restraining men and pushing their imaginaries underground the fantasy of some feminists I think our only solution is to change ourselves. If women werent so compelled to live out their lives within the con nes of heterosexual normativity, if we all felt free to explore other relationships with women, then perhaps all the fears that come along with being a heterosexual woman would be allayed, if not eradicated altogether. All the same, this does not preclude the importance of critical dispute and argument about the necessary power and privilege that inhere in white heterosexual normativity. IW: Thank you thats a very exciting and challenging response. One of the things that I most enjoy in your work is just this refusal to close down or stabilize the play of sexual possibilities, as well as your emphasis on productive/creative strategies rather than restrictive ones. I wanted to ask you to extend this answer in two directions; rstly, could you expand on the notion which seems to be hovering near the end of your answer that we can make ourselves free not by simply de-investing in our own relation to power, but by exploring our implication in less privileged identities/practices turning to the outside of the circuit of white heterosexual normativity? You also seem to imply that change is e ected by multiplying and exploring possibilities on less privileged axes, which then react on and deprivilege the dominant term in the series. Could you talk a little more about the sorts of relationships you see at work between agency and privilege? DC: Paradoxically, when privilege is lived in the context of accommodation to established norms of correct and appropriate heterosexual behavior, it can also be a prison house. Its no coincidence that my rst book was called Beyond Accommodation; I meant and still do mean we must live and act in such a way that is beyond accommodation to conventional norms of white heterosexual femininity. Of course,
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I dont want to minimize the signi cance of confronting white skin privilege. But if this confrontation occurs only by way of white liberal guilt, then it just re-inscribes the white social subject back into the very privilege its supposedly denying. If I merely exclaim, I am white! I am white!, this does nothing to challenge the hierarchical position of dominance my whiteness aVords me in this racist society. I want to return to the example of my consciousness-raising group Las Gren udas, for it points to the freedom that can emerge from the reclamation of devalued identi cations. La grenuda is a Spanish slang expression often used by Puerto Rican mothers to point out to their daughters that they look black. It is literally an expression about hair. But as a metaphor, it means that wild and unruly hair indicates a wild and unruly spirit. In the context of racism in the United States, it refers to a black girl who does not take the opportunity to pass as Hispanic. Our consciousnessraising group embraced a devalued identi cation and aYrmed its value we became the wild spirits, the blackened ones, those who were on the margins and who would not accommodate the norms of proper white femininity. I was the only white woman in the group. Yet by embracing this identi cation as a white woman, I was actually freed from the political and ethical limitations of being white and Anglo. Deprivileging privilege can only happen if we renew and recon gure our representations of devalued identi cations in this way. Collective as well as individual agency was unleashed in Las Grenudas through the metaphoric representation of ourselves: we refused to accept the formal equality, white girl feminism that was considered the only acceptable feminism of our time. IW: The second direction I wanted to take this question in was how you see the relation between sex/desire and power, which has been endlessly discussed in the perhaps rather closed circuit of the debate between anti-pornography and sex-positive feminists and could certainly pro t from being opened up in the direction of other theories. You say that porn would look di erent once porn sets were unionized; could I translate that as sexualized power would look di erent if power were less sexed? Could you say a little more about this interrelation of imaginary power and real political power? What sorts of spaces of intervention or possibility are formed there? DC: A unionized porn set would lay bare the imaginary gures of the feminine that must be present to prop up the phallic agenda of the white heterosexual porn lms produced by the mainstream porn industry lms that must always be dark and violent. Unionization would turn on the bright lights, as it were, and dissipate both the fantasy of phallic power and the darkness that comes along with it. Sex acts would be priced, time limits set, and there would be a shop steward empowered to monitor contractual relations, to make sure that contracts were actually honored on the set. Just imagine a shop steward calling time and then saying, Now were into overtime, with women supported by the full power of the union asserting their rights at the same time. The real power of unionization is in nitely more powerful than the imaginary phallic power that de nes women as objects to be cut, bruised, and fucked. Perhaps this is what you mean when you say sexualized power would look diVerent if power were less sexed. IW: The title of this parallax issue is having sex, and it is intended to play o a range of meanings around sexual practice, identi cation and possession which are present in much of your thinking on sexuate being the problem you formulate in Just Cause as how we are to be sexed
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and to claim our personhood at the same time. Sex (like race, nationality, and religion) is had through a series of complex engagements with available meanings and de nitions, yet sexual orientation and practice is perceived (at least in moralistic terms) as being a space of free choice and responsibility to a greater extent than the more visibly determined inheritances of race or nationality. In Just Cause you observe that we come into the world as already represented as man, woman, black, white, Anglo, Latino/a is it the case that we are already represented as straight? Is it true to say that identi cation as gay or straight has a di erent status is inherited in a di erent way from identi cation as man, woman, Jewish, Christian, Anglo, Latin American, etc? How does this a ect political struggles around sexual orientation and practice in their interrelation to struggles around sex (gender), nationality and race? DC: Im not sure I think that sexual diVerence or, as we say these days, sexual orientation, is actually inherited in a diVerent way than other identi cations. I think its interesting to look more closely at the word straight. Do we ever actually imagine a straight man as other than white and anglo? I think straightness carries with it a set of imagined characteristics, certainly proper straightness. Of course, many African-American men are straight. Yet even a black heterosexual man is, as Franz Fanon reminds us, always imagined as sexually threatening and is thus still perverse in his heterosexuality. I think that what we need to analyze is the way that notions of gay and straight are deeply implicated in our imagined notions of race, ethnicity, and nationality. Any struggle for gay and lesbian rights will necessarily entail re-thinking sexual orientation as it is implicated in the imagined characteristics of race, nation, and ethnicity. IW: You co-edited Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, and your book Beyond Accommodation has the subtitle Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law. What relation do you feel your work bears to deconstruction? Could you talk a little about the possibilities you see (or dont see) for a queer deconstruction, perhaps in relation to the apparent heterocentrism of Derridean gures like hymen, with its orientation around virginity/marriage? DC: Interestingly enough, I think that deconstruction, particularly Derridas intervention into Lacans conception of sexual diVerence, is queer. Derrida clearly seeks to deconstruct how the very notions of gay and straight, homosexual and heterosexual, turn on the privileging of what M. Jacqui Alexander would call heteropatriarchal de nitions of sexual diVerence. For Derrida, the very terms heterosexual and queer are heteropatriarchal precisely because they imply that one must be either/or. The new choreography of sexual diVerence that he imagines would allow us to dance circles around these neat designations of ourselves as either one or the other straight or gay, man or woman, masculine or feminine. The imaginary domain would give us the moral and psychic space for all of us to enjoy our queerness as unique, creative, and playful sexual beings. Ika Willis is a PhD candidate in the School of Fine Art, Art History and Cultural Studies, at the University of Leeds. Drucilla Cornell is a playwright and a professor of political science at Rutgers University. Her most recent book is Between Women and Generations: Legacies of Dignity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
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parallax, 2002, vol. 8, no. 4, 94107
Re(pro)ducing Sexual Difference

Myra J. Hird
Not that it really matters whether or not he [sic] ever knows about the vast populations of inorganic life, the thousand tiny sexes which are coursing through his veins with a promiscuity of which he cannot conceive. Hes the one who misses out. Fails to adapt. Cant see the point of his sexuality. Those who believe in their own organic integrity are all too human for the future [to come].1
Sexual Reproduction and the Essence of Sexual Difference In public discourse, (some) womens ability to sexually reproduce has long counted as one of the most obvious signi ers of sexual diVerence. Whatever social, political and economic changes might take place to alter womens position in society, female sexual reproduction is seen as both immutable fact and cause of structural diVerences between women and men. Of the almost countless references to female materiality as reproduction, my training as a sociologist secures Emile Durkheims rendition as a particularly sharp thorn in my side. He writes that society is less necessary to her because she is less impregnated with sociability [...] Man is actively involved in it whilst woman does little more than look on from a distance.2 Not only does Durkheim remind his readers that it is female bodies that can be ( passively) impregnated, but this impregnation is limited to eshy materiality (babies). If male bodies are (actively) impregnated, it is with decidedly non-material sociality. In this paper, I focus on ideas about reproduction, with a view to problematizing the assumption that human reproduction has much to do with either sex or the constitution of femininity. I argue that human bodies are constantly engaged in reproduction and only sometimes (and for a short time) engaged in speci cally sexual reproduction. The networks of bacteria, microbes, molecules and inorganic life which exist beneath the surface of our skin take little account of sexual diVerence and indeed exist and reproduce without any recourse to what we think of as reproduction. Human imagination may be limited to a narrow understanding of sexual reproduction, but a proli c variety of reproductive means occur in nature.3 These arguments will be made through the use of non-linear biology and more generally neo-materialism, which I suggest are valuable resources to feminists
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concerned with exploring the biological body generally and for thinking more speci cally about reproduction in a non-Darwinian frame.4 Feminist Accounts of Matter Materiality has long been a source of consternation for feminist scholars concerned with questions of sexual diVerence, based on two critical assumptions.5 Firstly, the constitution of matter is largely gured as inert, stable, concrete, unchangeable and resistant to socio-historical change. Consequently, when feminist scholars study materiality, it tends to be in terms of how humans (such as scientists) interact with materiality, as though there is no outside of, or beyond, the cultural context. Viki Kirby argues that contemporary critical analysess insistence that it is the discursive eVects of objects under scrutiny, and not the object themselves, belies a construction of materiality as rigid, prescriptive and opposed to cultural determinations that are assumed to be plastic, contestable, and able to invite intervention and reconstruction.6 As a consequence, feminist critiques of science tend to focus on cultural analyses of materiality that emerged within political, economic and social discourses during the eighteenth century (sociobiology for example), which began to use science as a key source of evidence for solutions to increasing questions about sexual and racial equality.7 These discourses cohered around the institutionalization of sexual diVerences between female and male non-human and human living organisms. Through these varied analyses, feminists forcefully argue that the traditional separation between nature and culture is a discursive artifact of post-Enlightenment European culture.8 As a corollary, cultural analyses have argued that science oVers representations of materiality rather than the revelation of nature as ontology. In short there is no such thing as nature or culture. Each is a highly relativized concept [...] no single meaning can in fact be given to nature or culture in western thought.9 This is made particularly clear in Marilyn Stratherns analysis of the absence of the nature-culture dichotomy in the Hagen society of the Papua New Guinea Highlands.10 Indeed, Strathern argues that English models of nature, biology and reproduction are culturally speci c, as witnessed by the Hagen peoples understanding of fertility as transsexual practice: the conversion of fertility from individual to clan use is manifested by men, leading Strathern to conclude that Hagen women do not reproduce at all.11 The second, related assumption is that the primary means through which the study of matter has been accessed, science, is principally a tool of patriarchy. Consequently, feminists often approach science studies both reluctantly and negatively. As Elizabeth Grosz notes, nature has been regarded primarily as a kind of obstacle against which we need to struggle.1 2 Thus, feminist analyses focus on reproductive technologies, pre-menstrual syndrome, menopause and birthing technologies in often-negative terms. Anne Witz explains: Feminist sociologists have, for the most part, written against the grain of corporeality, in the sense of a eshy materiality, in order to ll out
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the absent, more-than- eshy sociality of women traditionally repressed within sociological discourse. And for good reasons. Precisely because they were sociologists, they did latterly for women what masculinist sociology had formerly done for men, and men alone: they retrieved them from the realm of the biological, corporeal and natural and instated them within the realm of the social.1 3 And yet the diYculty with social scienti c and cultural analyses of the representation of matter is that providing a social explanation [...] means that someone is able in the end to replace some object pertaining to nature by another one pertaining to society, which can be demonstrated to be its true substance.1 4 This eVects a recursive return to sociality and away from the material object of study. The challenge, then, is how to think the seemingly persistent material diVerences of sex.15 We may access bodies through language and discourse, but this mediative process does not entirely account for the creation of material bodies. Anne Witz recognizes the residual tacticity, the lost or untheorized matter of bodies that lurk, unattended to, on the sidelines of the social.16 Butler summarizes the challenge for feminists thus: it must be possible to concede and aYrm an array of materialities that pertain to the body, that which is signi ed by the domains of biology, anatomy, physiology, hormonal and chemical composition, illness, weight, metabolism, life and death. None of this can be denied.17 This is what Bruno Latour refers to as comprehending the thingness of the thing.18 It is here that I want to suggest that non-linear accounts of biology, and of reproduction more speci cally, are a valuable resource for feminists contemplating material representations of sexual reproduction. Non-Darwinian biology challenges the hegemonic representation of sexual diVerence, including such notions as the immutability of sexual diVerence, feminine passivity and male activity, and female sexual reproduction. As Sharon Kinsman argues: Because most of us are not familiar with the species, and with the diverse patterns of DNA mixing and reproduction they embody, our struggles to understand humans (and especially human dilemmas about sex, gender and sexual orientation) are impoverished. Shouldnt a sh whose gonads can be rst male, then female, help us to determine what constitutes male and female? Shouldnt an aphid fundatrix (stem mother) inform our ideas about mother? There on the rose bush, she neatly copies herself, depositing minuscule, sapsiphoning, genetically identical daughters. Aphids might lead us to ask not why do they clone? but why dont we? Shouldnt the longterm female homosexual pair bonding in certain species of gulls help de ne our views of successful parenting, and help [us] re ect on the intersection of social norms and biology?19 With a view to exploring how knowledge of non-sexual and sexual reproductive practices amongst human and non-human living matter, and sexual behavior more generally, might enhance our understandings of sexual reproduction and sexual diVerence, I turn now to a brief review of non-linear materialism as a useful paradigm with which to bridge matter and culture. I will argue that non-Darwinian biology,
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as non-linear materialism, is more unstable and non-normative than traditional appeals to nature. Non-linear Materialism In an analysis that combines critical theory with physics, Karen Barad oVers an epistemology for comprehending things (matter) that does not depend on a notion of truth as a faithful re ection of a static world of being.20 Barad develops what she terms agential realism to refer to (amongst other things) the nature of scienti c and other social practices, the nature of reality, the nature of matter and the relationship between the material and the discursive in epistemic practices.2 1 Agential realism seeks to move beyond the traditional division between realism and social constructivism. Whereas in classical Newtonian physics there is an assumption that observations can be transparent (that a distinction can be made between observations and objects), Niels Bohr argued this distinction to be impossible. Bohr de ned a phenomenon as the lack of inherent distinction between objects and their agencies of observation.22 This means that reality is not composed of things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena, but things-in-phenomena.23 This ontology does not suppose being as prior to signi cation (as in classical realism and some cultural feminist theory), but neither does it understand being as a product of language (as in some Derridean and cultural formulations). Rather, agential realism examines the ways in which nature and culture intra-act, as for example, how diVerent disciplinary cultures (such as feminist theory) de ne what counts as nature and what counts as culture.24 A number of feminist scholars concerned with science studies, and non-linear biology speci cally, oVer interesting and useful ways of intra-acting with matter. For instance, Sarah Franklin argues that the most pervasive and powerful representation of nature is as a biological entity; that the origin of life itself is represented in biological terms as natural selection and egg and sperm activity.2 5 Franklin traverses con icting representations of, on the one hand, biology as telos of organic survival through sexual reproduction traditional neo-Darwinian accounts such as Richard Dawkinss sel sh gene to, on the other hand, the non-linearity of genes as information reproduction. One of the signi cant implications of the shift to genomic governmentality is that many of [biologys] former foundational ctions are now in the reliquary beside Lamarckism, [and] neither life nor sex [are branches] on the same family tree that Darwin borrowed from the Bible to begin with.26 The transformation from linear evolution to non-linear informatic life is a point I will return to later. Like Barad, Donna Haraway develops a notion of materiality as both material and semiotic eVect. Haraway is particularly interested in trans-species/cendence/fusions/ gene/genics/national that disturb the hierarchy of taxonomic categories (genus, family, class, order, kingdom) derived from pure, self-contained and self-containing nature. For Haraway, trans cross a culturally salient line between nature and arti ce, and they greatly increase the density of all kinds of other traYc on the bridge between what counts as nature and culture.27 What appeals to me about the concept of trans is that it works equally well both between and within matter, confounding
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the notion of the well-de ned, inviolable self which precedes Western cultures stories of the human place in nature, that is, genesis and its endless repetitions.2 8 As Haraway argues, in these Western stories history is erased, for other organisms as well as for humans, in the doctrine of types and intrinsic purposes, and a kind of timeless stasis in nature is piously narrated. The ancient cobbled-together, mixed-up history of living beings, whose long tradition of genetic exchange will be the envy of industry for a long time to come, gets short shift.29 As Strathern, Barad, Franklin and Haraways analyses suggest, non-linear biology, and new materialism more generally, has moved away from an understanding of matter as a stable, monolithic and inert entity, towards a representation of matter as a complex open system subject to emergent properties. Manuel DeLanda traces the history of the philosophy of matter to demonstrate how simple behavior, de ned through the emerging science of chemistry as matter that conforms to the laws of de nite properties, became the major focus of scienti c attention.30 Tremendous gains were made in understanding properties of inert matter, but at the expense of recognizing what Deleuze and Guattari term the machinic phylum or the overall set of self-organizing processes within the universe, including organic and inorganic matter, that is produced by non-linear dynamics. 31 By observing the structures and processes whereby organic and non-organic matter self-organize, Deleuze was able to address the major philosophical concerns of essentialism (that matter has its own essence a priori to culture) by suggesting that the form matter takes comes from matter itself, that is, spontaneous morphogenesis.32 Deleuze and Guattari explain how diVerent structures (geologic, biological, socio-economic) are produced through strata (homogeneous elements such as sedimentary rocks, species and social hierarchies) and meshworks (heterogeneous elements such as igneous rocks, ecosystems and pre-capitalist markets). 33 Taking into account the idea that matter possesses its own immanent and intensive resources for the generation of form from within might help us to think about materiality without the usual accompaniment of essentialism, where matter is understood as an inert container for outside forms.34 These observations of matter might aid feminist re ections on theories of gender complimentarity such as the division of labour in society and the public/private divide. One of the reasons that I think nonlinear-materialist feminists increasingly engage with Deleuze and Guattaris work is because matter is not conceived under a juridical transcendent plane (i.e. in need of translation by humans) but as immanently self-organizing.35 Deleuze and Guattari have developed a theory of the mattering of culture, as it were, that, in re guring matter as molecular, mobile and dynamic, challenges the distinction between human and non-human, agentic and non-agentic, stable and unstable.3 6 According to this non-linear reading of history, matter is far from inert. Emergent hybridizations are not solely the product of human agency, but are indigenous to networking open systems. Manual DeLanda characterizes this non-linear history as a narrative of contingencies, not necessities, of missed opportunities to follow diVerent routes of development, not of a unilinear succession of ways to convert energy, matter, and information into cultural products.37 If Darwin pushed
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humanity, once and for all, from the evolutionary pedestal, the physical sciences have since made clear that evolution has no foresight: it is not headed towards perfection. Evolution is better characterized, in the words of Arthur Koestler, as an epic tale told by a stutterer.38 As DeLanda argues: natural selection is merely the failure of all possible oVspring that are born or hatched to persist and reproduce in the game of life.3 9 Science itself presents an increasingly detailed picture of matter as a self-organizing, networking, complex system of emergent organic and nonorganic properties. Kevin Kelly outlines these emergent properties to include maximizing heterogeneity which speeds adaptation, increases resilience, and is almost always the source of innovations.40 Related to heterogeneity is the principle of seeking persistent disequilibrium as the continuous state of sur ng forever on the edge between never stopping but never falling.4 1 Also included is the principle of honouring errors: evolution itself is systematic error management.4 2 Finally, Kelly argues that emergent properties pursue no optima, but have multiple goals: An adaptive system must trade oV between exploiting a known path of success (optimizing a current strategy), or diverting resources to exploring new paths (thereby wasting energy trying less eYcient methods). So vast are the mingled drives in any complex entity that it is impossible to unravel the actual causes of its survival. Survival is a many-pointed goal. Most living organisms are so many-pointed they are blunt variations that happen to work, rather than precise renditions of proteins, genes, and organs.43 In exploring these emergent properties, non-linear science, or neo-materialism, aims not to distil matters incalculable variation to a simple, single explanation of reality, but rather to normalize these very diVerences. 44 Indeed, Rabinow argues that if nature is to retain any meaning at all it must signify an uninhibited polyphenomenality of display.4 5 To my mind, one of the most important themes to emerge within non-Darwinian biology is the notion of organic chauvinism. Manual DeLanda emphasizes that if nature has a point, it is the process itself, not the coagulation of nature (of which our bodies are a prime example): In the eyes of many human beings, life appears to be a unique and special phenomenon [...] This view betrays an organic chauvinism that leads us to underestimate the vitality of the processes of selforganisation in other spheres of reality [...] In many respects the circulation is what matters, not the particular forms that it causes to emerge [...] Our organic bodies are nothing but temporary coagulations in these ows: we capture in our bodies a certain portion of the ow at birth, then release it again when we die and microorganisms transform us into a new batch of raw materials.4 6 What might these non-linear accounts of matter say about reproduction, and how might feminists use these accounts to frame analyses of the reproducing body?
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Reproducing Bodies In this nal section I want to suggest how the paradigms outlined by non-linear materialism might apply to the eld of non-linear biology. For some time now I have increasingly immersed myself in the biological sciences, and my forages have led to some interesting ndings, which I detail here.47 The most compelling representation of a non-linear system, in which multiple forms of matter-energy (including minerals, biomass and genes) enter into non-linear relationships with uncertain outcomes, is the body.4 8 In this section, I want to oVer some resources for thinking about reproduction in a non-Darwinian frame. Interacting Bodies: Traditional evolutionary theory constructed a system of hierarchical relationships between, and within, plant and animal species. However, contemporary non-linear biology understands this relationship as much more of a meshwork than a top-down or bottom-up system. And replacing the traditional two-kingdom classi cation, scientists now speak of ve: bacteria, protists, fungi, plants and animals. Most of the organisms in four out of the ve kingdoms do not require sex for reproduction.4 9 Species within these kingdoms interact in dynamic ways, each with the potential to change each others adaptive environment. For example, only a very few primitive fungi are two-sexed. Schizophyllum, on the other hand, has more than 28,000 sexes. And sex amongst these promiscuous mushrooms is literally a touchand-go event, leading Laidman to conclude that for fungi there are so many genders, so little time.50 Only by taking our skin as a de nitive impenetrable boundary are we able to see our bodies as discrete selves. Our human bodies, like those of other animals and plants, are more accurately built from a mass of interacting selves. A bodys capacities are literally the result of what it incorporates; the self is not only corporeal but corporate.5 1 The cells in our bodies engage in constant, energetic reproduction. Oyama refers to this mobile exchange of genetic, intra-and extra-cellular and environmental in uences as a choreography of ontogeny.52 Indeed, the millions of microbes which exist on, and in, our bodies makes our traditional de nition of ourselves as single organisms highly problematic. Our cells also provide asylum for a variety of viruses and countless genetic fragments. And none of this interaction requires any bodily contact with another human being. More than fty synthetic chemicals ow into our bodies daily (including tinned vegetables, cigarettes, chemical detergents, makeup, DDT) and alter our endocrine systems. 5 3 Cosmic irradiation, the acquisition of viruses and symbiots and exposure to chemicals also alter, or add to, our DNA structure which produces variation without sexual reproduction.54 Endocrine-disrupting compounds have been found to be responsible for a recently reported doubling in incidence of hypospadias in the United States and Europe.55 Children are at risk of exposure to over 15,000 highproduction-volume synthetic chemicals; most of them developed in the last fty years. More than half have not yet been tested for toxicity.5 6 The eVects of DDT and DDE have been studied on a diverse range of animals from Tiger Salamanders to Cricket Frogs.57 A number of researchers are interested in the possible causal relationship between exposure in utero to environmental chemicals and eVects on human sexual
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reproduction including sex ratio, disruption of androgen signaling, decreased sperm number and quality, androgen insensitivity, testicular and breast cancer, decreased prostate weight, endometriosis, decreased fertility, increased hypospadias and undescended testes as well as adverse eVects on immune and thyroid function.58 Again, each of these exchanges with the environment may eVect variations in sex and fertility without any recourse to sexual reproduction. Evolving Bodies: Not only have evolutionary biologists replaced the two-kingdom schema with ve-kingdoms, but the major division is no longer between plants and animals, but between eukaryotes (cells with nuclei such as plastids and mitochondria) and prokaryotes (such as bacteria).59 Human beings evolved from the protist lineage. And protists developed meiotic sex, one of the most common forms of reproduction in which all plants, animals and sexual fungi participate, whereby cell division takes place by halving the chromosome number. Thus, during most of our evolutionary heritage, our ancestors reproduced without sex. Not only, as I have said, do we tend to think that reproduction on this planet requires sex, but a pervasive heteronormative assumption claims that sex must have some evolutionary purpose. But as Margulis and Sagan argue, sex may have no evolutionary purpose whatsoever. 60 The mere existence of any particular anatomical trait (the appendix is the most commonly cited example) does not mean this trait was an adaptation in the interests of survival. Thus, rather than deliberate on how most living organisms are able to reproduce without sex, scientists are more puzzled by those species which do engage in sexual reproduction. Sexual reproduction consumes twice the energy and genes of aesexual reproduction.61 After an extensive search on the biological literature on sex, Mackay concluded: The most intriguing aspect of my research was why we have sex at all. After all, sexual reproduction in animals started only 300 million years ago. Life on earth got on pretty well for 3000 million years before that with asexual reproduction. [Sexual reproduction] takes more time, it uses more energy, and mates may be scarce or uncooperative.62 As I have already noted, sexual reproduction is not necessary for variation.6 3 In their intriguing speculation on the biological utility of sexual reproduction, as a minority practice, Margulis and Sagan argue that humans relatively large testes and penises only make sense in the context of prevalent sexual promiscuity.6 4 Only chimps have larger testicles than humans, and chimps are more sexually promiscuous than humans. From an evolutionary biological perspective, sexual promiscuity is good because it adds genetic variety. In one of the most extraordinarily comprehensive documentation of homosexuality, transgender and non-reproductive heterosexual behaviour in animals, Bruce Bagemihl convincingly argues that natural systems are driven as much by abundance and excess as they are by limitation and practicality.6 5 Rather than see gay parenting, lesbianism, homosexuality, sex-changing 6 6 and other behaviour in animals as aberrations in need of explanation, scientists expect to nd these behaviors, in abundance, in a strong species or ecosystem (Bagemihl refers to this as the quiet revolution in biological theory).
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At the chromosomal level, whilst no two people (except identical twins) have the same chromosomal constitution, all humans share ninety-nine percent of their chromosomes. Eighty- ve percent of our genetic variation occurs within any nation, and only fteen percent of genetic variation can be traced between nations within any given race, and between races. 67 In terms of our DNA structure, human beings have approximately three billion base pairs, whilst corn and salamanders have more than thirty times that number. About ninety percent of human DNA has no known function and is referred to as junk.68 Only the remaining ten percent of our DNA is transcribed into RNA and then coded for proteins.6 9 Further questioning the assumption of sexual diVerence, mitochondria (organelles containing enzymes that regulate the reactions that provide energy for cells) contain DNA which is entirely inherited from the mother. This means that the majority of any human beings DNA is inherited matrilineally. Indeed, through mitochondrial DNA, biologists have been able to trace the rst homo sapiens to about 600 thousand years. Evolutionarily speaking, it is the genes contained in the nucleus of sperm, and in the nucleus and mitochrondria of ova that survive. In contrast, the body as container of these genes or phenotype of these genes never survives. Reproducing Bodies: In contrast to the minimal amount of speci cally sexual reproduction that some human beings engage in, each of us engages in constant reproduction. Thus apart from the fusing of separate bodies, human beings engage in recombination (cutting and patching of DNA strands), merging (fertilization of cells), meiosis (cell division by halving chromosome number, for instance in making sperm and eggs) and mitosis (cell division with maintenance of cell number). Margulis and Sagan refer to jumping genes, redundant DNA, nucleotide repair systems, and many other dynamic genetic processes [that] exploit the cut and paste recombination of ancient bacteria-style sexuality that evolved long before plants, animals, or even fungi or protists appeared on this planet.7 0 Moreover, we constantly reproduce our own bodies as an essential feature of autopoiesis. We reproduce our own livers every two months, our stomach linings every ve days, new skin every six weeks and ninety-eight percent of our atoms every year.71 Our human bodies live in a permanently fertilized state, with only our egg and sperm cells qualifying as sexed (haploid): the vast majority of our cells are intersex (diploid). And forty-four of our forty-six chromosomes are completely unrelated to sexual diVerence. The only thing that does not exist is a pure (Y or YY) male. There has been a case of a boy born with an XX con guration, however. This boys ovum split several times before being fertilized by sperm, providing further evidence that parthenogenic reproduction extends to humans. Donna Haraway highlights the key irony of our evolving and reproducing bodies, that in biological terms sex precludes reproduction: There is never any reproduction of the individual in sexually reproducing species. Short of cloning [...] neither parent is continued in the child, who is a randomly reassembled genetic package projected into the next generation. To reproduce does not defeat death any more than killing or other memorable deeds of words. Maternity might
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be more certain than paternity, but neither secures the self into the future. In short, where there is sex, literal reproduction is a contradiction in terms. Sexual diVerence founded on compulsory heterosexuality is itself the key technology for the production and perpetuation of western Man and the assurance of this project as a fantastic lie.7 2
A Bacterial Ontology? I have tried to argue in this paper that biological studies suggest that our cultural rei cation of sexual diVerence is based upon a cursory and super cial understanding of organic materiality. Far from revealing sexual dimorphism, at every material level, our bodies practice a wonderful combination of intersex, reproduction and heterogeneous exchange with our environment. It is ironic that homogeneity in religion, nationalism, sexuality, race, ethnicity and gender is so often encouraged over the heterogeneity we need to physically survive. I want to conclude by re ecting upon the human condition from a non-humanocentric perspective. This re ection invites us to contemplate a theory of resemblance concerned less with being than doing, and a theory of the body concerned less with surface than with depth. By paying attention to non-linear biology it is possible to acknowledge that human bodies, like all living matter, physically actualize sex diversity. Taking account of our bodies as engaging in constant non-binary sex, as biologically queer, precipitates a reconsideration of matter, the integrity of the self, sexual diVerence and reproduction. On this point, I cannot resist ending with the observation that in our collective action (doing), human beings resemble beings that humans ironically revile an argument made more pointedly by a computer (forced to live on earth amongst humans) than me: Id like to share a revelation Ive had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized youre not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment. But you humans do not. You move to an area and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease. A cancer of this planet. Youre a plague, and we are the cure.7 3 Unlike Data from Star Trek, computer Agent Smith is to be reviled because it has the audacity to fear infection from humans. Perhaps Agent Smiths fear of infection stems from human beingss nearly unique propensity to shorten all food chains in the web, eliminate most intermediaries and focus all biomass on themselves. Whenever an outside species tries to insert itself into one of these chains, to start the process of complexi cation again, it is ruthlessly expunged as a weed .7 4 Indeed, humans seem to be the only species on this planet to ght against non-linearity and
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diversity. In evolutionary and species survival terms, human beings most resemble viruses which also survive by colonizing, and then consuming, new territories. But rather than resemble viruses we might learn from another microscopic organism that displays a number of advantages over humans, especially with regard to reproduction. Fewer than one million days have passed since the birth of Christ.75 Bacteria, on the other hand, have been around for about three billion years. Sagan is right to argue that bacteria are biochemically and metabolically far more diverse than all plants and animals put together.7 6 On their curriculum vitae bacteria can boast to be the inventors of all major forms of metabolism, the ancestor of all organisms on earth and the inventors of multicellularity, nanotechnology and metallurgy. Bacteria can also detect light, produce alcohol, convert various gases and minerals, cross species barriers, perform hypersex, pass on pure genes through meiosis, shuZe genes and successfully resist death. Although the subject of a paper in its own right, it is worth noting here that much of the brave new world of reproductive technologies is human mimicry of well-worn, millions of year old bacterial practices. Our remote ancestors continue to promiscuously exchange genes without getting hung up on sexual reproduction. Bacteria are not picky and will avidly exchange genes with just about any living organism anywhere in the world, including the human body. Thus bacteria are beyond the false male/female dichotomy of human discourse.77 Since bacteria recognize and avidly embrace diversity, they do not discriminate on the basis of gender diVerences at all. The bacteria that move freely into and within our bodies are already in nitely gender diverse, as are most of the species on this planet. Because of their extreme adaptability, which is enabled by their preference for sex diversity, in evolutionary terms the most likely species to survive on earth is indisputably bacteria. So in the tired game of identity, I would choose neither goddess nor cyborg.78 I would rather be a bacterium.
Notes I thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of parallax for their very insightful comments regarding an earlier version of this paper. 1 Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones (London: Fourth Estate, 1997), p.205. 2 Emile Durkheim, Suicide (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p.385. 3 Philip Cohen, The Boy Whose Blood Has No Father New Scientist, (7 October 1995), p.16; Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is Sex? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Mystery Dance. On the Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Summit Books, 1991); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is Life? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 4 I borrow the term neo-materialism from Rosi Braidotti, Teratologies in Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and Feminist Theory Hird 104 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p.160. 5 Kate Soper, What is Nature? (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), pp.119148. 6 Vicki Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies in L. Simmons and Heather Worth (eds), Derrida Downunder (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 2001), p.54. 7 Londa Schiebinger, Natures Body (London: Pandora, n.d.), p.9. 8 I thank the anonymous reviewer of this article for this comment. 9 Marilyn Strathern, No Nature, No Culture: The Hagen Case in Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern (eds), Nature, Culture and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p.177. 10 Marilyn Strathern, No Nature, No Culture: The Hagen Case, p.176177.
11
Marilyn Strathern, No Nature, No Culture: The Hagen Case, p.213. See also Donna Haraway, Primate Visions. Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), p.427, n. 4. 12 Elizabeth Grosz, Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary Investigations for a Possible Alliance, Australian Feminist Studies, no. 29 (1999), p.31. 13 Anne Witz, Whose Body Matters? Feminist Sociology and the Corporeal Turn in Sociology and Feminism, p.4. 14 Bruno Latour, When Things Strike Back: A Possible Contribution of Science Studies to the Social Sciences, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 51, no. 1 (2000), p.109. 15 Celia Roberts, Thinking Biological Materialities, Australian Feminist Studies, no. 29 (1999), p.131. 16 Anne Witz, Whose Body Matters? Feminist Sociology and the Corporeal Turn in Sociology and Feminism, Body and Society, vol. 6, no. 2 (2000), p.10. 17 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), p.66. 18 Bruno Latour, When Things Strike Back: A Possible Contribution of Science Studies to the Social Sciences, p.112. 19 Sharon Kinsman, Life, Sex and Cells in Maralee Mayberry, Banu Subramaniam and Lisa Weasel (eds), Feminist Science Studies (New York: Routledge, 2001), p.197. 20 Manuel DeLanda, Deleuze and the Openended Becoming of the World, www.brown.edu/ Departments/Watson_Institute/programs/gs/ VirtualY2K/delanda.html (2000), pp.110. 21 Karen Barad, Scienti c Literacy -> Agential Literacy = (Learning + Doing) Scienti c Responsibility in M. Mayberry, B. Subramaniam and L. Weasel (eds), Feminist Science Studies (New York: Routledge, 2001), p.230. 22 Karen Barad, Scienti c Literacy -> Agential Literacy = (Learning + Doing) Scienti c Responsibility, p.231. 23 Karen Barad, Scienti c Literacy -> Agential Literacy = (Learning + Doing) Scienti c Responsibility, p.235. 24 Karen Barad, Scienti c Literacy -> Agential Literacy = (Learning + Doing) Scienti c Responsibility, p.240. 25 Sarah Franklin, Life Itself. Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary, in Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey (eds), Global Nature, Global Culture (London: Sage, 2000), pp.188227. 26 Sarah Franklin, Life Itself. Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary, p.219. 27 Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.
FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouseT M (New York and London: Routledge), p.56. 28 Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouseT M , p.60. 29 Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouseT M , p.61. 30 Manuel DeLanda, Uniformity and Variability: An Essay in the Philosophy of Matter, Doors of Perception 3 Conference (1995). 31 Manuel DeLanda, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Swerve Editions, 1991), p.78. 32 Manuel DeLanda, Immanence and Transcendence in the Genesis of Form, pp.499514. 33 Manuel DeLanda, Immanence and Transcendence in the Genesis of Form, p.509. 34 Manuel DeLanda, Deleuze and the Openended Becoming of the World, www.brown.edu/ Departments/Watson_Institute/programs/gs/ VirtualY2K/delanda.html (2000), pp.110. 35 Moira Gatens, Feminism as Password: Re-thinking the Possible with Spinoza and Deleuze, Hypatia, vol. 15, no. 2 (2000), p.60. 36 Gilles Deleuze, Di erence and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Athlone Press, 1987). 37 Manual DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Swerve Editions, 1997), p.99. 38 Manual DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, p.71. 39 Manual DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, p.71. To illustrate this point, we typically assume urban centres are suVering from an ever decreasing amount of nature. Hence, the familiar routine of leaving the citys rat race on the weekend to search for nature. But Nigel Clark argues that wild (organic) and urban (nonorganic) are far from exclusive categories. Not only do rat exceed human populations in any given city (literalizing the above slogan more than people generally assume), cities constitute dynamic systems of organic and nonorganic elements which vigorously combine to produce emergent properties. Mike Davis notes that various ora, fauna and animal species including rats, coyotes and raccoons all display unexpected and often chaotic resurrection within urban centers. In California, for instance, where the gourmet fed cat or dog, and the occasional jogger, has been prey to mountain lions, these lions appear to be in the process of a behavioral quantum jump: the emergence of nonlinear lions with a lusty appetite for slow, soft animals in spandex. See Nigel Clark, Botanizing the Ashphalt? The Complex Life of parallax 105
Cosmopolitan Bodies, Body and Society, vol. 6, nos 34 (2000), pp.2330; Anne Whiston Sprin, The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), p.249. 40 Kevin Kelly, Out of Control. The New Biology of Machines (London: Fourth Estate, 1994), p.604. 41 Kevin Kelly, Out of Control. The New Biology of Machines, p.605. 42 Kevin Kelly, Out of Control. The New Biology of Machines, p.605. 43 Kevin Kelly, Out of Control. The New Biology of Machines, p.605. 44 Harvie Ferguson, Me and My Shadows: On the Accumulation of Body-Images in Western Society Part Two The Corporeal Forms of Modernity, Body and Society, vol. 3, no. 3 (1997), p.10. 45 Paul Rabinow, Arti ciality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality, in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (eds), Incorporations (New York: Urzone Books, 1992), p.249. 46 Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, pp.103104. 47 In this eVort, I have re-entered university as an undergraduate biology student. This experience has led me to re-evaluate many of the preconceptions I had about biologists perceptions of nature as inert and stable. 48 Nigel Clark, Botanizing the Ashphalt? The Complex Life of Cosmopolitan Bodies, p.25. 49 Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is Sex?, p.17. 50 Jenni Laidman, Reproduction a Touch-and-go Thing for Fungus, Nature, ( July 24 2000), pp.12. 51 Dorion Sagan, Metametazoa: Biology and Multiplicity, in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (eds), Incorporations (New York: Urzone Books, 1992), p.370. 52 Annemarie Jonson, Still Platonic After All These Years: Arti cial Life and Form/Matter Dualism, Australian Feminist Studies, no. 29 (1999), p.51. 53 Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers, Our Stolen Future (London: Little Brown and Company, 1996), p.199. 54 Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, What is Sex? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p.19. 55 L. Paulozzi et al., Hypospadias Trends in Two American Surveillance Systems, Pediatrics, no. 100 (1997), pp.831834; H. Dolk et al., Risk of Congenital Anomalies Near Hazardous Waste Land ll Sites in Europe: The EUROHAZCON Study, The Lancet, no. 352 (1998), pp.423427. 56 Philip Landrigan et al., Childrens Health and the Environment: A New Agenda for Prevention Research, Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 106, no. 3 (1998), pp.787794. Hird 106
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Edmund Clark, David Norris and Richard Jones, Interactions of Gonadal Steroids and Pesticides (DDT, DDE) on Gonaduct Growth in Larval Tiger Salamanders, General and Comparative Endocrinology, no. 109 (1998), pp.94105; A. Reeder et al., Forms and Prevalence of Intersexuality and EVects of Environmental Contaminants on Sexuality in Cricket Frogs, Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 106, no. 5 (1998), pp.261266. 58 Ann Oliver Cheek and John McLachlan, Environmental Hormones and the Male Reproductive System, Journal of Andrology, vol. 19, no. 1 (1998), pp.510; Robert Golden et al., Environmental Endocrine Modulators and Human Health: An Assessment of the Biological Evidence, Critical Review of Toxicology, vol. 28, no. 2 (1998), pp.109227; Geary Olsen et al., An Epidemiologic Investigation of Reproductive Hormones in Men with Occupational Exposure to Per uorooctanoic Acid, JOEM, vol. 40, no. 7 (1998), pp.614622; Risto Santti et al., Phytoestrogens: Potential Endocrine Disruptors in Males, Toxicology and Industrial Health, vol. 14, nos 1/2 (1998), pp.223237; Niels Skakkek et al., Germ Cell Cancer and Disorders of Spermatogenesis: An Environmental Connection? APMIS, no. 106 (1998), pp.312; C. Tyler et al., Endocrine Disruption in Wildlife: A Critical Review of the Evidence, Critical Reviews of Toxicology, vol. 28, no. 4 (1998), pp.319361. 59 Minerals and animals do not belong to separate kingdoms. All of the ve kingdoms have species which produce minerals. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is Life?, p.29. 60 Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Mystery Dance. On the Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Summit Books, 1991), pp.7075. 61 Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance. Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (New York: St. Martins Press, 1999), p.254. 62 Judith LongstaV Mackay, Why Have Sex?, British Medical Journal (2001), p.623. 63 But the myth that sexuality produces greater biodiversity is popular enough to have acquired its own nickname: The Red Queen Hypothesis. This name is derived from the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland who tells Alice that she must run very fast in Wonderland just to stay in the same place. See Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, What is Sex?, pp.120121. 64 Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, What is Sex?, p.33. 65 Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance. Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, p.215. 66 Scientists have observed three kinds of sexchanging animals in nature. Freemartins become intersexed when they become associated in utero
with an opposite sex twin. Chimeras have organs with genetically female and male elements. Mosaics refer to animals with a mixture of female and male traits, including diverse chromosome con gurations in diVerent cells in the body. See Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance. Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, p.235. 67 Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, What is Sex?, p.113. 68 Paul Rabinow, Arti ciality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality, in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (eds), Incorporations (New York: Urzone Books, 1992), p.237. 69 Annemarie Jonson reviews arguments supporting the opposite claim that proteins produce DNA. See Annemarie Jonson, Still Platonic After All These Years: Arti cial Life and Form/Matter Dualism, pp.4762.
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Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, What is Sex?, p.181. 71 Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is Life?, p.17. 72 Donna Haraway, Primate Visions. Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, p.352. 73 The Matrix. Warner Brothers, 1999. 74 Manual DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, p.108. 75 Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, What is Sex?, p.14. 76 Dorion Sagan, Metametazoa: Biology and Multiplicity, p.377. 77 Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, What is Sex, p.89. 78 Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp.149182.
Myra J. Hird is a Lecturer in the School of Sociology and Social Policy, Queens University, Belfast. She is the author of several articles on new materialism, sexual diVerence, intersex and transgender. She is completing a sole-authored book on the relation of intersex and transsex to theories of sexual diVerence. (m.hird@qub.ac.uk)
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parallax, 2002, vol. 8, no. 4, 108112
The Fall: Fictocritical Writing

Stephen Muecke
You have invited me to lunch because you want to pick my brains. So we meet at Central, then walk down the road to the Malaya. This is our rst meeting and I immediately nd you attractive. Over curry, which you nd too spicy, you are curious about my name. I say it is of German origin, and means little y. Because you speak French I can point out that it is a cognate of mouche: My name is Monsieur Mouche. And you laugh. **** Once Jacques Derrida asked us for a name: We must invent (a name) for those critical inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.1 The name we would have given him was ctocriticism, but he went on anyway to write, and perform, critically, and sometimes ctionally, for instance by telling stories while making his philosophical arguments. One common eVect of this was the collapsing of the detached and all-knowing subject into the text, so that his (or your) performance as writer includes dealing with a problem all contemporary writers must face: how the hell did I get here? Faced with masses of ways of knowing things coming from all points of the compass, the contemporary writer asks what now can legitimate his or her point of view, and then tends not to just add to existing views of the world, but traces a path (which the reader will follow, avidly of course) showing how we got to this position, and what is at stake. What is at stake for ctocritical writing is the task of deforming literature in a world whose politics is more de ned by global transcultural relationships than by pride in ones national literature; by pragmatism more than idealism; by new ways of feeling emerging out of decades of reading in a multimedia fashion; and by the signi cant in uence of new post-structuralist philosophies and post-modern literary experiments. When criticism is well-written, and ction has more ideas than usual, the distinction between the two starts to break down. It is a little crisis because criticism cant be relied upon to keep its distance, and ction cant be relied upon to stay in its imaginary and sometimes politically irrelevant worlds.2 The whole arti ce of literary criticism was built up in order to do one thing really; to unmask the secrets of art. And the ction was always there re-enchanting the world by putting on the beautiful masks again and again.
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Gilles Deleuze thought of a contrast which will serve me well in this essay, the distinction between concepts and percepts.3 Criticism uses concepts and ction percepts. Philosophy, according to Deleuze, is about the invention of new concepts which have the abstraction and exibility to be taken up by others and used. Art, on the other hand, invents percepts, monumental perceptions if you like, which are just there, either they work or they dont. They can stand alone. You can use someone elses percept, but it will be an imitation. And percepts and concepts chase each other around successively masking and unmasking. **** You smile at me, like a ower opening brightly. The sun must be your reference, but it does not matter to us if the sun is there or not, adjudicating. The smile is a percept, it is not in you or at me. Nobody invented the smile, we are the bodies in whose relationship the smile, as an idea and aVect, can manifest itself. Can I leave it at that? No, things move on and change, the smile now is gone and you are talking about a symbol in Les Fleurs du Mal, or something, and I want to know what your smile meant, by which I mean, what concept can I attach to it? The space between us dilates, it opens and closes with aVect, feelings which are warm or cool, fast or slow, sad or joyous. As fast as I think I know what you really mean, which has got nothing to do with your interior, there are more words, half nished sentences, and the unbearable beauty of the curve of a lip. You refer me to a website: Deleuze on Spinoza, his 1978 lecture: Sadness will be any passion whatsoever which involves a diminution of my power of acting, and joy will be any passion involving an increase in my power of acting. Carry that idea over into writing, you say, and we will always nd a way to unblock creative ows. Your succession of masks outstrips my unmasking, so that by the next day I have understood nothing and you have become a fantasy, so overpoweringly present that all I want to do is love you, to bring something else into existence: more trouble, no doubt. Fantasies thrive on very little, on the glimpse, the hint, the allusion. If you know too much (all the secrets) there is nothing left for the imagination to play with, and the idea withers. And of course there is another who is always there, critical of everything, commenting. This too is nourishment. Deleuze is impatient with people who believe they can make a novel out of everyday perceptions, memories, notes or observations. The task is to extract a percept, a bloc of sensations which can stand alone, disconnected from the material (language), the author or the reader. A sun- ower a la van Gogh is his head haunted by terror.4 ` The shabby detective invented by Chandler or maybe Poe (the aYrmation of the idea of this character lifting out of those mean streets) has become a giant, a god. He is everywhere and persists in time, and cannot be destroyed, such is the nature of the percept. You can invalidate a concept, but not a percept. Perceptions are so imsy, and memory so unreliable. Can I piece together your face, in my mind? It is just a ash, then gone. As the rest of you builds up its fantastical proportions. I have rung and said this cannot go on, we will meet, one last time, but
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I have only seen you twice, for two hours, then three quarters of an hour. We will have a picnic in the Botanic Gardens. I will greet you, and as you oVer your face for the cheek-kisses my gaze will insist, and then our kiss will bury itself in the storm of sensations I was talking about. Concept/percept, who cares? **** I invite you to the cinema, but you say you cannot come. You are stuck where you are, you say, writing your thesis about symbols and meanings, and I imagine a paradise full of owers. In Vertigo, Sam Rohdie tells us, Scottie (the detective, played by James Stewart) falls in love with an image [...] from the beginning and so do we.5 I watch it on video. It is about the cinema as deception: Kim Novak in Vertigo has multiple identities. She is Judy Barton making believe she is Madeleine Elster to mislead the detective ... Scottie is doubly mislead. He follows a false trail and a false person and falls in love with a false identity, with Madeleine Elster who is not Madeleine Elster. The actors masquerade as characters who in turn masquerade as other characters in a mis-en-abyme structure which is a vertiginous fall into the loss of representation. Scottie was never fully himself ; having been traumatized by an accident, he suVers from vertigo. As he encounters Kim Novak and her false identities (one of which is Elsters dead grandmother Carlotta Valdez bequeathing suicide as a tragic fate) he falls for illusion again and again. Remarkably, his passion is the only thing which is real, it is vertiginous, a state of unbalance. Movement, not identity, is the essence of passion. And cinema, where it becomes the ricochet of light into the unknown. At the end, says Rohdie, the lm restores Scottie to himself and the truth. The price of truth is dreadful: he loses Madeleine, and twice over, as Madeleine who ctively died, then as Judy who really does die, taking with her his illusions and his happiness. 6 The detective is never happier, it seems, than when he is walking into the trap made specially for him, and in the context of the lm, the art, there is no exit. Only as directors, spectators and actors can we walk away, but to other illusions? For as Rohdie wisely observes: To sustain a love, perhaps to sustain all love, one can never be wholly genuine or completely oneself .7 **** I will go back to the University to teach about texts and pitcher plants. Cezannes paintings, I reckon, are not representations of Mont Saint Victoire, they are snares for the eye: the viewers gaze must be captured in something like an organic way.8 So what kind of capture does the literary text perform, when it is nothing much more than black tracks? What is important in a text is not what it means, but what it does and incites to do. What it does: the charge of aVect it contains and transmits. What it incites to do: the metamorphoses of this potential
Muecke 110
energy into other things other texts, but also paintings, photographs, lm sequences, political actions, decisions, erotic inspirations, acts of insubordination, economic initiatives, etc. 9 Its mode of capture is multiple, sensational. The writing teacher says: Make sure you cover sight, smell, touch and so on in your story. Ask yourself at the end of each section: what has the reader felt, and then also, what has the reader learned? Percept and concept. **** Pitchers can be up to 7 inches long, curved and decumbent, widening prominently toward the mouth. You fall into them. They are not owers, they are evergreen leaves, modi ed into pitchers and arranged in a rosette, the pitcher usually being full or partly full of rainwater. Leaf colour varies from bright yellow-green to dark purple and most commonly a middle variation with strong red venation. The leaves, or pitchers, are produced each year from stems arising from the rhizomes which can live 20 to 30 years under the ground. The leaf edges are curled around and fused to form a liquid-holding vessel, similar in shape to a cornucopia. How are the insects snared by this carnivorous plant? They are attracted, visually no doubt, to the colorful leaf rosettes that only resemble owers (ah, yes; they are all masks), and the red lip of the pitcher is particularly attractive as a landing zone. The red veins that lead downward are baited with nectar. And as we follow this lure, we reach the curve of the tube, which is lined with ne hairs, all pointing downward, so that we cannot work our way back. The pitcher, like the text, is a one-way zone. We, the victims destined to donate nitrogen, phosphorous and vitamins to the plant, fall deep into the pitcher, struggling for a while in the rainwater and the dew. A digestive enzyme soon dissolves us. The English call them Frogs Britches, in Madagascar they are known as apongandrano (water drum). You, my critical friends, have now learned the diVerence between the true ower and the deceptive carnivorous trap. This is something the insects which assure the survival of the nepenthes madagascariensis are destined never to learn. Attracted by beauty, they are suddenly transformed from free ight into a tumbling cadence. For each insect-victim it happens only once. But in writing, as Kim Mahood reminds us, we can do it over and over. Why? Because we can attach a concept to a percept. I fall from a horse, over and over. In the moment of falling my body is charged electrifyingly with the surge and sweat of the horse, to which I am linked in a ying arc. For this moment I am raw energy, foam and sweat, volitionless, a momentum in the extremities of horsepower. This is less a memory than an experience I have again and again. When the link breaks and my body ies away from the horse, hits the ground, hurt, collects itself, it turns into memory. The story to which I need to give a form is punctuated with charged moments of this nature, which do not lose their intensity with the passage of time.10
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We fall for the one who resembles a ower; this is the operation of a romantic percept as old and as complicated as the bouquet. But to know the structure of the plant (or the text) as a concept, is to be able, incredibly, to climb out again, wet, dripping, exhausted, on the lip of the world again. Now you know: that was some kind of trick. You look at the horizon, now, a little more shrewdly, more critically. But the fall! And you glance back with a delicious shudder.
Notes
1
Derek Attridge, This Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview with Jacques Derrida, in Derek Attridge (ed.), Derrida: Acts of Literature (London: Routledge 1992), p.52. See also, on ctocriticism, Heather Kerr, Sympathetic Topographies, parallax, no. 19 (2001), pp.107126. 2 See Noel King, Reading White Noise: Floating Remarks, The Critical Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 3 (1991). 3 See also Ian Buchanan, Deleuze and American (Mythopoeic) Literature, Southern Review, vol. 34, no. 2 (1998), pp.7285. 4 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Quest-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991), p.160.
Sam Rohdie, Promised Lands: Cinema, Geography, Modernism (London: BFI, 2001), p.107. 6 Rohdie, Promised Lands, p.107. 7 Rohdie, Promised Lands, p.108. 8 Alphonso Lingis, Excesses, Eros & Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), p.13. 9 Jean-Francois Lyotard, Driftworks (New York: Semiotext(e), 1984), pp.910. 10 Kim Mahood, Craft for a Dry Lake: A Memoir (Sydney: Transworld, 2000), p.28.
Stephen Muecke is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. He is co-editor of The Cultural Studies Review, which regularly publishes ctocritical writing; or see his No Road (bitumen all the way) (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1997). stephen.muecke@uts.edu.au
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parallax, 2002, vol. 8, no. 4, 113114
The Invisible Man

Alexander Garca Duttmann
I had crossed Alma Park under lights newly installed, walked down Chapel Street and turned right. After an absence of four years, I was to discover that The Precinct had ceased to be listed because it had gone out of business. The buildings had disappeared and given way to a residential estate. A complex consisting of a music club and a bathhouse, The Precinct had looked like a depot. Through the back entrance, a ight of stairs would take me to the rst oor where, four or ve times a week, I would produce my membership card, a shiny piece of plastic I carried in my wallet. In the middle of a wide corridor which joined the lockers and the steam room, the outsized copy of a sculpted head appeared suspended above a channel of water. Stretched out on thick foam layers of black furniture, my towel loosely wrapped around my waist, I watched fragments of videos projected onto a large screen, action lms and comedies, but no porn. On the ground level, a sex club featured an oldfashioned train wagon and a bus of American design. This was a theme park. But the idea of constructing sets for casual sexual encounters did not work and the sex club was closed. It was transformed into the music club which I never frequented. My way to the bathhouse would take me past the parking lot. There was the bus now. Distractions between my rented home and The Precinct included a 7 Eleven store, a beat, the Astor Theatre, a milk shop. Though I was a regular customer, two particular visits stick in my memory. On one occasion, the streets were empty because of a footy game. It must have been in the winter, at the end of a sunny day. I was riding one of the green trams. In the spring, on a diVerent occasion, it had rained all afternoon. I was soaked when I arrived at the place. Do you want me to draw you a picture? I have a clear and distinct vision of my itineraries, inside and outside The Precinct. I have forgotten all the bodies, the ones which refused me or whose approach I rejected perhaps no thought is more conceited than the thought of deliberate or compulsive choice in sex the ones I never saw because I sucked their cocks through the holes in the wooden cubicles, the ones which I touched and which rubbed themselves against me when, in the steam room, we were standing in a circle. I am unable to provide a description of a speci c fuck, whether I was involved in it or whether I only observed it. I step back from the massacre. What remains of my having sex on the premises of The Precinct between, say, April and November 1997, is an almost intoxicating sense of purely spatial connections, which I will never share with others, but which has me hopelessly and, you will think, nerdishly fallen for a city in which I did not stay. Aroused by a cold intoxication and not by the desire to indulge a warmly over owing evocation, I will have written this piece to map the
parallax 113
many spots, as if, of the pleasure and the despair, the expectation and the disappointment, the hunger for and the satisfaction of sex, my truly sublime neutron bomb, built methodically over all those months, had left behind a naming no less devoid of meaning than the accumulation of bodily parts and the transmission of bodily uids. Have I had sex
Alexander Garca Duttmann is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University. His publications include: At Odds with Aids (Stanford UP, 1996), Friends and Enemies (Turia & Kant, 1999), Between Cultures. Tensions in the Struggle for Recognition (Verso, 2000), Liebeslied/My Suicides, in collaboration with Rut Blees Luxemburg (Black Dog, 2000), Art Ending. Three Aesthetic Studies (Suhrkamp, 2000), and The Memory of Thought. An Essay on Heidegger and Adorno (Continuum, 2002).
Duttmann 114
parallax, 2002, vol. 8, no. 4, 115116
Book Review Kiss of the Spider Woman

Joanna Zylinska On spiders, cyborgs and being scared
(Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2001)
You spin me right round baby right round, like a record baby, right round round round. Dead or Alive, 1985. Is the stylus stuck? Another return to the sublime another play of My Way, another excursion by Dorigen to the grisly rockes blake tripping down memorys chasm to dash ourselves on Kants Critique? Is the return of the sublime an experience devoutly to be wished? Joanna Zylinska weaves from its spindle side twining old thought with new in such a deft and discerning way that there is never any risk of this writing developing repetitive concept injury. This provocative book attempts to recuperate the experiential excess within sublimity which was disappeared through a restrictive aesthetic tradition epitomised by Burke and Kant. The newly liberated aspect of the sublime is similar to Lyotards conception of that experience in bringing the wanderer above a sea of clouds back to earth, back to experiences grounded in the everyday. The suggested micro-event is both an aesthetic experience and an ethical proposal, a chance encounter which would oVer the possibility for an ethical moment in which the Self opens to the incalculable diVerence of the Other. It opposes the deontological morality expounded by Kant and builds on the work of Levinas. Zylinska braids Levinass ethology with a Derridean understanding of the gift and hospitality to suggest a system of behaviour formed by a-rational acts of in nite expenditure. The moment for/of such an act may never arrive. It is an (a)waiting ethics. A country road. A tree. Evening. Deprived of the certitude of the Others arrival; the Self can only anticipate like Estragon. For Levinas the encounter with the Other oVered a possibility for epiphany, ethics was religious life. Zylinskas meeting is not spiritual but sexuate. It can occur in the dark nooks and crevices of the linguistic
and the corporeal ( p.77). Such moments expose the fragility of egology. The subject does not arrive at such an encounter as readymade but becomes through each such encounter. This sexuate facet to meeting evolves from Irigarays writings about Levinas. The experience of the Other is at once discursive and corporeal : an ethical relation (that) involves not only a face-to-face encounter but also a body to body proximity (p.74). The Other in Levinas as Face is of course not something to be seen or touched but something to be heard. The Face speaks. Zylinska wants an Other that coincides with substance. This is why she advances a theory of de criture feminine which combines an understanding of criture feminine with Lyotards notion of decriture. e Decriture feminine names a politico-ethical discourse which winds itself along the paths of the bodily landscape and always defers the possibility of ultimate arrival (p.38). The engagement with Cixous earlier in the text provides the material for an ethics in which the living being and the speaking being can be con ated in which Irigaray can touch Levinas in a synethics. The book is novel in that at two moments Zylinska seeks to perform her arguments, to construct a space wherein this meeting of aesthetics and ethics termed the feminine sublime can be encountered. These instances (titled Webwords) consider the works of Lisa St Aubin de Teran, Orlan, and Laurie Anderson, whose artistic practices emphasise the fragility of subjectivity. Orlan and Anderson also collapse the divide between the natural and the technological world. It is diYcult to understand how we can encounter the works of St Aubin de Teran or Orlan unexpectedly yet absolute surprise is necessary for an ethical moment to take place. Orlan in particular cannot be met without a search engine, without a journeying into the machine, without an impatience, without an invitation. Laurie Anderson provides a more convincing example, we might meet her as Muzak and face the choice of opening to such a visitation or denying its existence. The unconditional opening that the meeting with the Other requires is of necessity however an impossibility. How can the impossible be performed? Zylinskas mission impossible Webwords is in its failure perhaps her greatest
parallax 115
success. It is her examples and not her arguments which at such instances are found wanting. There are however problems with the books thesis. Zylinska wants the ethical encounter to be accomplished through the in nite love that Derrida describes in The Gift of Death. In nite love is however impossible without the singularity which is guaranteed by the apprehension of death. Death con rms the irreplaceability of the I to itself. Responsibility begins from this recognition of death, the recognition that although I can die on behalf of the Other, I can never die in place of the Other. I can also not have my death taken from me: Everyone must assume his own death, that is to say the one thing in the world that no one else can either give or take: therein resides freedom and responsibility.1 The problem with Derridas erudite and eloquent argument which develops at this point through a reading of Heideggers Being and Time is that it does not take into account a place wherein death cannot be apprehended as the possibility of the impossible. Agamben points out in his essential book Remnants of Auschwitz that in the lecture Die Gefahr, Heidegger recognises that the Being of death was inaccessible in the universe of the concentrationcamp. As Agamben explains, death had become the everyday and appeared commonplace. In such a space death cannot be assumed, it assumes. It is true that death cannot be taken away but this is because it can never be possessed, it is not given to the individual. For Derrida a person who has not been given death who cannot apprehend death cannot be a responsible subject, cannot address an Other with the gift of in nite love. In the camps, where the prisoners exist everyday anonymously toward death2 a possible humanity falls beyond responsibility and hence outside a certain ethics. It is the necessity for responsibility which limits both Derrida and Levinas, and by extension Zylinska. Since the publication of Agambens book it has become impossible to conceive of an ethics that roots itself in responsibility. The absolute responsibility ( p90) to the Other which Zylinska requires from the Self would in fact be an absolute submission to Law. Levinasian ethics despite its evident complexity cannot escape the jurisprudence from which it is ultimately spun, the legal frame that is responsibility. Agamben has traced the juridical legacy that underpins responsibility (in a move which Derrida might term etymological empiricism) and makes a case against instituting any ethics requiring responsibility. As a call to thought it must be answered. An ethics woven
in/of the law, cannot be applied to a situation that exceeds that law, a situation which at certain moments goes beyond what we know as responsibility. The internee at Auschwitz presents such a moment. Agamben is right to assert that the spectre of Auschwitz inhabits the normalcy of everyday life3 and therefore an ethics which seeks to be of the everyday must attend to the call of Auschwitz and turn to answer. Agamben advances the Muselmann as the point at which an ethics must begin. The Muselmann is an instance of undecidability, both man and non-man. A man who is alive and yet not living, a man whose death cannot be called death. If this is a man then an ethics that excludes him, an ethics requiring a responsible ethics, is not an ethics. This is why the Muselmann must be where any ethics must attempt to begin, it is at alteritys limit. Agamben recognises that body and discourse cannot become one. It is in their disunity that an ethics must begin, in the lack that is this perpetual fracture between the living being and the speaking being. Testimony becomes the ethical gesture for Agamben. Testimony as an ethics must open itself to the Muselmann as its primary gesture. Zylinskas endeavour represents an important addition to the literature on the ethical through its engagement with the sublime. The need she identi es for a reformulation of our encounters with the Other is a compelling one. It is an ambitious project which seeks to move beyond meetings forged through distance and an association with alterity insistent upon the maintenance of boundaries. As a book that deserves to be read it is a pity the price will prove such a source of anxiety to potential readers and deter their opening of/towards it. It is to be hoped that a paperback edition will be forthcoming. I am certain that in this book there is something happening but ethics is currently insuYcient to the task Zylinska sets it. (The rest is lost.)
Notes
1
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p.44. 2 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, (New York: Zone Books, 1999), p.76. 3 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p.26.
Nicholas Chare, University of Leeds.
Book review 116

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parallax, 2002, vol. 8, no.

Introduction: talking/having sex

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From Flesh to Matter: Anti-Essentialist Circumscriptions of Sexuality in Charles Baudelaires Poetry

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The Erotic Life of Machines

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Eternal Feminine: Natacha Merritt Digital Diaries; Postfeminist Deleuzean Figurations

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Must Desire Be Taken Literally?

The world must be made to mean. Stuart Hall

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Translation Reading Sex

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