Hinge 2013

A child in a night shirt cannot be prevailed upon to greet an arriving visitor. Those present, invoking a higher moral standpoint, admonish him in vain to overcome his prudery. A few minutes later he reappears, now stark naked, before the visitor. In the meantime he was washed. – Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street

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A note from the editors

lfish

Talia Isaacson and Simcha Wa

The collective compulsion for positivity that allows its immediate translation into practice has in the meantime been gripped precisely by those people who believe that they stand in the starkest opposition to society.

This is not the least way in which actionism fits so smoothly into society’s prevailing trend.

A journal is something daily. It is a fitting medium for a discussion of the contemporary because it can be produced quickly, to match the rap- Theodor W. Adorno, “Critique,” 1969 idly changing object of its discussion.

And, while this edition of Hinge, is, in some sense, a traditional journal like any other, the tradition of the journal is not to produce timeless works of art and scholarship but critical interventions into the problems of the day.

The compulsion to produce a journal that looks at our situation in art, language, politics, literature, and popular culture, is to preserve a moment of reflection that the pressure of the situation threatens everywhere to erase.

The impulse is the belief that in order to change anything, we need first to understand it and not let the wave of urgency sweep us into “actionism.” These theories, then, are not ends in themselves, but are necessary beginnings.

Therefore, in order to change or move past liberal democracy, we need to untangle its myth; to present a “feminine writing,” we need to open up language to all its creative possibilities; to repair the destruction of our ecosystem, we need to pay attention to its representation in art; to understand the representability of a personal story of the Holocaust, we need to explore the difficulties that inhere in this representation; to understand the functions of Capital and Power, we need to see how the pre-eminent theorists of these all too contemporary phenomena lay out the problematic; to grasp the meaning of the “aura of remembrance” of a work of art, we need to examine the intersections of art and absence; to understand the relationship of linguistic meaning to abjection, we need to see what it looks like to read a novel through the lens of theory; and, to understand the possibilities of a liberating femininity in our time, it will be helpful to examine the persona(s) of our Queen of Pop. None of the papers herein make any attempts to offer solutions to our many predicaments and most hardly intersect in the objects of their study such that any clear manifesto for action could be produced. They all merely operate under the assumption, that before we can begin to untie the knots before us, we need to properly understand what they are.

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A Journal of Contemporary Studies 4

The Aura of Remembrance, or Dust Sebastian Ennis

8 Down the Hole and Through the Mirror Andrea Benson

White Ink Reed Clements

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Capital and Power Nicolai Krejburg Knudsen

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Untangling the Myth of Liberal-Democracy in Theory and Practice Gabe Hoogers

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Ugly Beauty and the Toxic Sublime Hilary Sclodnick

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Unsettling Narrative Cate May Burton

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Confronting Kofman’s Smothered Words Tamar Wolofsky

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“Bluffin with my Muffin” Katie Connell

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Publisher Patrick Blenkarn Editors-in-Chief Talia Isaacson Simcha Walfish Layout and Design Rawb Leon-Carlyle Editors Andrew Polhammer Laura Holtebrinck Eyo Ewara James Shields Greta Landis Jon deVerrenes Alanna Loewen

Reviewers Reed Clements Cate May Burton Andrea Benson Shoshana Deutsh Sebastian Ennis Jacob Glover Hilary Sclodnick Rachel Nelems John Maize

Volume xix, 2013 published by etc. press

Hinge: A Journal of Contemporary Studies is an undergraduate academic journal published annually by the Contemporary Studies Society of the King’s Students’ Union at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Please address submissions and inquiries to HINGE EDITORS, c/o Contemporary Studies Office University of King’s COllege 6350 Coburg Rd. Halifax, NS B3H 2A1 Copyright, in all cases, remains with the author.

Moose-heart Kibble Jacob Glover

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ra o tian E f Remem nnis branc e, or D ust

Sebas

For a number of years until his death in 2001, W. G. Sebald and the artist Jan Peter Tripp exchanged poems and lithographs. Unrecounted is the result: 33 texts & 33 etchings. It ends with Sebald’s essay “As Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese: On the pictures of Jan Peter Tripp.” Here are a few remarks on the relation between art and memory I had after reading that essay. In it, Sebald refers to “the aura of remembrance,” which seems like a term worth exploring; what it might mean, possible theoretical connections, and so forth.

The way Tripp’s art is interspersed throughout Sebald’s essay without introduction or captions, you get the feeling they’re souvenirs or mementos from a life you almost recognize; they seem to conjure memories which fade with the turn of each page – a bit like thumbing through a photo album, but not your own (but, God forbid, not some distant relative’s either: let’s just say the photos somehow seem familiar but without that strange familial aura that seems tacky, and just way too glossy, and a bit too close for comfort); but more like a photo album covered in dust in an antique store, or, better yet, a pile of photos that have toppled over and are collecting dust on the floor, and you try not to step on them as you read. Here, a collection of portraits and self-portraits in “almost worldless isolationism;”1 there, some “abandoned landscapes;”2 all and all, a fine collection of still lifes; but rather uncanny – it’s as if “the motionless objects bear witness to the former presence of a peculiarly rationalistic species”3 – which makes you think (at least, I’d hope it would – at the very least, let’s say, you’d read it twice). Maybe you think something like this: “These pictures . . . they’re like ephemeral moments brought to the surface of the page and yet suspended in the past, a past that resurfaces in the form of keepsakes.” But, then again, that’s just what I thought when I saw them. You should probably buy the book and see for yourself if you don’t believe me.

A drycleaner’s bag, not unlike a body-bag, with my wife’s funeral dress draped over my arm makes my elbow crook sweat while I stand in line at the grocery. Constance, my

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For those of you who have remained with me, I’ll try to sound a bit more academic from here on out. Sebald says of Tripp’s pictures: “The aura of remembrance that surrounds them lends them the character of mementoes in which melancholy crystallizes itself.”4 – As if Tripp had somehow salvaged fragments from memorial traces, crossed an abyss of time, and grasped with the faintest gesture those moments that guard our most intimate experiences. Now, I would like to say, “In even the simplest things, time lies in wait like the residue of a whisper,” but I won’t. At any moment memories may take hold of us and, inevitably, vanish. – In a face, a laugh, a wrist, a smile, or a childhood treat; in words, and images, and sounds too; the world is filled with memories. And we’re sometimes confronted with our own past — face to face with our own vanishing presence. This is the place of art, or it’s where I place it.

[Massive edit: pages & pages taken out; I’ll just sum it up for you: I mentioned time and space repeatedly (always together like that: “time and space”) for reasons which are currently beyond me, but it had everything to do with Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aura” of a work of art, which I nonetheless highly recommend – but I have reevaluated its importance to this essay; then there was talk of photography and something about death; I used the word “abyss” several times, which seemed impressive as I was writing, but now comes off sort of arrogant – on second thought, it wasn’t really all that helpful.]

You probably haven’t seen Tripp’s pictures, but let me tell you, they’re damn impressive – almost lifelike, but in a strangely morbid way. Sebald goes so far as to say each one attains a deep searching objectivity, which by “pure representation seeks to sound the phenomena of life.”5 But to say that Tripp’s work is photorealistic or hyperrealistic is incorrect. (Not that I’m saying Sebald said anything of the sort). Rather, what viewers admire about Tripp’s work without fail are “the less apparent points of divergence and difference”6 – not some misguided notion w/r/t their mimetic quality.

wife, says if there is a God, then she would like to think her baby-sister, Lucy, who died a month ago, is with him. I didn’t know Lucy, and the truth is I don’t believe in God

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Tripp’s is a forgotten reflection on organic life. Yes, it says something about life: namely, that it’s always ending. Admirers of his witness a certain decay w/r/t his subject matter, as if he had captured something of its passing.

It’s spooky: to look at a picture suspended in time, collecting dust: “we enter into time recounted and into the time of culture.” Now, here I want to say, “The time of culture,”7 – but this will seem a bit watered down (just to be brutally honest, which I have been trying to do thus far, but which I am also slightly regretting & doubting) – “is imbued in souvenirs” (aha!).

Culture and memory collide in cheap souvenir shops, in a bad way; but they seem at home together—but really in your face in a way that seems put on—in antique shops: where you can buy other people’s memories, their history, their culture; the bits of their lives – because there’s something missing in your own life; where there should be memories and tradition and your own personal history, well, let’s just say there’s this emptiness that I think we recognize, and we feel the need to fill it.

Here’s that theoretical connection I hinted at in the first paragraph: The first line of Baudelaire’s Spleen (II) is: “J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans.”8 – Like the monotonous groan of a cluttered soul. In French, souvenir can mean “souvenir” (keepsake) as well as “memory.” A souvenir is a memento. It is often tacky, kitsch, and uncanny. But when it’s old it gains seriousness. Most importantly, it’s personal, but also property; it’s the externalization and commodification of what is internal and proper: your memories (are you following me?). Basically, it’s like a souvenir has an “aura of remembrance” about it in which we invest memories; we build up a collection, and expect a certain return once we’ve inventoried our past—so that there’s something to look back on, and something to pass on. All I’m saying is that Tripp’s pictures feel like memories and relics, mementos and keepsakes, souvenirs that preserve life as if it were all a memory passing away; and my first instinct is to hold on, plant my roots, and approach them looking for a price tag. And that is a depressing thought.

much at all. I rarely manage an upward glance at the stars let alone think about what’s happening up above. But if there is a God I’m sure He is squatting between

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Notes Sebald, W. G., “As Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese: On the Pictures of Jan Peter Tripp,” Unrecounted. Trans. M. Hamburger. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004, 79.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid., 89.

5 Ibid., 78.

6 Ibid., 85.

7 Ibid., 90-91.

8 “More memories than if I’d lived a thousand years” (Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil. Trans. J. McGowan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, 146).

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the checkout-girl’s plump 18-year-old legs. Cached away in that pubic heaven, he sits waiting to be discovered. That old pervert. The white-trash checkout girl

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Down the Hole and Through the Mirror: An Exploration into the Domains of Female Language in the Writing of Lewis Carroll Andrea Benson

“‘Curiouser and curiouser!’

cried Alice,” is a memorable expression, one that transgresses the rules of English grammar in keeping with the peculiar style of Lewis Carroll’s series, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Carroll writes of his eponymous heroine’s adventures in dream realms, and in my reading, he communicates a pseudo-rendering of what Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray have set out as female writing, or écriture féminine. According to these two philosophers, the female experience has been silenced and is inarticulable within the historical system of patriarchy. This is because the feminine has no referent within the dominant masculine discourse that overlooks it. Notably written by a Victorian man – though, “For Cixous, écriture féminine was never reserved for women alone”2 – Alice’s Adventures and Through the Looking-Glass express a thoroughly female

White Ink: Feminine Writing and Joyce Reed Clements

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This paper is concerned with the problem of how we express ourselves in language. The problem is this: we are thrown into the symbolic order as into a binding contract, the small print of which is the entire Western tradition of thought, with all its prohibitions, exclusions, and repressions. Since no one’s psyche or experience is composed entirely of the tradition’s preapproved concepts – we all have bodies, sexualities, individualities – the representational form of language precludes those additional elements from finding signification, closing off linguistic expression to the more eccentric among us. And no one is more eccentric than woman: man has excluded her from the centre of the tradition so that he, supported by the hierarchical opposition between them, may occupy it himself. This predicament leads Hélène Cixous to develop the concept of écriture féminine (women’s writing, feminine writing), a way of writing that would embrace the

with the name tag reading, “Tereesa” smiles, but her teeth are stained from tobacco. “$22.35” she says. I hand over the bills and change, and, briefly, our fingers touch.

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experience. Carroll works within the logical order but plays with a typically masculine economy of reason to breed a new representation of the feminine.

Though it may not be a comprehensive or an ideal example of écriture féminine, Carroll’s series surely exemplifies the deconstruction and subversion of conventional logic that a new feminine language calls for. In Alice’s adventures, Carroll does justice to a female experience that is not simply a reversal, or opposite, of logic and thus reductive nonsense, but rather an application of some aspects of feminist theory which strive for a communication of the feminine.

According to Cixous and Irigaray, female language must subvert the logical order in order to deconstruct it and express the feminine. Cixous writes that this masculine logos has dominated history: “Nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason. … It is indeed that same self-admiring, self-stimulating, selfcongratulatory phallocentrism.”3 Écriture féminine disrupts this masculine discourse. Alice, on occasion acts as a sort of spokeswoman for the reality of the world she comes from,

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performative and extra-representational qualities of language, allowing women to express their forbidden sexualities.

This paper will explore her idea of feminine writing in relation to the works of James Joyce, a writer Cixous greatly admires. Joyce is significant to this project because his stylistic experiments are devoted to testing the limits of what and how language can express. By considering feminine and Joycean writing together, I will be able to more fully explore the possibilities and limitations of a writing that gives expression to the silenced. Specifically, I will discuss the way in which feminine writing illuminates both female and male sexualities, as well as the difficulty for the reader and lack of control on the part of the writer that are necessary facets of such a writing.

Cixous never provides a definition of feminine writing. She begins “The Laugh of the Medusa” with the phrase, “I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do.”1 Not what it is, but what it will do, should serve as a preliminary definition of her meaning. The question “What is

In the parking lot a woman, two or three cars away, talking on a cell phone, says, slightly too loudly to the person on the other end that she has lost her car and

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understandably having reservations about the foreign, topsy-turvy worlds she has entered. Early on in her Adventures, Alice is surprised at her use of nonsensical language, when she has thus far grown up with proper, logical English: “‘Oh dear, what nonsense I’m talking!’”4 The world she enters does not adhere to the sensical constructs of reality she is used to. In the LookingGlass, the order of logic is once again turned on its head. Alice notes: “the books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way.”5 She understands that a structure of language still exists, but it is transformed into something unfamiliar. She even states, “‘I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbithole – and yet – and yet – it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life!’”6 Alice, here, demonstrates an interest in exploring this alternate reality.

In both of Carroll’s stories, the young female protagonist enters and explores an “other world,” the first being down the rabbit-hole, and the second being the mirrored reality of the looking-glass. Accessing female language requires an opening up of the realm of the Other that represents the female.

a tree?” seeks the answer of a tree, the signified to which the signifier “tree” refers. This is representational language, wherein each word stands in for something else. Rather than answering the representative question, “What is feminine writing?” Cixous sets out to answer, “What will feminine writing do?” and this very choice provides the answer: it will work outside of representational language, writing, and thought. The very way in which she conveys this, not by stating it as I have – for I am obliged by the academic principles of clarity and interpretation to remain within the domain of representationalism – but by doing it, demonstrates what she means for feminine writing to do.

Non-representational writing is the kind that escapes the philosophical tradition. Cixous explains that “Nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason, of which it is at once the effect, the support, and one of the privileged alibis.”2 Purely representational writing is both the effect and the support of the history of thought, because it contains only signifiers for what two thousand years of monks and virgins have deemed acceptable table-talk: language is produced by and filled with the tradition of thought, so that it

needs a ride. I face the ground – avoiding eye contact with the woman, so she can’t ask me. I move my work-tools aside before loading the groceries into the backseat

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The rabbit-hole and the lookingglass represent such other realms.

According to Jean-Paul Sartre, “the hole is a symbol of a mode of being.”7 By “being” he means womanhood, as the negative counterpoint to the male. He provocatively continues, “The obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which ‘gapes open.’ It is an appeal to being as all holes are.”8 To him, then, woman is a lack needing to be filled, to establish a plenitude and an actual being. He states, “I have only to crawl into it to make myself exist in the world which awaits me”9 which is also true of Alice, who enters the rabbit-hole and inhabits a world that she creates as her own in her girlhood imagination.

Approaching the hole from a different angle, certain scholars note “the prenatal symbolism of the rabbit-hole or the pool of tears,”10 attesting to the rabbitholeis an allusion to the female (body) in what they see as overt womb imagery in the dark canal and Alice’s sitting in a room full of her own tears. Carolyn G. Heilbrun critiques such sexualized bodily analyses, commenting that “the analogy between pens and penises, between wombs and

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precludes the expression of anything that the tradition has repressed. In this manner it supports the tradition and perpetuates those repressions, such that purely representational language functions as an oppressive machine against which there is no recourse.

Fortunately, however, that machine has some bugs. Cixous explains that

there have been some failures … in that enormous machine that has been operating and turning out its “truth” for centuries. There have been poets who would go to any lengths to slip something by at odds with tradition … But only the poets – not the novelists, allies of representationalism.3 Poetry, unlike prose, is devoted to the non-signifying elements of language.

Rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, assonance, graphical arrangement — these are aesthetic devices that do not have any meaning of their own. Instead, they have an effect: they are pleasing or displeasing to the reader, they assist in memorization, and they appeal to those who do not “understand” the language. Such elements are constitutive of performative language.

They are the elements of language,

of my car; I hang the black bag containing my wife’s dress on a hook inside the door.

I’ll wait to see if Constance asks about the dress – no need to drudge up more grief.

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creativity, must be recognized … But surely we must develop other metaphors for creativity.”11 Cixous and Irigaray argue that there are holes in the traditionally male, linear, logical language that must be the sites of female expression. Cixous’s call for an écriture féminine stems from her argument that phallogocentric language is full of “exceptions” – fissures/holes; female writing should seep through the cracks of, and subvert, this Symbolic order.12 Irigaray also mentions the holes in language that patriarchy has created: “Just as the scar of the navel is forgotten [after birth] so, correspondingly, a hole appears in the texture of language.”13 These holes allow escape from patriarchal discourse, opening up into a female language.

Collectively, all of these interpretations of the hole posit it as representative of the feminine; Sartre does so negatively, Levin does so with the maternal body, and Cixous and Irigaray do so through a female language. It appears to be down one of these holes of language that Alice escapes from conventional reality and is able to venture into a realm of self-exploration.

As she descends down the rabbithole, Alice herself asks, “Would

writing, and thought that can answer the question “What does it do?” and let the repressed slip out.

Poetry articulates the repressed because “poetry involves gaining strength through the unconscious and because the unconscious … is the place where the repressed manage to survive.”4 The unconscious slips into language through its performative elements, and poetry, devoted to those elements, allows them to bring forth into expression those things that cannot be signified. Feminine writing, then, will infuse prose with the poetic and the performative, and thus give expression to the unconscious and the repressed victims of the tradition therein.

Chief among those victims is woman. Cixous’s feminine writing suggests that woman is in a unique position to produce such writing. At the same time, she condemns the history of female writers, arguing that the “immense majority” of their work “is in no way different from male writing, and … either obscures women or reproduces the classic representations of women.”5 In fact, she would not even consider those writers women in the context of her argument:

The clock blinks 5:48 at me when I turn the car on. Fuck. Constance might be drunk when I get home. The radio blares “Stardust” by Nat King Cole as I pull out of my spot, narrowly

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the fall never come to an end?”14 This thoughtful question brings to mind the seeming infinity of absented female experience, that experience of the “other” that ironically opens up a world of the self, a world of Alice’s own. Determined to find herself, Alice resolves, “‘It’ll be no use their putting their heads down and saying ‘Come up again, dear!’ I shall only look up and say ‘Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up.’”15 Consequently, Alice will inhabit this space of the Other until she has understood herself, at which point she will emerge from the alienation of the feminine as a subject.

The other domain of the female in the series is the looking-glass. The mirror realm in Through the Looking-Glass is not merely a two-dimensional replica of the original reality: “what could be seen from the old room was quite common and uninteresting, but … all the rest was as different as possible.

For instance, the pictures on the wall next to the fire seemed to be all alive.”16 The “Looking-Glass House” is more than a reflection of the real house, just as the female is more than

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When I say “woman,” I’m speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their … meaning in history.6

Thus “woman” is not characterized by her uterus or her chromosomes, but by her resistance to the “conventional man,” the man who embodies the tradition, the man who, like the writers mentioned above, may well be female.

As Cixous explains in “Castration or Decapitation?”, the opposition between man and woman contains within it all of the other oppositions of the tradition:

It’s the classic opposition, dualist and hierarchical.

Man / Woman automatically means great / small, superior / inferior… means high or low, means Nature/History, means transformation/inertia.

missing the lost woman. At home, my husky, Nix, is always already there waiting for me and beside himself. Throwing aside his favourite snowshoe hare chew toy, he greets me

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the negative image of the male, when one can step out of phallogocentric tradition and realize it. Alice makes believe that such an experience is possible, urging her pet to step onward with her into the lookingglass world: “‘Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through.

Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist, now, I declare! … And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away.”17 In her imagination and through her creativity, the other side of the looking-glass becomes a tangible reality that Alice can enter into. Beyond the looking-glass is, as Carolyn Burke states in an Irigarayan manner, “the ‘other side,’ a conceptual realm beyond the law of the Logos.”18 In Irigarayan theory, as opposed to a conventionally flat, two-dimensional mirror that reflects the female as only a twodimensional image, women’s domain is that of a curved, threedimensional mirror. Accordingly, beyond the looking-glass is the domain of the female. Irigaray states, “relations among subjects have always had recourse, explicitly or more often implicitly, to the flat mirror, that is, to what

In fact, every theory of culture, every theory of society, the whole conglomeration of symbolic systems … is all ordered around hierarchical oppositions that come back to the man/woman opposition.7 Woman is the avatar of the unconscious, the repressed, and the excluded. She represents and shares the unconscious with the rejected half of every binary opposition. In this sense, all of the repressed – all “deviant” sexualities, ethnic minorities, and oppressed workers – are in their own ways women. Thus the task of woman, in her opposition to the conventional man of traditional hierarchies, is to give expression to the repressed through performative writing.

Given that binary oppositions are so problematic, it may seem strange that I have elaborated one between performative and representational writing. I am however merely describing a pre-existing hierarchical opposition in the tradition, with its ideals of literal meaning and translatability. Thus in the same way that woman must write because she opposes centralized man, she must write performatively because that sort of writing opposes the privileged representational sort.

tongue lolling to one side. He makes me feel like I belong somewhere – perhaps with him in his homeland among the snow sprinkled glaciers. He licks my hands and face when I bend

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Feminine writing performs the endless privileges the relation of man 19 task of overturning and undoing to his fellow man.” In the these oppositions. looking-glass, one sees oneself as Other; in Alice’s story, then, Here I will turn for a moment to this looking-glass world is the the writing of James Joyce, who world of the Other that she is explored some of the extremes of the able to climb into and inhabit, performative. Particularly notable is the in a manifestation of Irigarayan “Penelope” episode that closes Ulysses, theory. The task of female a series of eight enormous run-on senlanguage is “to put into place tences without any punctuation. The a mode of specularization episode presents Molly Bloom’s thoughts that allows for the relation of as she drifts into sleep. They revolve woman to ‘herself’ and to her around daily life, her past, her sexuality, like, which presupposes a her husband, and her new lover. curved mirror ... of thought, To convey a proper sense of the of subjectivity,” rejecting episode’s style, I have chosen a pasconventional representation sage in which she ponders her breasts: in order to “disturb the staging of representation yes I think he made them a bit firmer sucking according to too-exclusively them like that so long he made me thirsty masculine parameters.”20 titties he calls them I had to laugh yes this This “curved mirror” of one anyhow stiff the nipple gets for the least consciousness is what Irigaray calls the speculum thing Ill get him to keep that up and Ill de l’autre femme, the take those eggs beaten up with marsala speculum of the other fatten them out for him what are all those woman.21 Like the rabbitveins and things curious the way its made hole, the looking-glass is 2 the same in case of twins theyre supposed also impenetrable except to represent beauty placed up there like to Alice herself. After she enters the other side of those statues in the museum one of them the mirror, she exclaims, pretending to hide it with her hand are they “‘Oh, what fun it’ll be, when so beautiful of course compared with what they see me through the a man looks like with his two bags full glass in here, and can’t get 22 and his other thing hanging down out of at me!’” This new world him or sticking up at you like a hatrack of her own is impossible

over to hug him. He nibbles my ears and squeals softly as we embrace for a moment. I sigh to myself into his fur. “Oh, Nix. I love you.” My wife calls from the other room: “I love you, too,

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others to penetrate (the use of the concept of penetration here pointedly indicating a resistance to the infiltration of phallogocentrism in this alternate reality). Alice explores alternate realities where she is untouchable, discovering herself as a subject by knowing herself as Other.

Alice laments the inevitable return to the real world when she says, “‘I know I should have to get through the Lookingglass again – back into the old room – and there’d be an end of all my adventures!’”23 Heilbrun, supporting a difference feminism, notes “the importance of those adventures long restricted to males. Men … will further enslave women if women identify all adventure as ‘male’ and not for them. Women must discover their difference.”24 In titling his story Alice’s Adventures and highlighting the prominence of the settings also in the title (“Wonderland” and the “Looking-Glass”), Carroll asserts that these adventures belong to Alice. Alice herself recognizes that she does not have the same status in reality, but she has agency in these exploratory settings, where woman, or young girl, finally becomes a subject.

The stories’ settings do more than simply indicate female territory as marginalized and

no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf.8

Joyce’s writing here is decidedly performative, due to the unusual effect of reading a text in which sentences flow freely into one another without any consideration of grammar.

It also expresses thoughts that are normally forbidden, and irreverently eschews the traditional hierarchies: the almighty phallus sticks up “like a hatrack” and needs to be shamefully concealed behind a cabbageleaf.

Most importantly, Molly is able to express a facet of her sexuality, and throughout the episode many other sides of it will find expression, such as her desire to shove her anus onto her husband’s tongue.9

Sweetie.” I don’t answer right away, and she appears in the doorway wearing a paint-covered long t-shirt with her hands on her hips, and watches me hug the dog. “Oh,

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unexplored within patriarchal discourse, but offer locales within which Alice can explore what it means to be herself and female.

The rabbit-hole becomes much more than a confined, dark tunnel, and the looking-glass much more than a static two-dimensional image of reality; they open up onto a world of possibility in which Alice can roam and discover her subjectivity and femininity.

Alice’s self-discovery is an expression of a feminine experience.

Once having entered these realms of the feminine, Alice appropriately begins to discover herself as a young girl. This revelation is analogous and coincidental with her discovery of herself as a female. Cixous states that the female territory is dark: “they [women] can be taught that their territory is black. … Dark is dangerous. You can’t see anything in the dark, you’re afraid. Don’t move, you might fall. Most of all, don’t go into the forest,”25 describing a systemic, indoctrinated warning against exploring femininity.

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Cixous would no doubt agree that the “Penelope” episode serves quite well as an example of feminine writing. “Penelope,” and Ulysses, ends with Molly recalling the moment her husband proposed to her:

I thought as well him as another and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.10

Cixous says of this climactic flood of “Yes” that it demonstrates the affirmative essence of the feminine project of overturning the traditional hierarchies: “We have no womanly reason to pledge allegiance to the negative. The feminine (as the poets suspected) affirms.”11 Citing Joyce, she states that Molly’s Yes carries “Ulysses off beyond any book and toward the new writing” – feminine writing.12

you were talking to the dog, weren’t you?” she mumbles with only a minor slur to her voice. Nix starts as if to move to my wife, but stops short and continues slathering my

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Alice exemplifies this tentative approach in entering the dark forest in the world of the looking-glass:

One potential objection to this claim would be that Joyce’s treatment of Molly as a character is sexist, and Cixous would agree. After all, she criticizes the history of literature for keeping women in bed, writing:

it looked much darker than the last wood, and Alice felt a little timid about going into it. However, on second thoughts, she made up her mind to go on: ‘for I certainly won’t go back,’ she thought to herself … ‘This must be the wood … where things have no names. I wonder what’ll become of my name when I go in? I shouldn’t like to lose it at all.’26 She defies apparent danger by entering the wood, and discovers that it is where things are nameless.

This forest is like Cixous’s dark female territory, an area on the fringe that is a near-void, where all things contained – Alice, in the story, and woman, for Cixous – lose their definition.

Alice proceeds to go into the wood and lose her name. She exclaims in frustration, “‘And now, who am I? I will remember, if I can! I’m determined to do it!’”27

Woman, if you look for her, has a strong chance of always being found in one position: in bed. … women don’t wake up by themselves: man has to intervene, you understand.

She is lifted up by the man who will lay her in her next bed so that she may be confined to bed ever after, just as the fairy tales say.13 Molly is confined to her bed for the entirety of her monologue, after being woken by her husband, so one might accuse Joyce of the same crime. It is, however, the greatest subversion to reveal the enormously filthy fantasies of a woman as she lies in her traditional prison.

hand with saliva. He and I, just the two of us, are his pack. He likes Constance, but I spend more time with him. Together, we could wander the Arctic seeking out that white spirit

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in frustration, “‘And now, who am I? I will remember, if I can!

I’m determined to do it!’”27 Throughout the series, Alice has difficulty uttering her name, as she constantly questions who she is. Levin summarizes: “[Alice] undergoes what modern psychologists would term an identity crisis. ‘Who are you?’ the Caterpillar asks … ‘Who in the world am I?’ Alice asks herself. Can she be Ada or Mabel?

Or is she the White Rabbit’s housemaid, Mary Ann?”28 Not only does Alice not yet know who she is, but she is also frequently mistaken for someone else, like Ada, Mabel, and Mary Ann. Finally, she is able to identify herself with confidence, at least by name, though submitting to an authority: “My name is Alice, so please your Majesty.”29 Alice is able to speak of herself from within the realm of the Other, in a form of feminine expression.

Burke claims that in Alice’s search for herself, “There is no answer, other than her selfrenaming.”30 Notably, Alice is never given a surname.31 She is an individual who is not particularized by a last name that connects her to others: “Lewis Carroll’s Alice … does not use a family name, for she seeks to live beyond the

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Cixous elsewhere calls Joyce’s writing two-faced: “one face is turned towards the institutions which are to be dismantled, the other towards theological milk – a milk which has gone sour and which makes the subject vomit.”14

Thus Joyce and feminine writing in general are able to take a sexist element of the tradition and turn it sour, sickening the reader and causing her to reject it. This has always been possible in the form of parody, which, with its inversions and subversions, is an old ally of feminine writing.

Joyce, however, is male, which raises some interesting questions about the relationship between feminine writing and male sexuality. Cixous writes that “woman must write woman. And man, man. So only an oblique consideration will be found here of man; it’s up to him to say where his masculinity and femininity are at.”15 This “oblique consideration” takes the form of a long footnote, part of which I will quote:

bear of Inuit mythology; we would find the hand of Franklin and march together, man and dog. Before Constance can walk away I ask in earnest, “How was your day?” “Not bad,

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Name-of-the-Father.”32 In the stories, she has neither mother nor father; there are no identifiers beyond her immediate self, save for her sister, who appears briefly at the beginning and end of her adventures in Wonderland. In her dream realms, Alice does not exist in reference to anyone else. Her independence attests to what Burke says of Irigaray’s purpose: “Irigaray is trying to imagine a realm – at once emotional and intellectual – in which woman is no longer defined in relation to man as his negative, other, or as lack.”33 Both Irigaray and Cixous attempt to subvert the notion of the female as contingent and lacking by creating a place for the feminine, which Alice’s character embodies. The Adventures and the Looking-Glass are not comprehensive as the beginning and end to Alice’s search for her identity, but they are certainly foundational parts of such a self-seeking process. Cixous states that the “unexplored” female is like an unexplored continent. However, the “Dark Continent is neither dark nor unexplorable – It is still unexplored only because we’ve been made to believe that it was too dark to be explorable.”34 Alice loses herself in the darkness,

Men still have everything to say about their sexuality, and everything to write.

For what they have said so far, for the most part, stems from the opposition activity/ passivity from the power relation between a fantasized obligatory virility meant to invade, to colonize … One can understand how man, confusing himself with his penis and rushing in for the attack, might feel resentment and fear of being “taken” by the woman.16

In this passage Cixous diagnoses an enormous problem with male sexuality.

Whereas woman, repressed by the opposition of activity and passivity and the primacy of the phallus, is able to see the tradition silencing her sexuality, man is deceived into believing his sexuality to be already written: he confuses himself with his penis, and thus fails to see the particular identity that dangles off of it. The result is what Cixous calls “phallic monosexuality,” and she opposes it to the celebration of sexual difference that has become, for “historico-cultural reasons,” the domain of woman.17

actually,” she replies. “The kids were really good today. You know the one little boy Vern, with pretty advanced Cerebral Palsy? He was having a good day – just a happy and

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but must venture into it to find herself and realize that this feminine “darkness” can be illuminated.

In finding herself, Alice simultaneously finds the Other.

The narrator states: “this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people,”35 so much so that much of the content of both stories is dialogue, and Alice often has conversations with herself. When trying to remember her name in the forest of the looking-glass, “all [Alice] could say was ‘L, I know it begins with L!’”36 Though likely enigmatic for readers, Burke comments on Irigaray’s interpretation of this passage:

‘L’ is, of course, multiple in Irigaray’s reading: Alice, “Alice,” Luce, and for a French speaker, elle/elles – the third person feminine, both singular and plural. To begin with elle(s) means to learn that the female self is multiple, that we are all written into the text.

Once through the looking glass, the unified self is seen as an illusion.37

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The phallus causes men to suffer the “grotesque and scarcely enviable destiny (just imagine) of being reduced to a single idol with clay balls.”18 Male sexuality, as part of the celebration of sexual differences, is eclipsed by this idol, silenced, repressed.

It is confined to the present domain of woman. As a result, male sexuality is feminine, in the sense that it too has been silenced and repressed by the tradition. Male writers like Joyce are therefore able to become women and perform feminine writing.

In light of this, much of Cixous’s language in “The Laugh of the Medusa” seems strange, as she speaks repeatedly about the female body writing itself.

She writes of woman, for example, that “There is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink.”19 But “white ink” does not only mean milk; it means the white spaces between and around letters, the silence that structures language and renders it intelligible. This silence is the silence of the repressed that allows the tradition to keep erect all of its turgid demarcations. Thus the feminine writer writes in white ink because she writes to express the unconscious and undo the traditional hierarchies. This

laughing day. That always lifts me up. Brings in a bit of fresh air.” The possibility of Constance’s good mood throws me into a brainstorm. A movie? Dinner-out? A romantic

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For Irigaray, Alice asserts herself not as a coherent being according to conventional reality, but rather as a multiplicity. In a sexualized take on female multiplicity, Irigaray claims that “just as the female genitals are ‘plural’ or multiple – the vulval lips ‘are always at least two … joined in an embrace’ – so women’s language will be plural, autoerotic, diffuse, and undefinable within the familiar rules of (masculine) logic.”38 Though Alice’s adventures are not explicitly erotic, Alice frequently assumes a plural form and has the most fun playing with herself. Her journey is a young girl’s analogous discovery of herself. This is not, however, to reduce her experience to that of the physical changes of puberty, as in Levin’s reductionist reading of Alice’s physical transformations as “nothing more or less than the physiological metamorphoses of girlhood.”39 Rather, the physical changes she undergoes in enlarging and shrinking are part and parcel of determining who she is, puberty or not. Diminishing rapidly from her enlarged size, Alice is able “to save herself from shrinking away altogether … very glad to find herself still in existence.”40

semen, flowing from a pen that is no longer understood to be a phallus.

The reason that I considered Joyce in particular over other authors was not because of Ulysses, but because of his final, most extreme work, Finnegans Wake. The work largely eschews plot, character, setting, narrator, grammar, syntax, and the unity of the very word itself: all of those qualities that bring coherence and structure to representational writing. Finnegans Wake could thus be considered the most extreme example of feminine writing.

Indeed, Cixous describes the Wake as having “capitulated forth” from “that unheard-of place” – the unconscious – and describes it as “the text of texts, the readable-untranslatable”; “Here,” she writes, “an extremity is invented.”20 This extremity is that of a text that tears apart the very fabric of language itself.

Here is an example, chosen at random:

Go in for scribenery with the satiety of arthurs in S.P.Q.R.ish and inform to the old sniggering publicking press and its nation of sheepcopers about the whole plighty troth between them, malady of milady made melodi of malodi, she, the laglage of lyonesses, and him, her knave arrant.21

stroll? Ignoring the groceries I just bought I tell her, “That’s great! You know, I was thinking. I just went grocery shopping, but there wasn’t much of anything worth buying in

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Through her shifts in size, Alice symbolically questions her substance, just as women must challenge their assumed significance and status. For Irigaray, “women lack access to language appropriate to the expression of their desire [… and so they tend] to articulate their condition physically, to ‘suffer it directly in their body.’”41 Alice’s fluctuation in size corresponds to a bodily expression of her condition; woman “physically materializes what she’s thinking; she signifies it with her body”42 in a Cixousian maxim of “writing the body.”43 Alice, representative of the female, is manifold, just as female language should be. Cixous wants to “make the old single-grooved mother tongue reverberate with more than one language.”44 Cixous envisions two senses of language, a concept that defies sense, breaks up the one-to-one representation of logic, and disrupts a masculine discourse. Carroll consistently uses puns to get beyond the literal sense of words to their multiple meanings. He moves from symbolic to semiotic language by playing with language in a conversion of order, a manipulation of typical representation into something distinctly idiosyncratic.

As Heilbrun suggests of elucidating a different language, “Surely in emphasizing ‘difference’ and uniquely female culture, we should avoid the trap

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I would like to draw attention to a few key qualities of this passage. First of all, it is radically performative, as evidenced both by its abundant wordplay and its willingness to get caught up in the sound of its own words, as in the malady-milady-melodi-malodi sequence. It also leaves behind the notion of a word standing in as a representative for some real thing or idea. These qualities show that it does the most radical form of feminine writing. However, the passage – and the whole six-hundred and twenty-eight page novel – is virtually unintelligible and takes a tremendous effort to read, because it is a challenge to the very structures of language and thought that allow us to understand anything.

As Ruben Borg remarks in his essay “Neologizing in Finnegans Wake: Beyond a Typology of the Wakean Portmanteau,” this method of writing “undermines our confidence in grammar, reminding us that there are texts we still need to learn how to read.”22 It is this awareness that we must always be learning to read that prevents us from falling into a deathly acceptance of the traditional hierarchies. At the same time, however, this means that feminine writing must always be difficult to understand; and while this is not necessarily negative, it is nonetheless a limitation.

the whole store. Let’s go out for dinner downtown. I’ll take you on a date.”

She smiles, but not as easily as she once did, and almost suspiciously. “Okay.

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of depriving ourselves of male discourse altogether while we attempt to subvert it.”45 She goes on to claim in direct reference to Carroll’s series, that Alice herself “ embodies the female use of male logic against itself,”46 showing that there is a system of sorts to the madness, and that Carroll engages in successful deconstruction.

Carroll satirizes education, that logos-driven vehicle of categorized structure, for instance, by twisting its language. The character of the Mock Turtle turns language upside down: “‘Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,’ the Mock Turtle replied; ‘and then the different branches of Arithmetic – Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.’”47 Carroll plays on mainstays of schooling, referring to reading, writing, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, respectively, to “mock” (as the turtle’s own name suggests) and effectively destabilize an exemplary microcosm of the institution. Burke extols the virtues of female language in its wordplay, writing, “such writing is itself is itself generative in its power to set to set language in motion. It is liberating to discover that one may transgress the demands of univocal signification by letting in the linguistic ‘accidents’ that don’t fit into logical discourse – the puns, conjunctions of opposites, and coinages that open up the realm of meaning.”48

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Along with its difficulty, the most characteristic feature of Finnegans Wake is its overabundance of wordplay.

In particular, the text is littered with a distinctive style of portmanteau in which two or more words are combined based on a similar sound or spelling. These portmanteaux are performative in that they ignore the representative meaning of the component words, reducing them to a pure performance of sound or spelling; once the words are combined, their meanings are arbitrarily and unsuccessfully conflated. In the above passage, one example is “publicking” from public and pub-licking, and another is the use of “arthurs” in place of “authors,” hinted at by the word “scribenery.” These portmanteaux are rather close to being puns, but Borg draws a strong distinction. He writes that in the pun “Language is cleverly manipulated so as to cause two different intentions to coincide in a single utterance … restoring our confidence in the orderliness of the language system itself.”23 The ability we have to create a perfect pun serves only to prove that the linguistic system works. The portmanteau, on the other hand, is disruptive because it is artificial:

That would be nice. Let me change.” She says and runs upstairs. I slug back a glass of water and hurry away groceries. Nix wanders over with his food-bowl

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However, Alice challenges this multiplicitous nature of language:

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’49 Presumably, Humpty-Dumpty considers whether she or language is master in this other world that is supposed to be hers. For Cixous and Irigaray, woman must occupy her realm and steer a new, semiotic language that opens up a realm of meaning Kelly Oliver writes of this opening in Cixousian language, “repressed within patriarchal cultures, woman’s speech resonates with a song that opens onto a volcanic laughter … Cixous writes that if one dares to look at Medusa (the figurehead of the repressed and feared feminine), one will see that that she is laughing, and beautiful.”50 Virginia Woolf comments on the “irresponsible laughter” that Alice’s adventures similarly elicit: “‘Only Lewis Carroll,’ she wrote, ‘has shown us the world upside down as a child sees it, and has made us laugh, irresponsibly. Down the groves of

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[T]hough it shares with the pun the ability to combine multiple words and meanings, the portmanteau resists the impression of a carefully arranged context or of a successfully engineered verbal coincidence. One might say, then, that it is more of an arbitrary conflation of meanings than the pun. It operates more violently, often disrupting the integrity of received grammatical and morphological patterns.24 Thus the portmanteau calls attention to the artificiality of language itself, disrupting its authority. Furthermore, Joyce’s style of portmanteau does not produce a single, cohesive meaning, and thus leaves the signifying structure at war with itself. This means that in place of the unitary meaning of the representative text, the performative text produces multiple meanings and interpretations, never entirely under the control of the author. Cixous remarks that “In Joyce, writing has resources which will produce something uncontrollable.”25 But this is not only true of Joyce and his portmanteaux: it is true of all feminine writing. I was able to find semen in Cixous’s white ink because

in his mouth alerting me that it is feeding time. I pour some of his kibble fortified for “the middle aged dog” into his bowl; some of the pieces spill onto the

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pure nonsense we whirl laughing, laughing.’”51 In laughing, the female (or the reader, for Woolf) enjoys the ridicule of tradition as the Other emerges through a different language.

The task of this new female language is “to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the ‘truth’ with laughter.”52 Alice literally overturns the Queen’s court of law at the end of her Adventures: “she toppled over the jurybox with the edge of her skirt, upsetting all the jurymen.”53 Symbolically, Alice disrupts the epitome of logos – the court of law – with a defining garment of femininity: her skirt, which pointedly upsets the men of the jury. In this fitting example of a Cixousian disruption, Alice seems to enact the declaration: “Now, I – woman am going to blow up the Law: an explosion henceforth possible and ineluctable; let it be done, right now, in language.”54 Though Alice performs such an act more in content than in language, she explodes the law and is able to speak. She asserts herself in both writing and speaking; first, she writes for the White King: “A sudden thought struck her, and she took hold of the end of the pencil … and began writing for him,”55 and at the end of her Adventures, she will not be silenced:

she had relinquished control over the meaning of her text. A writer cannot control the substance of the unconscious; she can only work to create a breach in language through which that uncontrolled, unsignifiable world might make itself felt.

Feminine writing thus has two limitations: difficulty of comprehension on the part of the reader and lack of control over meaning on the part of the writer. Both of these difficulties arise because of feminine writing’s emphasis on performative elements of language.

Since those elements do not signify, the meaning of a text that emphasizes them can never be immediately clear to either the reader or the writer. This is how the unconscious finds expression: by circumventing conscious intentions and traditional laws. Feminine writing subverts the representational side of language in order to upset the associated tradition of thought. Cixous calls this gesture feminine because the opposition between man and woman subsumes all of the other hierarchical opposition from which the tradition is constituted, so that whoever upsets that tradition is a woman.

snow-white floor, and he slurps them up like a vacuum. Nix enjoys his dinner as usual; he doesn’t mind the sameness. I’ve wondered often about rotating food for him, but it seems

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“‘Hold your tongue!’ said the Queen, turning purple. ‘I won’t!’ said Alice.”56 In the end, Alice writes and speaks before and against authority, just as, for Cixous, woman “must write herself, because this is the invention of a new insurgent writing”57 against patriarchy.

In the end, readers must remember that Alice’s adventures are technically dream episodes. According to Cixous, women, “Muffled throughout their history… have lived in dreams, in bodies (though muted), in silences, in aphonic revolts,”58 and so Carroll elucidates a female experience in the adventures of his protagonist, Alice, who lives in dreams. He writes the feminine as he exposes the repressed. Cixous claims that unconsciousness is the repressed in which women persevere: “the unconscious, that other limitless country, is the place where the repressed manage to survive: women.”59 Alice, as a young woman, not only survives but discovers herself in the infinite realms of her unconscious dreams. The last line of Carroll’s final poem concludes, “Life, what is it but a dream?”60 For Cixous and Irigaray, women’s lives depend on the realization of a dream of a language of self-expression that exists outside the phallogocentric and constrictive reality in which they live. Carroll achieves this form of expression by writing Alice through her dreams.

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That said, as the example of Joyce proves, feminine writing is also possible for male writers because male sexuality itself is feminine: it has been eclipsed by the phallic monosexuality of the tradition and forced to occupy a similar space in the unconscious.

Feminine writing does not exclude; that is the task of the tradition. Instead, it opens expression up to all those who work against the tradition by writing with white ink.

that it is not the taste of the food or the texture he likes but that I give it to him. Often, I sneak him scraps of steak from the cutting-board and pretend it’s the raw heart of a moose we’ve

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Notes 1

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, 12.

Kelly Oliver, Introduction to “Feminine Writing and Women’s Difference,” 254.

3 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 261.

4 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, 13.

5 Carroll, Looking-Glass,138.

6 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, 33.

7 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 781.

8 Ibid., 782.. His view supports a perception of the female as scotomized; that is, as a blind spot (hole) in the optical field of vision that is glossed over and incorporated into a holistic picture (pardon the pun).

9 Ibid., 781.

10 Harry Levin, “Wonderland Revisited,” 597.

11 Carolyn G. Heilbrun, “A Response to Writing and Sexual Difference,” 808.

12 Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 261.

13 Luce Irigaray, “Body Against Body,” 247.

14 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, 5.

15 Ibid., 16.

16 Carroll, Looking-Glass, 140.

17 Ibid., 138-9.

18 Carolyn Burke “Irigaray Through the Looking-Glass,” 296.

19 Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One,” 210.

Irigaray responds to tradition, specifically to Lacanian theory involving “The Mirror Stage,” when an infant recognizes himself as other in his mirror image.

20 Ibid., 210.

21 The “speculum” refers partly to a gynecologist’s speculum investigating the female’s physiological sex.

22 Carroll, Looking-Glass, 139.

23 Ibid., 148.

24 Heilbrun “A Response to ‘Writing and Sexual Difference,’” 808.

Continued on next page…

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Notes Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in French Feminism Reader, ed. Kelly Oliver (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 257.

1

2

Ibid., 261.

3

Ibid.

4

Ibid.

5

Ibid., 260.

6

Ibid., 258.

Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” in French Feminism Reader, ed. Kelly Oliver (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 279.

8 James Joyce, Ulysses (London: The Pitman Press, 1954), 712–713.

7

9

Ibid., 739.

10 11 12 13

Ibid., 742.

Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 266.

Ibid.

Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” 278–279.

Hélène Cixous, “Prediction to First Names of No One,” in The Hélène Cixous Reader, ed. Susan Sellers (New York: Routledge, 1994), 31.

14

15

Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 259.

16

Ibid., 275.

17

Ibid., 266.

18

Ibid.

19

Ibid., 263.

20

Cixous, “Prediction to First Names of No One,” 30.

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (Toronto: Penguin, 2000), 229.

21

Ruben Borg, “Neologizing in Finnegans Wake: Beyond a Typology of the Wakean Portmanteau,” Poetics Today 28.1 (2007): 145.

22

23

Ibid.

24

Ibid., 145–146.

Cixous, “Prediction to First Names of No One,” 31.

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just killed together. Kibble or moose heart, Nix is at home when he’s eating. The thought of moose-heart makes me hungry. Constance takes a long time upstairs. “Constance?”

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29

Notes Cixous “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 259.

Carroll, Looking-Glass, 169.

27 Ibid., 169.

28 Levin, “Wonderland Revisited,” 598.

29 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, 77.

30 Burke, “Irigaray through the Looking Glass,” 299.

31 The editor’s note to on the second-last page of the Looking-Glass notes that the first letters of each line of the proceeding poem that ends Carroll’s series when read downward give the full name of the original Alice – Alice Pleasance Liddell (Carroll, Looking-Glass, 272).

32 Burke, “Irigaray through the LookingGlass,” 299.

33 Ibid., 296.

34 Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 266.

35 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, 10.

36 Carroll, Looking-Glass, 169-70.

37 Burke, “Irigaray through the Looking Glass,” 299.

38 Ibid., 289.

39 Levin, “Wonderland Revisited,” 598.

40 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, 16.

41 Burke, “Irigaray through the Looking- Glass,” 289.

42 Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 263.

43 “And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it” (Ibid., 259).

44 Ibid., 267.

45 Heilbrun, “A Response to ‘Writing and Difference,’” 809.

46 Ibid., 806-7.

47 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, 93.

25 26

Burke, “Irigaray through the Looking-Glass,” 304. 49 Carroll, Looking-Glass, 207.

50 Oliver “Introduction,” 255.

51 Hilma Wolitzer, “Foreword,” xii.

52 Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 269.

53 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, 114.

54 Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 268.

55 Carroll, Looking-Glass, 143.

56 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, 121.

57 Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 261.

58 Ibid., 268.

59 Ibid., 261.

60 Carroll, Looking-Glass, 273.

48

Down the Rabbit-Hole and Through the Mirror

I listen. “Constance?” I listen harder this time then wander upstairs. At the top of the stairs, I freeze, but I can only make out a faint sound. The faucet is running in the bathroom next to

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f m nce o s so oduce cepta om i c a d t e o it and pr e e n s u s o i Fr r a ntly, to alism Liber facture it consta u n a m nstraints and the to , [the system] of co it, with, of course – Michel Foucault, problems of cost raised by this production.

The Birth of Biopolitics

Introduction, Ontology, Method Discussions regarding the relation between Foucault and Marx have often been overshadowed by either the differences in their normative approaches to social struggle, confined to their different views of history, or have merely engaged with the relation to Marx through Foucault’s relation to French Marxism (especially that of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Althusser).1 In this paper, I intend to bracket these questions. Instead, I wish to examine an important intersection between the two social theorists. For both, an analysis of the capitalist period was of the utmost importance. My suggestion is that, if we bracket the questions above, a dialogue can be established, where Foucault and Marx offer mutually illuminating answers to the same question: how is subjectivity formed in the early capitalist period?

In a way, what I propose is to read Marx in a Foucauldian way and Foucault in a Marxian (as opposed to Marxist) way or, to put it more precisely, to read Marx through the lens of a Foucauldian method and ontology and to read Foucault through a Marxian interest in capitalism.

The conditions of this dialogue, obviously, require some articulation.

First of all, I wish to dismiss the question concerning historical “progress” (whether teleological, humanistic, dialectical, etc.). In doing so, I intend to avoid the confrontation between Foucault’s methodological Nietzscheanism and Marx’s (revolutionary turning of) Hegelian dialectics.

Rather, I read Marx as deconstructing the structure of capitalism,2 which

me; Constance reaches and turns it off. Heavy mineral-rich drops splash in a small puddle forming on the sink’s drain. Light, from the vanity mirror, juts out at angles from the slightly

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means that I read Marx not as a historical determinist but as in a negative engagement that tries to undermine and articulate the structure of capitalism that shapes everyday life. Thus, the question I pose is one of the compatibility of the two social theories.

Secondly, I am not trying to trace influences (from Marx to Foucault, that is) or to “choose sides” but merely to ferret out the formations of subjectivities, i.e. the functions of these subjectivities and their conditions, in the early capitalist period.

Thirdly, to read Marx through the lens of Foucault is an unorthodox approach. First of all, because it places Marx in a Foucauldian ontology which implies an extreme skepticism concerning any claim to “truth” and “reality.” Rather than making one level of analysis the primary and all others secondary, Foucault’s ontology is an “open” ontology based on discursive events.3 That is, it is always open to new domains of truth and reality. This means that we cannot understand Marx’s economic basis as the real basis of society and the theories about this as the truth (or the science). Instead, I intend to read Marx’s analysis as describing a particular domain of truth. This will place Marx within the open ontology of Foucault. Secondly, my reading of Marx will not engage in the discussion concerning continuity and discontinuity between different “phases” or “approaches” in Marx’s thinking but instead try to develop an overall narrative that can be understood as constituting such a particular domain of truth.

In short, I want to examine the historical formations of subjectivity in Marx’s and Foucault’s social theories concerning the early capitalist period. By establishing this dialogue, I hope to show that Marx’s interest in the conditions of production, exemplified by his description of the automaton in Grundrisse, can be reread as an interest in the power relations of the workplace and that this will provide Foucault with a more adequate conjunction between the mechanisms of discipline and security.

open bathroom door. Constance stands, one hip cocked, one eye-closed and the other wide, casually applying some mascara in the mirror. “I called for you. Is everything ok?” I ask.

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The Process of Subjectivity Central to this endeavor is, obviously, the notion of subjectivity.

Central to Marx’s thinking is a rejection of any transcendental notion of subjectivity. Famously, Marx proclaims in his Theses on Feuerbach: “Feuerbach resolved the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.”4 Marx sees man and hence subjectivity not as relying on transcendental presuppositions but as constituted by their social relations. This means that we cannot conceive of subjectivity outside of society or of any constant human essence.

Subjectivity is not something that “enters the world” but something that is formed by it. As he writes in The German Ideology: “As individuals express their life, so they are. That they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.”5 As individuals are determined by what and how they produce, subjectivity is not only determined by its historical context but also by its particular place within that historical context. In short, subjectivity is never in a vacuum. It cannot be understood (or, rather: it does not exist) apart from its specific function. Subjectivity is always a process.

Similarly, Foucault is opposed to any presupposed notion of subjectivity.

Foucault, too, holds the view that subjectivity must be understood as originating in a socio-historical context. In his exemplary analysis of the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish, Foucault writes: “It is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies.”6 For Foucault, too, subjectivity is understood as a process in a field of power. Subjectivity is fabricated. This means that in order to understand a historical period, we must understand the different kinds of subjectivities at play in it, and in order to understand the subjectivities at play, we must understand how they function and what their conditions are.

“Yeah,” she says back. “You called? I must not have heard you because of the faucet. Sorry.

Are you ready to go?” She contorts her face into an Iroquois shaman mask and finishes

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Security, Discipline, Law In the last chapter of The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, when speaking about the political regulation of biological processes such as birth, life expectancy, and the level of health, Foucault writes: “This bio-power was, without question, an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes.”7

With these few lines published in 1976, Foucault introduces the term “bio-power.” This notion marks a shift in Foucault’s work in two ways. Firstly, it signifies a more explicit engagement with contemporary politics than in his earlier work. Thus, bio-politics is “an indispensable” characteristic for capitalism. Secondly, what he presents in the contrast between “the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production” on the one hand, and “the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes” on the other hand, is a new level of power-analysis. Earlier, he focused on the juridical mechanisms, which through punishment constitute the difference between what is permitted and what is prohibited action, and the disciplinary mechanism, which through surveillance offers “a possible transformation of individuals.”8 In contrast, the notion of population relates to the domain of power he calls security. This deals with human beings as a species that can be subjected to calculations of probabilities. In Security, Territory, Population he describes these different levels of analysis: The law prohibits and discipline prescribes, and the essential function of security, without prohibiting or prescribing, but possibly making use of instruments of prescription and prohibition, is to respond to a reality in such a way that this response cancels out the reality to which it responds – nullifies it, or limits, checks, or regulates it.9

her make-up. “Oh,” I say, “the faucet. Right.” Nix can tell we are leaving, as we come down the stairs. Anxiety warps his face and the pain in his eyes curls the nerves in my heart

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If we understand power as inherent in social relations (and thus not something one can “have” in abstracto), law is the sovereign’s prohibition of certain actions, discipline is the prescription of a certain individual’s behavior, and security is the regulation of a social reality. Whereas law and discipline involve power exercised over individuals, the subject of security is the population as such, which means that security is indifferent to the particular individual. Security might use law and discipline to achieve its goals, but these goals are on the level of the population rather than the level of individuals: it works through calculations of probabilities. In Foucault’s own words, the final objective of security is the population. The population is pertinent as the objective, and individuals, the series of individuals, are no longer pertinent as the objective … but simply as the instrument, relay, or condition for obtaining something at the level of the population.”10 Obviously, what marks the difference between earlier political systems and capital-ism is not the biological notion of population, nor is it the fact that the population is influenced by politics. Rather, it is the politicization of life understood as the appearance of a new discursive level that constitutes security, as the regulation of the population, as a domain of truth. Thus, bio-power is “what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life.”11 Foucault, Physiocracy, Freedom Foucault (and Marx for that matter) locates the genesis of this discursive formation in the theory of physiocracy. The interesting thing about physiocracy as an economic theory is that it considers the market to be a sphere of reality that must be understood in its complexity rather than as a “site of justice,” where the sovereign can intervene as he pleases.12 Thus, physiocracy is “an economics, or a political-economic analysis, that integrates the moment of production, the world market, and, finally, the economic behavior of the population, of producers and consumers.”13

like spider legs in a candle flame. Poor dog. If only we could hunt on the tundra together.

He watches me from the stair landing. I can’t look at him without feeling guilty, so I put my

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In the second half of the eighteenth century, when physiocracy was most influential, the primary political concern was scarcity, and thus the focus of the physiocratic analysis was agriculture. In order to avoid food scarcity, the physiocrats set out to understand how the production of grain (and not just the market of grain) functioned. This led to the physiocratic proposal that the restrictions on hoarding and export should be lifted. This would lead to an immediate rise in prices, which allowed the peasants to pay for more extensive sowing and better cultivation, and this, in the long run, diminished the probability of scarcity and, as a result, further price increases.

Surely, prices would rise when the first signs of a bad harvest appeared, but, as the physiocrats reasoned, if grain is allowed to be traded freely (inside the country and between countries), people will know that import will take over where the national harvest failed. This means that instead of hoarding the available grain and waiting for the price to go higher, people will put it on the market as soon as the price rises which will keep it from rising further.14 The immediate rise in price will cause some scarcity but not a full-size scarcity. If the government restrains itself from intervening in the grain market, “The scarcity-scourge disappears, but scarcity that causes the death of individuals not only does not disappear, it must not disappear.”15 Hence, the physiocratic analysis functions on the level of population. In this discourse the population is a “political subject” that is distinct from the subjection in both the juridical and disciplinary mechanisms.16 The population is a political subject in the way that it is that which the mechanisms are “directed [towards] in order to have a particular effect,”17 but also the subject of the political analysis, since there is no external intervention.

The population is expected to bring this conduct about by itself.

At the heart of the physiocratic theory is the belief that the population will regulate itself. By leaving the market to function without intervening the physiocrats intended to let the market “formulate its truth and propose it to governmental practice as rule and norm.”18 This established the market

hand on his head but keep my eyes on Constance. “Good boy,” I say to Nix. But Constance misunderstanding me says, “Good bye? What are you talking about, Francis?” “I just said:

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as a site of truth, where one could observe the “right,” “natural,” or “true” price. The government, then, had to respect these “natural” mechanisms. To consider the market a “site of truth” rather than justice, implies a certain governmentality. This governmentality came to be known as political economy.

Governmentality means “the reasoned way of governing best and, at the same time, reflection on the best possible way of governing.”19 Thus, as “the art of governing” it signifies the inherent principles that a government at a specific time considers to be the norms or principles that it must follow in order to govern properly. In this way, political economy is a governmentality that takes the function of the production or the market as its site of truth. Political economy, as it is introduced by physiocracy, implies that the government imposes a limitation on itself. This is not because an infringement of this limitation would be illegal, as in an infringement of legal rights. Rather, the government must limit itself so as to govern “better,” since the objectives of the government have shifted from the level of individuals to the level of the population. Thus, the government governs through calculations based on the “natural” economic behavior of the market. To achieve its objectives, governmental reason accepts these limits, for only through accepting these limits can the behavior of the population be calculated in such a way that the government can decide what is the most efficient thing to do. Thus, Political economy … considers them [governmental practices] in terms of their effects rather than their origins, not by asking, for example, what authorizes a sovereign to raise taxes, but by asking, quite simply: What will happen if, at a given moment, we raise taxes on a particular category of persons or a particular category of goods?20

Through the political economy the “possibility of limitation and the question of truth” are thus introduced in governmental 21 reasoning. The self-imposed limitation of the government, based on the market as a particular domain of truth, is, for Foucault, what characterizes liberalism as a form of government and capitalism as an economic system, where the market remains unregulated by the government.

“Good boy,” to the dog. Ready?” I ask urgently and reach for her coat from the closet. “Yes. Is everything okay with you?” she asks back. “I’m fine. I’m just hungry.” I come up from

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Foucault suggests that the freedom promised by liberalism must be understood in terms of this particular form of governmentality: [I]n the liberal regime … freedom of behavior is entailed, called for, needed, and serves as a regulator, but it also has to be produced and organized. … Freedom is something which is constantly produced. Liberalism is not acceptance of freedom; it proposes to manufacture it constantly, to arouse it and produce it, with, of course, [the system] of constraints and the problems of cost raised by this production.22

The freedom of the liberal subject is thus not freedom in a transcendental or idealistic sense of the word. Rather, its freedom must be seen as conditioned by the social powers that shape the society in which it arises.

In fact, the free subject is nothing but these power relations. The freedom of the early capitalist period is thus understood as a freedom of government insofar as the government willingly, in order to live up to its own ideals of governing, limits itself and its own sovereignty. In fact, the political economy and the freedom of this kind of liberalism are one and the same: the government limits itself after the model of political economy, and the calculations of the political economy are conditioned by the non-interference of the government. This particular relation is the production of the freedom of liberalism that must be understood as the production of a free labour market with a plenitude of import/export-possibilities. This is the world market.

Simultaneously, this is the production of the population as a political subject. This means, however, that the freedom of liberalism is a freedom on the level of population and not on the level of the individual.

The political-discursive emphasis on population does not entail that the other forms of control are abandoned. In fact, the individual’s subjection to juridical and disciplinary mechanisms is what brings the regulation of the population about: “The problem of security is the protection of the collective interest against individual interests.”23 Foucault references his analysis of the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish as the “conjunction between the disciplines and liberalism.”24 He notes that Panopticism “really is a general political

behind and hug her, running my hands from her waist down to her hipbones. The skin of her tummy is lighter, slightly more peach colored, than the rest of her body. It’s soft here

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formula that characterizes a type of government,”25 but he fails to show how exactly this conjunction functions. Panopticism might very well by the “general formula” for the disciplinary mechanisms, but when he fails to show in concreto how the disciplinary mechanisms work in this period, he actually fails to uncover the conditions that this power relation relies on. However, I think, that this relation between the subjectivity of the individuals and the freedom of the market (that is, the subjectivity called population) in the early capitalist period can be illuminated by (re)reading Marx with the framework offered by Foucault.

Marx and the Automaton Marx’s analysis of the economic system of the early capitalist period is quite similar to Foucault’s. This is not surprising since Marx, to a large extent, bases the descriptive part of his project on theories by the physiocrats and Adam Smith. In Grundrisse, when describing the abolition of tariffs, protection and prohibitions that established the world market, Marx writes: Free competition is the relation of capital to itself as another capital, i.e. it is the real behaviour of capital as such. …

Production founded on capital only establishes itself in so far as free competition develops, since free competition is the free development of the conditions and means of production founded on capital and of the process which constantly reproduces these conditions. It is not individuals but capital that establishes itself freely in free competition. 26

Marx, too, acknowledges the market as a domain of truth in which the “real behavior of capital” can be observed. Furthermore, he recognizes that in the free competition, i.e., when the government understands and respects its own limits as they are revealed by the political economy, this behavior is self-regulating. Marx, too, considers the population a political entity that is simultaneously its own subject and object.27 This, however, means that it is “not individuals but capital that established itself freely.” Yet again, Marx seems to

against my rough hands. Cool too, against my clammy nervous fingers. Feeling my wife, my lover, close to me for the first time in weeks, fills me with a calm warmth like a fire in

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anticipate Foucault’s analysis by identifying a level of power (that of capital) that is indifferent to the level of individuals. In a certain sense, the freedom of liberalism is the freedom of capital. Marx writes: “This kind of individual liberty is at the same time the most complete suppression of all individual liberty and total subjugation of individuality to social conditions which take the form of material forces – and even of all-powerful objects that are independent of the individuals relating to them.”28 For Marx, the formation of subjectivity at the level of the population, which was marked by the establishment of the world market, is based in a change in the formation of individual subjectivity.

It is the “complete suppression of all individual liberty.” The character of this relation is illuminated by Marx’s detailed work on the actual conditions of workers in the early capitalist period. A paradigmatic (but somewhat overlooked) example of this is what Marx calls the automaton.

In Marx’s terminology the automaton is a machine that works more or less automatically or, rather, that “consists of a number of mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves can be no more than the conscious limbs of the automaton.”29 As a piece of machinery, the automaton is fixed capital, i.e., a piece of equipment used but not used up in the production process. The automaton is, for Marx, paradigmatic for the production process in the capitalist society, where the worker merely functions as a part of a larger mechanical or industrial complex. Here, labour is “dispersed, subjected to the general process of the machinery itself, it is itself only a limb of the system, whose unity exists not only in the living workers but in the living (active) machinery, which seems to be a powerful organism when compared to their individual, insignificant activities.”30 Marx’s automaton functions on two levels: that of discipline and that of security. Firstly, when the worker functions as a “limb” of the machinery, it means that his body is subjected to the disciplinary mechanism of the factory, where he must adjust to a certain movement and rhythm of work

the Yukon. Just as my Klondike fantasy begins to flicker like a soft flame, she spins away from my arms and stares at me disapprovingly and sighs. Her breath like a fog of gin

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that seeks to heighten his productivity. In this way, the automaton can be said to resemble the Panopticon, since it isolates the worker and seeks to discipline him to heighten his efficiency. In the automaton the worker subjugates himself to the machine. The work done is no longer dependent on the skill of the worker but rather on the “technological application of science”31 to which the worker must subject himself. In Marx’s words, the worker “is no longer the principal agent of the production process: he exists alongside it.”32 In Marxian terms this is (one kind of) alienation.

Secondly, this apparatus, with its alienating consequences for the worker, influences the level of security by rendering the individuals “insignificant.” By confining the role of the individual to that of a limb in the machinery, literally anyone can take the place of the individual worker. Without intending to do so, the workers render their individual interest insignificant for the accumulation of capital. Thus, the automaton is a joint or conjuncture between discipline and political economy. A conjuncture, I believe, that is also present in the Marxian understanding of exploitation, where the workers do not render themselves richer from working in the factory but, in the long run, causes their own impoverishment.

Exploitation for Marx is essentially related to the theory of surplus value, where the product of the worker’s labour is of more value than the labour itself. As the capitalist owns the product of labour, he owns the surplus value. This surplus value takes the form of either an investment in new fixed capital (which will streamline the disciplinary mechanisms further) or in circulating capital (that is, resources that through the labour of the worker must accumulate more surplus value for the capitalist): “Labour power has not only produced alien wealth and its own property, but also the relationship of this wealth (as wealth concerned exclusively with itself) to itself as poverty, through the consumption of which wealth puts new life into itself and again makes itself fruitful.”33

teases my nose. “Looks like someone can’t tell the difference between hungry and horny,” she says, smirking now. “Let’s go.” I have to battle Nix back into the house as we leave;

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Labour power thus produces wealth for the capitalist and in doing so it produces the conditions for its own subjugation. The value of the product of labour is set as high as possible (on the current market) to accumulate surplus capital for the capitalist, while the value of labour is set just low enough for the worker to fulfill his biological needs. The exploitation and alienation of the individual workers are thus, according to Marx, the conditions of the free market. The “natural” price that appears on the market relies on the disciplinary subjection of the individual worker in the factory, but once these disciplinary mechanisms have been established they become self-enforcing since they accumulate more capital that ultimately will be invested in more production, with more exploitation, which again accumulates more capital.

In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx writes “political economy hides the alienation in the essence of labour by not considering the immediate relationship between the worker (labour) and production.”34 Through the dialogue with Foucault, we can elaborate on this “hiding of alienation” present in the “relationship between the worker and production” by saying that political economy functions on the level of the population and, further, that the type of capitalist production that is entailed by political economy is, in fact, conditioned by this alienation, which is a result of the disciplinary mechanisms in the automaton.

How, then, is this alienation hidden? This hiddenness is explained by the fact that political economy as a form of security is indifferent to particular individuals but operates on the level of calculations of probabilities. Thus, the “natural” price for labour is a price that maintains a certain level of health (the level that will enable the workers to fulfill their role in the industrial complex) and a birthrate that will secure labour for the future. This, however, is not on the level of the individual worker: it is not a matter of individual rights. Rather, it is a calculated “average” – which means that some workers will not have the income necessary to maintain a decent level of health and reproduction.

Constance leads a few steps ahead. From the dark yard a man’s voice startles us. “Connie?”

As he speaks I hear a small dog snort somewhere near the mystery man’s feet. His clothes

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In fact, this is necessary to keep the price of labour down – to maintain the “average” that the production is conditioned by.

Marx, with his somewhat simplified materialistic-dialectic view of history, saw this self-enforcing process on the level of population as necessarily continuing more or less uninterrupted to the point where the proletariat would form a class in society big enough to overthrow the bourgeoisie. Famously, he claimed in the Manifesto that “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”35 This must be understood as an internal conflict on the level of security, where the danger of the individual interests (that is, the proletarians) finally reaches a point, where they over-throw the “general interest” of political economy. Both history and the dialogue with Foucault show that this historical necessity was an illusion. Obviously, I now come dangerously close to questions concerning normativity and views of history that are well out of the scope of this essay. I would like to suggest, however, that reading Marx through the ontological pluralizing lens of Foucault might illuminate not only the methodological but also social theoretical failures of the normative aspects of Marx’s endeavor, while, simultaneously, adding the important aspect of power relations to production, which functions as a conjuncture between the levels of security and discipline, that curiously enough seem to be lacking in Foucault’s own work.

Conclusion Foucault’s failure to consider labour as an important conjuncture between security and discipline might be explained as a strategic way of distancing himself from the self-proclaimed French Marxists of the 1960s and 70s.

Today, however, attempts to conceptualize the capitalist system are either abandoned at the start or focused primarily on analyses of ideological formations, and so I believe that a genealogy of capitalism is of utmost importance. Here, Foucault’s analysis of the early capitalist period as the birth of biopolitics is an appealing starting point. Foucault’s analysis

blend into the suburban night. Fear squeezes sweat from my every pore and three or four small drops of urine from my bladder. I don’t recognize the voice; it’s gruff and dry much

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successfully identifies a governmentality based on political economy, which holds the market to be a particular domain of truth, as the characteristic event for liberalism and capitalism. He fails, however, to adequately connect the subjectivity form known as population to the subjectivity of individuals. To do this, I believe one must consider the subjectivity involved in the process of production known as labour, and this is where I suggest that a revision or rereading of Marx is essential.

Marx’s automaton functions as a paradigmatic joint between these two levels of subjectivity by showing how the industrial workplace is, simultaneously, a mechanism of discipline designed to heighten the efficiency of the individual worker and a mechanism of security since it renders the individual and his particular skills insignificant for the process of production. Further, as Marx argues, through the accumulation of capital through surplus value that can be invested in new ways of production, the workers effectively help re-enforcing their own exploitation by reproducing its conditions. By working, they lower the price of their own labour to its “natural� price, which is the price that up-holds the industrial complex of accumulation-exploitation by rendering itself more and more indifferent to the individual.

like the voice of a man who has eaten too much salt; like a man who has recently sat in a bar eating nuts for a long time; like a man eating heavily salted nuts while he thinks about

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Notes For example, Foucault’s interview with Duccio Trombadori, published in English as Remarks on Marx, should be renamed Remarks on Marxism (cf.

Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx).

2 cf. Bradley Macdonald, “Marx, Foucault, Genealogy,” 270.

3 cf. Michael Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 29ff. Also, Foucault says in “The Discourse on Language”: “The genealogical side of discourse … attempts to grasp it in its power of affirmation, by which I do not mean a power opposed to that of negation, but the power of constituting domains of objects” (cited in Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism & History 9).

4 Karl Marx, Selected Writings, 157.

5 Ibid. 161.

6 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 217.

7 Foucault, The Foucault Reader, 163.

8 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 5.

9 Ibid., 47.

1o Ibid., 42.

11 The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, in Foucault, The Foucault Reader, 265.

12 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 30.

13 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 19771978, 41.

14 Ibid., 39.

1

Ibid., 42 Ibid.

17 Ibid., 43.

18 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 30.

19 Ibid., 2.

20 Ibid., 15.

21 Ibid., 17 22 Ibid., 65.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., 67.

25 Ibid.

26 Marx, Selected Writings, 371.

27 This might seem to be a strange claim, but population, I believe, is essentially hidden in Marx’s notion of capital: capital is indifferent to individuals, since capital is the sign of the behaviour of the population. In the market economy, the flow of capital signifies exactly the “natural” behaviour of the population. I will return to this hiddenness later.

28 Ibid., 372.

29 Ibid., 373.

30 Ibid., 374.

31 Ibid., 375.

32 Ibid., 380.

33 Ibid., 367.

34 Ibid., 79.

35 Marx, Selected Writings, 222.

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Capital and Power

confronting his estranged lover in-front of her puny husband whom he then shoots or stabs. Nix howls perched on the couch looking out the front window. I wonder if Nix can

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Untangling the

Gabe Hoogers

Myth of Liberal-

Democracy in Th

eory and Practic

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Introduction At the beginning of this decade, there exists a renewed sense of democratic triumphalism. As authoritarian regimes have faltered and collapsed throughout the Middle East, Francis What we may be witnessing Fukuyama’s famous declaration, pronouncing is not just the end of the the end of history, appears again to be relevant: Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.1

However, this universalizing statement is threatened, as always, by the burdensome theory it claims to endorse. Liberal-democracy as it exists today is a conflation of multiple contradictory ideas, and yet it has come to define what it means to be a ‘democratic’ state. “Democracy,” according to Joseph Nye, a prominent political theorist, “is government by officials who are accountable and removable by the majority of people in a jurisdiction (albeit with provisions for protections of individuals and minorities).”2 Nye here conveys a representation of the currently prominent Western political system, liberal-democracy. Such a definition is profoundly confused, however, if it hopes to grasp at democracy, a term irreducible to the present, impossible to isolate from its rich roots in the Greek polis and the inspired re-envisionings of the late renaissance.

Confronted with the challenge of a widely accepted, but confused, conception of democracy, some prominent thinkers have provided more sophisticated formulations of democracy. John Hoffman, Michael Hardt,

smell the man; sense the unease of the pack – my unease. Constance strains her neck to see into the darkness; the hair on her neck stiffens and glistens in the porch light. The

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Antonio Negri, and Canadian political theorist C.B. Macpherson provide essential historical background for this endeavour. Hoffman summarizes the task at hand: Because democracy suffers from this tantalizing ambiguity, it is a concept whose threads cannot be disentangled without historical analysis. It is only as we follow the twists and turns of its conceptual development that we can begin to acquire the perspective and contextual feel necessary to focus analysis.3

What all these thinkers point to as a primary concern is the extent to which ‘liberal’ and ‘democracy’ have been conflated. Sadly, this process has not been isolated to theory – populations have been disenfranchised, and communities impoverished, as often unrestrained capitalism advances at the expense of wide-spread democratic empowerment.

Of the most egregious cases of democratic disempowerment at the hands of capitalism is found in the history of colonised Latin America, described vividly by Eduardo Galeano in The Open Veins of Latin America.

Since that book was written, Latin America has again suffered from the advancement of capitalist markets under the programme of neoliberalism, another attempt to open up the markets of the region in the late 1980s and 90s. That neoliberal programme became known as the ‘Washington Consensus’ – essentially an attempt to expand the reach of capital, and provide for capitalistic growth, often under the guise of democracy.4 Vast numbers of the Latin American population have suffered as a result.

Rising from the culmination of the neoliberal programme in Latin America, however, are powerful populist movements that seek to challenge the ‘liberal-democratic’ initiative. Those movements, though only recently emergent, provide pragmatic examples of democracy decoupled in theory from liberalism. The success of such movements will help to determine whether democracy can be reconceived, recovered from the liberal capitalism that has been conflated with it over time.

man stands just outside the porch light’s globe of safety—where I want to stay. “Hello?”

Constance inserts into the calm suburban night. “Connie, it’s me, Ken,” the unwelcome

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Democracy before Liberalism The history of democracy reveals conceptions of a form of society entirely separate from later liberal, capitalist forms. In fact, many of these conceptions appear to undermine the very foundations of liberalism itself.

Prior to the development of liberalism (during the 17th century, according to Macpherson), democracy existed in a variety of possible visions of society.5 Famously, ancient Greek democracy was the first organized political system in which all citizens could directly engage in political decisions.

However, such a system contained within it implicit contradictions: many were excluded from the criteria of citizenship, and it was materially reliant on a huge class of slaves. The challenge, then, is to express democracy as a pure form – one that sheds the contradictory baggage of actual political orders. Hardt and Negri indicate that the notion of democracy is present in the writings of Spinoza, as early as the 17th century: When Spinoza calls democracy absolute he assumes that democracy is really the basis of every society. The vast majority of our political, economic, affective, linguistic and productive interactions are always based on democratic relations.6

Hardt and Negri expose the political value of such a statement: democracy is the basis of most everyday exchange, and the contrived superimposition of liberalism stifles democracy in the political realm. The task is to conceive of a political system that allows humanity’s democratic possibilities to be expressed without infringement. Such were the societies that sought to expose the notion of class as a political superimposition, according to Macpherson.

Democracies, he argues, have been interpreted as “rule by the poor, the ignorant, the incompetent.”7 In fact, the task for many political philosophers was to formulate a conception of society without such divisions: one which recognizes that current models construct classes and that class is not essential to any particular individual. “When we look at these democratic visions and theories,” writes Macpherson, “we shall find […] that they all depended on, or were made to fit a non-class-divided society. It is hardly too much

visitor insists, “from Lucy’s funeral.” “Oh God,” Constance whispers breathlessly. “What are you doing here? You can’t be here. Why are you here? Please go away.” But she knows

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to say that for most of them democracy was a classless or one-class society.”8 Thomas More’s vision in Utopia and other democratic conceptions like it shared this classless theme because within the logic of such thought, democracy is not possible while classes remain. Indeed, a purely democratic society would certainly be classless – participation by poor classes, so often the majority, would abolish economic inequality.

When power is eroded from institutional structures that enable inequality, into the hands of populations previously disenfranchised from institutional power, inequality, by definition, disappears. Interestingly, however, Macpherson holds a view that reverses such chronology: The other prerequisite [of democracy] is a great reduction of the present social and economic inequality, since that inequality … requires a non-participatory party system to hold the society together. And as long as inequality is accepted, the non-participatory political system is likely also to be accepted by all those in all classes who prefer stability to the prospect of complete social breakdown.9

In other words, unless inequality is challenged, true democracy cannot exist, for those who hold power, society’s elites, will refuse to part with it, and populations will refuse to combat their supremacy. These two accounts indicate a sort of catch-22 for democracy: to have democracy, you must have equality of income (and other social factors), but equality of income is only possible given democracy. The critical question is how, or if, such an impasse can be overcome. Is the project of democracy untenable given its demands? Again, Spinoza’s early conception provides an indication: Modern democracy […] has no limits and this is why Spinoza calls it ‘absolute.’ This move from the many to everyone is a small semantic shift, but one with extraordinarily radical consequences! With this universality comes equally radical conceptions of equality and freedom.10

Democracy, then, is unlimited in its conceptions, and such a formulation of pure democracy provokes radical and endless reforms. As a historical example, suggests John Hoffman, “If people equate democracy with freedom and equality, why stop with adult male citizens? The principle of liberty is bound to go to extremes. As a principle, it implies a

it’s too late. “Excuse me. I’m Francis,” I say. “Constance’s husband. Can I help you with anything?” I don’t mean to sound frightened, but I am and I do. If Nix were with me fear

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potential universality which limited applications of the principle contradict.

Herein lies its ambiguous character.”11 To suggest that a society, by this account, is ‘democratic’ is to confuse a universal process with a definitive political character. Democracy is the radical process towards the equalization of power, and though some subjective applications of such equalization occur in political policy, it is not possible to classify an entire system as democratic, for only some characteristics promote the universal process. The challenge is to assess which particular trends or policies are democratic. The mistake is to assume that such a task comes without significant implications for other processes at work, particularly those of liberalism. As Macpherson reveals, democratic forms come as an afterthought in the development of liberalism, and the two ideas have often clashed in practice. It is in the historical examination of liberalism’s ascendancy that one can locate the tensions in the two concepts and possibilities for overcoming those tensions.

Conceiving Liberal-Democracy Famously, C.B. Macpherson illustrated the inextricable connection between property ownership (and the market economy) and ‘liberalism’ in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Indeed, liberalism is a set of values that strengthen the market economy, providing moral justification for all that the market brings with it. Insofar as liberalism represents a moral strengthening of capitalism, it is not unusual to use these terms interchangeably, though there are subtle differences in each theory, one being predominantly moral, the other economic. John Hoffman further extends the analogy, arguing that liberalism commodifies the individual: “The social activity of individuals appears to them as ‘the action of objects’, since individuals make contact only when they exchange ‘things’ […] Individuals confront one another as persons whose will resides in the objects they exchange.”12 Further, as individuals come to interact on the basis of their wage labour, inequality is necessarily built into liberal interaction, suggests Hoffman. As a moral justification to

wouldn’t be an option, but alone, packless, it finds my soul and tightens my chest. “Good evening, Francis.” says Ken still with the dry voice finally stepping into the light. He’s about

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limitlessly accumulate wealth, liberal theory neglects its duty to protect the social whole. Hence, some aspects of liberalism are clearly and necessarily anti-democratic. Liberalism creates the justification for an institution, capitalism, which regulates the distribution of wealth. As wealth becomes more unequally distributed, powers – to purchase goods, participate in forms of social life, engage in politics, etc. – concentrate in fewer numbers, who can then control the distribution of their own wealth through wages.

Democratic aspects of liberalism were an afterthought, only arising from the forceful political pressure of the underprivileged and with great reluctance.

A democratic aspect of the governance of liberal society was only considered by liberal theorists late in the 18th century. Macpherson illustrates that The concept of a liberal democracy became possible only when theorists – first a few then most liberal theorists – found reasons for believing that ‘one man, one vote’ would not be dangerous to property, or to the continuance of class-divided societies. The first systematic thinkers to find so were Bentham and James Mill, in the early nineteenth century.13

Further, Mill and Bentham were, to a certain degree, forced to reformulate liberal theory when the working class began expressing its discontent through popular mobilization, and liberals could no longer morally justify the horrendous state of living of most of the lower class.14 Bentham and Mill’s theories justify extending voting rights to non-property owners, but only if the sacred institution of property remains sacrosanct, as for Bentham, “without security of property in the fruits of one’s labour […] civilization is impossible […] Hence, between equality and security, the law must have no hesitation: ‘equality must yield.’”15 Inevitably, because the theorists’ priority remained the preservation of property, only minor democratic concessions were made, and ones that would safely ensure that the anti-democratic inequality of liberal relations remained. In Macpherson’s own words: “This was the genesis of the first modern model

six feet tall with nicely done hair swept to the side, a Blackberry hangs on his hip, and his cologne almost chokes me. Attached to a long leather lead is an ugly shih tzu with an

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of democracy. It is neither inspiring nor inspired. The democratic franchise provisions were put in the model only belatedly.”16 It was only with the passing of a generation that liberalism would begin to take on the guise of humanism, with the writings of John Stuart Mill.

The younger Mill argued that liberal society’s role should be to enable the self-development of the individual, acknowledging the barriers to that aim within his own society. Mill argued, famously, in favour of universal suffrage, which still included some important anti-democratic caveats, including an uneven distribution of votes. It was the first genuine attempt to democratize liberalism for the sake of the marginalized. Importantly, by Mill’s time, a new liberal-democratic experiment was underway – the United States – and Mill was highly influenced by its attempts at democracy within a market society. The United States was able to reconcile extending the franchise to the poor because they could acquire property and therefore had a stake in property protection. Importantly, though, even in the United States, democracy was distrusted and protected against: “the struggles which had ensued in the eleven years since the Declaration of Independence appeared to many to exemplify the turbulence and follies of democracy.”17 For many of the Founding Fathers, democracy was a political form from which society should be defended, representing a threat to the very founding principles of liberalism, synonymous with civilized society. Ultimately, it was argued that extending the vote to the poor did not necessarily affect class association; importantly for Mill, it had the possibility of developing the political character of individuals.

Thus, liberal theory was reworked to include more popular provisions, but as Macpherson notes, Mill’s goal of allowing for unlimited development of the individual under this system inevitably fails. Some of the ‘democratic’ characteristics of early American and reformed British government were ultimately subdued by the effects of unlimited capitalist enterprise, and the weakness of the democratic initiatives themselves.

obscene red collar; it begins to snarl at me and snort. Nix growls louder through the glass.

“I’m here for Connie,” Ken says. “I’m in love with her. She’s the most important thing in

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The development of democracy in the form of an expanded franchise in liberal states did not, ultimately, eliminate the socially constructed inequalities of poverty, nor did it produce a state of unlimited opportunity.

In fact, many inequalities were built into this new ‘democratic’ enterprise, such as the exclusion of women, racialized, and indigenous people from suffrage, which only ceded with immense pressure from organized social movements. Initially, liberal democracies were democratically limited in a number of fundamental respects that have ultimately defined today’s liberal societies. Firstly, democracy in the form of the vote is necessarily a form of limited disempowerment because power of decision-making is transferred to representative figures, only removable by election. In theory, representatives are to express the general will of their constituents, with each voter having no more influence than any other, but this is not always the case in practice.

Capital began to interfere in American democratic processes early on, particularly as bribing Congressmen became commonplace, and only the wealthy could fund successful election campaigns.18 The liberal ethic that encourages the expansion of capitalistic enterprise motivated the advancement of capital into the political arena in an unpredictable way.

Such a development impacted the effect of the vote of the poor, with elites having the ability to disproportionately affect the political process.

In one respect, Macpherson fails in his analysis, providing theoretical analysis, but often ignoring the populist movements that enable or force that theory. As previously noted, elites in power are reluctant to more equally distribute that power, and only do so if forced by social circumstance.

As history demonstrates, the effects of such circumstance are manifest in all liberal-democratic societies, but Latin America provides one of the most profound and visible examples. Latin America has had to perpetually challenge, since its colonial exploitation, elite rule, and its pronounced social movements in that challenge continue to provide genuine demonstrations of democratic policy opposed to liberal foundations.

my world. These last few weeks without her have been hell on earth. I’m sorry that I am doing this but, Constance, you are my everything. You are my stars and my moon. You are

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Latin America and the Rise of Liberalism In 1971, Eduardo Galeano published one of the most influential analytical histories of Latin America to date, entitled The Open Veins of Latin America. In it, he describes a continent ravaged by the effects of colonialism – Latin America’s populations have been exploited by foreign invaders for the purposes of extracting its extensive resources. Galeano writes: The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing. Our part of the world, known today as Latin America, was precocious: it has specialized in losing ever since those remote times when Renaissance Europeans ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilizations.”19

A dark undertone resonates throughout, as the spectre of liberalism spurs exploitation as a means for the growth of capital. Indeed, one predominant driver of colonialism is said to be capitalism.

Latin America, importantly, was of the first regions to react and revolt against colonial rule. In 1813, Simon Bolivar, a Spanish military leader, led the first revolt against the Spanish conquerors of Latin America, liberating Colombia, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador from Spanish control and sparking a movement that spread even further geographically and historically, as will be described below. Galeano explains, however, that Latin American states shed the oppression of colonialism only to take up other anti-democratic forms, ensuring that the resources of the continent would continue to be exploited.20 With those new forms, Latin American populations would face tremendous, often violent, struggles in their attempts to develop genuine democracy. Even the very basic sovereignty of Latin American nations, that which allows for basic institutional democratic policies, would be threatened in the name of liberal expansion.

As capitalistic expansion, driven primarily by the United States and its Monroe Doctrine, infiltrated Latin America, individual populations in nationstates faced their own struggles for democratic empowerment. One stark example of such a struggle is that of Bolivia’s. As one of the states directly

my sun and my flower, you make my world turn, you woke me up from my black and white dreams and introduced me to a colourful world.” I think of transforming into Nix so that

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liberated by Bolivar’s armies, Bolivia had, by the mid-20th-century, an extended tradition of constitutionalism and liberal-democratic government.

Like many nations of its kind, Bolivia faced a situation in which the majority of the population, specifically the indigenous population of the country, was excluded from the basic democratic franchise. More than that, the indigenous majority endured egregious social inequality when compared with their Spanish-descended counterparts. Indigenous populations suffered, without even the guise of equal opportunity, in the liberal framework.

Liberalism has, in other words, established an ethic wherein the white minority is entitled to disproportionate power in the forms of wealth, status, and social rights, while the indigenous majority remains in deplorable conditions.

Bolivians eventually staged a revolution in response to the unrequited promises of liberalism. The inequality of the Bolivian system, which allowed little to no avenue for political dissent of non-citizens in its formal political arena, led to a massive social uprising in 1952. Ultimately, citizenship rights were granted to indigenous populations, mines were nationalized, and the government initiated mass agrarian reform (reappropriating land to underprivileged farmers).21 The revolution demonstrated the culmination of grassroots social movements’ ability to organize populations in Bolivia and a culture of resistance to liberal control. As the 20th century progressed, however, so too did the inequalities that remained in the Bolivian system, despite the revolution. These inequalities would be pushed to their limits at the end of the 20th century in Bolivia’s most recent struggle for democracy.

Democracy Subsumed As liberal society developed and gradually became the dominant political mode of Western cultures, the accepted definition of democracy began to change with it. The earlier Spinozan understanding of democracy as an absolute and universal concept was gradually eroded as popular movements concentrated their efforts on democratizing particularities in the liberal system. Further, the advent of the Cold War brought with it a

I could defend my honor violently and heroically, but that would just hurt Constance more.

Ken’s voice retrieves me from reverie as he concludes the speech: “You see, Baby, it’s you

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a great repression of the multiplicity of democratic visions, subsumed to two options, each perversely formulated: democratic (liberal) or socialist (Soviet) and nothing in between. With that Cold War mentality, a new ‘democracy’ is construed – liberalism and democracy become conflated. The confusion of terms finds its strong theoretical basis in Joseph A. Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, in which “democracy is simply a mechanism for choosing and authorizing governments, not a kind of society nor a set of moral ends; and … the mechanism consists of a competition between two or more self-chosen sets of politicians (elites).”22 The individual, in this conception, has taken on characteristics of market forces within his or her self: he or she is the consumer and material maximizer, and ‘democracy’ is the market. This definition of democracy could only arise as liberalism subsumed democratic thinking into its market logic. In this there are grave implications, for if accepted, a major concession has been made: either the population has unwittingly given up its effective franchise to the rule of the elite, or politicians no longer regard themselves as true representatives of populations. Otherwise, a non-democratic system of government has existed since the beginnings of liberal-democracy, only now accurately described as such (under the false pretences of democracy). Macpherson thinks that the latter is true. He empowers the reader to reject the Cold War view, insinuating that there remains power in populations to change the discourse and practice of democracy, to disentangle it from its liberal-democratic conflation. It is true that despite the limited democratic space in the equilibrium model for alternative discourse, there remains a non-formal power of individuals outside the governmental structure. It is precisely outside formal structures, in grassroots movements, that alternative visions have been able to arise, most coherently and pertinently in the social movements of Latin America.

or nothing.” “What the fuck,” I growl with lupine intent. “What the fuck.” My throat feels like I threw it in a drier on high for an hour. Nix continues to howl in the background –

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The struggle for Bolivia Since the 1970s, the United States has aggressively engaged in the political process of market liberalization. It developed a policy, preliminarily formulated at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, to globalize free capitalist exchange, encouraging, through more or less violent means, the end of isolationist policies and the opening up of unexploited markets.

Often these movements privatized assets which the public had owned before.

In other words, with the capitalist exploitation of resources, profits are concentrated in the hands of a few individuals, rather than being available for the public good. In the 1980s, this policy arrived in its most developed form as the ‘Washington Consensus.’ The ‘Washington Consensus’ represented the most coherent public assertion and policy platform utilizing the rhetoric of democracy to spread a ‘neoliberal’ agenda. It is the culmination of the conflation of liberal-democracy.23 Disproportionately affected by this policy were the populations of multiple Latin American countries, notably Bolivia. During this period, Bolivia’s national assets were privatized, its social programmes were slashed, and as a result, income inequality between its citizens spiked: “fixed” realities of Latin America’s

social formation, like the Bolivian mining unions, once as certain as the rising sun or the eternally snow-capped peaks of the Andes, evaporated under neoliberalism.

This was not just the result of unbridled market forces, but of deliberate political action.24

All of this, of course, was eerily familiar to those with a sense of Latin American history: the colonial era was precisely an oppressive, largely damaging effect of the continual phenomena of capital seeking areas of growth. As this reminder of colonial oppression swept the continent, so too did a growing discontent become more public. Social movements reared their heads, and a crisis of legitimacy developed in neoliberal regimes. Indeed, at the beginning

ever faithful. I turn to Ken and Constance. He’s staring at her like she really does mean the world to him; like she really is his moon and stars. “Fuck. You actually said that?” This

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of the new millennium, the formal political system of Bolivia was experiencing rhetorically violent criticisms that threatened the viability of the entire project of neoliberalism. In particular, the coca workers’ union of Bolivia was leading a strong movement for reform, attempting to build a coalition from a variety of underprivileged groups in Bolivian society. The Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) successfully united these groups. As neoliberal policies culminated, so too did populist reaction.

The unlimited capitalist mentality of neoliberalism culminated in the symbolic ‘Water Wars’ in Bolivia. In 2000, in the province of Cochabamba, the water system was auctioned off to a private corporation, which then ran the system as a for-profit enterprise. This was a direct result of a World Bank demand, which held hostage a $25 million loan until water was privatized, effectively demonstrating a crucial tactic of the Washington Consensus: seizing and exploiting public, previously democratically-managed resources. Inevitably, water prices skyrocketed, forcing artificial drought on large segments of the population. Ultimately, an uprising resulted, demanding the re-nationalization of water supplies. The concerted effort won its demands, and set off an important chain of events in Bolivian history. Over the next 5 years, the successes of social movements continued to bolster opposition to government, and finally, in 2005, the grassroots social movement of MAS won formal political power. For the first time in Bolivian history, Bolivians had an indigenous President, Evo Morales. More than just a symbol of the changing face of politics, Morales embraced a bold rhetoric of social change, one that he promised would push back against the liberal inequalities with which the country had been so plagued. Morales promised a genuine move towards democracy.25

is more a question for God between the Checkout Girl’s legs, but Ken accepts it as his own. “I’m very sorry. I’ll never know exactly how you feel. I know that, but I am so sorry.”

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Progress Towards Genuine Democracy? Bolivia Under Morales Evo Morales was elected in 2005 on a platform of radical change. He promised to challenge the United States and other capitalist hegemonies, to create a new sovereignty in Bolivia. Under the ambiguous title of ‘socialism,’ Morales spoke about promoting indigenous, nationalist, social, and economic rights, and further stressed the need to improve pre-existing democratic structures, reforming representation and political participation as Bolivians knew it. Bolivia’s position, unlike other similarly-aligned states, can be described as more closely associated with the indigenous politics that fuel its social movements. Indigenism has become a primary standpoint of the Morales government, with political power being redistributed to indigenous councils, where more direct decisionmaking traditionally takes place. There is a genuine understanding of the negative impact the state has played in the autonomy and welfare of the indigenous majority.

Since Morales’ election, the MAS has introduced a number of sweeping political reforms, the most overarching of which was the implementation of a new polynational constitution. The constitution upholds the rights of the population to directly engage in the political process, attempting to break down many of the barriers that I have contended representative democracy brings.26 Further, the MAS government has initiated significant reforms to government social services, and is able to do so with the nationalization and democratization of a number of gas and mining companies. Universal health care for children, literacy programs, and allowances for schoolchildren are among the social services that Morales has introduced. Morales genuinely has attempted to manifest his anti-neoliberal, prodemocratic rhetoric. Only time will tell if such attempts will have a lasting effect on the populations of Bolivia, and whether Bolivia, and other Latin American nations like it, will be able to push the process of democratization more fully than liberal-democracy could. Morales has sought to bring democratic aspects of traditions that escalated him to power, such as indigenism and nationalism, into the governing documents of the state. It is in this respect that the conflation of liberal-democracy becomes all the clearer – the empowerment of populations through democracy is a movement that cannot be imposed. It must be a genuine reflection of populations, not an arbitrary back-door measure.

He stutters these last words and turns his ahead away from me and faces the ground. “If you want to hit me, I understand.” “I don’t want to hit you. I want you not to have slept with

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Notes Francis Fukuyama. Wes Jones, “The End of History?.” Last modified 2003. http://www.wesjones.com/eoh.htm.

2 Joseph Nye. The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone. (Oxford: Oxford UP), 2002.

3 Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, (New York: Penguin, 2004), 134.

4 Former United States President Bill Clinton referred to it as the establishment of ‘market democracy,’ more commonly understood as the ‘Third Way’ of politics (Vilas, 238).

5 C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 2.

6 Negri and Hardt, Multitude, 311.

7 Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), 9-10.

8 Ibid., 10.

9 Ibid., 100.

10 Negri and Hardt, Multitude, 240.

11 John Hoffman, State, Power, and Democracy: Contentious Concepts in Practical Political Theory, (Brighton, Sussex: Wheatsheaf, 1988), 146.

12 Ibid., 159.

13 Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, 10.

14 Ibid., 44.

15 Ibid., 30.

16 Ibid., 42.

17 Hoffman, State, Power, and Democracy, 135.

18 Ibid., 140.

19 Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, (New York: Monthy Review, 1997), 1.

20 Ibid., 116.

21 Linda Farthing and Kohl Benjamin, Impasse in Bolivia: Neoliberal Hegemony and Popular Resistance, (London: Zed, 2006), 93.

22 Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, 78.

23 William Robinson, “Promoting Polyarchy in Latin America: The Oxymoron of ‘Market Democracy’,” in Latin America after Neoliberalism: Turning the Tide in the 21st Century?, (New York: New Press, 2006), 107.

24 John Crabtree, “Bolivia: Playing by New Rules,” in Reclaiming Latin America: Experiments in Radical Social Democracy, (London: Zed, 2009), 45.

25 Farthing and Benjamin, Impasse in Bolivia.

26 Crabtree, “Bolivia: Playing by New Rules.”

1

Untangling the Myth of Liberal-Democracy in Theory and Practice my wife,” I shout back and look at Constance. “Connie?” “For God’s sake, Francis, he lives in Canada. How would I have known he would come here? I...” She whines and begins to

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ian mass media Sublime: c ad xi an To C e in th s d e an ap landsc and art Ugly Beauty ns of industrial o ti ta n se re p re c Aestheti

Hilary Sclodnick “These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear… For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.”

- Edward Burtynsky

Edward Burtynsky, Nickel Tailings #30, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996. Printed 1998. National Gallery of Canada (no. 39974)

The aesthetic of the Canadian landscape has often been represented in relation to the sublime. The sublime is an ideological construction that has roots deep in the Western tradition and continues to dominate the way we conceptualize the natural environment. However, the values and ideals of popular and political culture have shifted in North America generally, and in Canada particularly. Our technological age – with the forces of globalization, industrialism and urbanism – has given birth to the notion of the toxic sublime. In relation to representations of industrial and toxic sites, recent scholarship has put emphasis on the relationship between environmentalism and photographic aesthetics, which opens up the possibility of communicating ecological principles through art. This paper will analyze the conceptualization of romantic and extractive gazes through the art of Edward Burtynsky, in his depictions of the chillingly toxic and disturbingly beautiful. Further, this paper will investigate his attempts to reconcile ideals of aesthetics and environmental ethics with notions of progress and industry.

weep. Nix snarls through the window. I ask her: “You fucked this guy? You fucked this guy?”

I sound angrier than I intend to. Constance lurches as if to hug me, but I awkwardly avoid

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While some had previously conceived of nature as wild or alien, many in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries regarded it as a positive and beautiful force. In her paper “Paradigms and Paradoxes: Nature, Morality and Art in America,” Susan Platt explains that in Europe, landscape art depicted nature based on well-established concepts such as the picturesque, the beautiful and the sublime.1 The sublime, as articulated by English philosopher and writer Edmund Burke (1909), refers to “the spiritual uplift beyond rational understanding that comes from untamed nature and its overwhelming forces, such as thunderstorms or waterfalls.”2 Burke distinguished beauty from the sublime, arguing that while beauty could be found in small objects, things that are smooth, delicate or elegant, the sublime exhibits vastness, privation, difficulty, infinity, magnitude, and magnificence.3 Immanuel Kant also defines the sublime by its magnitude and physical power, distinguishing it from beauty.

With beauty, he says, the mind is restful and contemplative; with the sublime, the mind is moved.4 The ideological origins of the sublime in landscape art can be traced to early Renaissance works. In Masaccio’s fresco, The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (c. 1427), the garden signifies a sacred space separate from the profane world into which the sinners Adam and Eve are cast.5 The construct of the sublime creates a dichotomy between the natural environment and human civilization.

Garoian (1998) argues that Cartesian dualism finds its analogue in landscape art in the form of the Kantian sublime, whereas nature is represented as an exotic other, exalted for its magnificent tranquility, yet demonized for its overwhelming power.6 The simultaneous element of attraction and repulsion within the sublime further perpetuates the conceptual divide between civilization and nature in Western thought. This relation to nature holds dangerous potential when nature is viewed as a resource in reserve that is separate and other.

her arms. She stumbles, blinded by tears, and feet heavy with gin. Three times she tries to catch me, and three times I evade her arms. “Oh stop,” I say. “Don’t touch me. You’ve

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In the early nineteenth century, North American landscape was depicted as pristine and “uncultivated wilderness,” and was juxtaposed with a notion of European civility and “more domesticated” nature.7 However, the latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed a radical shift in public conceptions of nature that corresponded to accelerating industrialization and the conquest of the continent.8 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, artists began to reject the restraints of materialist bourgeois society. They began to celebrate modern technology rather than nature.9 In the early twentieth century, this sense of awe, alienation, fear and eventual sublimity began to be associated with man-made objects whose immensity and magnificence rivaled the nature’s ability to “boggle the mind.”10 However, the current advances in environmental knowledge revealed the powers of progress and industry as a dangerous and overwhelming force. As such, in the late twentieth century, many artists have turned once again to nature and the land as central themes in their work.11 The Group of Seven is the most prominent example of Canadian art depicting nature as sublime. For those in the metropolitan areas, there is something reassuring in the landscapes of the Group of Seven. As Hodgins and Thomas say in their article “Taking the Romance out of Extraction: Contemporary Canadian Artists and the Subversion of the Romantic/Extractive Gaze,” [The Group of Seven] keep alive a vision of the Canadian hinterland as environmentally pristine, and in doing so, they assuage any lingering sense of guilt that the competitive consumption upon which the urban economy rests is based upon exploitation of nature and/or of those who live in the periphery.12

The purity of the depictions of Canadian landscapes in the art of the Group of Seven masks the assault we are imposing on the land. This image of purity functions under the guise of a national identity committed to a conception of clean, untouched, and vast wilderness.

done this. You and your salvationless cunt.” I regret it as the words leave my mouth. Ken, the tweed-clad knight errant, punches me in the ear to save his lady’s honour from my

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Platt explains how, by the 1930s, utopian beliefs and pure aesthetic experiences no longer seemed very important, as “people starved to death and artists were imprisoned for creating modern art.”13 She says that artists primarily felt a need to express their social and political concerns. Consequently, the landscape Fred Varley, Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay, was reintroduced into art as a major 1921. National Gallery of Canada (no. 1814) moral theme. Furthermore, with a backdrop of accelerated technology, globalization and industrialization, the Canadian landscape was drastically transformed physically, and the vision of industrial technology reached mythic proportions.

Garoian argues that the “operative principle by which machine technologies facilitated this cultural transformation was appropriation the confiscation of human and natural resources for progress and the aggrandizement of industry.”14 Garoian adds: Appropriation is the raison d’etre of machine metaphors in modern art. The mining of natural resources, the assembly mode of production, the management of labor, the conglomeration of corporations, and the commodification of manufactured goods - all served as models for modern artists. The ironic presence of their appropriations in the art world raised critical questions about the function of art and the artist in the industrialized world.15

The industrial landscape introduced new and evocative imagery for visual artists to consider, as well as introduced machines that changed the way they viewed the world and produced their work.16 This laid the foundation for the aesthetic industrial gaze. From an initial sense of the beautiful, picturesque, and sublime, Platt has now come to see the environment as “victim of a violent rape.”17 Today, in post-industrial society, notions of the sublime come in a new form: the toxic sublime.

foul language. It stings, and his class ring cuts open my ear lobe, but I ignore the pain and look him in the eye as if were he to keep looking at me any longer whale-rib harpoons will

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The term “toxic sublime” refers to the tensions that arise from recognizing the toxicity of a place, object, or situation, while simultaneously appreciating its mystery, magnificence, and ability to inspire awe. Hodgins and Thompson argue that Canadian modernity views nature through two seemingly opposed gazes: the extractive and the romantic.18 On one hand, nature is seen as full of untapped resources and potential energy, ready to feed the ever-expanding capitalistic market. On the other, nature is romanticized and seen as a place of retreat and tranquility. While the extractive and the romantic gazes continue to be the primary lenses through which Canadian modernity views the landscape, according to Hodgins and Thompson, the emerging ecological consciousness in Canada and elsewhere since the 1960s has meant that these gazes and their “implicit reduction of nature to human purposes” have been increasingly disputed.19 Photography, since its earliest appearance in the United States in 1839 as the Daguerrean “magic mirror,”20 has always occupied a privileged position in depicting natural landscape, and thus has contributed to the framing or lens through which modern culture relates to nature. In “The Machine in the Garden Revisited: American Environmentalism and Photographic Aesthetics,” Deborah Bright investigates how photographic-image industries reflected and created changing models for how nature has been conceived and understood over the last 150 years. She says, “It was this seamless blending of optical truth and aesthetic pleasure that made photographs supremely useful for communicating values about human relations with and in the ‘natural world.’”21 The camera and the art of photography has been a pivotal productive agent of images of nature and culture. As Bright writes, By tracing the parallel development of public nature consciousness and the production of marketable photographic imageries of nature over time, we will see dominant tendencies of North American nature photography within their broader social contexts, not only in terms of style and iconology, but as responses to the social pressures of an industrial empire that has grown, matured, and declined in the compressed space of two centuries.22

issue out my eyeballs to bury themselves in his skull. I can hear Nix growl his approval through the window. Ken looks down – a small victory, but a victory nonetheless.

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Bright traces the history of the camera from the mid-nineteenth century, emphasizing its role in the unprecedented commodification of natural scenery. The camera made it possible for scenery to be packaged and sold to the masses, with its consumption a sign of leisure and status.23 With the new technology of the stereograph, images of natural landscapes were sold to the major railroad companies, and depictions of nature were disseminated widely.

This led to the development of National Parks. At the turn of the twentieth century, the demand for mass access to the National Parks meant that new roads were excavated. This in turn led to the rise of nature conservation, and the National parks became protected areas. This movement sparked the inauguration of the Sierra Club in 1892,24 and eventually gave rise to the modern environmentalism movement. However, the corollaries of the popularity of nature as a genre of leisure became apparent very quickly; nature was literally being loved to death.25

Edward Burtynsky, Oxford Tire Pile #8, Westley, California, 1999 Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (no. 2000.102)

My bleeding ear forces me back into the house and over a sink. Nix greedily nudges my hand on to the top of his head. He moans softly as I scratch between his eyes, my other

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Photography and environmentalism share an intimate relationship because photography is the medium par excellence for depicting and framing a culture’s perception of nature. It shows an optical reality, yet it constructs and frames that reality through a certain light. This is why in the world of contemporary art, there is such a rich and active community of environmental or “eco-photographers.”

What is frequently promoted as “environmentally concerned” photography in the art world depends on established conventions of beauty, because, as previously discussed, the striving towards beauty or sublimity is the tradition of landscape art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.26 Bright argues that as efficient tools of communication and as bearers of influential histories of representing nature in industrial societies, photographs will continue to play a crucial role in these debates.27 What we now face are the challenges of making images of nature that speak to us in a language that we can understand, and that confront us with the issues at hand.

Industrial landscapes showcase the immense scale of the human intervention in nature. Some examples are the mining of natural resources, the assembly mode of production, mass amounts of waste, matrices of overpasses and freeways, or toxic industrial waste in rivers. Representations of such scenes pose an ethical question. Does the artist respond to and interpret such horrific ecological conditions, or rather, do they create alternate imagery that virtually preserves or recreates nature as beautiful?28 Peeples notes that contemporary artists who attempt to create a presence out of contaminated sites are often criticized, since the beauty of their images conceals or disguises the health and environmental risks of the polluted sites they photograph.29 In response, Peeples uses the concept of the toxic sublime as a means of analyzing the tensions arising from visual representations of environmental contamination: beauty and ugliness, magnitude and insignificance, the known and the unknown, inhabitation and desolation, security and risk.30

hand presses the whole roll of paper towels to my ear. I look out the front window. Ken’s clutching the dog leash with one hand and he reaches out for Constance’s hand. She allows

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Peeples uses Burtynsky’s art to show how the tensions of the toxic sublime function to alter the sublime response in order to provoke the viewer to contemplate their position within a polluted and contaminated world. Instead of a genre of environmental photography that depicts a clear environmental ethic, the toxic sublime produces conflict by simultaneously showing beauty and ugliness. The toxic sublime connotes both the magnitude of the projects and the insignificance of man. For Peeples, the toxic sublime illustrates the disparity between what we know of production and what we do not know of its affect. It questions the role of the individual in the toxic landscape while “simultaneously eliciting Edward Burtynsky, Rock of Ages #23, Abandoned Section, the feelings of security and Adam-Pirie Quarry, Barre, Vermont, 1991. Robert Koch Gallery. risk, power and powerlessness.”31 As Cammaer notes in her review of Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary on Burtynsky called Manufactured Landscapes,

In the praise for his work, some critics describe how Burtynsky’s large-scale photographs revive the eighteenth century notion that the landscape is a direct route to the sublime. To talk about Manufactured Landscapes people use terms such as “stunning,” “beautiful,” and “spectacular.” The sheer vastness of his of his images evokes intense contrasting emotions such as awe and terror. 32

In this sense, Burtynsky’s images certainly qualify as what Edmund Burke described as the aesthetics of the sublime.

Burtynsky deliberately creates this tension; he wants the viewer to be both attracted and repulsed, in order to, as he says, “show

him to hold briefly before pulling it away. Even though it’s for a moment it hurts to see her touching him. I suppose whatever they’re talking about must be rough and maybe a little

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them the dilemma we’re in.”33 In an interview, he is quoted as saying, “I don’t want to be didactic. I’m not trying to editorialize and say this is right or this is wrong. Either extreme is too simplistic.”34 He argues that taking a moral stance requires his audience to agree or disagree, but he prefers his audience to think about the issue for themselves.35 He also tries to avoid explicitly confronting the ethical issues by emphasizing the aesthetic qualities of his work.36 Despite his lack of an unambiguous environmental position, his work is positively embraced by many environmental organizations as exposing industrial crimes against the environment.37 Burtynsky’s aesthetic choices produce the sublime in the toxic. In doing so, he leaves a powerful and provocative legacy of images that alter environmental attitudes and action.

Canadian representations of landscape have always stood in relation to the Western aesthetic tradition’s notion of the sublime. Yet, through industrialization, this understanding has been transformed into the notion of the toxic sublime. Photography is a powerful force in producing images that display our relations with nature. The promising potential of the coupling of photography and environmentalism has been realized. Today, Canadian contemporary art faces the challenge of representing the cultural landscape as industrial or toxic. It faces the challenge of breaking out of the tradition of the extractive or romantic gaze. Burtynsky reveals that landscapes of contamination or refuse are already the cultural landscape for some, eliciting a much-needed sense of urgency on a global scale.

Edward Burtynsky does not necessarily transcend this conceptual framework, yet he makes it explicit, allowing the viewers to take their own stance on the issue. Burtynsky simply holds up a mirror to our society and asks: well, what do you think? This is precisely what is necessary for contemporary technological society to begin curbing its insatiable appetite for progress and convenience, and begin thinking about the other side of production and the afterlife of consumption.

touching will help it move faster. I look down at Nix. His taught spine points at the door, his back legs tensed and ready to spring. His nose twitches as he smells the air. Ken? Ken’s dog?

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Notes Susan Platt, “Paradigms and Paradoxes: Nature, Morality and Art in America,” Art Journal 51(2) (1992): 82-88.

2 Platt, “Paradigms and Paradoxes,” 82.

3 Jennifer Peeples, “Toxic Sublime: Imaging Contaminated Landscapes,” Environmental Communication 5(4) (2011) : 373-392.

4 Peeples, “Toxic Sublime,” 379.

5 Charles Garoian, “Art Education and the Aesthetics of Land Use in the Age of Ecology,” Studies in Art Education 39(3)(1998): 244-261; 248-9.

6 Garoian, “Art Education,” 248.

7 Platt, “Paradigms and Paradoxes,” 82.

8 Deborah Bright, “The Machine in the Garden Revisited: American Environmentalism and Photographic Aesthetics,” Art Journal 51(2)(1992): 60-71.

9 Platt, “Paradigms and Paradoxes,” 84.

10 Peeples, “Toxic Sublime,” 379.

11 Platt, “Paradigms and Paradoxes,” 84 .

12 Peter Hodgins and Peter Thompson, “Taking the Romance out of Extraction: Contemporary Canadian Artists and the Subversion of the Romantic/Extractive Gaze,” Environmental Communication 5(4)(2011):393-410; 398.

13 Platt, “Paradigms and Paradoxes,” 85.

1

Garoian, 252.

Garoian, 252.

16 Garoian, “Art Education,” 252.

17 Platt, “Paradigms and Paradoxes,” 88.

18 Hodgins and Thompson, 394.

19 Hodgins and Thompson, 395.

20 Deborah Bright, “The Machine in the Garden Revisited: American Environmentalism and Photographic Aesthetics,” Art Journal 51(2)(1992): 60-71; 60.

21 Bright, “The Machine in the Garden,” 60.

22 Ibid.

23 Bright, “The Machine in the Garden,” 61.

24 Bright, “The Machine in the Garden,” 62.

25 Ibid.

26 Bright, “The Machine in the Garden,” 68.

27 Bright, 70.

28 Platt, “Paradigms and Paradoxes,” 87.

29 Peeples, “Toxic Sublime,” 373.

30 Ibid.

31 Peeples, “Toxic Sublime,” 377.

32 Gerda Cammaer, “Edward Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes: The ethics and aesthetics of creating moving still images and stilling moving images of ecological disasters,” Environmental Communication 3(1)(2009):121-130; 129.

33 Peeples, “Toxic Sublime,” 380.

34 quoted in Torosian, 2006, p. 48 as cited in Peeples, “Toxic Sublime,” 377.

35 Peeples, “Toxic Sublime,” 377.

36 Cammaer, “Manufactured Landscapes.”

37 Peeples, “Toxic Sublime,” 377.

14 15

Ugly Beauty and the Toxic Sublime

My blood? A distant moose? Nix paws the carpet, looking for purchase. Outside, Ken and Constance begin to argue. Constance shakes her head, and Ken looks at the house – at me.

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Unsettling Narrative: Lens of Abjection Coetzee’s Political Resistance through the

Cate May Burton

In J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, the magistrate of the Empire’s frontier struggles to decipher the lives of the Barbarians.

His curiosity is suspect in light of his sensual relationship with a stray Barbarian girl, who simultaneously fascinates and repels him.

This enticement mixed with disgust is exactly the kind of ambivalence Julia Kristeva defines as “abjection.” By examining the thematic of ambiguous permeable boundaries in Barbarians alongside Kristeva’s analysis of the “abject,” I shall develop a fruitful perspective on the relationships of linguistic meaning to abjection, of abjection to desire, and ultimately of abjection to the magistrate’s narration.

I shall begin by discussing Kristeva’s “abjection” in three of its characteristic functions: impinging on boundaries, disturbing linguistic order, and conditioning all desires. This will shed light on the magistrate’s recurrent aim to uncover the truth. The primary focus will be on his affair with the Barbarian girl, which exemplifies the relationship of abjection to desire in that the magistrate wants to lose himself in his obsession with the girl. Kristeva explains that abjection moves people to assert their individuality whilst disturbing the conditions of this myth.1 In Powers of Horror, the term “desire” refers to the fluid experience of trying to identify with a stable external thing.2 I will retain Kristeva’s sense of this term. This enables me to argue that the magistrate’s desire operates simultaneously in multiple elements. His desire to uncover the truth of the Barbarian girl is one example of his broad interrogation of the world, which functions as a further quest for stable selfhood. He wants to tell the truth, but his work exposes the nonexistence of unitary truth.

The themes Coetzee highlights are fitting in the context of abjection: permeable boundaries, inarticulable truths, and infinite desire.

He starts toward the house, but Constance grabs his hand. He twists away and makes for the front door. My stomach drops to my knees, but I hold fast. Nix rushes to the door in

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Coetzee does not explicitly incorporate psychoanalysis, so the prevalence of these themes is surprising. I shall discuss the indeterminacy of Coetzee’s subject with reference to Anne Waldron Neumann’s article “Escaping the ‘Time of History’? Present Tense and the Occasion of Narration in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.” Then I shall contrast this analysis of the present tense narration with Cecilia Sjöholm’s claim in Kristeva and the Political, that the power to overthrow political oppression means disturbing boundaries, particularly in art. I shall question whether the magistrate is able to subvert linearity and claims to unitary truth and argue that Barbarians challenges political authority with recourse to abjection. Since Kristeva and Coetzee both implicate humans in political quandaries, I argue the space of abjection imparts efficacy to political life.

With reference to narrative, I also conclude that the instability of political and linguistic selfhood takes on greater meaning through works of art.

For Kristeva, the abject occurs on the boundary between an inside and an outside but contravenes the strict division of these two spaces.3 The experience of separating the self from the world is the primary instance of abjection because the subject must dedicate psychic energy to asserting itself as total and self-enclosed.4 In one sense, the abject is something that mediates the psyche’s interactions: “There is an effervescence of object and sign—not of desire but of intolerable significance; they tumble over into non-sense or the impossible real, but they appear even so in spite of ‘myself’ (which is not) as abjection.”5 The way the subject interprets objects requires the additional integration of signs, which have no logical predetermination and are thus “impossible.”6 The subject must relinquish its claim to being a completely separate self-enclosed body, since the meaning of its interaction with the world approaches a type of thought which defies the linearity and logic of a subject-object perspective. The self cannot persist unless it adopts a self-alienating strategy by which it can repel the disturbing incommunicability of the way objects take on meaning.7 Abjection is therefore implicit in the fashioning of self in relation to others and objects.8 As soon as the subject repels something of its intimate

anticipation of the intruders. I follow in order to pull him away. As I get between Nix and the door, Constance opens it. Nix growls and Ken’s dog greets me by tearing three inches

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interior, objects associated with this expulsion carry the latent phenomenon of the abject for the subject to confront if it confronts the objects. The object is only abject to the extent that the subject can distinguish it from itself. When a subject experiences the breach of itself in an opposing object, it feels “a vortex of summons and repulsion.”9 This pervades abject phenomena – mutually supportive attraction and rejection.

An object free from abjection generates a desire for meaning, which the subject can satisfy only by viewing itself as appropriating the object free from distinction and difference. However, the object that takes part in abjection opposes the subject in such a way that to desire meaning leads to a confrontation with the impossibility of meaning.10 The displeasure the subject feels in confronting the threatening expelled material of its self-alienation results from the incommunicable meaning of this material: “Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me.”11 There is a displacement of the disturbing leap from object to sign without logical necessity into a disturbing incommunicable significance, which resounds in the feeling of abjection. The uncanniness of self-alienation takes on a new hatred for the subject that characterizes abjection. The subject feels disgust toward the self-alienating material because of the subject’s denial that meaning is unassimilable into our ordering of the latter. We order meaning in language as elements that refer from themselves to others; similarly, we order our subject-formation around the principle that there is a distinct and tangible inside-outside limit. The indeterminacy of the boundary between the self and the object is distressing for the subject, which is analogous to distress at the indeterminacy of the connection from any sign to its object. Abjection operates when something disrupts the order we generate, which is simultaneously linguistic and subject-forming.

Abjection impacts the subject all the more through its emergence alongside the subject’s most fundamental desires. The infant rejects the milk his parents give him out of their desire to nurture him: “But since the

of skin from my shin. Reflexively, I haul off with my other foot and slam the dog lifting it up like a furry soccer ball, but the leash in Ken’s hand yanks the dog by its neck back

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food is not an ‘other’ for ‘me,’ who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself.”12 The assertion the infant makes of being autonomous from the care of his parents is self-alienating in that the infant gains his original meaning in the desire of his parents. This meaning requires the collective to interact and have import for the infant, therefore he needs his parents to acknowledge his meaning.

The milk nauseates because it becomes especially important in the infant’s subject-formation. The infant cannot but turn the expulsion of the milk into a cleft between his desire to inhabit a self-sufficient body and the world of desire that conveys value to him.

Abjection arises frequently at the sight of desire because it subsists on a kind of need or lack that preconditions all the subject’s desires. Abjection is at the core of the subject’s claim to being in and for itself, which is the impossibility it continually asserts. Abjection is experienced at the

peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject.13

The subject finds the impossible in the sense that the objects it desires are only incompletely attainable as aspects of self-formation. The subject tries to draw things into itself when it desires them but cannot actually subsume them. Dissatisfaction is inevitable and results from the fundamental abjection of its being. The subject seeks to found a perimeter for itself but has no way of separating itself neatly, so the concept it forms of itself is unrealizable and necessitates the self-alienation of its intimate abject self.

From thereon out, all desires are partly manifestations of the fundamental lack, which the subject cannot slake. In this way, the subject must relate to the objects that plunge across boundaries with ambivalent

to the ground. The dog yelps as it hits the floor with a sound like a melon breaking on concrete. Before it can get up Nix launches his full 150-pound-self on top of the

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fascination, while negotiating the boundaries of its desires for seemingly external things.

Turning now to Barbarians, the magistrate’s intoxication with the Barbarian girl illustrates that desire does not always pertain to abjection.

The magistrate’s desire does not fit readily into any category of affect or type of want, i.e. lust. At times, the magistrate suffers from a staunch erection absent of any pleasure or excitement.14 Any attraction he shows toward the Barbarian girl involves obliterating his consciousness of boundaries or permeating her boundaries in search of her true self. The magistrate’s enjoyment of the girl’s body leads him to “fall into oblivion sprawled upon her body.” He wants to escape himself: “These dreamless spells are like death to me, or enchantment, blank, outside time.”15 Coetzee implicitly draws a connection between being a distinct self and being in a particular temporal context. This will become critical to the analysis of Coetzee’s political art. The magistrate’s obsession with massaging the Barbarian girl intertwines with a wish to forget his distinct conception of himself. This suggests an attempt to abnegate responsibility but could be a sign of dissatisfaction with possible objects of desire fulfilment.

The magistrate questions what draws him to the Barbarian girl but knows that he does not desire her sexually. When he examines his interest in her, he realizes that he feels an impulse to unravel her meaning like a code: “It has been growing more and more clear to me that until the marks on this girl’s body are deciphered and understood I cannot let go of her.”16 The girl’s body always strikes him as closed off, incomplete and wounded.17 The marks of her torture – for which he bears some responsibility – reflect the processes of the Empire’s oppression of “barbarians.” The magistrate struggles to make sense of the perpetrators of Empire, but he recognizes that he himself wants to pinpoint a significance inside the Barbarian girl in a similar way to the interrogator who tortures her for information.18 When he tries to interpret her wounds, he is both searching for the explanation of her torture and learning how the torturer comes to mistakenly believe he can force the truth from his victim.19 Many times, the magistrate casts

prostrated animal. I reach out, somewhat half-heartedly, to stop him, and Ken drops the leash to put himself between Nix and his dog. But Nix is too quick. In a moment of

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doubt on his experience of attraction to the Barbarian girl. His intoxication dissipates and he remains wanting but repulsed by her: “The erotic impulse, if that is what it has been, withers; with surprise I see myself clutched to this stolid girl, unable to remember what I ever desired in her, angry with myself for wanting and not wanting her.”20 It would be a mistake to read this contradictory desire as tedium that takes hold through simple monotony. The magistrate admits to himself that he does not know if he has pure lust for the girl, and he cannot extricate himself from her, though he sees her as blank and ugly. Abjection here produces shame because of the unwitting function the magistrate serves in the Empire and the associated delusion that he can extrapolate some truth from his companion.

The magistrate continuously seeks truth as though it is just behind the next veil of meaning, but he demonstrates the impossibility of essential truth. He seeks knowledge while denying the absolute truth of the Empire.

Thus he continually contradicts himself. He digs up remnant shards of text from the earlier barbarian inhabitants. His aids in this endeavour are “discouraged by the speed at which the sands drift back.”21 How fitting that the magistrate is working against the passage of time but does not therefore abandon the struggle. It is as though Coetzee is telling us from the beginning that the magistrate’s life is transient, that his is not the voice of History. Though the magistrate cannot decipher the script of the barbarians, he pretends to read to the Colonel from the letters of barbarians. The multiple interpretations that he gives for each text illustrate his affinity for non-unitary linguistic meaning. He points to one part of the text and says, “It is the barbarian character war […] It can stand for vengeance, and, if you turn it upside down like this, it can be made to read justice.”22 The implication here is that language can distort the meaning of “war” until the political reality becomes revenge or justice. The Magistrate therefore understands how the meaning of language is undecided and can alter the course of events. Furthermore, the sign for the concept of “war” must not have a necessary designation of this concept. Otherwise, it would not be possible to understand it to mean “revenge” or to read the character

hysteria, I relish the thought of Nix and myself finally hunting together. The small dog’s shrill cries crack the night like a seal-pup lost, looking for its mother. Ken roars for

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upside down. The plurality and indeterminate character of language aid the magistrate in undermining the Empire’s claim to transcendent authority.

Coetzee’s exploration of the other touches on many manifestations of abjection and makes these experiences vibrant and full in literature. The magistrate’s attempt to expunge the boundary between himself and the other is intrinsic to his fascination with the barbarian girl: “But with this woman [the Barbarian girl] it is as if there were no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry.”23 The magistrate’s desire for truth permeates his sensual body but also his exclusion from History: “I think: ‘I wanted to live outside History. I wanted to live outside the history that Empire imposes on its subjects, even its lost subjects.’”24 By questioning the Empire from his stance at the frontier, the magistrate wishes to have a more legitimate understanding of himself. He cannot relinquish the responsibility of participating in Empire, so his exclusion from History is a perspectival difference rather than a total eradication.25 When the magistrate attempts to document the town, he admits that he is not being truthful.26 Given the indeterminacy of linguistic meanings and his complex relation to the culpability of Empire, it is probable that he never could convey the truth of the Empire’s war on the barbarians.

Yet another desire for truth takes place in his struggle for memory: “I am forgetting the girl […] From her empty eyes there always seemed to be a haze spreading, a blankness that overtook all of her.”27 His memories of the barbarian girl slip away because of the separation between himself and her, which he could never traverse. The abject emptiness of the meaning he wants in her body forecloses her communication with him and the possibility of connection or intimacy between individuals. The obsession over determining the truth of this other is the greatest obstacle to learning anything about her.

Anne Waldron Neumann argues that the magistrate’s narration undermines the linear, authoritative voice of History. The defiance of History is part of the magistrate’s perspective, but this is more than a mere political choice of the present tense, as Neumann conceives of it. Coetzee may have chosen present tense narration for many reasons, but Neumann singles out the importance of indeterminate temporality: “every moment is present; past

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fades; future is hidden; cause and effect remain to be unraveled and pondered.”28 The many abject instances in Barbarians give the present tense this character of indecipherable logic. Neumann pinpoints the magistrate’s ambivalent regard for history: “history is inscribed in Coetzee’s novel as the record both of the magistrate’s attempt to erase it and of his attempt to understand it.”29 In this instance, history can be both the events occurring in the magistrate’s lifetime and the account that becomes doctrine for later interpreters of these events. On the first score, the magistrate craves truth, while on the second, he refrains from authorizing even himself to give a satisfactory account. The frustration of not accessing a kernel of pure knowledge at the heart of events is an experience the magistrate abjects because it challenges his position as a responsible figure in the scheme of oppression and torture and analyzing the Empire. In abjecting this attempt to access truth, the magistrate feels himself to be other than himself; he intuits that he has lied to himself.30 The phenomenon of abjection ties together both sides of the magistrates relation to history because it is an expression of the self-alienation he perpetrates on himself and it captures the magistrate’s ambivalence.

Cecilia Sjöholm argues that the permeable boundaries of the body convey greater significance to language and art than a mere literal content.

She writes that the abjection of expelling bodily fluids is akin to the permeable “other” of art: “These liminal phenomena can be read as manifest expressions of the fact that the other encountered in a work of art may have an infectious function.”31 Artwork indeed enters and fascinates viewers, listeners or readers. The boundary between the subject and the artwork is bidirectional and unstable in that the artwork demands an active interpreter to have the meaning it presumes to transmit. Analogously, the instability of the physical body and of its external limits informs the concept of one’s body and self. As Sjöholm writes, “The body is not so much an object of thought, or representation, as a form of contamination following every process of symbolisation.”32 Symbolisation refers here to the way concepts impose particular linguistic and organizational limits to

Nix to stop and for me to grab him. But Nix leaps easily away, clutching the small dog in his teeth. He growls, and I recognize his attitude from when I would play with him as

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objects. The work of designation requires that humans undergo subjectformation and thereby suppress the body’s porous boundaries. As such, experiences of order and language tend to exclude the material body. The “infectious function” of art and the “contamination” resulting from symbols reveal the potential power of literature to destabilize the everyday symbolic position of the subject and the body. Sjöholm exhorts us to think of revolution as the instant in which we see the fragility of our bodies.33 This will confront the linear, subject-centred, authoritative and unitary political body with the indeterminacy on which it founds itself and thereby weaken all possible oppressors of vulnerable, permeable human beings.

The magistrate’s vulnerability shines through whenever he reflexively discusses his doubts about his own version of events. He ultimately arrives at complete uncertainty: “Like much else nowadays I leave it [the dreamlike square] feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.”34 By interpreting his journey as potentially futile and without destination, the magistrate opens his potential narratives to utter contingency, which does indeed fragment the destinybound train of History. The magistrate knows that memory will distort his concept of the barbarian girl even further: “hereafter, I know, I will begin to re-form her out of my repertoire of memories according to my questionable desires.”35 This is one instance in which the ambiguity of temporality and causality is striking: he says in the present that his memory of the girl from the past will be suspect in each instance of the future. That complexity speaks to an experience of doubt and memory that endangers any authoritative claims or political regimes. The present-tense does not clinch that upheaval; the indeterminacy of the subject and of language does.

Conversely, the magistrate does not seem capable of embracing the frailty of his body or that of another. He describes the lack of communication between himself and the barbarian girl, “in the bated silences which make up so much of our intercourse she cannot but feel my gaze pressing in upon her with the weight of a body.”36 If the burden of the physical body is a pressure that forces itself on the girl like his gaze trying to decipher her,

a puppy. I know his next move before it happens. Nix’s head begins shake. First he wrenches side to side – touching his ears to each shoulder – while his strong neck spins his

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then the magistrate experiences corporeality more as self-enclosure than as permeable vulnerability. Through isolation and torture, the magistrate develops a new relation to his corporeal self: “I touch the thickened nose, the ugly scar under my eye by which, I am beginning to learn, people are surreptitiously fascinated.”37 Without security in his body, his tentative tactile understanding of his injuries exposes a more frail self. The magistrate grapples with the abjection others see in him, which challenges his position as the investigator fascinated by the barbarian girl’s distortions. His blindness to the perspective of the barbarian girl is a formidable obstacle in his quest for understanding.

Though the magistrate’s attempt to destabilize the Empire’s claim to absolute truth falls short of Kristeva’s abject subversion, Coetzee’s novel demonstrates the importance of fragility for the potential overthrow of oppression. The magistrate’s stance as a pawn in the Empire’s war is inseparable from his rigidity as a self-enclosed body and his desire to permeate the other to uncover unitary truth. While self-doubt tempers his yearning for truth and he grows increasingly conscious of the ambiguity of linguistic meaning, the magistrate cannot relinquish his sense of selfenclosure and cannot enter into intimate communication with others.

Even when the magistrate chastises himself for his equivocation, he takes himself to be a key figure in the political sphere: “a jackal of Empire in sheep’s clothing!”38 This contradictory stable identity refutes his complex indeterminacy and leads the magistrate both to his obsession with the barbarian girl and to his complicity in the war. The magistrate recalls that he told himself to wait out the war, the line that marks the frontier on the maps of Empire will grow hazy and obscure till we are blessedly forgotten.’

Thus I seduced myself, taking one of the many wrong turnings I have taken on a road that looks true but has delivered me into the heart of a labyrinth.39

Rather than admitting how frail his body makes him, the magistrate continuously positions himself as a political agent whose life can have

head back and forth. His teeth sink into real flesh – not fluff-stuffed rabbit-pillow. Each jerk shreds more muscles and tubes, and while the jaw tightens tendons tear and bones buckle.

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individual political meaning from his outward actions in the political sphere. Coetzee is able to show how the subject who remains blind to his experience of abjection, the person who pursues “a road that looks true,” is unable to fight against the oppression of political order.40 Abjection permeates the political stakes of Barbarians. The magistrate’s intoxication with the barbarian girl is both attraction and repulsion. His desire to arrive at a kernel of truth betrays the subject’s fragility. Finally, his recognition of the instability of linguistic meaning illuminates the impossibility that leads the subject to undergo abjection. The magistrate’s narration is self-doubting and seeks an outside of history, but these characteristics require his own self-assertion and his expulsion of the abject. Thus his nonlinear and indeterminate perspective of events is the result of his attention to the abject. Cecilia Sjöholm presents Kristeva’s account of abjection in art and associates the instability of the meaning in artwork with the power to fight political domination. The magistrate’s understanding of the indeterminacy of linguistic meaning is one facet of Coetzee’s subversion of a political claim to unitary truth. However, the magistrate is complicit in the Empire’s war, and his perspective retains the character of self-assertion, even though he wants to distinguish himself from the Empire and its unquestioning claim to authority. Coetzee’s complication of any possible true account of historical events shows the potential of literature to subvert political power by undermining coherent unitary truth. Barbarians casts into doubt the wholeness and self-determination of political subjects and the truth of History. To subvert oppression, the work of art must grapple with sites of abjection and thereby challenge assertions of autonomy and authority.

The pain-howl gargles into silence and then there is only the hiss of excess oxygen leaving the dead dog’s lungs. It looks like Nix has just bitten into a 60-pound water balloon

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Notes 1

Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror, 5.

Ibid.

3 Ibid., 1.

4 Ibid., 11.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., 5.

9 Ibid., 1.

10 Ibid., 1-2.

11 Ibid., 2.

12 Ibid., 3.

13 Ibid., 5.

14 J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 163.

15 Ibid., 33.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.,. 45-6.

18 Ibid., 46.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid., 35.

21 Ibid., 15.

22 Ibid., 122.

23 Ibid., 46.

24 Ibid.,169.

25 Ibid.,149.

26 Ibid.,169.

27 Ibid., 94.

28 Anne Waldron Neumann, “Escaping the ‘Time of History’?” 67.

29 Ibid., 78.

30 J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 149.

31 Cecilia Sjöholm, Kristeva & the Political, 96.

32 Ibid., 127.

33 Ibid.

34 J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 170.

35 Ibid., 79.

36 Ibid., 60.

37 Ibid., 140.

38 Ibid., 79.

39 Ibid., 149.

40 Ibid.

2

Unsettling Narrative

full of dog blood. Blood from my leg mingles with the dog blood on the floor. Constance, standing in the doorway looks at me disapprovingly. Nix shakes his head and his tongue

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’s Smothered Words Confronting Sarah Kofman ritings in her Autobiographical W Tamar Wolofsky

“How can it not be said? And how can it be said?”

- Sarah Kofman1

As a “Jewish woman intellectual who has survived the holocaust,”2 Sarah Kofman is uniquely situated to address the difficulties of communicating the experiences of the Shoah. Indeed, autobiographical writings and theoretical musings overlap extensively in her two most self-revealing works, Smothered Words and Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. Encrypted in her memoirs is an ongoing struggle with language to adequately represent her own memories of the Holocaust. In an attempt to overcome this difficulty, she extensively quotes the works of Maurice Blanchot and Robert Antelme in Smothered Words. By reiterating the words of Antelme’s book The Human Race, Kofman discusses the indestructible unity of man, a position which her extensive alienation from others in Rue Ordener threatens to overturn. The structure of Rue Ordener echoes the fragmentariness of Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster, which attempts to make sense of the rupture in tradition both authors situate in Auschwitz. Both works extensively discuss her father’s experience during the Holocaust, which Kofman has imagined and reconstructed through hearsay, creating a sense that her writing is an attempt to resurrect his words which had been smothered. Ultimately, Smothered Words and Rue Ordener function as the author’s exploration of absence: her father’s, as well as the millions of individuals murdered during the Holocaust. The smothered voices of the absent speak through Kofman’s words. Using the opposition of silence and speech, both literally and figuratively, explicitly and implicitly, Kofman constructs a new ethical imperative: to write in order to remember.

slops lazily from side to side as if the taste of shiatsu offends him. I shrug and turn to look at Ken kneeling in his dog’s blood and cradling the body as the head dangles over

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Kofman’s memoir Rue Ordener, Rue Labat opens with the imperative to write, a calling spurred by her father’s ancient, broken fountain pen, which sits on her desk. This book, the last Kofman wrote before her suicide in 1994, is non-linear and fragmentary, its narrative of Kofman’s childhood interspersed with comments from her adult self. The conscious juxtaposition of eras in Kofman’s personal history highlights the naivety of the young girl with the intellectualism of the older woman. Elsewhere, Kofman has commented that, “autobiographies are false … written as retroactive illusions for the aim of idealization,”3 a statement which agrees with Holocaust historian Lawrence Langer’s critique of the “constructed and inauthentic nature of more polished [written] forms of memory.”4 However, despite these criticisms, Rue Ordener emerges as Kofman’s testimony of her experience during the Holocaust. While it is a conventional memoir in the sense that it recounts the story of her childhood, it is a recounting shaped by Kofman’s critical theories relating to Holocaust memory and communication. In Smothered Words, Kofman writes, “About Auschwitz and after Auschwitz no story is possible, if by a story one means: to tell a story of events which makes sense.”5 Kofman’s memoir lives up to this dictum: it does not make sense that a child should have to live in hiding, separated from one parent and alienated from the other, with little to eat and a constant fear of deportation. While no part of the memoir takes place in Auschwitz, except for the imagined scene of her father’s death, the memory is shaped by Auschwitz, the “absolute … before which other rights and other duties must be judged.”6 For this reason, her story does not “emerge from lived experience per se, but from the difficulties of articulating that experience.”7 The limits of expression in the face of Auschwitz have been extensively investigated, but Kofman’s memoir approaches the dilemma differently. To confront the absolute, she writes about her own small part in it, albeit in a confusing and twisted manner. In an essay reformulating the conception of the Holocaust as an ‘unspeakable’ event, Thomas Trezise instead encourages the reader to “listen to the silences or read between the lines, attentive to what impels and exceeds understanding.”8

his arm drenched in cruor. Rocking on his knees, the grown man sobs like a child into the mottled coat. “Chancey! No! Oh no, no, no – my poor, poor Chancey,” he moans. I

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These words are especially applicable to a reading of Rue Ordener, the story which does not, and cannot make sense. To follow Trezise, reading with an eye to the silences or omissions in the text allows the trauma to emerge from in between, or from within the words themselves.

The events of the memoir seem simple enough, but a close reading reveals that nearly as much is omitted or implied as is explicitly said.

After her father’s deportation, Kofman’s life changes abruptly: her schooling is interrupted, and she is sent off to the countryside to be hidden for the duration of the war. Since young Sarah cannot stand to be separated from her mother, she returns to Paris, and the two find asylum in the tiny apartment of her parents’ former neighbour, a woman she comes to call Mémé. Kofman quickly comes to favour their saviour over her own mother. The girl reveres Mémé, becoming her constant companion, pupil, and ersatz daughter on the streets of Paris. With her, Kofman can walk without fear, whereas her mother cannot leave the apartment for fear of deportation. While separation from her mother had previously been the greatest threat, now Kofman can’t risk being seen with her. The transformation of her mother from a refuge to a liability is epitomized by the scene where Kofman awakens in the clinic after having had her tonsils removed: “My mother proceeds to talk very loudly, sympathizing with me in Yiddish, anxious to alert the doctor. Mémé, very calm and smiling, says, ‘It’s nothing terrible!’”9 The two mothers, whose demands on Kofman directly contradict one another, are remembered as a central conflict in Kofman’s childhood.

Another motif in the memoir is Kofman’s relationship with food. While hiding in the country, her refusal to eat foods that aren’t kosher threatened to reveal her as a Jew. She writes, “I spent my time crying and refused to eat, especially pork, which had always been forbidden me. This refusal, whose pretext was obedience to my father’s law, must also have served, without my being completely aware of it, as a means of returning to my mother.”10 As a result, she was returned to her mother in Paris, but the refusal to eat constituted a disavowal of the “maternal categorical imperative”11 which she discusses in her short essay “Damned Food.” In the essay, she

whisper to Constance, “I’m sleeping at a hotel. I’ll be back tomorrow. I’m just going away for tonight.” Constance looks hurt and says back pleadingly: “No. Please don’t go.” A long

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describes the “double bind” in which she was caught between her father’s “paternal authority,”12 the prohibition of food, which did not accord to Jewish law, and her mother’s imperative to feed her children excessively. Kofman’s usual response when confronted with previously prohibited food was to vomit, an action, which becomes a trope in Rue Ordener. This quasi-involuntary, psychosomatic response to unkosher food continues even with Mémé, who teaches her to love formerly prohibited foods such as “raw horsemeat in broth” and “rare steak cooked in butter.”13 While Kofman wants to eat Mémé’s food, which is carefully prepared in order to improve Kofman’s poor health, her body initially violently rejects it. It is in this naming of the forbidden foods that Kofman’s long-absent father edges his way back into the text. In her introduction to some of Kofman’s shorter autobiographical essays, Frances Bartkowski writes, “The mother’s and father’s voices produce one double bind; the mother’s voice in conflict with [Mémé’s] produces yet another. The knots which result put speech under an interdiction.”14 Caught at an impasse between her mother and father, as well as her two ‘mothers,’ Kofman finds it impossible to satisfy anyone. In reaction, she herself is denied satisfaction from food.

The text of Rue Ordener, while telling the story of Kofman’s own childhood, is densely interwoven with references to her father. Although he is deported in the first pages of the memoir and is never seen again, his absence weighs heavily in the text. He is figured as a martyr during his deportation, when he reveals himself despite his wife’s attempts to hide him by lying to the police.15 This scene characterizes Kofman’s attitudes towards her parents for the rest of her childhood: her mother is perceived as a conniving, manipulative liar, while her father is blameless and holy. In a discussion of Kofman’s autobiography and testimony, Avi Hirvonen writes, “[Her father] sacrificed himself so that his family would not be taken. Sarah compared the purity of her father’s act of self-sacrifice to her mother’s lies, which filled her with shame. Sarah had chosen sides: instead of the maternal pragmatic reasoning represented by justified lies, she turned to the father, the representative of Jewish law.”16 Having thus chosen sides,

pause. “Well, maybe it’s for the best. We both have some thinking to do. Ken wasn’t going to stay. It was a mistake. I’m sorry about this, about the way I’ve been, about it all. I’m sorry.

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the seeds for the ruination of her relationship with her mother are sown.

The links between these two seemingly unrelated strands of the memoir – her father’s deportation and Kofman’s turn away from her mother – indicates that her father’s absence is the driving impetus behind the retelling, as well as many of the events in her life. The only news the family receives from her father after his deportation is a card sent from Drancy, “written in French in someone else’s hand.”17 Already, from the moment he was taken from the family, her father’s words were smothered and stolen from him. While she turns away from his paternal authority due to Mémé’s influence, she returns to it and to Judaism after the war. Inspired by a scout leader at the Hebrew academy, who is the first male role model she mentions after her father, she “learned Hebrew again, said all the prayers, and respected the three yearly fasts.”18 The new male role model replaces her father but does not displace him; rather, he urges her back towards her father’s authority – his unshakable relationship to God, which speaks from beyond his grave. Her father’s death, which is gruesomely described to Kofman after the war by a man who claims to have known her father in Auschwitz, is that of a literal suffocation. He was buried alive for praying instead of working on the Sabbath. His death was not a swift ending but rather an ellipsis: an infinitely stifled possibility with no conclusion. Of the influence of Kofman’s father on the text, Hirvonen writes, “The absence of the father is not the absence of absence, but the unbearable pressure of the presence of absence.”19 The repeated intrusions of her absent father into the text symbolize Kofman’s immense hardship in her lifelong attempts to grapple with his murder and with its connection to the millions of murdered individuals in the Holocaust.

Despite her position as the first-person narrator, Kofman only attributes one instance of active speech to herself as a child: after the war, she runs away from her mother in Nonancourt to hitchhike back to Mémé in Paris.

When she is picked up, she says, “I’ve lost my mother. She lives in Paris.

Can you drive me back there?”20 This statement is an evident lie, but both the untruthfulness of the statement and its positive content hold symbolic

He was coming in to apologize – for your ear. I don’t know what he’ll do now… that his dog is…” She shakes her head and looks down at the ground. “I love you, Frank. I’m sorry.”

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meaning. Earlier in the memoir, Kofman expresses shame and shock when her mother lies: “I felt very ill at ease. I didn’t know yet what a ‘white lie’ was.”21 However, as time progresses, Kofman, too, learns to smother the truth, and often lies that Mémé is her mother. The question is also unanswered: the men who pick her up only drive her to the nearest police station where she is reunited with her real mother. However, there is truth in the statement: Kofman can be said to have lost her mother, if mother denotes a person who inspires feelings of love, safety, and comfort. By the end of the war, neither her mother nor Mémé fulfill these requirements, and Kofman feels guilty about relying on either one. Kofman’s only active statement throughout her memoir, “I’ve lost my mother,” comes to its fulfillment with Mémé’s death and the funeral that Kofman does not attend. Kofman is left explicitly motherless, with bitter memories of both women.

Kofman’s only statement in Rue Ordener, which expresses loss and an unanswered question, mirrors her discussion of language and power in Smothered Words. In the former, which is both autobiographical and theoretical, she questions “how it is possible to tell a story when what is told exceeds the framework of a story.”22 As has been shown, Kofman’s life story encompasses more than just her own experiences – it is interwoven with complex forces that act upon her consciously and subconsciously.

Most of all, her story is told in the shadow of Auschwitz. Kofman writes, “Because he was a Jew, my father died in Auschwitz. … this event, my absolute, which communicates with the absolute of history, and which is of interest only for this reason.”23 Implicit in this statement is a shame of retelling, as if Kofman’s story is only important because it is connected with Auschwitz.

Kofman’s difficulty in writing and speaking is taken up in Smothered Words, as she writes, “Faced with the absolute of power, words can only stick in your throat, where they are held in reserve for their own preservation. And yet it is necessary to speak – or else you choke, suffocate.”24 As a child, Kofman’s response to her absolute of power, to the three parental figures who restricted her in all directions, was to vomit: an understandable reaction to choking.

As an adult, Kofman’s perspective shifts from her absolute to the absolute:

I love her, but I don’t say it, I just smile weakly and imploringly. With Nix by my side, his shoulders undulating with each step, we trudge toward my car–our sled. I whisper, “Good

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Auschwitz. Rather than vomiting, Kofman writes in order to rid herself of the words so long caught in her throat. Translator Madeleine Dobie comments on a change in Kofman’s writing after the publication of Smothered Words, which was “both the first work in which Sarah Kofman addresses the Shoah and the first to contain a recognizably autobiographical moment. … By contrast, in the corpus of texts written after Smothered Words, Judaism, anti-Semitism, and the Shoah on the one hand, and autobiography on the other, emerged as predominant concerns.”25 Smothered Words marked a turning point in Kofman’s oeuvre, after which “she could no longer write didactically and philosophically. She had to turn to quasi-poetic language.”26 Hirvonen argues that “her philosophical texts were a preparation for the autobiography, in which she returns from ‘another life’, the life of the university and philosophy, to the earlier life dominated by the paternal law, the absence of her father and the fight between her two mothers.”27 It is as if the publication opened up a floodgate, releasing Kofman’s smothered words from their knotted residence in her throat.

Perhaps as a reaction to the smothered words, or perhaps in defiance of them, a great deal of Smothered Words consists of quotations from other works, with a focus on the connection between the self and the infinite.

Texts by Blanchot, and Antelme are so densely interwoven with her own that it is often difficult, if not impossible, to discern a statement’s original author. In readings by Blanchot and Antelme, Jews are figured as being emblematic of the relation with the infinite – that which the Nazis wanted to destroy but could not.28 Kofman’s My father, a rabbi, was killed because father’s death in Auschwitz is often he tried to observe the Sabbath in given as an example of this the death camps; buried alive with a shovel for having – or so the witnesses unshakeable relation. She writes, reported – refused to work on that day, in order to celebrate the Sabbath, to pray to God for them all, victims and executioners, reestablishing, in this situation of extreme powerlessness and violence, a relation beyond all power.29

boy.” I take the main arterial, the hunting trail, into town. Nix hangs his head out the passenger window; his nose searches the air for smells. My ear aches, and I realize that

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The relation is beyond all power because the SS cannot destroy it, despite its enormous efforts. Robert Antelme takes up the indestructibility of the unity of mankind in his memoir of survival, The Human Race. Kofman reiterates his discussion of the ways in which the SS destroyed the language of the detainees in the camps, made them into animals, and forced them to fight over scraps of food. The SS were all-powerful, while the detainees had no power at all. However, the community of those without power, “the community (of those) without community,”30 creates a new unity. For Antelme, “The more our condition as men is contested by the SS, the more likely our chances of being confirmed as such.”31 In starvation, the inmate is reconnected with that essential human need for food – a need shared by the SS. The SS are powerful, but not infinitely so: “The executioner’s power cannot be other than one of the powers that men have, the power of murder. He can kill a man, but he can’t change him into something else.”32 In this way, Antelme shows that the “abject dispossession suffered by the deportees signifies the indestructibility of alterity, its absolute character.”33 Despite Antelme’s insistence that mankind constitutes an absolute, overriding unity, Kofman’s memoir seems to stress an absolute alienation between people. Her five siblings are only mentioned cursorily. She comes to detest her mother; and even her once-beloved Mémé dies alone. Her infatuation with Mémé wrenches her away from her relationship with her parents and her Judaism, which she had held so dear before the war. Kofman recounts proudly: “I didn’t think at all any more about my father, and I couldn’t pronounce a single word in Yiddish despite the fact that I could still understand the language of my childhood perfectly.”34 The defiance of Yiddish, her refusal to speak, is here seen to be a conscious choice to alienate herself from her mother. Yiddish, the literal ‘mother tongue,’ was a representation of Kofman’s past, and her refusal to speak it is an active rejection of this absent community. After the war, she fluctuates between love and utter disregard for the woman who had hidden her and saved her life. For her own mother she has nothing but bitterness and resentment.

While Antelme maintains that the SS could kill but not change a man into

I’m crying. Nix looks toward me and tilts his head, feigning interest in my weakness.

Crusted blood around his mouth smears his jowls into a smile. Instincts and hunger guide

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something else, Kofman explicitly states that, “Mémé brought about a real transformation in me.”35 These striking discrepancies between Antelme and Kofman’s positions on the unity of mankind in their Holocaust memoirs almost seem to discredit Kofman’s extensive discussion of Antelme in Smothered Words. Following this disagreement, the final line of Smothered Words pulls out a bleaker strand from Antelme’s indestructibility of man.

Quoting Adorno, Kofman writes, “Man ‘after Auschwitz’? The indestructible.

But this means ‘that there is no limit to the destruction of man.”36 Kofman’s alienation can be seen as a failure to communicate: her words were smothered, caught in the double bind. During the war, her resentment of her mother’s stubbornly lingering connection to the dead, smothered past made communication impossible, since Kofman was fiercely moving away from it. As a university student after the war, Kofman cut off all ties with Mémé, writing, “I can’t stand to hear her talk about the past all the time.”37 Kofman’s refusal to look at the past constitutes a disavowal of her younger self. In her autobiographical writings, Kofman comes to recognize the unity between her past and present selves. In communicating the trauma of the past, Kofman works towards a new ethical imperative in Holocaust writing: the necessity of facing the past, rather than looking away.

When Kofman speaks of the insufficiency of language to communicate the events of the Holocaust, she surely includes herself in the category of those who cannot understand. Kofman, though a survivor of the Holocaust, was never in the concentration camps. While she tries to imagine her father’s experience, she can only truly know her own experience. She writes, “How can one speak of the ‘unimaginable’ – that very quickly became unimaginable even for those who had lived through it – without having recourse to the imaginary?”38 By speaking through Antelme’s experience, as told in The Human Race, Kofman avoids “the trap of complicity with speculative knowledge, with that in it which is tied to power, and thereby complicit with the torturers of Auschwitz.”39 In an essay exploring the rhetoric of Holocaust testimony, Michael Bernard-Donals stresses the need to demonstrate a new understanding of the communicative role of writing.

me back to the grocery store. In this feeling, Nix and I are one. Pulling into the lot, I see a cashier smoking just outside the sliding automatic doors. She brings her arm to her lips

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He states, “Writing cannot bring the object of knowledge to the reader … but writing does … remind the reader of it … What writing and, ideally, rhetoric can do, however, is indicate that which is ‘really written in the soul,’ what lies at the source of language – what lies at its point of origin but to which language does not provide unfettered access.”40 BernardDonals recognizes the discrepancy between what can be witnessed and what can be testified, especially following the trauma of the Holocaust.

If, following Antelme and Kofman, language was power in the camps, the language used to testify must be sensitive to its previous, and therefore possible corruptions. Encapsulating the problems of language, Kofman writes, “To speak: it is necessary – without (the) power: without allowing language, too powerful, sovereign, to master the most aporetic situation.”41 Auschwitz – the absolute of history, the aporia that defies logic – can only be communicated through language, but a language whose power has been taken from it. In this vein, Kofman cites the final scene of Antelme’s The Human Race, in which Antelme has a kind encounter with a young Russian man at the end of the war. They do not speak the same language, and can only communicate in the language of the SS. Kofman writes, It is as though Antelme wanted to erase the betrayal of this language, to rehabilitate the language of the other by giving it the last word; by making this language that had ridiculed and insulted them affirm, by this final Ja, the restoration of human liberty and solidarity, the unity of the victim and the torturer beyond the division of languages, and above all, beyond the SS’s desire to divide the human race, to reduce to ashes its indestructible unity. 42

Kofman’s writing, as a dense interplay of tenses, authors, and theories, therefore attempts to overcome the corruptions of power in language.

By subjugating her own words to the words of others, her language seeks to emulate the language without power, the language of the inmates of Auschwitz.

Bernard-Donals agrees that Holocaust testimony can only be written in the language without power. Writing that the Shoah’s “weight of atrocity seem[s] to leave a hole in the fabric of narrative,”43 he looks for

and inhales lazily from a half-burnt cigarette. As she exhales the smoke hangs in the air like a bear’s hot breath above an icy river. I bump my shin getting out of the car and

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ways to overcome the impossibility that the survivor’s testimony will ever be able to convey the trauma of the Holocaust itself. He writes, “Blanchot tells us that when an individual bears witness to an event … the event itself, lost to memory and to knowledge, exerts such a pressure on narrative that it destroys it. In rhetorical terms, the disaster is an effect of discourse that focuses the reader’s attention on the impossibility of substituting oneself for the ‘I’ of the narrative.”44 Rather than judging the validity of Holocaust memoirs on whether they seem believable or relatable, BernardDonals proposes a new rhetoric of Holocaust writing. This new method, “‘intransitive writing’ … works by drawing the reader’s attention to the impossibility of making the substitution of herself for the historical actor, the difficulty of saying, ‘I am here,’ I understand. It brings to the surface of the historical narrative the aporias that exist between subject and object.”45 Hirvonen brings Kofman’s memoir into the rhetoric of intransitive writing when he claims, “For Kofman, there is no coherent and linear autobiography. Instead of a master subject, who would retrospectively reveal and represent the truth of one’s life and self, there is the impossibility of consistent and coherent self-representation.”46 The reader cannot place herself within the narrative of Rue Ordener, nor is it necessary, for the memoir to fulfill its purpose, that the narrator be supplanted with the self.

Bernard-Donals favours the opacity of intransitive writing over highly aestheticized and polished memoirs that invite the reader into the place of the survivor, writing that, “while we may glimpse a trace of the event’s horror, we do so at the expense of knowledge.”47 This position, that writing should indicate without revealing, points to a line from Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster that prefaces Smothered Words: “The wish of all, in the camps, the last wish: know what has happened, do not forget, and at the same time never will you know.”48 This statement highlights the need to remember, but also constitutes a blessing over the new generation. This hope, that we should know what happened but never experience it ourselves, can be best conveyed through Bernard-Donals’ rhetoric of the disaster, which indicates, rather than reveals, a truth.

groan loudly and forget to close Nix’s window. Then as I begin to limp toward the door my cell-phone rings; it’s Constance. I silence my phone and look up. The smoking woman is

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Kofman, as the narrator of her own life story, is torn by conflicting forces and caught in the double bind of her parents’ demands. As a child, she was smothered: unable to speak freely or to exact changes on her situation. The trauma of Kofman’s childhood problematizes her memories from the outset. However, reading her memoir Rue Ordener, Rue Labat through the lens of her theoretical writings on Holocaust representation, Smothered Words, reveals the impact of this trauma on her writing. Kofman’s memoir is a story of absence: of her father, of speech, of the free childhood that was robbed from her. However, through a close reading of Blanchot and Antelme, Kofman restores unity between herself, her own smothered past, the power of language, and the indicative truth of words which Rue Ordener seems to lack. In this way, Kofman’s autobiographical writings come to stand for a new kind of ethics of Holocaust representation.

Writing, while it cannot answer the unanswerable questions broached by the Holocaust, can work towards a personal understanding, and thus personal satisfaction. The ethical imperative, as formulated by Kofman, is to overcome the smothering power, which lodges knotted words in the throat. As the words emerge, the writer – the sufferer – regains the power. This act of liberation serves to vindicate the millions of dead: they who were murdered, like Kofman’s father, in Auschwitz and elsewhere.

In this way, Kofman’s autobiographical writings, by virtue of their content, overcome her previously smothered words.

walking toward me. Her cigarette butt flips from her fingers and bounces, sparks, and slides to a stop on the asphalt like a renegade flint-flake scraped over a fire-pit escaping to the

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Notes Sarah Kofman, Smothered Words, 9.

Ibid., 7.

3 Kofman, Autobiogriffures, quoted in Avi Hirvonen, “The Ethics of Testimony,” 148.

4 Quoted in Sara Horowitz, Voicing the Void, 21.

5 Kofman, Smothered Words, 14.

6 Ibid., 7.

7 Kathryn Robson, quoted in Hirvonen, “The Ethics of Testimony,”158.

8 Thomas Trezise, “Unspeakable,” 62.

9 Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. 43-44.

10 Ibid., 24.

11 Kofman, “Damned Food,” in Frances Bartkowski and Sarah Kofman, “Autobiographical Writings,” 8.

12 Ibid., 7.

13 Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, 42, 57 14 Bartkowski and Kofman. “Autobiographical Writings,”7.

15 Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, 6.

16 Hirvonen, “The Ethics ofTestimony,” 148-150.

1 2

Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, 9.

Ibid., 80.

19 Hirvonen, “The Ethics of Testimony,” 159.

20 Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, 72.

21 Ibid., 6.

22 Madeleine Dobie, “Translator’s Introduction,” xv.

23 Kofman, Smothered Words, 10.

24 Ibid., 24.

17 18

Dobie, “Translator’s Introduction,” xi.

Hirvonen, “The Ethics of Testimony,” 161.

27 Ibid., 156.

28 Kofman, Smothered Words, 8.

29 Ibid., 34.

30 Ibid., 70.

31 Ibid., 64.

32 Ibid., 69.

33 Ibid., 72.

34 Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, 57.

35 Ibid., 41.

36 Kofman, Smothered Words, 73.

37 Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, 84.

38 Kofman, Smothered Words, 36.

39 Ibid., 8.

40 Michael Bernard-Donals, “The Rhetoric of Disaster,” 77.

41 Kofman, Smothered Words, 10.

42 Ibid., 55-56.

43 Bernard-Donals, “The Rhetoric of Disaster,” 79.

44 Ibid., 81.

45 Ibid.,79.

46 Hirvonen, “The Ethics of Testimony,”154.

47 Bernard-Donals, “The Rhetoric of Disaster,” 87.

48 Blanchot, quoted in Kofman, Smothered Words, 5.

25 26

Confronting Sarah Kofman’s Smothered Words

walking toward me. Her cigarette butt flips from her fingers and bounces, sparks, and slides to a stop on the asphalt like a renegade flint-flake scraped over a fire-pit escaping to the

HINGE

“Bluffin with my Muffin”: Lady Gaga and the Multip licity of Gender Katie Connell

The chorus of Lady Gaga’s 2009 single Poker Face repeats the lyric “can’t read my/no he can’t read my poker face.” At the crux of Lady Gaga’s identity as a performer is a sincere involvement in a discourse on gender and sexuality. Gaga actively engages with the theories posited by Judith Butler in Imitation and Gender Insubordination. Butler argues to recognize gender as inherently separate from sex, thus constituting a performative act. Gaga draws on the image of a “poker face,” a facial expression donned to ‘not give anything away,’ thus presenting gender and sexuality to be, like a card game, something that can be played. In a 2009 BBC interview with Jonathan Ross, Gaga explicated that, “the song Poker Face is about ‘poker facing’ with your sexuality. When I was making love with my old boyfriend, I used to think about women sometimes.” Lady Gaga demonstrates a selfawareness of her theoretical mission, which is both inspiring and intelligent.

She acts from within the paradigm of the heterosexual matrix that is superimposed onto the mainstream culture of top-40 pop music in order to subvert it. What is especially remarkable about Lady Gaga is the means by which she eloquently makes critical theory accessible through the synthesis of clever lyrics and arresting imagery in her music videos.

For Judith Butler, “compulsive heterosexuality”1 establishes hegemonic binary gender constructs that dominate society. Heterosexuality “sets itself up as the original, the true, the authentic; the norm that determines the real implies that ‘being’ lesbian is always a kind of miming, a vain effort to participate in the phantasmic plentitude of naturalized heterosexuality which will always and only fail.”2 Butler’s analysis of drag, however, conducts a line of reasoning that establishes that “drag enacts the very structure of impersonation by which any gender is assumed.”3

surrounding snow. She’s moving awkwardly, loping, like a bear would on two legs; one of her platform heels might be broken. She raises one arm to wave, and her rings bounce

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In Poker Face, Lady Gaga condenses Butler’s assertion that “there is no ‘proper’ gender, a gender proper to one sex rather than another, which is in some sense that sex’s cultural property”4 to one line: “’I’m bluffin with my muffin.” Gaga’s blurring of gender constructs is further perpetuated through the lyrics of her song Born This Way, which poetizes Gaga’s philosophy as a “quasi-religious therapeutic narrative that calls forth the superstar in everyone.”5 The chorus of Born This Way is reminiscent of a manifesto of acceptance in which Gaga sings, “I’m beautiful in my way/’cause God makes no mistakes/I’m on the right track baby/I was born this way.” Also recurring in the song is a chanting bridge where Gaga repeats the phrase “don’t be a drag, just be a queen.” Butler notes that “drag constitutes the mundane way in which genders are appropriated, theatricalized, worn and done; it implies that all gendering is a kind of impersonation and approximation.”6 It may seem problematic that Lady Gaga can be coincidentally ‘born a certain way’ while also demonstrating self-awareness of the drag she assumes to perform her gender and sexualities. Gaga, however, is confounding any attempt to locate her gender or sexuality within the heterosexual matrix. She is thus illuminating the tension between the claim to “an original”7 and the disruptive panic that “imitation”8 incites within this forum.

A myriad of other Lady Gaga lyrics allude to this critical point. From the Born This Way album, the song The Queen communicates, “I can be/the queen that’s inside of me.” The “queen” to whom Gaga refers concurrently represents the empowered ruling woman but also the drag queen. In this anthem, Lady Gaga empowers the performance of gender. If the “queen” that is inside is, in fact, a drag queen, Gaga suggests that the only inherent attribute to her person is the compulsion to perform.

Beyond a lyrical intersection with Butler’s theories, the aesthetics of Lady Gaga’s self-presentation are also insubordinate to hetero-normativity and any heterosexual “claim to originality.”9 Lady Gaga, Stephanie Germanotta by birth, assumes multiple identities that make it impossible to locate her as any fixed original. Butler claims that all identities are “radically

moonlight and gleam white like claws. My body stiffens for an attack as she comes closer.

I realize she’s taking a path to skirt around me – no doubt a feint to take me from behind.

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unstable”10 because of a compulsory habit to repeat that identity in order to achieve any kind of stability. In her demurral to repeat the same ‘I’ over and over again, Lady Gaga refuses to stabilize and secure an identity for herself, encouraging this ‘radical instability’11 of categories.

Lady Gaga receives an inordinate amount of public attention and discussion induced from a discomforted public’s inability to assign her any one gender or sexuality. Gaga achieves what Butler refers to as “exposing heterosexuality as an incessant and panicked imitation of its own naturalized idealization.”12 Through the narratives of her music videos, Lady Gaga has presented herself as a straight woman, a lesbian, a straight man and another creature entirely. These identities often trickle over into real life, preventing a spectator from designating where Lady Gaga’s performance ends and her own identity begins. Lady Gaga’s entire project suggests that the two are inseparable and could be the same. The possibility that everything Lady Gaga does constitutes a performance achieves a philosophical objective very similar to Butler’s theories.

These multiple personas that Lady Gaga wears are embedded into the narrative of her music videos. Though Lady Gaga often sings about loving men in her music, she admittedly allows her sexuality to move outside of heterosexuality, presenting it as a continuously morphing entity. The lengthy music video for the song Telephone, a duet with Beyoncé Knowles, begins in a stylized women’s prison into which Gaga, as a prisoner, is aggressively escorted by two female security guards who strip her naked and throw her into a cell. Upon being stripped naked, one of the guards remarks, “I told you she didn’t have a dick,” to which the other replies, “too bad.”

This dialogue is a facetious reference to an explosive public conversation brought into attention by various internet blogs and celebrity news sources in which the public speculated as to whether or not Lady Gaga had a penis and was either a transvestite or hermaphrodite.

This rumour has multiple and profound implications. Theoretically, it demonstrates what Butler describes as a reactive ‘panic,’13 to a blurring of comfortable binary gender conventions. That inability to identify the

I’ll be ready. As she passes by on my right I reach my hand out for her shoulder. But she whirls round so quickly that I can’t get my hands in front of my eyes fast enough to block

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genitalia of a pop star is so pressingly uncomfortable that it requires incredible public attention exemplifies the heterosexual hegemony that dominates public discourse. In its attempts to confine Lady Gaga, the setting of the women’s prison in the Telephone video alludes to the aggressive policing of gender constructs while also parodying them. This is further elucidated when Gaga enters the courtyard of the prison and begins to explicitly make out with a butch woman whose gender, by conventional standards, is extremely ambiguous. Many prisoners in studded leather bikinis, as well as guards with bras and unbuttoned shirts, create an S+M motif within the prison where the atmosphere of punishment becomes infused with vivid sexuality. The camera’s persistent focus on shots of the crotch also serves a thematic purpose, which is that “there is a theory and therapy in [Lady Gaga’s] nakedness that is heavily theoretical.”14 Martin A. Peters cites one of Stephanie Germanotta’s papers, written as a student at New York University. Peter’s establishes that Germanotta knows “Kenneth Tynan’s critique of Freud and embraces the modern sexual relationship on the basis of ‘a Euro sexual openness, a perspective that embraces fetish and profane desire as our most fundamental and primitive form of sex, seeing the human body only as a form with sexual signification.”15 The identity of Lady Gaga’s body is not limited to being “only…a form with sexual signification.”16 As the narrative of the Telephone video advances, emphasis is placed on Lady Gaga and Beyoncé having a lesbian relationship.

Beyoncé picks Gaga up from prison in their yellow van, which has Pussy Wagon painted onto the side. It is the same vehicle made famous by Quentin Tarantino in the first installment of his film Kill Bill, a van that his strong female protagonist expropriates via theft of its sleazy, chauvinistic owner, Buck. The idea of the “pussy” as a vehicle of feminism for these two women implicates a politicized dimension within Telephone and recalls a Riot grrrl emphasis on the image of the vagina as a mouthpiece. Gaga and Beyoncé engage in suggestive dialogue in the van. They even end up poisoning Beyoncé’s abusive, misogynistic boyfriend, following which they ride off into the sunset, hands clasped. In Telephone, Lady Gaga assumes a lesbian sexuality that forcefully writes into the mainstream the Mace. And it burns. But my eyes drenched in sting keep my mind off of Constance, while it burns. My phone’s ringing again reminds me that Const – But it really burns. The cashier

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hegemonic discourse of pop music, a category of sexual identity that has been “excluded”17 from “the thinkable, the imaginable, that grid of cultural intelligibility that regulates the real and the nameable.”18 Another impressive means by which Lady Gaga’s dislocates herself from acting under the signifier of a singular gender or sexuality is established in Yoü and I. In this music video, Gaga debuts her male alter ego, Jo Calderone, a drag with “slicked-back brunette hair and dressed in a black suit and white – looking convincingly like a man and wearing typical male attire.”19 In Yoü and I a youthful looking Lady Gaga, wearing only a slip plays the piano in the middle of a cornfield. Gaga as Jo Calderone sits on top of the piano smoking, snapping along to the melody and embodying conventional masculine body language. During the bridge of the song, via trick of the camera, the feminine Lady Gaga leans up to kiss Jo Calderone. This image of being kissed by oneself transcends the physically possible. It powerfully challenges the categorization of gender, sex, and desire by presenting the impossible as possible. Butler would be pleased with Gaga’s reinforcement of the “parodic replication and resignification of the heterosexual within non-heterosexual frames [which] brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called original, but it shows that heterosexuality only constitutes itself as the original through a convincing act of repetition. The more that ‘act’ is expropriated, the more the heterosexual claim to originality is exposed as illusory.”20 Gaga has also attended award shows as Jo Calderone, bringing her performance of gender past the confines of a performance in video. Her performance as Jo becomes a part of interpersonal interaction. Heather Duerre Humann, who has promoted Though Butler’s remarks are useful, especially the theoretical junctions between since she links drag with the ‘failure of heterosexual regimes,’ it is worth noting Gaga and Butler, analyzes the drag that they are directed at drag performance in performance of Jo Calderone. general, whereas the Jo Calderone controversy In referencing Butler’s Critically deals specifically with the situation of a woman impersonating (and passing as) a man.

Queer, Humann writes: In other words, the Lady Gaga/Jo Calderone controversy occupies the realm of ‘drag kings,’ a phenomenon couched in culturally and historically specific terms differing from that of drag queens.21

snarls something and kicks me in the balls. My eyes still hurt and now so do my testicles as they shrivel into raisin like ideas of their former glory. I sink to my knees. “But God –”

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As previously established in analyzing Born This Way and The Queen, Gaga has already invoked an association of identity with the drag queen. With Jo Calderone, Gaga furthers her subversion of gender categories by representing the drag king. Humann quotes Laurence Selenick’s analysis of “the relationship between the politics of representation of drag and society’s attitudes about drag.”22 He argues that “‘once drag queens had become Disneyfied and safe, drag kings (performance artists or nightclub comics, depending on the milieu) seem to have emerged as another dangerous alternative.”23 Being a drag king involves “the act of transformation rather than mere impersonation.”24 Humann argues for the drag king’s performance as politically unique.

“When the body ‘escaping biological determinism’ is the female body,”25 drag offers the opportunity to “offer counter-narrative to the dominant cultural messages seeking to define and confine women’s bodies.”26 Lady Gaga’s ability to undermine the need to adhere to gender categories is politicized in many songs on the Born This Way album where Gaga explores her identity as something inhuman. She presents herself as alien or a “monster.” The Born This Way video is presented as a sciencefiction narrative where Lady Gaga assumes the role of the “mother monster” of a new species. Onscreen, her body is presented as a fragmented collage of vibrant abstractions, unidentifiable as human. Stars in the sky form the shape of ovaries. She narrates in a voiceover, that “birth of magnificent and magical proportions took place…but the birth was not finite, it was infinite… the mitosis of the future began.” By abstracting herself as the creator of an alien species, Gaga is insinuating the possibility of a rebirth in human psychology where perceptions of identity are not “finite” or limited to the binary, but “infinite.”

The narrative of the ‘mother monster’ continues to state that this kind of psychology “bears no prejudice, no judgment but boundless freedom.”

In the video, “evil,” is described by the ‘mother monster’ narrator as a “rotation in agony between two ultimate forces…the pendulum of choice.” Gaga artfully points to the harmful divisiveness of the binary, or having to choose one or the other – good or evil, man or woman, heterosexuality

I gaze up at her for a moment and recognize Tereesa with God between her legs from earlier that evening. “Oh Shit – Fuck,” she says, and apologizes a couple of times.

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or homosexuality. For Gaga, the force that disallows fluidity between categories is a rotation in “agony” and a form of violence.

Many academics and cultural theorists have questioned Lady Gaga’s potential for a subversion of rigid gender categories because of her status as a mainstream pop musician. Curtis A. Fogel and Andrea Quinlan question appointing Gaga with the role of a feminist or a “gendered warrior”27 because the “themes of sex and violence”28 that are the core of her music videos, “might not be the feminist objectives of a gendered warrior but rather, a marketing strategy that has undoubtedly worked.”29 While it is legitimate to display skepticism towards Lady Gaga and many others in the popular music industry who have benefitted from her global success, it seems far more cynical and oppressive to suggest that the modern celebrity and feminism have to be at odds with one another. Additionally, the expectation that Lady Gaga, who doesn’t adhere to a fixed gender identity, should be a “gendered warrior,”30 is a misunderstanding of her “theoretical project,”31 which is based in becoming inconsistent in gender identity.

Michael A. Peters clarifies Lady Gaga’s cultural relevance:

I suggest via Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard that the ‘global spectacular’ has taken over from a dying avant garde and Lady Gaga’s performances are Heideggerian works of (capitalist) art that also borrow from a long line of performance art (and neoliberal performativity) blending music, art, fashion and performance with public confession and therapy, which is designed to engage in a kind of audienceidentity politics of aesthetic self-creation.32

Peters acknowledges that the means by which artists become subversive has changed, as “performance in the age of new social media enable us to examine the ways in which individual performances reflect, reproduce or challenge cultural norms, and how they shape social life much more directly.”33 Gaga is able to “blur the dualisms of art and the everyday”34 by allowing her performance to transcend being locked to the confines of the music video, hit single or stage performance and extend into real life interaction.

In doing this, she achieves something quite miraculous.

Evidently, she mistook me for someone else. She runs off, steps nimbly into car and peels out of the lot. “Oh God,” I sigh, again. But God’s gone from this place. He’s gotten in a

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Peters views Lady Gaga as a key figure in remapping the “relationship between performance and theory, popular culture and philosophy.”35 This is a “reinvigorating”36 undertaking “because it provides a source of conviction and action, and a basis for reflecting on a mass produced culture that nevertheless has the capacity to reflect bits of itself to itself in a cycle of criticism that produces something new to say and show.”37 Additionally important is that the mass produced culture “Gagaism”38 critiques is one in which sexism is normalized and heavily implicated. Gagaism does not rely on the conventions of pop culture in which the female body is commodified in a reliably predictable fashion. Instead it subverts these conventions explicitly, in front of a captive public eye, displaying that there exists a fine line between desire and discomfort.

Lady Gaga’s powerful feminism is reinforced by Jennifer M. Woolston’s article “Lady Gaga and the Wolf, ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ The Fame Monster and Female Sexuality.” Woolston notes that, “Gaga writes (or co-writes) all of her own music, and this feat aligns her with the feminist theories of Hélène Cixous. Women must write themselves into the world, reject male representations of the self, and express their longings without fear. Gaga does this repeatedly.”39 The means through which Gaga’s “self-penned lyrics … fearlessly and unabashedly express women’s desires,”40 is remarkable.

Cixous’ The Laugh of the Medusa, reads as if it could be inspired by Gaga’s mission. Cixous states, “other love. – in the beginning are our differences.

The new love dares for the other, wants the other, makes dizzying, precipitous flights between knowledge and invention. The woman arriving over and over again does not stand still she’s everywhere, she exchanges, she is the desirethat-gives.”41 In her acquisition of multiple identities Gaga does anything but “stand still”42 within binaries. Lady Gaga “thrills at our becoming”43 in the video voiceover narrative for Born This Way where she refers to the “magnificent and magical” birth of “a race within the race of humanity, a race which bears no prejudice, no judgement but boundless freedom.” The futuristic, space-age landscape of the video implies Cixous’ notion of “our becoming”44 as an event in the future which has yet to happen.

beat-up station wagon and peeled out from this place. Perhaps, for the best. As I roll around on the ground bloodied, Maced, hungry, missing my drunken depressed wife, a friendly

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Moreover, Lady Gaga’s identification with herself as ‘mother monster,’ in Born This Way and her endearing reference to her fans as ‘Little Monsters,’ forms a blatant “monster narrative”45 within her work that echoes The Laugh of the Medusa. Cixous writes: Wouldn’t the worst be, isn’t the worst, in truth, that women aren’t castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the sirens were men) for history to change its meaning?

You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.46

According to this model from Cixous, Lady Gaga is then the Medusa with the power to ‘change the meaning of history,’ – a grand designation. Still, Gaga’s work and its inseparability from her performance demonstrate an impassioned involvement in changing history and its hegemonic discourse. Gaga’s reclaiming of the ‘monster’s’ signification as terrifying and ugly to present it as “beautiful and laughing”47 must not be belittled in its intentions. Additionally, Woolston views Gaga’s “monster narrative”48 in her album The Fame Monster as a rewriting of the hegemony present in “Little Red Riding Hood.” Woolston comments, “just as the wolf could embrace the visual disguise in the literary renditions of the tale, Lady Gaga effectively models how surface expectations often betray.”49 Lady Gaga not only subverts binary gender constructs but critiques longstanding narratives that enforce binaries within literary and cultural history.

Attempts at writing Lady Gaga off are oppressive attempts at subjugating a woman who has aggressively ‘written herself into the world,’50 and “blaze[d] her trail in the symbolic.”51 She is a powerful, dissident figure who gives, through stimulating art, “a love that rejoices in the exchange that multiplies.”52 Lady Gaga’s critical engagement with the hegemonic discourse that prevails within mainstream contemporary culture is certainly an “exchange that multiplies.”53 Her presentation of multiple personas effectively destabilizes the conventions of perceiving gender which have become customary and comfortable. She is a driving force in making “theoretical informed art”54 accessible, showing “that both art and theory can be practiced

and familiar whine tickles my crusted ear. Nix paws my shoulder and sniffs, whining, at my blood. I sit up, and he drops a dead rat at my feet. There are no punctures, so I know he just

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be practiced experimentally, pragmatically and in an engagement with the world that produces an intersection, an interaction, an intertextuality – a relational set of qualities.”55 Lady Gaga’s rightful position as a principle cultural figure is rooted in an energetic and sweeping performance which frees theory from the confines of print and releases its salient points about gender into the collectively established psychologies of the public.

found it. Looking toward the blue Wal-Mart sign eclipsing the moon, Nix makes as if to howl,

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Notes

Ibid., 78.

Fogel and Quinlan, Lady Gaga and Feminism, 186.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 Peters, “Lady Gaga,” 31.

32 Ibid., 27.

33 Ibid., 33.

34 Ibid., 27.

35 Ibid., 34.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

39 Woolston, “Lady Gaga and the Wolf,” 108.

40 Ibid.

41 Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” 274.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

45 Peters, “Lady Gaga,” 31.

46 Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” 266-267.

47 Ibid.

48 Peters, “Lady Gaga,” 31.

49 Woolston, “Lady Gaga and the Wolf,” 108.

50 Ibid.

51 Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” 269.

52 Ibid., 274.

53 Ibid.

54 Peters, “Lady Gaga,” 32.

55 Ibid.

26 27

Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 127.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Martin A. Peters, “Lady Gaga,” 27.

6 Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 127.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid., 130.

10 Ibid., 128.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid. 129.

13 Ibid., 129.

14 Peters, “Lady Gaga,” 31.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., 31.

17 Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 126.

18 Ibid.

19 Heather D. Humann, “What a drag,” 74.

20 Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 130.

21 Humann, “What a drag,” 77.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid., 78.

1

“Bluffin with my Muffin”

but, instead, he gurgles, and burps before drinking from a small puddle in the pavement.

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Nicolai Krejberg Knudsen is an exchange student from the University of Aarhus in Denmark. He came to Halifax to complete his B.A. in Philosophy with a year of Contemporary Studies.

Katie Connell is in her fourth year of a B.A. with combined honours in English and Creative Writing. She is fascinated with popular culture. Once she saw Lady Gaga on Queen St. East in Toronto and wept.

Hilary Sclodnick, born and raised in Toronto, is completing a combined honours degree in Contemporary Studies and Environment, Society and Sustainability. Cate May Burton is a

fourth year student in the Contemporary Studies Program and Spanish.

In the past year, she did research for Sierra Club Atlantic, was Sustainability Officer for King’s, and was CoPresident of the Contemporary Studies Society.

Gabe Hoogers, upon completing a degree in Contemporary Studies and Political Science in December, travelled to Bolivia and danced with Evo Morales on the streets of La Paz. A former President of the King’s Students’ Union, he now works for the Canadian Federation of Students.

Sebastian Ennis is a student at King’s; soon he won’t be.

He laughs and is forgetful; he writes things down when he tries to remember.

Tal Isaacson and Simcha Walfish are pursuing Combined Honours in Contemporary Studies and Classics.

Their collective interests range from Plato to pornography.

Andrea Benson is a fourth year student graduating with her Honours in European Studies. She likes to laugh irresponsibly, is excited to don spring florals, and hopes to pursue her own adventures out there in the unhinged real world, comparing some literature along the way.

Tamar Wolofsky is a third-year student in Contemporary Studies and History. When she is not writing papers about the Holocaust, she performs with Uncles Improv, bakes bread, and dabbles in gardening.

Reed Clements is in his final year of a combined honours degree in Contemporary Studies and English. His paper is dedicated to the former, current, and prospective grade school students who have been teased for being insufficiently masculine. He plans to do graduate work on James Joyce, but not before he has some adventures.

Jacob Glover reads, writes, lifts weight, and eats bacon. Next year he will begin a Master’s degree with the Dalhousie Classics Department. did not design Rawb Leon-Carlyle is studying CSP and Psychology. Glas He does not like being in only one place at once. and never will.

Patrick Blenkarn graduates this spring with a Combined Honours in Contemporary Studies and Theatre Studies, with a Minor in Film Studies. He enjoys watching long, boring French films (often) alone. He also runs an imaginary theatre company with earnest.