sixty days

sixty days
and sixty ways
resplendent
across from me it sits
artificial marking
a moment that should
it should be
a certain way with memories
of the way it used to
be so many times sixty
days try to catch themselves
without understanding:
the infinite joy of running

sitting with a subject

this most beautiful thing
see that it sits
and by an upturn,
or a down maybe
mostly a sideways
and a red with soft plastic
and how it is not there
except in a fold, a smell
or a contemplation, it
thinking of you making and unmaking,
which should really be everything
if you think about it

the same is,
and the only thing that changes
is the time that you take to look

yet another wasted day in dundas ontario

softly i see
the horizon
the way from here to there
it paints like a landscape
pushing me back (mom told me not to stare)
and takes a while to grab you,
but does not play in time
no different from the table i used to write
like graffiti, a cloud, or an orgasm
i want to die in public
words are a massacre, one substituted for another
while life sits softly and looks beyond itself

time

time sits like a peculiar thing
as though speaking was both
crime and victim
and silence its persuasion

only endings say nothing
while raising mountains and meaning everything
leaves falling sideways counted
makes the day, so beautiful here outside
if outside is more possible than standing
it calms like a fury
while supposing rain like drops of sunshine
ending on my thigh, like a morning

Dundas, with Sobe's Orange Carrot

try
not being there
it is silent
and like a sacred word
it is not
and cannot be

a place in the country

look at the way the sun grabs and holds a side
the building now made complete
with a bird in play, maybe
and its last time here for a while

trees hide the light and it's weird how they don't
speaking gradually "that everything already is"
and time for me/building/bird is a thing of intensities
and a watching that changes,
making poetry of all that is no more

this ghost that we haunt,
infesting every moment with time is
a scratching, like a pearl to an oyster
this is the defence which is beautiful and necessary

and so everyone jogs together past the building and the tree
forgetting the light as they forget themselves in perpetual song

Dundas

The Transcendent Rational Self: or, How to Tickle a 300 year-old Subject

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.
– Stendhal



The eighteenth century can be examined as a period charting the development of the autonomy and legitimacy of the individual subject within both philosophic and cultural discourse as emerging from the Enlightenment project. This is indeed a highly reductionist and therefore thoroughly naive interpretation of European history, but it does successfully correlate with the emersion of aesthetic discourse as a self-sufficient entity in philosophy. It is my belief that these two conceptual streams are inextricably bound and fundamental to the artistic output of the era. This is not the space for a lengthy audit of western philosophy as an ideational totality, or even for an attempt to negotiate its many oppositions, occlusions, and lacunae. Rather, I wish to use elements of Kantian and Hobbesian thought along with several examples from English poetry to reflect a certain archaeology which would be more amentaceous in a much longer examination than is presently undertaken.

Fundamental to this examination is the development of the study of humanity itself, for the Enlightenment can be observed as the increasing interiorization of the critical faculties onto the Self. In this regard Pope’s An Essay on Man is successfully emblematic: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man” (II, 1-2). As I will later elaborate, this humanist focus does not exclude God to the extent that the first line might suggest, and indeed the final line of the opening stanza outlines the importance of a transcendent absolute for the realization of humanity’s potential, as the poet desires an epistemology that will “vindicate the ways of God to man” (I, 16). The lines following this statement delineate the extent to which humanity can apply its faculty for reason, as originating with the conception of humanity crafted in the image of God: “Say first, of God above, or man below, / What can we reason, but from what we know?” (I, 17-8). The rather infamous Great Chain of Being extends from divine perfection to all that it has created: “behold the chain of love / combining all below and all above” (III, 7-8). In Pope’s epistemological framework, love represents the sublime which is humanity’s gesture to transcend itself. Love is both compassion and desire, the former of which unites organisms while the latter imposes a continual reinvigoration of intellectual processes. The purpose of human endeavour is to understand existence as a rationally ordered reflection of God’s perfection, and the will of humanity to understand its environment reflects the generative (and performative) impulse of the Word of creation:

Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides,
Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;
Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,
Correct old time, and regulate the sun;
Go, soar with Plato to th’ empyreal sphere,
To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;
II, 19-24

This image is precisely a conception of humanity modelled after God, analogous to Genesis 1:27. As a related yet chronologically divergent aside, George Herbert’s Prayer (I) from 1633 also inscribes the generative Word upon the lips of humanity: “Prayer, the church’s banquet, angel’s age, / God’s breath in man returning to his birth” (1-2). Here, both prayer and those who pray simultaneously create each other in the image of God. All of creation is contained within this prayer – “The six-days world transposing in an hour, / a kind of tune” (7-8) – and thus the infinitude of temporality is itself compressed as one finite performative utterance.

To return from this momentary tangent, no longer was the human environment one in which the human subject stood in awe – in the most absolute sense of the term as a sense of beauty and terror of the irrational unknown – of its surroundings, but rather all of existence could ostensibly be rationalized in order to control and direct such understanding. While medieval thought had positioned the human body and its consequent sensory experiences as a corruption of the truth represented in the divine, Enlightenment discourse reinterpreted truth as empirical evidence demonstrating the sublimity and absolute nature of the divine. Descartes had charted all of existence within the empirical framework of numerical quantization. His epistemological system, with the famous cogito ergo sum principally emblematic of his ideology as a whole, exposes the human subject as its locus. Descartes’s cogito posits the conscious subject as transcendent to, and thus autonomous from, nature, and thus the split between consciousness and object reaches its most logical extreme. The Self is itself made transcendent as the I of this dictum, as a subject always-already existing in the duality of object and actor, a nostalgia for both past and present. The mind becomes a preternatural construction, hierarchized above nature and the body, and in a very real sense serves to prefigure divinity itself. In this capacity the mind-body split is extended to the origin of knowledge production. Cogito ergo sum was the monolithic phallus reflecting a cultural sense of masculine identity as self-contained, sovereign, and transcendent. As Mary Wollstonecraft so eloquently pointed out, the Enlightenment project was an a priori exclusion of women as a negative Other that had to be controlled and contained in order to be understood. It is a notable irony that the importance of morality to such an epistemological system, as I will describe below, is consequent with the violent colonization of the Other in order to control the degree to which it informs the Self.

Interestingly, one can readily note the degree to which reason was used as a counter to itself, in terms of aesthetic discourse. In a very real fashion, certain elements of eighteenth century aesthetics tried to seek an outside to the jurisdiction of the rational mind. As mentioned above, frequently this gesture required a transcendent divine source, usually referencing the Platonic idealized forms, in order to justify aesthetics as a truth within an empirical framework. In other words, philosophers such as Hobbes and Kant needed to include the irrational, in its most absolute form as a divine presence, as part of the epistemological system which rationalized knowledge. For Hobbes, the former is best encapsulated early in chapter XVII: “the Lawes of Nature ... of themselves, without the terrour of some Power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our naturall Passions, that carry us to Partiality, Pride, Revenge, and the like” (223). In other words, the Self must be controlled by an Other to which it is fundamentally dependent. Over the course of the text, Hobbes outlines a material substitute for divine intervention, namely the transcendence of the state, which serves to act as a physical manifestation of divine reason filtered through human virtue.

For Kant, such a dependence on metaphysical theories functions as the syncretic basis for Reason itself. As he argues in his Critiques, reason is the ontological and a priori judgement of information as filtered by human experience. It is reason which defines Objective experience, and thus makes sense of the world in both a rational and symbolic way. Art is no different than science in this context, for each is an examination of rational possibility. There is a fundamental distinction between the two that must be considered, however. Art requires aesthetics in order to reify itself as an artistic gesture different from a non-artistic gesture or event, such as can be defined within the realm of the ‘mundane vulgarity’ of the common. To use a wholly absurd example, it is possible to distinguish an aesthetic sense in the desire to eat a bowl of soup in front of an audience in the manner of the Brechtian Theatre of the Absurd, yet such an action would not signify an aesthetic gesture when the context of its performance in front of an audience expecting theatre is absent. In this sense, the Self of the artistic gesture requires an external observer in order to reify it(S)elf as objet d’art. This external entity is typically a projection of the Self into a transcendent space which nostalgically examines the origins of its transcendence. Thus, we can agree with both Martin Buber and Jacques Derrida when they complete the Self by means of the negational aspects of the Other. In other words, the artistic gesture is the recognition of the importance of the non-Self – that which is not a manifest element of the Self – as fundamental to the conception of the Self within productive terms. The aesthetic is the negotiation of a subjectivity which negates itself in order to reify itself.

In order to unpack this last statement with a little detail, a brief examination of aesthetics and subjectivity is required. In Leviathan, Hobbes points out that aesthetics derive from sense perception, and as a consequence are not qualities inherent in the object itself:

Which Object worketh on the Eyes, Eares, and other parts of man’s body;
and by diversity of working, produceth diversity of Apparences. The
Originall of them all, is that which we call SENSE; (For there is no conception
in a mans mind, which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten
upon the organs of Sense.) The rest are derived from that originall.
(85)

Information is determined in its most primal form by the senses themselves, and any interpretive gesture on the part of the observer must be accomplished with the awareness that it is not the object which is being judged, but rather the representation of that object to the Self. Thus the process of critical inquiry is not distinct from the object in question, but rather judgement and object (or to rephrase, the sensory stimulus) are contingent and can be seen to occupy the same continuum of Self (as equally interior and exterior). While Hobbes did not formulate this process of judgement to the degree that Kantian philosophy was to in the century following his own writing, at least in the important regard of the will of the individual subject Hobbes prefigured Kantian thought. It is at this point that aesthetics becomes associated with reason, as each mirrors the triumph of the will of the subject in Enlightenment discourse. I do not presently wish to unnecessarily cloud this (already somewhat occluded) examination, yet it seems clear that morality is the conjoining element of the natural and the transcendent, for it is morality which signals the intention of judgement (and by extension, of aesthetics) to make the Self a universal, and by consequence a transcendent, entity. In its most absolute sense, aesthetics reflect not the object of critical study but rather the critical study of the Self projected externally. As Hobbes outlined in the first section of Leviathan, “men measure, not only other men, but all other things, by themselves” (87). Stated alternately, beauty is not a property of an object proper, but rather it is a representation of that object to the Self as a conceptual figuration shaped and created by the process of the Self applying judgment to that which is interpreted by sense perception as a non-Self.

Despite this aggrandization of the Self, in the pre-Freudian teleology of Enlightenment thought metaphysics is required to explain (and allow) the irrational. For Kant, an object perceived by a human subject is different from the true object itself – the Ding an sich, or thing-in-itself, which is the ostensible cause of all perceived phenomena. This object in its ‘natural’ state is thus transcendent over the human observer; it is something that cannot be understood in its totality. It is by means of the application of judgement that the object enters into the semantic space of knowledge production (and thus a natural object is represented as a transcendent one). As Adorno formulated in one of his published lectures, “reason is the absolute that holds sway in us all and is supposed to indicate to us what is good and what evil” (Adorno: 93). Thus reason as a gesture toward transcendence mediates experience between the transcendent and the empirical. Yet it should be understood that God is itself viewed as existing in a non-Objective form, and thus it is a priori immune to the application of reason. God is not the sublime, but rather the sublime is a signal path (or system of symbols arranged in a rhizomatic fashion) between judgement and its idealized source of origination, which of course within this teleology is God.

The extension of judgement into the imaginative undertaken in the gesture to understand God represents the manifestation of the sublime in human sensory experience, and thus constitutes the foundation of aesthetics. In the sense of bridging the limitations of subjective experience, the sublime can be seen to represent a negotiation between contradictions, such as freedom and determination, which Kantian thought tries to rationalize. By entering into the otherwise closed system of objective phenomena (or in other words, a phenomenon which creates sensory data by its very existence: volume, weight, motion, etc), judgement inscribes the Self-in-judgement onto the Object of its gaze. This a priori inscription of the Self reifies itself as a transcendent identification – as Beauty, for example: what is beautiful is determined as such on the grounds of giving pleasure to the Ego (in the Freudian sense of both the pleasure principle and death drive libidinously invigorating the subject, an explication which is notoriously beyond the scope of this present examination). Humanity has reached the logical extent of this Promethean gesture, by reifying itself as contingent with a divine essence which underwrites the entire epistemological system of language and signification. Consequently, it is possible to understand the sublime as a consequence of subjectivity itself. That which is ‘self-evident’, or in Kantian terms that which is the given, is that which is most in question within philosophical inquiry since the eighteenth century. As Adorno points out in one of his lectures, “Schopenhauer was perhaps the first to point out that the given is not limited to sense-data, but in some fashion also contains the deity who is supposed to have been the cause of whatever is given” (76). There can be no sense of the aesthetic without a subject, and the subject of the Critiques is one requiring a God in order to rationalize the irrational and provide the foundational essence of the entire Kantian epistemological system.

The outcome of the Enlightenment project should not be misunderstood as a unifying and totalizing one in the sense of its being universally accepted. Many were highly critical of the limitations of reason and scientific inquiry. Of course, one of the principle criticisms Pope expresses in his An Essay on Man is the hubris of humanity in attempting to transcend its own morality by overstressing reason beyond humility: “Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule– / Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!” (II, 29-30). There is in Pope no Prometheus to serve as the sacrificial lamb for humanity’s intellectual benefit, and consequently humanity alone must overcome its pride. Swift demonstrates a similar, and notably less hesitant, contempt when Gulliver visits the Laputians in Book III of his Travels, and the scientific method is satirized in the absurd and superfluous enquiries of the various scientists. The earlier poet John Wilmot was equally as critical of reason, which frequently caused humans to err in contradiction to desire and impulse. In his Satire Against Mankind (1680), reason is likened to a sea which drowns humanity, despite the “Books [which] bear him up awhile, and make him try / To swim with bladders of philosophy” (20-1). While the uncontrolled application of reason is found to be a hollow virtue for humanity – “I’d be a dog, a monkey, or a bear, / Or anything but that vain animal / Who is so proud of being rational” (5-7) – it is evident that by the middle of the text, Wilmot is praising the critical application of reason as representing the will of the individual:

Thus, whilst against false reasoning I inveigh,
I own right reason, which I would obey:
That reason which distinguishes by sense
And gives us rules of good and ill from thence,
That bounds desires with a reforming will
To keep ‘em more in vigor, not to kill.
Your reason hinders, mine helps to enjoy,
Renewing appetites yours would destroy.
(98-105)

In a very real sense this attitude prefigures the Kantian conception of judgement, in which the individual subject is given an ontological priority over its objective surroundings.

It is perhaps most fitting to summarize this somewhat rhizomatic present examination, a (pointedly anachronistic!) comment from Walter Benjamin can best exemplify the aesthetic conceptualisation I have outlined above:

Truth does not enter into relationships, particularly intentional ones.
The object of knowledge, determined as it is by the intention inherent
in the concept, is not the truth. Truth is an intentionless state of being,
made up of ideas.... Truth is the death of intention.
(Benjamin: 35-6)

If we are to take Benjamin at his word, then truth is not consequent with the sublime, which is the relation between the transcendent and the material. Such is hardly an optimistic proposition for Enlightenment epistemological systems, for it suggests that to endeavour towards the sublime is merely to quest after spectres. Morality is useless in this context, for as Nietzsche was so famously to demonstrate, all moralities are constrained by the conditions of their origination. Only within a universe defined in terms of divine generation does morality based on the sublime remain legitimate. This is one of the key limitations of Kantian philosophy, and served as one of the principle entry points for the dismantling of his thought. We can suppose that it will not be until the humanities attempts to transpose the current scientific discourse concerning chaos principles into critical studies that the sublime and truth can be ratified as a mutually inclusive system of knowledge production.

QZH

Bibliography: A Rhizome and not a Grocery List...

All primary literary sources quoted from http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/index.cfm except as noted.


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

Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London:
NLB, 1977.

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Touchstone, 1996.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. C.B. Macpherson. London: Penguin, 1985.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason, and other writings in moral philosophy. Trans.Lewis Black. London: Garland, 1976.

—— Critique of Judgement. Trans. Werner Pluhar. New York: Hackett, 1987.

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. New York: Random House, 1992.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women. London: Penguin, 1990.

Salva Me: Slavery, or how the sun makes one feel when stuck indoors

One can glance at the early modern period and perceive an interesting field of knowledge / power at play in European society. One principle dynamic (or boundary, if the field metaphor wishes to be continued...) is an ontological impetus towards the transcendence of the human subject, a fold in which individuals are defined precisely at the moment at which rights are given to them, those rights being defined by the self-legitimating individual. This reification of the primacy of the individual subject, a movement toward Nietzsche and away from Aristotle, represents the birth of a subjectivity not requiring a transcendent God for its ontological priority, but rather the subject itself is legitimated by the very process of its observation. Truth no longer required the appeal to a divine origin in order to be authenticated, but rather the method of inquiry itself inscribed a particular authenticity, most appropriately, capitalized as Reason. Almost anything could be systematized and thus legitimated under the guise of rational thought, and that which did not fall under the rubric of the reason-able was excised and only entered into the historical record by a silence and/or a transgression whose control was necessary. Simultaneous to this development of the Self is the improvement of technologies and structural apparati which can be seen to curtail the agency of that ostensibly liberated subject (from the tyrannies of individual rules, either religious or secular; from the ignorance of illiteracy; from the prejudice of error brought on by irrational thought; etc...). There are several trajectories by which this latter course takes shape in the field of social relations, yet save for perhaps the most obvious tangents I do not wish to burden myself with their analysis here. Of principle interest to this present examination is the extent to which slavery came to define the human subject under colonialism. I wish to under take this examination leaving off questions of Other and Self in terms of racial absolutes, to which such analyses usually refer. The reason for this has less to do with the politics of colonialism, which was indeed a racialized phenomenon, than with the politics resulting from early capitalism.

The Other has to do with the violence necessarily enacted upon the Other during the gesture toward (archival) identity. As will be elaborated below using The Explorations of Captain James Cook In the Pacific, the violence inherent in the process of colony building has a reflexive gesture, as the savagery inscribed on the colonized subject – the blackness of their skin and characters – becomes evident in Cook himself. Identity is a construction which operates on the principles outlined in Derrida’s Archive Fever. Briefly stated, Derrida elaborates a conception of the archive as being the site of violence between affirmation and censorship, and it is this site where ritualized discourse allows a trace of the archon itself to enter the archive as the jouissance of its excising function. This function of the archons circumscribes identity to the point where the desire to exclude becomes the ontological priority of the act of archiving. In the case of Archive Fever itself, this function is allegorized as the ritualized act of circumcision. Consequently, the creation of a site of knowledge is a project more concerned with negation rather than a creative gesture. In terms of the performance of identity, it seems evident that a particular identity is chosen by a process of social interpellation. The individual actor cannot be categorized as an archon – an agent who negotiates the performance of individual identities – for their own behaviour. And yet, the enacting of an identity is itself an instance of jouissance, a pained creation signalling the termination of the subject from the infinitude of possibility. As such, the individual can be located in terms of the mark of violence, their bodies representing the Derridian gesture of circumcision. Thus individual identities can be observed as the negotiated compromise between the violence of absolute interpellation from external forces and personal agency. It are these structures of/for interpellation which are most relevant to the existence of slavery; as Deleuze and Guattari demonstrated in Anti-Oedipus, it is this element of fascism which permeates all of life under capitalism (or that particular flow of desire which leads to/from capitalism). Yet it is not a broad castigation of capitalist production which concerns me, but rather the specific desires found in capitalism which were expressed under English slave-trading.

Foucault’s Discipline and Punish can serve to elaborate a narrative of this development, and serves as a critical shadow for this present analysis. To extract a rather broad generality from this text and invert it somewhat with regard to English colonialism (in particular the economic use of the colonies, and not territoriality in a more abstract sense of material possession), It seems evident that for economic reasons the liberated individual subject required a subjugated other with which to define its own sense of liberty. Colonialism was not as simple a matter as suggested by legal mandates, as for example the orders Captain Cook gave to his men in Tahiti in 1769: “1st To Endeavour by every fair means to cultivate a friendship with the Natives and to treat them with all imaginable humanity” (ECJC 25). The Other becomes the unconscious of production, its repulsive rather than socially acceptable desires, and as such both Foucault and Deleuze witness the importance of this marginalised population in signalling the more authentic productive capacity of a society. Yet slaves must not be understood to be individuals excised from their rights in the sense of a lack, as in the acceptance of slavery in a wholly non-violent manner representing a lack of a certain ‘spark’ in the black person’s soul which would lead to a more open rebellion – Hannah More objects to the ostensibly widespread belief that Africans do not have a sense of pain or sentiment as Europeans (and are therefore lesser human subjects, if not non-subjects) in her poem Slavery, for example. In this sense, slaves should not themselves be viewed as an exteriorized population, but rather as a violent inclusion of non-willing bodies into modernity. It is equally not accurate to understand slavery and colonial occupation as separate entities within the field of colonial politics, but rather as contingent with the production of identities in a more structurally general sense. Kristeva notes in Strangers to Ourselves that “between the man and the citizen there is a scar: the foreigner” (98). It is this ‘scar’ which gives a real form and definition for citizenship (or national inclusion, in a more broad sense, as women and the poor were not rightly part of the citizen body). We should note that the foreigner in relation to the colonial experience only figures for the subjugated populations of colonial rule who are not enslaved. By taking the scar into oneself, or in other words allowing slavery as a fundamental element of production, the colonizing authorities were performing something else. One cannot understand the interpellation of slave-subjects using the metaphor of the scar (as a memory, as a historical trace upon the body), for slavery represses the sense of reflective time to allow subjectivity. There is no cogito in a very real sense for there is no allowable ‘I’ in the slave-subject whose identity is stripped of all agency.

The silence of the historical record manifests as that which is said by the metal devices used to curtail the speech of the slaves and open their mouths against their will. Franz Fanon in Black Skin White Masks describes language as acting in a constructive manner, as identity is formed simultaneously with the speaking subject. Yet the most influential element of identity is one that is assumed from an authoritative culture: “to speak ... means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization” (17-18). One can perhaps understand the silence imposed upon slaves in the eighteenth century as the mark of violence against their humanity in its most absolute sense. He posits the colonized subject as a shrunken and trembling Self, which can only find expression – a voice in cultural discourse – through the adoption of ‘blackness’, which derives from white constructions of that identity. As evidenced by the narratives later examined, slaves must remain as non-speaking subjects, for at this instant they remain patently non-human, and thus available for conscripted labour. Consequently, they are seen a priori as irrational at the moment of interpellation as subjects precisely for their supposed inhumanity, and are therefore eligible for the rather brutal (and sexually fetishistic) manner in which they were treated by their masters, as evidenced, for example, by Mary Prince’s autobiography. Indeed, the fetishistic element of slavery is perhaps its most symbolic gesture, as Marx, and later Deleuze and Guattari, focussed on desire as fundamental to all economic production. The latter theorists went so far as to state desire to be production itself, and in this light we can read the economic history of English colonialism with slavery as its engaging force as so much ejaculate writ large by each lash of the whip.

It is, however, rather inconceivable that colonialism spared subjects on either side of its power dynamic the psychological trauma of its continuation. To further Kristeva’s earlier point:

With the Freudian notion of the unconscious the involution of the strange in the psyche loses its pathological aspect and integrates within the assumed unity of human beings an otherness that is both biological and symbolic and becomes an integral part of the same.
(STO 181)

In other words, the otherness attributed to the irrational is merely the projection of the unconscious onto a material Other which is easily definable. In this sense there is no difference between Self and Other in any logical system: “uncanny, foreignness is within us: we are our own foreigners, we are divided. ... The other is my unconscious” (183). It is at this juncture that we must return to Foucault, who reminds us that both the repression and liberation of power equally reify a singular performance of authority. It is precisely at this point that a gap opens in which colonial anxieties pour. In this limnal space, a boundary for the psyche for both individual and institution, resistence can foment, and there are indeed artefacts of revolutionary gestures (scar tissue, to pardon an obvious metaphor) and colonial nervous conditions in the historical record. It is unlikely, however, that such anxieties were consciously understood by most, as in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries only a few notable thinkers and personalities excepted to slavery. To the average conservative citizen of England, the abolitionist cause was seen to itself reflect a certain irrationality with regard to normative identity structures.

Some of the source documents that can be used to examine the nature of the archive of colonialism were created with records of initial contact between cultures. The Explorations of Captain James Cook underscores Adorno’s terse interpretation of Kantian philosophy in Problems of Moral Philosophy, namely that “reason cannot be divorced from self-preservation” (93-4). Thus, when Cook kills the natives for a variety of issues, mostly involving theft, murder is justified as a necessary solution, and consequently rationalized by his editor: “as so often happened, a native theft led to a native death” (ECJC 157). It is possible to read a sense of abuse of authority when Cook makes contact with the native Tahitians. The behaviour of both parties is similar save for the existence of European firearms, which allow the English a degree of material authority to enforce their judgement. Thus, a theft by the Tahitians is met with an increasing amount of criminal activity: “a resolution was passed to detain all the large canoes that were in the Bay, and to seize upon Tootaha and some others ... and keep them in Custody untill the Quad_t was produced” (30). It is the strength of the written inscription, the resolution, – a mark of desire with the archive – which differentiates this action from legal policing and vengeful retaliation. Perhaps more interesting, at least in terms of the social imperative to repress desire, explicated in Anti-Oedipus as contingent with all systems of social production, are the various instances in which Cook attests to the moral corruption of the island inhabitants. This is most prominent in his descriptions of their sexuality, from the anxieties that he expresses concerning a virginity / fertility ceremony performed by some youth in Tahiti, to the sexual diseases that spring from intimate contact between the native peoples and his crew. Notably, he seems to undermine his own beliefs when stating that “this Second Visit of ours hath not mended the morals of the Natives of either sex” (128) followed by a description of European activities in new world which are of a more highly brutalized magnitude. It seems likely that his desire to observe a war between two factions (during the Second Voyage) is the ritualized purging of violence from the psyche akin to Roman gladiatorial combat; an arena for the sacrifice of the Self, a transcendent instinct for annihilation. Like a child playing with toy soldiers, Cook relays his excited anticipation:

I must confess I would have stayed five days longer ... but it seem’d that they wanted us to be gone first. ... Thus we were deprived of seeing the whole of this grand Fleet and perhaps too of being Spectators of a Sea Fight, a Sight [excitement rises!], I am well convinced, well worth the seeing. I took some pains to inform my Self in what manner they joined Battle and fought at Sea
(161)

Interestingly, the islands themselves figure as a playful sandbox in a very real sense, as foreign animals are introduced as the resulting consequences are briefly observed. It seems that the European subject believed the subjugated Other to be an experimental subject, in which use was ascribed and violently constricted. There is an apparent epistemological approach here evident, namely that the Other is used to define and expand the subjective limits of the Self. A test-subject is manipulated within a certain degree of operation and judged accordingly. That which gets defined as Reason is that expression of judgment allowed by the strength of military technology. As Cook (and a near infinite amount of other points and foci of cross-cultural contact) demonstrates, sometimes the irrational beast needs to be shot in order to stimulate and promulgate rational knowledge.

At this point it is possible to regard slavery, not as two sides of a coin (or perhaps more accurately with the aforementioned child and sandbox), following Hegel, but rather as some abolitionst writers themselves had, providing a more subtle understanding of their social structures. Knowing the more intimate details of capitalism – as a teleology leading through Marxian analysis, to production-desire of Deleuzian thought – we are long past Hegel’s dialectic of Master and Slave. Rather the system of production which required slavery to be inscribed into its economic fundament recognized a more widespread abuse of the disenfranchised. Clarkson emphasizes precisely this point by examining the lives of sailors in the British Navy, and more specifically those involved in the slave trade. Sailors were rounded up either by force or by liquor and entered into a situation of indentured servitude: “seamen also were boarded in these houses, who, when the slave-ships were going out, but at no other time, were encouraged to spend more than they had money to pay for; and to these, when they had exceeded, but one alternative was given, namely, a slave-vessel, or a jail” (History 1459). This statement points toward a more generalized form of slavery that was indeed persistent throughout the empire, regardless of racial anxieties the British might have felt toward the subjugated populations in the Empire. Quite rightly, Clarkson recognizes the continuum which formed the slave economy, harming both ‘master’ and ‘slave’: “the trade was, in short, one mass of iniquity from the beginning to the end”. In this guise, the “savage man-stealer” (1457) were the productive desires of the nation which subjugated both black and poor British. Clarkson’s tract is as equally sentimentalized as More’s poem, yet ostensibly had a greater impact upon British consciousness due to its more rationalized and journalistic composition. It was a sentimental appeal to the sympathies of the British reading public, intended to demonstrate the horrors and suffering experienced by those who were forced into servitude. The cruelly cramped conditions on board the slave ships, in which “death was a witness which could not deceive them” (1463), represented an inconceivably inhumane treatment of potential Christians – “Africa ... freed from the vicious and barbarous effects of this traffic, may be in a better state to comprehend and receive the sublime truths of the Christian religion” (1464). More damning, however, is the fact that Clarkson implicates the British in the supposed savagery and ‘blackness’ of those deemed inhuman to the point of absolute bondage. It is illogical to assume that the British would be spared any psychological anxiety:

Do they experience no corruption of their nature, or become chargeable with no violation of right, who, when they go with their ships to this continent, know the enormities which their visits there will occasion, who buy their fellow-creature man, and this, knowing the way in which he comes into their hands, and who chain, and imprison, and scourge him? Do the moral feelings of those persons escape without injury, whose hearts are hardened?
(1458)

It is this connection between the guilty and the source of their guilt which anticipates an empathic response from the reader, as reason alone is not enough to encourage the rejection of an economic system which was itself seen to epitomize a rational ordering. Clarkson relates that it was the debasing of English society by a reliance on trade tied to a slave economy which precipitated a consequential depravity among the slaves themselves: “when the moral springs of the mind are poisoned, we lose the most excellent part of the constitution of our nature, and the divine image is no longer perceptible in us” (1464). We can understand the latter part of this sentence as a veiled condemnation of English Anglicanism, as well as referencing Clarkson’s filiation with Quaker beliefs, although he himself was an ordained Anglican. Likewise, it is possible to read a double meaning in Clarkson’s earlier question, “Is there no crime in adopting a system, which keeps down all the noble faculties of their souls, and which positively debases and corrupts their nature?” (1458). Just as Foucault implicates the observer with the observed in his understanding of the panopticon, Clarkson originates any moral corruptions that English society fashionably attributed to slaves with the system imposed by the English, and ultimately to a corruption of the English religion. He finds this corruption so repulsive that he is driven to a state of absolute irrationality – and indeed to hysteria, to engender the codes of interpellation. It is at this point that the structures (Reason, order, ‘England’, etc...) interpellating the subjects of empire collapse in upon themselves. Clarkson’s sickness denies the isolation of colonized and colonizing subjects, and signals a very material inversion of the absolute tyranny of the body of the Other as occurs in what can be called subhuman bondage. Consequently, we can understand this sickness as consistent with Foucault’s conception of the prison: as one in which both guard and prisoner are equally circumscribed in their agency. Kristeva’s scar has been written upon Clarkson’s skin as equally as those who haunt his conscience: “I was kept continually harassed: my mind was confined to one gloomy and heart-breaking subject for months. It had no respite, and my health began now materially to suffer” (1460). It is this scar which marks the simultaneous existence of the archive as national identity and the forced manipulation of bodies by early capitalism. The point of illness marks the entrance of psychology into history, as the immanence of bodily experience intersects the interpellating structures which code social discourse and economic practise. Like disease we can view this phenomenon as a contagion, as a structure which encodes desire and production. The “contagious ... crime of the oppressor” (1464) is the self-perpetuating system in which both master and slave are involved, representing both the desire to control populations in order to build a nation in imperialist terms as well as the jouissance experienced during the process of archiving a nation’s history. An almost sexual zeal is attributed to the tortures perpetuated against slaves: “the truth was, that, for the sake of exercise, these miserable wretches, loaded with chains and oppressed by disease, were forced to dance by the terror of the lash, and sometimes by the actual use of it” (1463).

A similarly fetishistic description of the slave-master’s relationship to his servants is given in Mary Prince’s account of her life. Although the text itself is ostensibly in her own voice, in both style and rhetoric the account seems to have been a construction of her editor, Thomas Pringle. In light of this fact, it is not possible to view her descriptions of slave life as an authentic account, yet its importance is as a filter or gloss and not as the inscription of a voice from the subjugated. Perhaps because of this, a high degree of sexual tension is apparent in this account of forced submission. The experience of the two slave boys is the language of de Sade, with pleasure and pain being of equal suffering and invoking a similar expression of release:

Both my master and mistress seemed to think that they had a right to ill-use them at their pleasure; and very often accompanied their commands with blows, whether the children were behaving well or ill. I have seen their flesh ragged and raw with licks. – Lick–Lick– they were never secure one moment from a blow, and their lives were passed in continual fear. My mistress was not contented with using the whip, but often pinched their cheeks and arms in the most cruel manner.
(HMP 1441)

Later, the ritual of punishment as performed by the master of the house reverses the symbolic outcome of the sexual function, as a pregnant woman is tied and beaten until she loses her child:

My master flew into a terrible passion, and ordered the poor creature to be stripped quite naked, notwithstanding her pregnancy, and to be tied up to a tree in the yard. He then flogged her as hard as he could lick, both with the whip and cow-skin, till she was all over streaming with blood. He rested [post-coitus...?], and then beat her again and again. Her shrieks were terrible.
(1441-2)

As Prince makes evident in her account, the scars created out of slavery did speak where the slaves themselves could not, as they served as body memories which were themselves traced into the archive of nationality. Seen in this regard, it is possible to view the archive – and perhaps even rational thought itself, if we here implicate Descartes – in a general sense and the English nation in the particular as the means by which desire, which must be interpreted as a highly localized phenomenon, encodes social discourse. As the work of the English abolitionists attest, one must make an appeal beyond reason alone in order to accomplish any sense of justice and equality between peoples, as reason is a product of specific desires and is wrongfully enshrined as a transcendent absolute.

There is no manner in which the ghosts of colonialism can be exhumed and interrogated. We do not ourselves possess the rituals necessary to bring voice to the silenced space in which those who have been violently excised from the archive of civilization. Only a profound silence – the intake of water as the final communicative gesture between Friday and Susan in Coetzee’s Foe, ostensibly terminating the latter’s (symbolic) life with one performative gesture – marks the trace of slaves themselves, who were made individuals only to lose that status (to exist as a non-status, a limnal boundary) in order to be re-inscribed as machines of production in the most absolute and fascistic sense. In a very real sense however, it is important to recognize that slavery was itself fundamental to the Enlightenment as a trace of the emergence of the individual human subject.



Background and Bibliography

The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 1: The British Isles, 1830-1865. Ed. C. Peter Ripley. New York: U of North Carolina P, 1985.

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

Brathwaite, E. K. History of the Voice. London: New Beacon Books, 1984.

Clarkson, Thomas. “The History of the Rise, Progress, & Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament”. From Eng. 747 coursepack. (1456-64.)

Cook, James. The Explorations of Captain James Cook In The Pacific. Ed. A.G. Price. New York: Dover, 1971.

Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari. Mille Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. B. Massumi. Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Fanon, Franz. Black Skin White Masks. Trans. C.L. Markmann. London: Paladin, 1970.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979.

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

Prince, Mary. “The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave”. From Eng 747 coursepack. (1440-
43.)

Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah

Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah is fundamentally an examination of the consciousness of the colonial imperative, alternately the drive for conquest over the Other. This is accomplished primarily within the discourse of subject relocation, as the author provokes in the reader a desire to reclaim the Other, a gesture enacted as a requisite for the understanding of the Self. In a very real sense, this examination is not only a manifestation of the Foucauldian conception of the science of ordering, itself fundamental to the ideation of Enlightenment philosophy as espoused by Kant and Hegel, onto an imagined colonial identity. In other words, by speaking through the colonized Other and looking back at the Self, Hamilton’s text suggests a project of forgiveness and purification on the part of the imperial project, or at least the progressive elements of the consciousness of said project, which mirrors the ritualized forms of purification championed by Hindu society, according to several characters in the novel. That this conception of a subjective consciousness is examined within both the (relatively concrete) narrative field as well as the (conceptually abstract) structural field itself reflects the author’s awareness in the totalizing gestures of cultural and economic imperialism. Such a totalizing conception of the imperial project should not be taken as itself a absolute, but rather as a mode of cultural interpretation, for Hamilton herself problematizes the degree to which any ideological structure can be universalized.

The epistolary structure of the novel is itself a means by which the colonial experience is represented. It is not a travel narrative in the sense typical for English popular literary interests, in which a civil Englishman enters into a realm of the unknown and forcefully controls it, despite the little moments de jouissance in which the protagonist is on the verge of being consumed by a violently threatening Other. In a very real sense, cannibalism represents the limit to which the violence of colonialism can be exteriorized and projected onto the subjects of that violence (those who receive its effects). Colonialism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the impetus for controlling a subjugated population is inscribed onto imperial subjects as a defence mechanism against the perceived irrational barbarities of the former. Hamilton utilises fictitious correspondence between members of the Indian aristocracy as the organizing principle for her text. This structure serves to demonstrate the ramifications of colonialism from the subjective position of the subjugated, contrary to the typical literary practice exemplified by Robinson Crusoe. In her novel, consumption as a psychological anxiety precipitating and resultant from the drive to colonize is turned in upon itself, as the act of cannibalism is one involving the subjective localization of the colonial (Indian) subject. Accordingly, the narrative gaze is that of the colonized Other examining the customs of English society from an ostensibly exterior subjective position. In this sense, the voice of the Other is used as a means by which the reader can enter into an exotic and romanticised alterity, a field in which the self-reflective gaze of the imperial subject reifies both colonized and colonizer. Ostensibly this is done as an apologetic gesture, an attempt at reconciliation while simultaneously masks and reifies the guilt felt by the subjugation of a society to imperialism.

In this capacity, it is not surprising that rituals of cleansing and forgiveness are highlighted throughout the text, be it Sheemaal’s comparisson of the English and Indian ceremonies of the Purekah on p. 136 or the various purification rituals performed by the Rajah before eating, holding “court”, and other social phenomena. Throughout the text, references are made to the Rajah’s interest in the institutions and offices of English society, and this curiosity serves to elaborate a more fundamental concern. Following Foucault’s archaeologies of Western culture in both Discipline and Punish and Madness and Civilization, institutions can be understood as ritualized behaviours made concretely manifest in very openly political terms, or more precisely, in obvious economic terms of power and control (who gains agency over banking, religion, and education, for example). Late in the text, the Rajah describes what he believes to be one of the principle ideological structures which governs the English economy. He is highly critical of the degree to which non-religious, and in his eyes consequently amoral, sentiments inform the behaviour of the citizenry. Christianity is not wholly accepted by the English, who do not truly practise the Christian doctrine: “if this is really the religion of Christ, how falsely are people often called Christians” (240). Early in the text, Sheermaal accuses them of mistreating their servants, contrary to the more enlightened practises of the Hindu people. In the fourth letter, he describes the manner in which humans are stored and traded like any other trade commodity, with no importance save a healthy return of investment. Later in the text, the Rajah is appalled by the slave trade surrounding the navy, in which forced conscription is exercised by press gangs. In the tenth letter, he comments on the English (and more widely the European) proclivity for war, and accords the degree of control over the minds of warring Christians to an almost fundamentalist zeal for individual gain: “when a significant number of Christian men are united together, to form an army ... they shall be licensed to commit murder, at the command, and by the authority, of their religious superiors.... [This] shall no longer be termed, Murder; but Glory!” (170). Indeed, it seems as though he is reacting to the institutionalization of a certain kind of violence; it is not the ritualized and violent annihilation of the self which is fundamental to a thorough understanding of the Hindu Vedas, but rather the violent control of the Other, which is enacted in order to limit the degree to which Otherness informs the Self. Early in the text, Maandaara prefigures the Rajah’s letters toward the end of the text by expressing a degree of abhorrence toward the forms of violence ritualized in English culture, and the extent to which such beliefs and practises can disrupt Hindu culture, for example, the British slaughter and consumption of sacred cows described on p. 104. Indeed, his fear of infiltration from the English parallels similar feelings in English consciousness, which serves as fundamental to the impulse of social domination evidenced by colonialism. He indicates that this corrupted religion – these “Christians of the new system” – is heavily tied to a mercantilist ideology of individualism and the aggressive accumulation of wealth: poverty is consequently “stigmatised with a degree of infamy ... by their very laws, and under the immediate inspection of their sage magistrates, it is punished in the most exemplary manner ... [and] is evident throughout the tenor of law”.

Atheism is linked to the renunciation of Nature, and indeed perception itself in its once absolute (ie: religious, as per St. Augustine) and Platonic conceptions. Industrialization remains a shadow to this censoring of the Natural. By endeavouring to remove elements of (perceived) chaos from such rituals, thus ostensibly making them both more concrete and absolute, power is reclaimed away from the Other onto the Self, for it is the localization of subjective experience that allows the Foucauldian conception of knowledge / power to be realized. In a rather vulgar sense, it is absolute subjectivity which allows the performance of identity to occur at its most potent, and the institutionalization of subjects within the discourse of national politics serves to remedy the question of free will which serves as the basis of Enlightenment philosophy. To invoke a rather overused (at least in the polemics of Marxist interpretation) example, the interpellative gestures involved in the exercise of authority serve to qualify the interpellated subject as one whose identity is only fully realized in the act of sublimation to the state apparatus. It is for this reason that Mahatma Gandhi’s politics of self-annihilation were so confounding to the imperial apparatus of control, for there was no “subject” with which the state could respond; such, however, is the future of Indian colonial history which served as the illogical outcome of the process of colonization as elaborated in Hamilton’s text.

The quasi-scientific categorization of Indian culture which opens the text, book-ended with a functional glossary of Hindi terms, is emblematic of this gesture to order. It represents a quantification and hierarchization of the legitimate or authentic – data which is judged in- or admissible, itself a mark entered upon the archive of cultural legitimacy understood in the vein of Derrida’s censors in Archive Fever, where agents exercising varying degrees of power / knowledge legitimate themselves as guardians of culture by virtue of their exclusionary function. Any sense of truth, or indeed of subjective authenticity, emerges from the process of archiving that “truth”. The judgement of the censors reflects the structural apparati which created the archons themselves as agents of power, in the process reifying the very ideological field in which truth (and by extension, any sense of the real) is determined. Judgement is given sentimental value according to taste and education, and accordingly reflects a very clear ideological positions antithetical to the principles of the universalist impulse to which it gestures. Thus that which is deemed admissible into the archive is that which can be rationalized as authentic. Of course, that which is deemed authentic under such circumstances must be understood in the relative conditions for such an appraisal argued by the Rajah throughout most of the novel. It is this element of the text which is the most ontologically problematic, as this sense of relativism is in fact emergent from a universalizing principle of European rationalism. This is perhaps best represented in the character of the student Delomond, who speaks with the conviction and exclusionary self-aggrandizement of Enlightenment discourse: “the connection between philosophy and virtue is “so natural, that it is only their separation that can excite surprise; for is not the very basis of science, a sincere and disinterested love of truth? ... it promotes a detestation of everything that is mean or base” (208). In a very real sense, truth is ontologically dependent on this specific process of critical inquiry – the infamous scientific method which emerged in the 17th century. As Doctor Severan explains, “there are few predominant dispositions of the mind, which may not be analysed and traced through their origin and progress by any one who will give himself the trouble to pursue the necessary process” (214). Of course, Delomond’s last statement reflects the entry of judgement into discourse, and consequently the individual exercises its sense of evaluation along the principles outlined by Derridian thought, namely in a process which transfers meaning from context to subject as outlined a moment ago. In his opening letter, calls for a localist outlook relative to the whole of society, describing the utopian system of law as one of representational democracy: “all laws are therefore issued by the sanction of their representatives; every separate district, town, and community, choosing from among themselves, the persons most distinguished for piety, wisdom, learning, and integrety, impart to them the power of acting in the name of the whole” (85). This statement closely mirrors the thought of the period, from Locke to Hume, concerning the primacy of the individual subject for the legitimacy of the political system. The Rajah’s initial acceptance of English culture as a totality signals the inscription of colonial values onto his position within Hindu society. In other words, the most efficient manner in which the British could subjugate the Indian population was to convince the ruling class of the benefits of English civilization.

It is this Preliminary Explication which serves to most wholly exemplify the colonial project, as the agency and autonomy of the colonized (quantized, categorized) subjects are most blatantly denied. There is no examination of the contradictions and irrationalities evidenced by a social body, but rather one can interpret this section as an explanation of social characteristics within absolute terms. This section is far too reductive in outlook, and serves to oppose the beliefs of some post-colonial critics that “all identity is individual, but there is no individual identity that is not historical, or, in orther words, constructed within a field of social values, norms of behaviour, and collective symbols”. Consequently, the social castes serve as a uniform entity ideologically mobilized in order to rationalize social control; in the very real history of English colonization of India, the controlling castes – the brahmin – were used to more efficiently control the Ryots, or Indian peasantry, which vastly outnumbered any military force Britain could station in the country. Similarly reductive is the distillation of English society into the three classes of People of Family, People without Family, and People of style. The degree of individuation espoused by Enlightenment philosophy is ontologically antithetical to this particular rationalist impulse. And yet the sequence involving the Rajah’s experience with the English legal system – localized as a Hall of Justice, and more specifically as “the Magistrate seated in his chair” (251) – demonstrates the degree to which enlightenment logic can deconstruct its own principles. Citing Locke and Berkely among others, the defence council argues that identity (and by extension truth) is not a constant, but is defined by the moment of its expression, and is consequently situationally based: “what is right? what is wrong? what is vice? what is virtue? but terms merely relative” (254). Reason itself is not an absolute entity existing a priori in human subjectivity. Rather, it is the system of meaning – Foucault’s science of order – emerging from the conscious subject and projected externally. It seems evident that this sequence is intended to serve as a parody of the judicial system and its ontological faults as a social institution intended to dictate the properly moral behaviour of humanity, especially in relation to the legal corruptions of justice within capitalist society, as outlined on p. 241.

As elaborated by Foucault, a society of control requires a consistent indoctrination of specific ideological practises. It is for this reason that Hamilton examines the nature of the English educational system, which for the most part excluded women from any degree of involvement. Through many of the letters, a philosophy of equal educational opportunity is elaborated. Indeed, the status of women is ostensibly juxtaposed with that of the colonial subject, each as a subject lacking agency due to the Enlightenment discourse of control. In a very real sense, women is socialized as being antithetical and in a binary relation to Enlightenment philosophy: “the education of boys is, in same degree, calculated to open, and gradually prepare the mind for the reception of knowledge; that of girls, on the contrary, is from their very cradles, inimical to the cultivation of any one rational idea” (221). Reason is itself a censoring of that which is not male, or perhaps more precisely, that which is male defines reason by virtue of an endeavour to control the influence of what is deemed outside of the subjective discourse of masculinity proper. As Julia Kristeva outlines in Strangers to Ourselves (and further elaborated in Nations without Nationalism), “women have the luck and the responsibility of being boundary subjects: body and thought, biology and language .... origin and judgement, nation and world” (STO, 35). Hamilton’s solution to this problem is itself highly problematic, for, in appealing to the importance of education for female agency and realization of ability, she invokes the same masculinized control of the production and dissemination of knowledge. The fifth letter perhaps best exemplifies this imperative, as it outlines the benefits of providing women with the same ‘rational’ education that men received. It is not the engendering of knowledge which is itself most problematic, but rather that Hamilton ignores the socio-economic aspects of education as well, namely that the poor did not have the means to be themselves educated.

As the philosophical trajectory of the novel – despite an ostensible relocation to an anti-imperial ideological position – remains tied to a discriminate assumption of the voice of the subjects of colonialism, I believe that it reflects a less than equitable relationship between England and India. The Indian subject, viewed in its most absolute sense, has no voice or sense of agency. Several breaks in the narrative suggest an attempt to provide an Other for discourse itself, as though Hamilton were aware of the conceptual limitations of her text. There are several temporal breaks in the Rajah’s correspondence, most easily evidenced by the editorial interjection on page 144. In the postmodern, this gesture might have taken the form of the annihilation of the medium itself; one can see for example, the dissolution of the structure of the film in regard to the ability to authentically represent a variety of subjectivities in Abbas Kiarostami’s 1997 film Taste of Cherry for example, in which all narrative focus locus meaning with the interruption of the “real world” into that of the film itself, questioning the very notion of the “Real” to which representation is gauged. Concurrently, there is no Britain described in Hamilton’s text that is not the projection of a self-reflexive subjectivity onto the Other which is subject to imperial control; it is in many respects supportive of the subjugation of the Indian subjects which the novel ostensibly wishes to liberate. Consequently, the novel can be seen to sustain the dominant ideological position exercised by the imperial Will, thus supporting the repressive institutional structures of colonialism. That being said, there is a degree to which I liked the book...

Linda Colley's "Britons" = yet another stupidly boring seminar

Linda Colley’s Britons

Linda Colley’s 1992 book Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 attempts to determine the national character of the British Isles during the period in question. Principle to her study is a certain conception of the “nation” as an ideological construction which derives from specific cultural and economic developments. As Benedict Anderson has pointed out, the conception of a unified national identity is itself highly problematic. It should not be understood as a collection of cultural or political essentialisms which originate in ethnic characteristics, but rather should be viewed along the lines of Anderson’s rather infamous edict as ‘an imagined political community’. With this in mind, it is possible to locate Colley’s argument that the British population was collected as an imagined community – and more particularly, that they came to define themselves – “in reaction to the Other beyond their shores” (6). Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Britain was at almost continual war with France, particularly as a reaction to Imperial (or in other words, colonial) interests. Indeed, Colley goes so far as to suggest the rather bold statement that “prolonged struggle tested and transformed state power on both sides of the Channel” (3), ultimately resulting in the emergence of key social institutions such as the Bank of England and a nationwide financial system.

The first chapter of her book seeks to determine the identity of the Britons, and more precisely to determine how the British people viewed themselves as a unified national body. The country was itself created in 1707 when Parliament passed the Act of Union, unifying Scotland, England, and Wales into one political entity. Despite some language differences, particularly with the Welsh, who did not give up their language until the twentieth century, the three initially separate countries had drawn ever closer together by trade. In the case of Scotland, there was also a monarchal connection through the Stuart Dynasty. There remained some disparities among the three regions, however. There was no shared Celtic identity between the Scottish and the Welsh despite their shared linguistic difference from England proper. As well, there was a fair amount of internal division between locales, evidenced, for instance, by the continued cultural strife between the Highlands and the Lowlands in Scotland and between the Northern and Southern territories in England. England itself was internally unified by language, economy, and a less geographically diverse terrain than either of its neighbours, yet the variety of local customs, foods, and literatures demonstrate that English culture was not homogenous. Indeed, it seems evident that the border zones between nations had more in common with each other than they did to the centralized authorities to which they were ostensibly tied. It should be accordingly noted that under such conditions any sense of national identity must be read in a heteroglossiac manner: “Great Britain in 1707 was much less a trinity of three self-contained and self-conscious nations than a patchwork in which uncertain areas of Welshness, Scottishness, and Englishness were cut across by strong regional attachments, and scored over again by loyalties to village, town, family and landscape” (17). Some of these cultural differences were negotiated by advances in infrastructure, communications, and trade, the latter of which being free of internal tariffs or duties in opposition to Continental practise. There was a great deal of internal mobility largely resulting from trade, and consequently, “England and Scotland ... experienced a much faster rate of urban growth in the eighteenth century than did any other part of Europe” (39). Indeed, the “relative sophistication of [Britain’s] economic networks played an important part in keeping this culturally diverse land together” (43).

The most significant distinction Colley makes in her study is the extension of the psychological binary of Self and Other – an important trope for Ego formation since Freud – to the more broad social construction of national identity, and indeed Britons saw themselves as God’s chosen people. Fundamental to this belief is the protestant reformation of the sixteenth century which led to an independent church in England. British identity was the reification of the perceived difference between the island Self and the continental Other. This difference did have an internal dimension as well, for the biggest internal conflicts surrounded the ideological gulf felt between Protestants and Catholics. By the eighteenth century, Catholics could not vote, and were indeed second class citizens. It was believed that all of the catastrophes of recent history – the tyranny of James I, the London fire of 1666 – were all precipitated by Catholics. Print was of vital importance in unifying the Britons within this ideological field. Daily newspapers were numerous by the early eighteenth century, and outnumbered those produced by continental nations. While London served as the locus for print (and indeed non-print) culture – many provincial editors relied on news from London to fill their dailies – protestant ideologies had infiltrated British culture to such an extent that the ideological fundament of the papers reflected a similar, while not totally monolithic, culture. Cheap publications such as almanacs, sermons, and broadsheets sold exceptionally well and were quick to produce, and consequently were widely available to the subordinate classes: “this enormously enhanced access to print was a vital part of the conviction that Protestant Britons were peculiarly privileged” (42). They were used as vehicles for the spread of anti-Catholic sentiments and other “history” lessons, and were frequently written “to demonstrate the country’s centrality and miraculous deliverance from popery” (22). Similarly, John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which was as equally popular as the Bible, “linked brutal religious persecution with Roman Catholicism and foreign intervention” (27). The Martyrs were themselves associated with the commoners as well as the aristocracy in order to avoid, or at least hold at bay, any class antagonism.

While there was some tolerance of Catholicism – many knew a Catholic neighbour – Catholics could experience the same hostility as meted out to witches and heretics, particularly in times of war. Catholic nations were characterised by the British as slothful and inept, while Catholic values were themselves perceived as “upside-down” (36). The British did not experience the hardships of starvation and foreign invasion, and consequently there were no significant instances of civilian casualties or property destruction. “The relative absence of famine was a powerful aid to social stability” (37), and this stability led to a belief that Protestantism was indeed the more ‘righteous’ ideological path. Adversity to the ‘obvious moral corruption’ of Catholicism helped define a British identity as chosen by God: “suffering and recurrent exposure to danger were a sign [sic] of grace; and, if met with fortitude and faith, the indispensable prelude to victory under God” (29). Indeed, religion had so tied itself to political (national) identity that in 1688 and 1714 the rules of succession were altered to disallow Catholic claimants on the throne from gaining power. The Hanoverian George I, for example, himself of German origin, was given power by Parliament over fifty otherwise more eligible individuals whose sole detrimental characteristic was their adherence to Catholicism. To legitimate Protestant rulers, the divine right of kings, fundamental to English legal structure since Magna Carta, was itself suspended in favour of “divine providence and the people’s will” (48). Great Britain was allegorized as the new Jerusalem, with battles against Catholic states depicted as “the triumph of Israel over the Moabites” (31). Apart from the loss of some American colonies in 1776, Britain enjoyed a series of strategic victories: “it was easy ... for Protestant polemicists to argue, and tempting for the mass of men and women to believe, that it was the expulsion of those Stuart princes who had inclined toward Catholicism, and the unity of the island under a Protestant dynasty that had transformed Britain’s position in the world” (53) from the insular, rather marginal power it had been in the sixteenth century to the might of its Imperial control by the nineteenth.

Such an aggrandized sense of Self needs a potent Other with which to ontologically define itself. For much of the period in question, France occupied this hallowed position for the British consciousness. The country did pose a threat to British interests, as it had a larger landmass and population, could field a stronger and more numerous army, and was pointedly anti-Protestant. It was feared that the French would restore Catholicism to Britain and consequently return the country to the hell of its troubled history: “the prospect in the first half of the eighteenth century of a Catholic monarchy being restored in Britain by force, together with the recurrent wars with Catholic states, and especially with France, ensured that the vision that so many Britons cherished of their own history became fused in an extraordinary way with their current experience” (25). It is here that Colley’s argument falls slightly. It seems more likely that the Other was a religious rather than a national one, even though the two were one and the same in the case of countries such as France. The acceptance of the many Hugenots who fled the Continent to settle in England is proof that the British people did not equate foreignness as inherently corrupt. Furthermore, by stressing the importance of the British Parliament to national identity – the institution was idiosyncratic to Britain, for many such congregations had ceased to operate on the Continent: “Parliament was unique, splendid and sovereign, the hard-won prerogative of a free and Protestant people” (50) – Colley implicitly suggests an alternate avenue for Otherness that she does not explore. Parliament as a social construction represents a unique conflation of the individual and an ontological tendency for anti-individualism, for it was ostensibly used to represent the will of the individual as reified by social and legal structure. Many, even those Britons who lacked full citizenship for economic reasons, could bring their political desires before this institution, and this sense of agency for the otherwise marginalised was a potent force uniting the disparate peoples of Great Britain. The perceived Other is the individual who does not conform to the rules of political interpellation: “the Protestant construction of British identity involved the unprivileging of minorities who would not conform” (53). It might be possible to argue, however, that the more authentic Other in the case of the British consciousness is the irrational, to which both Protestantism and legal practise applied their medicaments. The Self evolved over the course of three centuries, manifesting as potent social institutions, such as Parliament and the legal code, which themselves signified Britishness more than any individual cultural practise. That these institutions were shared amongst the territories which constituted Great Britain signals the true unifying nature of the projection of Self-identity onto a national consciousness.

oh Humphrey Clinker, won't you ever learn?

The presence of human bodies cen be readily traced in a variety of texts, and indeed through the work of Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes the corpus humani has become a focal point of a great deal of contemporary literary criticism. While as a general principle I do not like to include biographical details of authorship as an entry point into textual interpretation, in regard to Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker, there can be little to differentiate the author function from the theme of his novel. Each represents the same gesture to transcend a diseased and thus emphatically mortal body. Smollett’s text reflects the growing concern the author had concerning his own deteriorating health. It was in a very real sense a sentimental swan song to his profession, as the vitriolic social criticism of earlier works such as Roderick Random and Ferdinand Count Fathom was constrained to a much greater degree in Humphrey Clinker. While some critics have awarded a certain austere respect to the text for being a more muted satire than the author’s previous works, Smollett’s last novel should not be misunderstood as a light social farce lacking a probing critical intention. As I will soon elaborate, the text becomes a locus for an ontological deferral, and as such serves to elaborate a meta-narrative of humanity seeking to postpone an existence which is by definition entropic.

The process of writing is itself key to this deferral, and acts as a mediator between the personal and the public. Like the social conception of the body itself, writing signals the entrance of an individual into public space, and yet simultaneously it is an antisocial activity in terms of its removal – or perhaps more accurately the self-imposed hermetic isolationism, a compartmentalization – of the author from their society. As Barthes was to describe in relation to the Surrealists, sometimes there can be too much literature as the body as res actualis is overlooked. As a foundational device for the narrative – here an epistolary, and thus somewhat fragmentary, structural trope – writing is both a gesture reifying an instant to consequently make it transcendent over the temporality of its initial context, and simultaneously it serves to obliterate the experiential existence of that moment. In other words, the process of writing both sanctifies and annihilates its subject with the same ontological gesture, and thus can be seen to reflect Camus’s notions of ritual suicide as a creative termination as elaborated in The Myth of Sisyphus. It is for this latter reason that the travel metaphor is elaborated in Smollett’s text, as Matt Bramble seeks continual motion in order to cure his degrading health and differ the ultimate sedentary existence as a body interred. At times, he seems to regret the drive to capture his experiences in textual form, and at these instances Bramble seems aware of the Janus nature of language as simultaneously formative and destructive of subjective experience:

My letter would swell into a treatise, were I to particularize every
cause of offence that fills up the measure of my aversion to this,
and every other crowded city – Thank Heaven! I am not so far
sucked into the vortex, but that I can disengage myself without
any great effort of philosophy – From this uproar of knavery,
folly, and impertinence, I shall fly with double relish to the serenity
of retirement ... the hospitality and protection of the rural gods;
in a word, the jucunda oblivia vitae which Horace himself had
not taste to enjoy. (155)

This Zen-like transcendence to which the Horace quotation refers – an exquisite and divine annihilation of the senses precipitated by an absolute and immanent subjectivity – is precisely the differal suggested by both the writing process and Bramble’s own quest for palliative care. It is a state of non-existence, of absolute silence which precipitates from an unending babble of voices. In a similar manner, Bramble terminates contact with his doctor when he is in motion, yet the journey itself precipitates the writing of letters explaining his current ailments in order to seek medical guidance: “as we shall be in motion for some weeks, I cannot expect to hear from you as usual; but I shall continue to write from every place at which we make any halt” (188). As readers, we are meant to question the nature of writing as an instrument for socialization – in this capacity, Bramble’s nephew Jery Melford proclaims the virtues of the growing popularity of female authors, “who publish merely for the propagation of virtue” (160). If writing must be seen as antithetical to the travel motif, at least in terms of their mutual temporal exclusivity, then Bramble’s letters (which, more accurately, should be interpreted as proselytisations and not epistolary documents in the traditional sense of “how are you dear friend?”...) should be seen as attempting to create an insular society tangentially associated with the bustle and turmoil of the urban masses. With Bramble’s complaints, Humphrey Clinker serves to document the growing fecundity of the middle classes and the alterations demanded by such a society: “all is tumult and hurry; one would imagine they were impelled by some disorder of the brain, that will not suffer them to be at rest” (119). In actuality, just as Bramble’s diseased body gives the text its narrative drive, so too does the “diseased mass” represented by the urban centre precipitate the capturing of Bramble’s thoughts into the physical form of the letters he writes.

It is with the character of Matt Bramble that connections can be made between Humphrey Clinker and the earlier, more overtly critical, of Smollett’s texts. Principally, movement suggests an antithesis to the urban settlement which seems most contrary to Bramble’s ideology. Throughout Bramble’s letters, the spread of urban development is likened to a cancer affecting the body politic, where social success and decay are made concomitant: “we live in a vile world of fraud and sophistication” (67). It is the masses, congregating in the largest urban centres such as London and Westminster, which serve as the locus for this particular discontent. Cross contamination between social classes is an unavoidable prerequisite for urban growth, and it is precisely this aspect of the masses which Bramble finds most objectionable: “the mixture of people in the entertainments of this place was destructive of all order and urbanity; that it rendered the plebians insufferably arrogant and troublesome, and vulgarized the deportment and sentiments of those who moved in the upper spheres of life” (80). Indeed, it is the urban centre as a hybrid entity that is most antithetical to Bramble’s sentiments, and yet Smollett’s subtle satirical impulses juxtapose the elder gentleman’s antisocial proclivities with the pursuit of his health, which is realized fundamentally as a socially dependant phenomenon. The spa represents the fluid boundaries suggested by urban spaces, and as such is a place of absolute biological community, whose organisms intermingle freely and promiscuously: “what a delicate beveridge is every day quaffed by the drinkers; medicated with the sweat and dirt, and dandriff; and the abominable discharges of various kinds, from twenty different diseased bodies perboiling in the kettle below” (75). This contamination is given a particularly potent satire by involving issues of the rich classes consuming the poor: “as we drink the decoction of living bodies at the Pump-room, we swallow the strainings of rotten bones and carcasses at the private bath” (76). (As a thoroughly inconsequential aside, we can view Tabatha’s dog Chowder as representing the ineffectual complaints of the aristocracy against the presumptions of the merchant and lower classes stepping on their privilege and economic and cultural jurisdiction. In this guise, it is an interesting correlation that Tabatha gives up her dog the day she gives up attacking her servants.)

Bramble’s rejection of normative social discourse initially manifests itself in the fainting spell he experiences upon commencing his treatments. That the elder Bramble swoons at Bath represents a negation of the ontological priority for selfness. His rejection of society is ultimately a rejection of his own body, a jouissance gesturing to the oblivion in which he himself as a subject of social discourse and as a body interpellated as such within the public sphere is given absolute autonomy. As another aside somewhat tangential to this present examination, it is interesting to note that in one of his letters Bramble’s nephew makes it clear that bodies sublimated to public scrutiny, and in particular bodies which transgress social normalization, are mediated as abstract entities separate from the individual consciousness of the person involved. Thus, Humphrey Clinker, when falsely arrested for highway brigandry, enters the penal system not as an individual, but as a concept: “I saw the body [emphasis added] of poor Clinker consigned to the gaoler of Clerkenwell” (183). In light of this, it is possible to deduce, as Foucault has, that bodies gain individuality only when social norms have been internalized and the interpellative process can function in the interest of those who exercise power within social discourse. Bramble is aware of the interpellative controls imposed by society, and in particular that society creates the sense of Self and Body that stimulates health, and yet his aggressive condemnation of the English society of his contemporaries signals the jouissant suicide of the individual entering the public sphere. Indeed the public sphere is rendered organic in its depiction as a vile and corrupt – truly, a diseased – entity. It is disease which bridges the public and the private aspects of human existence. Bramble condemns the decay of the river Thames, itself an ecologically corrupted sign for the prosperity and development of the increasingly financially well-endowed London, as an urban pariah:

If I would drink water, I must quaff the maukish contents of
an open aqueduct, exposed to all manner of defilement; or
swallow that which comes from the river Thames, impregnated
with all the filth of London and Westminster – Human excre-
ment is the least offensive part of the concrete, which is
composed of all the drugs, minerals, and poisons, used in
mechanics and manufacture, enriched with the putrefying
carcasses of beasts and men; and mixed with the scourings
of all the wash-tubs, kennels, and common sewers within
the bills of morality.
(152)

In a very real sense, the urban centre is a hybrid entity of biological and technological organisms; ochre and blood reflect urine and grease, and all are the vital and diseased fluids of urban civilization. It is neither individually but the two in conflation that Bramble criticises. His aggressive condemnation of the daily presses signals that the voice of this hybridity is bastardized in Bramble’s eyes: “the public papers are become the infamous vehicles of the most cruel and perfidious defamation” (134). It is as though the epistolary form justifies the entrance of his own consciousness into the public sphere, whereas editorial content destroys the sanctity of opinion by means of the institutionalization of individual discourse. It is important in this regard that Humphrey Clinker himself is given little room to express his own sentiments. There are no letters written by Clinker, but rather his character and exploits are relayed through interpretation by the other characters. In a very real sense, Clinker serves as the pardoner for the masses to which Bramble is himself reacting. Preaching to improve their station – for example, he seeks to end the widespread use of common profanity, and thus equalize the virtues and sentiments of the different economic classes, to which Bramble responds: “there will be little or nothing left to distinguish their conversation from that of their betters” (132) – Clinker stands as a messianic figure for the soon-to-be-redeemed masses. He seems to be the manifest hybridity of urbanity, the country bumpkin who can mutate his appearance as required. His action, and more importantly his silence, designate him as a thematic inversion to Bramble’s xenophobic and decrepit existence. It is possible to wonder whether it is for this reason that many of the characters feel that he must be saved from the injustices of imprisonment, despite some evidence to suggest his guilt. At the very least, Clinker can be seen as a healthy (and almost universally humorous) alternative to the negational gestures elaborated by Bramble in his letters. By stoically accepting social discourse and obligation, Clinker represents the joie de vivre necessary to truly evade (while not avoiding) death.

A Constellation of the Self: The Body Productive

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

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

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

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

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

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interlude: an excuse to purge

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Men’s eyes look into things
Our eyes look out

A great deal of ourselves
We offer to the mirror

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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