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...

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

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

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Tangent

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

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

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

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


II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why do you throw them in the river?”

“No good reason”

“So it’s not traditional”

“Don’t think so”

(King: 266)


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

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


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——— Nations Without Nationalism. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.

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"powerful" examination of Joy Kogawa's Obasan

Joy Kogawa’s Obasan is a dramatically powerful examination of the interpelative possibilities of textual discourse. The text quite pointedly interrogates the cultural and historical assumptions of the reader in order to emphasize its attempts to give voice to those who were denied even the citizenship required to do so. As the protagonist of the text in an endeavour to localize her identity invokes her own past, I would like to begin by quotation. A fragment of the archive, from page 256: “There are incebreaker questions that create an awareness of ice”. So my icebreaker is as follows: Can we examine the conceptualization of remembrance in Obasan as a reinscription of original trauma onto a new space of subjectivity occupied by the reader? This is not done in any negative sense in terms of the value of pleasure within the text, for indeed in many respects pleasure lies at the heart of the narrative. To my eyes this formulation of using history, of refracting the past into and through the present, reflects Josef Hayim Yerushalmi’s statement / question, “Is it possible that the antonym of ‘forgetting’ is not ‘remembering’, but justice?” Certainly such seems to be Kogawa’s project with Obasan as objet sui-même in the archive of cultural memory.

Like Proust’s madelaine, Naomi’s walk to the coulee opens the seal covering her memories. It also serves to bookend the narrative, structurally and thematically enclosing histories and events which the reader ostensibly pieces together by the final chapters. In a similar manner, Obasan’s statement “Everybody someday dies” serves this function, although I will reflect her Zen-lie reticence by dealing with it latter, and not here. Before the reader can properly situate itself in the present of 1972, Kogawa uses the somewhat uncontrollable entrance into Naomi’s past as a strategic differal which serves to dislocate the normative subjectivity associated with reading historical prose as ‘of the past’. 1972 contains few narrative events and captures about a month of time, yet nearly three dozen chapters of extra-temporal narrative are required to resolve the present. This dislocation of reader’s subjective sense of the present in the text reflects the similarly fractured notion of identity that Naomi has herself experienced. The present is used as an ordering device for the past, as various traumatic events are examined and ‘unforgotten’: sexual abuse by a neighbour; the fracturing of Naomi’s family, perhaps best demonstrated by her increasing distance from her brother, Steven, who seems particularly comfortable in his conformance to Canadian racism; and the maggots, abused animals, and nightmare dream sequences which seem structurally informed by the horrors of the description of the bombing of Nagasaki, to which they lead in the text.

This connection between past and present is made most elaborate by the ‘walk to the coulee’ sequence. The first, which opens chapter one, seems innocuous enough, and indeed the reader is soon made aware that Naomi and her Uncle have been performing this ritual, repeating this journey, for years. It is not until the end of the text that the significance of this walk becomes apparent, as then it is evident that the trips to the coulee began shortly after Uncle and Obasan learned of the death of Naomi’s mother. The journey at the end of the text also stands as Naomi’s eulogy for the passing of her Uncle. Consequently, the walk prefigures a recurrence of the moment of trauma transposed into another subjective temporality through repressed and projected remembrance. This can be understood as certain obsessive routines demonstrated by Freud to be the repetition of the moment of traumatic immanence displaced into a more controllable action to allow the conscious mind to legitimate the trauma (trauma as not-negating-the-self) while simultaneously rejecting it (trauma as the non-self which needs to be overcome). For Naomi’s uncle, this differal is the acceptance of fate: “what will be will be”, as he says on page 220. And yet with his death, Naomi comes to understand the duplicity – in the sense not just of falseness, but of doubleness – of the pain experienced by herself and her family. To remain silent on the matter is to underline, to repeat, the violence against the self which was the initial trauma.

That for Naomi this rejection of self-violence occurs as an unveiling, a flood of memories and traumas unearthed, is within Derrida’s sense of the archive as elaborated in Archive Fever, the pleasure of censorship enacted by the guardians of history. It is the re-subjectification of the initial trauma to a present always-already in crisis, which for the Naomi of 1972 is the simultaneous death of her Uncle and the realization through external sources – letters, government documents, etc, in Aunt Emily’s package – of her “true” history. This realization itself requires a death, but I must differ the death of hermy mother for the present, as any good Derridean should.

The invocation of a “true” self, one with which to ‘come to terms’, is of course emblematic of the more broad concerns that Canada, and indeed in even broader terms the historical archive itself, must negotiate with the fascist control of the undesirable Other, which manifests most prominently during times of war, despite any claims the Other might make to have / perform citizenship. That the book ends with a memorandum from the Committee on Japanese Canadians to the senate and legislature of Canada is Kogawa’s gesture to the archive itself, in terms of both its responsibilities and its silences. Importantly, most of the historical documents come from Aunt Emily who, in opposition to the rest of the family, loudly challenges the silences and differals which constitute “respect through suffering” which characterises some forms of traditional Japanese culture as remnants of Buddhist and Shinto principles. In a very real sense, it is Aunt Emily who is the voice of the archive, her activism signifying the repressed guilt felt by the historical record (or by the archon s themselves, to humanize the concept). The historical notes contained in her package serve as a ghost structure, an homunculus summoned by the projected psychological trauma felt by the collective population and inscribed – or marked as in Cain, instances of stigmata, and other manifestations of psychophysiological trauma – on the archive proper, here in the form of news media. Unlike in Stalinist Russia, for example, such traumas are not ‘forgotten’ by the media in Canada. There is no conspicuous censorship which denies even the archive a voice to speak. Consequently, the media can properly act as Marshall MacLuen’s extension of the human nervous system into the public sphere. That an otherwise dusty collection of old papers is anthropomorphized to the degree stated above is made clear by its importance (in the sense of biopower espoused by Negri and others) to Naomi for the ordering of her memory and the realization of a sense of identity. Her memories and the historical documents enter the same subjective space, a region where silences speak and voices are muted.

There is a difference among the silences in the text, however. Initially, Naomi seems to think that Obasan’s silence represents a strategic forgetfulness: “Some memories, too, might be better forgotten. Didn’t Obasan once say ‘Is it better to forget?... If it is not seen it does not horrify. What is past recall is past pain” (45). While this curvival strategy does indeed work for both Obasan and Uncle, it should be noted that they were already of middle-age during the war, and thus were consequently, as my father will attest, more stubbornly set in their ways and resistant to change. Their silence is not forgetfulness, but rather the mantra kodomo no tane – for the sake of the children – explains their lack of communication. For this older generation, silence is a manner in which racism and other traumas are sidestepped. Obasan, for example, does not wish to provoke the men in the restaurant in chapter twenty-eight by acknowledging them or defending Naomi from their sexual advances. Much like the silence concerning the fate of Naomi’s mother, this is a self-imposed silence, and not an unconsciously unwilling forgetfulness or physical damage in the sense of amnesia. Indeed, Obasan seems to be quite specific in her collection of domestic objects, and taken as a whole they can be interpreted as material signifiers for memory, they are the textural artefacts of a lost temporality. Much as Aunt Emily kept the ‘public’ record intact, likewise Obasan retains the personal archive of the family. In this capacity, both Emily and Obasan represents in a sense the inversion of Derrida’s use of Freud’s pleasure principle in relation to the historical archive. Together Emily and Obasan can be pictorialized as a Janus figure, creating a present by looking simultaneously to the past and to the future. The violence done to them – and of course to Japanese Canadians as a whole – was itself the jouissance of exclusion and purposeful omission, of white (empowered) Canada restoring a sense of order and security to their formulation of self and citizen by promoting disorder and fear amongst a minority Other. Both Obasan and Aunt Emily are figurations of the unconscious guilt experienced by white Canada and marked into the archive as a silence, a negation which realizes a physical presence by degree of negative dialectics. The pretense of war in the 1940s may have alleviated such feelings to a degree, yet those who experienced those years had their sentiments recontextualized and dislocated, made non-immanent, by the passing of the ‘yellow-threat’ into memory after 1945. The speaking-silence of Obasan and the overt political activism of Aunt Emily signals the archive re-inscribing trauma back to its proper location: within the general body politic of the country (and to the reader by extension, or in a more precise sense by an implosion, as it becomes the site for archival conflict). It is for this reason that the book focusses on the historical documents, and indeed quite rightly ends with one. The outrage felt by many Canadians when the novel was initially published in 1982, and the subsequent movement to formally redress financial losses and otherwise give justice to Japanese Canadians who suffered from officially sanctioned racist policies is reflective of the re-infliction of the initial scar fundamental to the healing process. To use an anatomical metaphor, when scar tissue remains around certain internal mechanisms it frequently damages the organism; surgery, the calculated infliction of new wounds over old ones, must be performed in order to properly heal the patient.

Perhaps the most interesting point Kogawa’s text makes is in regard to the importance of silence, and indeed the agency which can be found within such a unique space of what I hesitatingly refer to as negative discourse (a term used partially to reflect Adorno’s elaboration of negative dialectics). On a more general level, Obasan’s speech-through-silence is analogous to the archive displacing itself, its previous ontological function, in order to create one anew. The previous jouissance was realized by the mark upon the space of archivization (here, as mentioned above, a people as well as a physical database cataloguing a history, for Kogawa does not delineate the two – again, this is affirmed by Naomi’s continual re-subjection of her identity to the historical process). As de Sade most famously wrote, there is little to differentiate pain from pleasure as distinctly opposing categorical imperatives, and thus the realization of pain, the vocalization of trauma, itself becomes the pleasure used to inscribe itself into the ‘new’ archive, which for Naomi is 1972 and for the reader is an always 1982. Naomi’s search for her mother is emblematic of this process, and is of course at the heart of the narrative. Like many other traumatic events in the text, this quest is relayed largely by differal, in particular by metaphoric means:

The dance ceremony of the dead was a slow courtly telling, the heart declaring a long thread knotted to Obasan’s twine, knotted to Aunt Emily’s package. Why I wonder as she danced her love should I find myself unable to breathe? The Grand Inquisitor was carnivorous and full of murder. His demand to know was both a judgement and a refusal to hear. The more he questioned her, the more he was her accuser and murderer. The more he killed her, the deeper her silence became. What the Grand Inquisitor has never learned is that the avenues of speech are the avenues of silence. To hear my mother, to attend her speech, to attend the sound of stone, he must first become silent. Only when he enters her abandonment will he be released from his own.
(228)

The Grand Inquisitor alludes to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov to be sure – an intertextual discourse above the scope of this present examination – but also figures Naomi’s own psychological defences. The reader does not have to wait long for Naomi to be silenced and for her mother to speak; there are six pages between this narration and the exposition of the two letters describing the atomic blast at Nagasaki. These letters signal the jouissance of the archive destroying its past and (by) creating its present, for the extreme violence and traumatic consequences of Canadian racial oppression reach their most logical extension in the brutal description of the bombing and destruction of a city and its inhabitants. The utter dehumanization required to carry out this act transfers metaphorically to the atomization of many of those present and subjected to ground zero.

And yet even the dead speak as witnesses to the beautiful and sublime atrocity which is warfare; this is especially true when those alive remain silent. Metonymically, this is reflected by the author’s repeated use throughout the text of imagery concerning eyes and the process of sight, with descriptions of looking and not looking frequent in the narrative. Importantly, Naomi herself sees these instances and remembers them, even over other details. If we are to believe that the eyes mirror the ‘soul’ of individuals, then it is obvious that while Naomi “cannot tell about this time ... the body will not tell” (196), then the eyes speak with their silence in the most profound manner. One of the most striking details in Grandma Kato’s description of this horrific event is also the first given to the reader, and outside of the temporality and subjective space produced by the full description proper: “Like in a dream, I can still see the maggots crawling in the sockets of my niece’s eyes.... There is no forgetfulness” (234). In dreams as in life, eyes usually have sexual connotations, and the maggots here described are certainly feeding on the generative function of dead flesh. Thus the productive healing provided by speaking what was once seen, of reinstating the children of traumatic memory to historical (and in a sense ontological) legitimacy.

To return to the act of jouissance inherent in the process of archivization, Kogawa’s novel is successful precisely because this horror which ends both the novel and Naomi’s quest for self identity is the fate of her mother. Simultaneous to this is her arrival in chapter thirty-nine to the coulee that she had always traversed with her uncle. With the termination of the narrative at this point, Kogawa underlines the cyclical nature of memory and identity (a designation perhaps more aptly termed as fluid, to use the sea metaphor which the author herself does). In this context, the archive, be it personal, communal, or historical, must like every good compost be continually turned in order to keep it generative. In symbolic – and carbonc-cycle – terms, we must all return to our mothers in order to achieve meaning with this, the present, identity. Thus the past, and ostensibly the future, remain insurmountably tied to the present, and indeed give it the (tragic) immanence required for the recognition of meaning.