(Trans)-formations I : identity and property : essays in cultural practice

Transcription

(Trans)-Formations I
Identity and Property
Essays in Cultural Practice
W ydaw nictw o U n iw ersy tetu Ś ląsk iego
K atow ice 2002
(Trans(-Formations I
Prace Naukowe
Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
w Katowicach
nr 2110
(Trans)-Formations I
Edited by
W
o jc ie c h
K alaga an d T
W ydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
a d eu sz
R achw ał
K atowice 2002
Editor o f the Series: H istoria Literatur O bcych
A l e k s a n d e r A b ł a m o w ic z
R ev iew er
J a d w ig a
n n
M T o
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7 3
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M a szew ska
Front co v er illustration
according to
h ttp ://w w w .p h y s.u n i.to ru n .p l/d u ch /w y k la d y /k o g -m /0 3 -c.h tm
Executive Editor
S a b in a S ten cel
T ec hn ica l Ed it or
B
arbara
A
renhovel
Proof-reader
M
arta
P
isk o r
C op yright © 2 0 0 2 by
W yd aw n ictw o U n iw ersytetu Ś lą sk ieg o
A ll rights reserved
ISSN 0208-6336
ISBN 83-226-1207-9
Contents
In tro d u c tio n ( W
..............................................
7
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became MixedUp Zombies or How to be the Living Dead in T echnicolor.......................
11
K atarzyna A
o jc ie c h
K a l a g a , T a deu sz R ach w ał)
ncuta
E wa R ych ter
Am I My Lover’s Keeper? Identity and Possession in Emmanuel Levinas’s
“Phenomenology o f Eros” .....................................................................................
K atarzyna B
o r k o w sk a
Property and Identity: Heaney as an Example .....................................................
A
neta
29
40
Z acharz
On the Way to Nowhere - Reflections Upon the Impossible of Identity . . .
54
P io t r D z ie d z ic
The Word, the Self, and the Underground Estate of Pierce Inverarity in Thomas
Pynchon’s The Crying o f Lot 49 ........................................................................
Ja cek M
62
ydla
“Lust in Action.” Possession, Transformation, and the Exorcising o f Eros .
72
R a f a ł D u b a n io w s k i
Transforming Europe: Landscape and Domesticity in English Literature of
the 1 9 3 0 s ......................................................................................................................
87
C
V
harles
ander
Z w aag
Postmodern Auto Conversions ...................................................................................
M
Sarnek
a r c in
Netizens, Hive-minds, the Profiled: New Wired Identities o f the Communi
cation Revolution E r a ..............................................................................................
T o m asz K
ałgorzata
M
arek
K
125
ed yń sk a
Dana, Eire, Cesair: The Fluctuating Identity o f the Irish Chthonic God
desses ............................................................................................................................
M
105
alaga
Plagiarism in the Contemporary Academia: Identity and Ethics .....................
M
94
135
u l is z
The Identity of the Commander - Nomad Organization Against the State
..
151
Subject in Difference, or on (Feminine) Becomings: Deleuze and Guattari’s
and Cixous’ Concept o f Subjectivity ................................................................
167
M a r ta Z a ją c
R afał B
o r y sła w sk i
Say What I Am: Aldhelmian Riddle as the Language o f Transformation
...
187
Improperly ........................................................................................................................
202
S treszczenie
...................................................................................................................................................
216
R e s u m e .............................................................................................................................................................
218
S ła w o m ir M a s ło ń
Introduction
Identity and property are closely related terms. Identity as the quality of
being the same, o f being absolutely one, hides the ambiguity of property, of
having unchangeable properties as one’s absolute property, and of thus being
proper. The economy of property, its management, is ethically marked as
“proper,” as appropriate. It positions any disturbance o f identity as improper,
as a lack of proper properties which translates itself into a deficiency, a dis
turbance of normality, a “neither-this-nor-that.” The present volume is about
the “neither-this-nor-that,” it problematises both identity and property as pos
itive categories by way of slightly de-domesticating them, de-economising them
as absolute terms, by way of showing how they feed upon their negatives in
order to secure their seemingly unquestionable positions.
Identity seems to be a category o f life rather than that of death. Yet, as
Katarzyna Ancuta observes in the paper opening this volume to the living-dead
(“The Incredible Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became MixedUp Zombies or How to be the Living Dead in Technicolor”), our culture is
strangely infatuated with zombies, with creatures which haunt identity through
the return o f its end in death. Zombies are recognizable as zombies only from
the outside, from the position o f life, and never from their own positions by
themselves. Recognizing zombies as not us, we secure our properties simul
taneously desiring, perhaps masochistically, to see ourselves as zombies whom
we all are, but to which we fail to testify due to the fear of zombies.
If zombies bring to the fore the ambiguity o f the subject via the ambiguity
of living, Levinas questions identity’s unity from the perspective o f loving.
Seeing love as “the equivocal p a r exellence,” Ewa Rychter notices (“Am I My
Lover’s Keeper? Identity and Possession in Emmanuel Levinas’s ‘Phenome
nology of Eros’ ”), he simultaneously essentialises Eros and unsays it, leaves
it undefined and undefinable. Ego cannot master love exactly due to the lack
o f space for property in it. Such an unsaying, as a kind o f linguistic dis
possession, is also taken up in Katarzyna Borkowska’s paper (“Property and
Identity: Heaney as an Example”) in the context o f shaping/unshaping o f the
poetic and national identities in Seamus Heaney’s poetry. From the rational
perspective, from the position o f ratio, linguistic dispossession is a negativ
ity. Aneta Zacharz reads in her paper (“On the Way to Nowhere - Reflection
Upon the Impossible o f Identity”) elements o f the philosophies o f Shestov,
Levinas, Blanchot, and Brach-Czaina trying to show ways out from this
negativity to the spheres of liminality and absence seen as the spaces where
identity is constituted.
That one can be dispossessed of one’s identity via disruption o f commu
nication, a postal disturbance, is the theme undertaken by Piotr Dziedzic in his
reading of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying o f Lot 49 (“The Word, the Self, and
the Underground Estate of Pierce Inverarity in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying
o f Lot 49”). The inability to communicate posits one always already “under
ground”, in the sate o f undesirable isolation from the world which notoriously
refuses any direct possession, a simple and unequivocal understanding. The
idiom o f possession also infiltrates our thinking about the erotic and, as Jacek
Mydla argues (‘“ Lust in Action.’ Possession, Transformation, and the Exor
cising of Eros”), is responsible for the vagueness o f the distinction between
“love” and “lust.” Eros seen as the extatic coming out o f one’s shell is des
tined to remain incomplete - it is as it were motored by lust, an unreasonable
project and the promise o f possessing which hides defeat at the point o f its
beginning.
Transformations beyond control, as Rafał Dubaniowski argues (“Transform
ing Europe: Landscape and Domesticity in English Literature o f the 1930s”)
constitute a significant aspect o f the formation of the modem European iden
tity in the 1930s, an identity which, disillusioned with itself, loses the hope
o f salvaging the world by art. At the time when the “imagined has become the
unimaginable” inventiveness begins to be seen as culture’s failure, an apoc
alypse which signifies time cut off from a place. As a result o f this dis-placement, Modernism finds significance in such objects which come to stand for
the ideas or emotions, which as it were replace them. Postmodernism, accord
ing to Charles Vander Zwaag (“Postmodern Auto Conversions”), annuls such
objects by way o f making it impossible to say who is the “experiencer” o f ideas
and emotions, by way making the subject a semi-visible mixture o f interpreted
interpreters o f the world. What comes with what he calls late postmodernism
is the invisibility o f objects deprived o f any marks o f identity. Late postmod
ern texts aim at a certain invisibility, an invisibility in which the interpreter
becomes invisible to him / herself. This paradox challenges the privacy of iden
tity and, with the coming of the Web, transforms us into “netizens” dwelling
in a politically undetermined space of seemingly free communication where
New Wired Identities o f the Communication Revolution Era”) sees in this pos
sibility a cryptographic protocol which enables a totally new anonymous iden
tity, and which announces the dawn o f might be called “crypto anarchy.” What
Tomasz Kalaga (“Plagiarism in the Contemporary Academia: Identity and
Ethics”) finds to be threatening in the postmodern convulsions o f the subject
is the conflation of “production” and “creation” which, in the context of the
contemporary academia, complicate the notions o f plagiarism and of academ
ic honesty.
Certain fluctuations of identity can also be found in the sphere o f the divine,
to which Małgorzata Medyńska (“Dana, Eire, Cesair: The Fluctuating Identity
of the Irish Chthonic Goddesses”) testifies in her reading o f the mythic Irish
chthonic goddesses. Certain seemingly universal entities escape our historical
grasp when viewed from the perspective where the very idea o f space and
movement are de-universalized. Sometimes, as Marek Kulisz argues in his
analysis o f the identity of the commander (“The Identity of the Commander
- Nomad Organization Against the State”), things can be historicized only if
we take into consideration the possibility of there being a parallel history,
a history which questions the identity of history itself. A singular becoming
of an identity might always be illusive and it cannot be reduced to some originary singular source or pillar which grants them some secure presence on what
Marta Zając (“Subject in Difference, or on (Feminine) Becomings: Deleuze and
Guattari’s and Cixous’ Concept o f Subjectivity”) calls the “plane o f imma
nence.” That plane, as the plane of singular becoming, is undermined in
a number o f contemporary critical theories by a number of “becomings” which
also “de-masc-ulinize” the culturally privileged plane(s) o f perception. Plane
perception may always hide a riddle, a mark of a riddle which, though tradi
tionally belonging to the playful side o f human existence, may always turn out
to be the constitutive part o f human expression, an aporetic de-clarification of
what is plainly stated which Rafał Borysławski (“Say What I Am: Aldhelmian
Riddle as the Language of Transformation”) finds in his reading o f Aldhelm’s
riddles. Property and properties are riddled by the improper, by “improperly”
which Sławomir Masłoń (“Improperty”) sees as the place-moment of exposi
tion, of the unmasking of the proper whose identity hides the depthlessness of
the surface which, though improper, needn’t be negatively superficial.
W
ojciech
K alag a a n d T ad eu sz R achw al
Katarzyna A n c u t a
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who
Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up
Zombies or How to be the Living Dead
in Technicolor
Yeah, t h e y ’re d e a d , th e y 'r e a ll m e s s e d up.
G eorge A. Romero
It is hard to be a zombie. Slaving all day for no reward, driven by insa
tiable hunger, feared, unwanted, unloved. “If your sister were a zombie, what
would you do for her?” reads one o f the questions o f a zombie trivia quiz. The
answer bears the weight o f a moral judgement: “Ignore her.” How come then
that those miserable soulless creatures have managed to become cultural icons
of the end o f the 20th century?
The aim o f this paper is to shed some light on the infatuation o f contem
porary culture with zombies/the living dead resulting from the glorification of
inertia. Zombies, as presented in the article, are understood in terms o f par
adoxical entities defined primarily through their lack of identity and, as such,
acquiring new properties and becoming a new identity, instantly recognisable
to anyone but themselves.
Beginning with George A. Romero’s trilogy of the Living Dead (1968/1978/
1985), and especially his consumer zombies, I intend to investigate the image
of the living dead, as springing from a number o f contemporary film produc
tions and literature, and discuss its interdependence on the representation of
mental disease. Observing the constant growth o f the desirability o f the zom
bie category I want to link it to a more and more common belief in the pos
sibility o f achieving the sense of liberation only through the complete and
unconditional submission to the external reality and the forces governing it.
* * *
To begin with let us think of the origins of the concept. And the origins
take us to the island of Haiti. According to a Vodou Encyclopedia a zombie
(zombi, zombi cadavre) is a soulless dead body returned to life by a black
magician called a bokor. Other definitions do not actually speak o f the body
being dead but rather “believed to be dead” by the family and the zombified
person himself/herself. The scientific world, greatly interested in the process
o f zombification, dismisses the importance o f magic rituals for the sake of
a more easily verifiable explanation, mainly the use o f drugs and a toxic potion,
the components o f which still remain unknown to the researchers.1 The sorevived zombie is brain damaged and as such becomes easy to control and can
be used as a slave for hard labour.
In the interview for The Times Papa Williams, a London-based practising
Haitian houngan (a vodou priest), confesses to zombifying his enemies. He also
provides his own definition:
“A zombie is a person who becomes one o f the walking dead. You are still
alive, but you have no soul. I have a soul here” he says, then taps on a vessel
that looks like an oversized coconut and is bound with a string. [...] Using
a potion he describes as ‘the powder’; he turned his adversary into a zombie
and now keeps the man’s skull on his altar. (As an aside he claims quite
plausibly there are many people w'alking around London with no souls.)2
Papa Williams believes that it was vodou “which secured liberation for the
slaves in Haiti in 1804,”3 adding that even today Haiti is 90 percent Catholic
and 100 percent vodou. Whether we believe him or not is one thing, but the
fact that there has always been a correlation between vodou and the political
history o f the island is indubitable. It was a bokor, Franęois Macandal, who
originated the 6-year slave revolt of 1751-1757 and who later paid for it with
his life, burnt at the stake by the French. That he was seen to wrench himself
free of his chains while being engulfed by the flames only helped to establish
a stronger belief in his supernatural powers.4 In 1791 a vodou ceremony marked
the start o f yet another rebellion of the black slaves, whose leader, Boukman,
unsurprisingly was a houngan. A pike with an impaled carcass o f a white baby
soon became a distinguishable mark o f the rebels, and the bloodshed that
followed left an estimated 12 000 dead, with Boukman himself sharing the fate
1 A m on g the com ponents o f the alleged potion are su p p osed ly su bstances received from
various p o iso n o u s plants and anim als, such as toads, tarantulas and in sects, not to m ention
hum an rem ains to sp ice things up.
2 The T im es, A u gu st 7, 1999; L ee H enshaw , “W orshipping the dark s id e .”
3 L ee H en shaw , “W orshipping the dark sid e .”
4 R onald S egal, F rom th e B la c k D ia s p o r a (L ondon: Faber and Faber, 1 9 9 5 ), p. 107.
of Macandal.5 And the 1806 assassination o f Dessalines, who came to be
recognised as the father of Haitian independence, not only resulted in the general
appraisal of his “dying for the cause” but also earned him a place in the vodou
pantheon.6
Similarly, the years of “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s regime (1957-1991) would
not be the same if not his conscious employment of vodou as yet another
technique o f political manipulation. As a practising vodounist himself,7 Duvalier recognised the position vodou held in the awareness of Haitians. Nu
merous houngans and bokors incorporated by him into the intelligence and his
own rural militia, popularly called Tonton Macoutes (the term derived from the
kreyole word meaning “uncle bogeyman”) helped him in his reign of terror over
the island.8 Knowing that these were very often the same people, it should come
as no surprise that the blue denims, red scarves and peasant hats worn frequently
in the countryside by vodou priests became an easily recognisable uniform of
the Macoutes.9
But the cultural concept of the zombie, even though undoubtedly heavily
indebted to its vodou origins, owes equally much, if not more, to Hollywood
filmmakers. And although they are almost as old as the cinema itself, cinemat
ic zombies evolved mainly thanks to the vision of one man - George A. Romero.
For when in 1968 Romero released his first part of the Living Dead trilogy
(Night o f the Living Dead), he did much more than revolutionise modem horror
film - he contributed to the formation o f a new icon o f fear.
Romero was not the first filmmaker to take interest in zombies. Films like
White Zombie (1932), I Walked With a Zombie (1943) or The Ghoul (1933),
had all successfully toyed with the concept before. But anybody*familiar with
those early productions must agree that Romero’s zombies are very different.
Romero was the first to notice that the exotic quality of the Haitian soul
less creatures can be successfully transferred into the reality of early Amer
ican consumerism. His vicious attack on the consumer society is especially
visible in the second part of the trilogy (Dawn o f the Dead). America is al
ready swarming with the living dead, who, like the plague, are becoming more
5 H aiti, The H aitian R evolution, “The S lave R eb elion o f 1791,” w w w .usariem .arm y.m il/
haiti/tabcon.htm on lin e 0 0 - 0 5 -0 8 , 16:16.
6 S egal, p. 2 03.
7 D u valier’s loa w as Baron Sam edi, know n as “the guardian o f cem eteries and a harbinger
o f death,” although rum ours w ere actually spread as to D u valier b ein g the incarnation o f the
Baron h im self. D u valier claim ed p o sse ssin g supernatural pow ers and w ou ld q u ick ly silen ce
all those w h o dared to q u estion his vod ou sk ills.
S e e “H aiti: A b r ie f H istory,” w w w .lan gu age-w ork s.com /H aiti/h istory.h tm on lin e 0 0 - 0 5 0 9, 17:44; also S egal, p. 216.
8 S egal, p. 214: “The word tonton [uncle] refers to a b ogeym an w h o c o m es at night to
take aw ay naughty children in his m acoute (the straw satchel o f the p easan t).”
9 S egal, p. 214.
and more difficult to stop. A small group of people decides to make a run for
their lives and look for a desert island with hopes to survive the madness in
isolation. It seems even more important since one of the group members is
pregnant. Unfortunately, fleeing from the meat-eating monsters on the rampage,
they encounter an unforeseen obstacle - a shopping mall.
The deserted mall is like a red rag to a bull - it attracts absolutely every
one. The zombies, of course, are no exception here. They flock around the
empty shops, chewing on lipsticks and trying on hats, bound to the place,
remembering that they used to love and desire it in some other life. It is more
than just the hunger for flesh that guides them through the empty shop aisles,
after all there is not a living soul in sight. Somewhere on the way they have
ceased to be perceived as evil monsters. What is more disturbing, however, the
zombies look not just pathetic but also very human in their abandonment and
hopelessness, lost in the gigantic labyrinth o f the mall.
The pallor o f death on the faces o f the zombies leaves us under the im
pression o f the dead unwittingly mimicking the glossy plastic mannequins
displayed in the shop windows. But the moment our empathy centre is shifted
and we begin to see the dead in terms of large walking plastic dolls we also
become aware o f the monstrous, predatory qualities of the living. The shop
ping mall suddenly becomes the great prize worth fighting for. The war begins
- the living against the dead, the living against the living. In the end the dead
begin to look favourable - at least their motives in all that bloodletting are purely
survivalist and they do not kill one another for the sake o f material goods. The
living, on the other hand, do: blood flows readily and we begin to understand
that, addicted to possession, the living cannot live beyond ownership. Who is
the zombie?
Romero’s infatuation with zombies is visible throughout his film career. Still,
his living dead are not exactly the most pleasing of all creatures. Even though
by contrast they may prove more easily justified than humans, it is nonethe
less hard to call them human. They are devoid o f emotions, their memory, if
any, is always very limited and fragmented, and although they react to exter
nal stimuli and can be trained by means of positive and negative reinforcement
(as shown in the third film of the cycle, D ay o f the Dead), they are in fact
presented in terms of lower animals. Their entire raison d ’etre seems to be
brought down to satiating their hunger. The hunger for human flesh - just one
more reason why they should be feared and avoided. And, one more compar
ison with the animal world, they multiply like rabbits!
The zombie world is very democratic. Anybody has a chance of becoming
a zombie, that is if he or she has not yet been entirely consumed. This ran
domness of the process makes it even more frightening. Vampires and were
wolves prefer a much more elitist approach - you need to be bitten to trans
form. It is not so, however, with zombies. Here the prerequisite is the fact of
your being dead, and it does not really matter o f what causes. But then, per
haps as the price for that, unlike vampires and werewolves, zombies are rel
atively easy to dispose of.
Romero never provides us with an explanation for the sudden appearance
o f the walking corpses among the living. Just as there is no real explanation
for their motivation, apart from hunger. All they do, in fact, is move awkward
ly following the food. And the only disturbing thought in all this is that “the
food” is us.
There is no clear reason why zombies should feel the craving for human
flesh. One possible explanation may be confusing the “savage” vodou culture,
notorious for its animal and rumoured human sacrifices, with the cannibal
practices o f other feared savages. Or perhaps somehow people felt that walk
ing corpses would not look credible as vegetarians. And since their getting into
a shop to buy a juicy steak seemed an odd idea then why not turn the world
into a self-service restaurant instead?
In one o f the many films spawned by Romero’s original, The Return o f the
Living D ead (1984), zombies have a more specific purpose to their diet apparently they need to consume human brains, as these very brains are the
source o f enzymes which diminish the pain o f being alive again. How is that
for an explanation?
Romero’s living dead are probably the most popular type of zombies in
culture, represented widely in multiple books and films. They are, however,
only a part of the picture. At this point I would like to introduce the classifi
cation o f the zombie icon into 4 types and briefly discuss each of the groups.
For the sake of the paper I would like to suggest the division of zombies
into four categories: 1) random zombies - driven by their survival instinct and
characterised by constant hunger, 2) slave zombies - direct descendants o f the
vodou tradition, created solely for the purpose o f ensuring the material profit
or sexual gratification of their masters, 3) evil zombies - malevolent creatures
o f limited intelligence driven by the desire to do evil rather than just by pure
animal instinct, 4) smart zombies - fully aware and intelligent creatures whose
properties make them superior to ordinary human beings.
The living dead o f Romero clearly belong to the first and most popular
category. Their strength lies in numbers and although their table manners leave
much to be desired they frequently tend to steal the empathy of the audience.
But then, as I said before, Romero’s zombies are politicised creatures and they
are a part o f a metaphor. Stripped o f their symbolic dimension they retain the
basic characteristics of random zombies: they are still the animalistic brainless
creatures driven by the insatiable hunger for human flesh. They are, o f course,
also far from the only ones.
Among others, the random zombies category encompasses most of the morti
viventi o f the Italian cinema: the walking dead fathered by Lucio Fulci (Zom-
bie Flesh Eaters [1979], City o f the Living D ead [1980], The Beyond [1981]),
the corpses returning to life on the sixth night after their burial in Michele
Soavi’s Dellamorte, Dellamore (better known as Cemetery Man [1994]), or the
dead guarding the gates o f Hell in the underground crypt o f Lamberto Bava’s
Graveyard Disturbance (1987). “When there’s no room in Hell the dead will
walk the Earth,” warns Romero. And, judging from the number of film pro
ductions, all with more than enthusiastic treatment o f the subject, my bet is
they are going to start with Italy.
On the other hand random zombies do not feel out of place in the more
exotic setting of Calcutta, designated by Poppy Z. Brite to be impregnated with
the walking dead. Perhaps because as she wrote, “Calcutta was a city relative
ly unsurprised to see its dead rise and walk and feed upon it.”10 On a more
cynical note she also observed that the dead were among the best-fed citizens
of the city, because just as it could be expected they existed only in relation
to food.
Peter Jackson’s vision o f the zombie carnage in a sleepy suburbia (Braindead, 1992), attributing zombification to a viral infection taking its beginning
in a bite o f a rat-monkey, is yet another key example o f the category. But,
whether they walk in exotic places, abandoned malls, picture-perfect suburbia,
misty cemeteries or American small towns, random zombies are pathetic crea
tures. At least from our point o f view. They are devoid o f emotions, o f mind,
o f past and future. They are absolutely of no use to anyone. If they were able
to conceive of the predicament they found themselves in, they would most likely
prefer to be dead themselves rather than foolishly insist on living.
Slave zombies at least seem to have a purpose. True, from their perspective
it is hard to talk about great career options, but for some people they can make
a real difference.
A true ZOMBIE would be mine forever. He would obey every command &
whim. Saying ‘Yes, Master’ & ‘No, Master.’ He would kneel before me lifting
his eyes to me saying, ‘I love you, Master. There is no one but you, Mas
ter.’"
Such, at least, were the lifetime ambitions o f one Quentin P., the main pro*
tagonist of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, Zombie. In her novel Oates paints
a disturbing portrait of a warped psychotic mind. The book, which has a diary
touch to it, takes us on a rollercoaster ride through the head o f a seriously
disturbed individual. For Quentin P. might seem the most boring man alive,
sharing his time between doing his job of a caretaker and taking care of his
10 Poppy Z. Brite, “Calcutta, Lord o f N erv es,” in S w a m p F o etu s (London: Penguin B ooks,
1995), p. 152.
11 Joyce Carol O ates, Z o m b ie (London: S ign et, 1996), p. 49.
grandmother’s lawn, but in fact he is obsessed with a thought of making him
self a love zombie.
Forced to suppress his homosexuality, afraid to admit to it him self and
already on parole for sexual molestation of a child, Quentin takes to reading
obscure medical manuscripts from the early 20th century and experimenting
on vagrants, trying to master the art o f lobotomising people by means of an
ice-pick, with an intention of turning them into his sex-slaves. (Un)fortunately
his “patients” never tend to live long after the operation, which forces him to
continue his quest.
Underneath the macabre story lie fundamental psychological truths. Quen
tin is a son of a respected university professor, a powerful father figure he feels
unable to match up to. Whatever he does seems a failure; his homosexuality
being just one more thing differentiating him from the model son his father
wants. The self-suppression o f his inner yearnings results in augmenting his
desperate need o f acceptance. Quentin aches to be loved and cherished, although
the dominance o f his father makes him look for the same dominant-submis
sive type o f relationship rather than a well-balanced partnership.
His obsession with creating a love zombie is nothing else but the admission
to his complexes. He accepts as a fact that only a brainless creature would be
able to live with him and love him, and indeed, even though his “patients” die
very soon after he operates on them, he lives under an illusion that for a brief
moment he was loved. He would even go as far as to imagine that his lovers’
body parts he preserves after they are gone were given to him as “tokens of
their affection.”
Quentin P. did not succeed in his plan. Perhaps he failed to account for the
paradoxical workings of the human brain, which just hates being interfered with
and at the same time readily dons the manacles of love itself. After all, as a wellknown song has it: “love is [...] cruel and it’s brutal, it distorts and deranges,
it wrenches you up and you’re left like a zom bie...”12
But leaving speculations about feelings aside, let me return to the main
reason why slave zombies are in demand, which is their unquestionable value
as cheap labour. The abolition of slavery meant a huge increase in labour costs
and let’s face it, so far nobody has been marching for the rights o f the dead.
Films like the TROMA team release, Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town (1991),
explore the subject o f slavery and freedom, continuing the long lasting tradi
tion of horror touching the nerve of social problems.
Chopper Chicks is one o f the so-called “TROMA’s strong women’s series,”
films devoted to turning the fragile, vulnerable, often initially abused women
into heroes and letting them take revenge on their oppressors, whoever they
are. Here, the notorious Chopper Chicks are a gang o f women bikers who
12 E urythm ics, “L o v e is a Stranger” (S w e e t D rea m s, 1983).
escaped the bondage of stereotypical gender conventions in a patriarchal so
ciety in search of freedom and personal fulfilment. They go as they please, take
whatever, or indeed whoever, they want to and lead a carefree life. To some
of them, however, this seemingly free life is yet another form o f slavery and
they secretly dream of going back to the husbands and children they abandoned.
And all they need to make their choices obvious is a horde of zombies, who
accidentally break loose from the mines where they have been kept and ex
ploited by the good town folks and are ready to ravage the town. This inci
dental rebellion of the mindless creatures helps our heroines realise they can
in fact make their own choices, the zombies are quickly disposed of, and
everything resolves in a happy ending to the enjoyment o f the audience.
So far the only cinematic attempt to treat zombies with a gravity accordant
to their original importance in Haitian vodou practice has been Wes Craven’s
The Serpent and the Rainbow (1987), based on a non-fiction book by a Harvard
ethno-botanist, Wade Davis. Davis, who was paid by a pharmaceutical firm to
investigate Haitian drugs and poisons used in vodou cults, discovered there was
in fact a form of tribal judgement in which a person who offended the tribe
was given a special drug to appear dead to the family. Then, while such per
son remained conscious all the time, s/he was in fact burnt alive during what
was supposed to be a funerary ceremony.
Craven, who never shied away from admitting that he was making
a commercial film, did manage to go beyond the usual cliches o f the horror
genre. His vision of The Serpent and the Rainbow is in fact a terror story with
elements o f adventure, romance, and politics set in the times of “Baby Doc”
Duvalier. Being aware o f the ways of Duvalier and his Tonton Macoutes, and
the corruption o f vodou for the sake of political terrorism in Haiti, Craven
explored the potential for manipulation and power games connected with the
zombie symbolism. But even though the film crew did get the initial blessing
from the local bokor (plus one extra pig sacrifice with the ritual blood drinking
in the middle of the night), the growing number of incidents o f mysterious
diseases, hallucinations and madness fits, which began to plague everybody
involved in the shooting, combined with the political situation getting out of
control (1987)13 forced them to leave Haiti and its vodou to themselves. Had
they stayed they would have become just one more relatively easy target for
economic and political manipulation - the game all too familiar to zombiephiles.14
13 “Island C on noisseu r - The R epu blic o f H aiti - H istory” : “The leader o f the interim
m ilitary-civilian governm ent, G eneral Henri N am phy, prom ised presidential ele ctio n s for N o
vem ber 1987, but they w ere called o f f after D u valierists m assacred at least 34 voters early
on p o llin g day w ith apparent m ilitary co n n iv a n ce.” w w w .carribeansup ersite.com /haiti/ online
0 0 - 0 5 - 0 9 , 17:39.
14 Brian J. R obb, S c re a m s a n d N ig h tm a res. The F ilm s o f Wes C ra v e n (NY: The O ver
look P ress, 1998), pp. 1 2 5 -1 3 5 .
Whether kept for the sake o f sex, politics or simply as cheap labour slave
zombies seem useful, even if only in a perverted sense. In the age of huge
business corporations more and more greedily regulating our lives one cannot
but draw comparisons.
While the first two categories represent rather low forms o f life - the
animalistic random zombies driven by instinct and the slave zombies turned
to mindless and soulless property - the latter two categories could be seen as
intelligent living-dead forms. They also differ substantially from the zombies
we have already talked about.
Evil zombies, represented at its best by The Evil D ead trilogy (1982/1987/
1992), could under certain circumstances be treated as a mutation o f the meatchewing random zombies. They are dead, they are relatively easy to dispose
of, their strength still lies in numbers and they act instinctively. But at the same
time they are creatures of some, even if limited, intellect, which they use entirely
with the intention o f inflicting grave bodily damage on people.
Here the symbolisation of zombies mingles with that of demonic posses
sion. When the usual plan o f taking those whom they want by force does not
work evil zombies employ deceit. They will shift shapes, speak in voices, lure
with empty promises, bargain and reason with their potential victims and very
often get their way by tricking people into submission. At the same time they
will always give in to human intellect in the end.
Evil zombies often serve some higher power, usually called a Demon, and
in fact are merely mercenaries. Their presence is nothing but the acting out
o f the Christian idea o f temptation, the resistance to which is the certain way
to salvation. In fact they are often referred to as “the servants o f Hell” and their
goal is to enslave human souls and take over the world on behalf o f the Demon,
a scenario not that far from the Book o f Apocalypse.
Evil zombies refrain from meat-chewing activities, as it is not just the hunger
for flesh that drives them. They are, however, partial to axes and chain saws,
as these seem to be perfect tools for handling the meat we never cease to be
in their eyes. A grotesque version o f psychopathic killers, evil zombies often
act according to some well-devised plan, frequently motivated by revenge. In
Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, the dead begin to plague the living after the
mythical Necronomicon, The Book o f the D ead has been stolen from them. In
Lamberto Bava’s Changeling (1987) the dead husband returns to take revenge
on his unfaithful wife guilty of his murder. In Romero’s Strange Facts in the
Case o f Mr. Valdemar (his contribution to Two Evil Eyes [1990] co-directed
with Dario Argento) Mr. Valdemar gets back at his wife and her lover after
he has fallen victim to a hypnotic experiment.
Evil zombies also seem to be great favourites with Stephen King, who very
often associates their malevolence with juvenile delinquency. Many of the dead
he brings back to life are in fact children or teenagers. But whether they used
to be angelic toddlers (Pet Sematary) or adolescent town bullies (Sometimes
They Come Back) the message we read in King’s books is clear: death cor
rupts all. The good and the bad, the innocent and the guilty - if they ever come
back, they come back evil.
The fourth category, smart zombies, causes most controversy. It refers to
those of the living dead who remain in full (or almost full) control of their
intellect. I agree that my inclusion of such a category at this point may seem
risky. But then, if we take all the four categories o f zombies into considera
tion, we begin to understand zombies in terms of anthropomorphic forms (dead
or alive) characterised by their complete lack o f identity rather than intellect.
And even though smart zombies remain acutely aware o f the reality surround
ing them, any new identity they assume remains always a negative identity. In
other words, they comprehend what they are not but are unable to see what
they are. Somewhere on the way they lost out on the process of transforma
tion, being left only with its outcome. With no memory o f what they used to
be, they have no idea what will become of them.
At the same time, although I believe smart zom bies to be zombies, I also
think they should be treated separately, for their zombiehood is very unusu
al. What is most singular about them, however, is neither their conscious
ness nor intellectual prowess but their unique superhero appeal. Contrary to
other zombies, smart zombies are not considered inferior to humans but rather
treated as superhuman, their quality o f being already dead making them
virtually immortal (“virtually,” since, as in the case o f every “immortal” mon
strous creature - see vampires or werewolves - there is always a way to
dispose of them). And, what is also a novelty, they tend to be on the good
side.
Intelligent zombies are a relatively new phenomenon. They owe their
existence to a trend prevalent in contemporary Gothic, Horror and SF genres
ever since Ann Rice’s Vampire Chronicles shifted the empathy centre onto the
non-human hero, seen as the embodiment of otherness in the times when the
representation of the Other as Woman, Homosexual, or Ethnic Minority is no
longer sufficient. Good examples of such alternative zombie-heroes may be The
Crow, the risen-from-the-dead avenger created by James O’Barr, James Her
bert’s Survivor, left behind by the dead to investigate the crash of their plane,
Clive Barker’s Cabal, resurrected to fight for the underworld, or Lucius Shep
hard’s green-eyed melancholy vodou warrior (Green Eyes).
In recent years [smart] zombies have taken over philosophy. They have been
successfully utilised to argue for and against issues concerning consciousness,
functionalism, materialism or artificial intelligence. David Chalmers, whose
book The Conscious Mind contributed greatly to the philosophical zombies
having risen from the grave, defines zombies as creatures which are “physi
cally and behaviourally identical to a conscious human, but lack any conscious
experience.”15 Chalmers believes his zombies to be logically possible or, in other
words, conceivable.
David Chalmers believes in the possibility of zombies understood in terms
of hypothetical physical entities lacking qualia (the properties of experience
or phenomenal properties). He sees them as a conceptual possibility. His zom
bies may have no qualia but they still have beliefs because “beliefs unlike qualia,
seem to be characterised primarily by the role they play in the mind’s casual
economy.”16
Describing the zombie’s mind Chalmers frequently uses the phrase “all is
dark inside.” In his counter-argument Allin Cottrell points out that “darkness”
in itself is a quale and suggests thinking of the inside o f the zombie’s head in
terms of a rock-like structure instead.17 Larry Hauser, on the other hand, opts
for the image of the head full o f saw-dust.18 But whether it is darkness, saw
dust, or rock, most philosophers agree that there is nothing it is like to be
a zombie. The argument of course follows whether the above statement is not
itself enough to posit the inconceivability of zombies as such.
Chalmers’ work defends the principle of organisational invariance, which
states that “given any system that has conscious experiences, then any system
that has the same functional organisation at a fine enough grain will have
qualitatively identical conscious experience.”19 At the basis of his theories lies
the presupposition that a given functional organisation can be realised by
different physical systems, such as for instance the brain and a silicon system,
or indeed the human and his zombie equivalent.
In effect Chalmers suggests that a zombie is going to be capable of expe
riencing things and drawing logical conclusions on the basis o f these experi
ences, the only difference being that although he will use the same self-ascription mechanisms as we do he might be wrong about his ascriptions. He will
say “I see red” and he will not see anything, or perhaps he will see blue instead.
But the fact o f the zombie being wrong about his mental states does not make
it impossible for him to have beliefs, for beliefs, as Chalmers argues, do not
depend on qualia.
Similarly Todd Moody believes that “[s]ince conscious inessentialism tells
us that no mental activity requires conscious accompaniments, it follows that
15
D avid J. C halm ers, “A b sen t Q ualia, F ading Q ualia, D a n cin g Q u a lia ,” w w w .u .
arizona.ed u/~ch alm ers/pap ers/qu alia.h tm on lin e 0 0 - 0 3 - 1 4 , 16:26.
:6 D avid J. Chalmers, “Self-A scription W ithout Qualia: A Case Study,” w w w .u .arizona.edu/
-ch alm ers/p ap ers/gold m an .h tm l on lin e 0 0 - 0 4 - 0 7 , 12:38.
17 A llin C ottrell, “ S n iffin g the Cam em bert: on the c o n c eiv a b ility o f z o m b ie s,” w w w .
im prin t.co.u k/cottrell/jcsm ainfram e.htm l on lin e 0 0 - 0 3 - 1 4 , 17:20.
18 Larry Hauser, “R even ge o f the Z om b ies,” w w w .m em bers.aol.com /lshauser/zom bies.htm l
on lin e 0 0 - 0 3 - 1 4 , 16:48.
19 C halm ers, “A b sen t Q ualia, F ading Q ualia, D an cin g Q u alia.”
no overt behaviour requires them either. So if conscious inessentialism is true,
zombies are true [...] it is quite possible for an entire world of zombies to
evolve.”20 At the same time, however, he posits that although zombies could
be treated as our behavioural twins and as such they would be capable o f
communicating in a language not that different from our own, zombies would
not be able to originate our mentalistic vocabulary. They could talk about
“knowing,” “understanding,” and “believing,” but these words would mean
something different and they would be devoid of conscious experience.
Daniel Dennett argues for the inconceivability o f zombies.
[WJhen philosophers claim the zombies are conceivable, they invariably un
derestimate the task o f conception (or imagination), and end up imagining
something that violates their own definition [...] If, ex hypothesi, zombies
are behaviorally indistinguishable from us normal folk, then they are really
indistinguishable.21
He blames the philosophers’ sudden outburst o f interest in zombies on, what
he calls, the Zombie Hunch - an intuition that there is something missing
(although it is hard to say exactly what) in mechanistic models o f conscious
ness and a conviction “that there is a real difference between a conscious person
and a perfect zombie,”22 both claims which he predicts, will be implausible in
future.
Although Dennett mentions that the zombie discussions resemble the futile
philosophical disputes of the old days regarding the number o f angels dancing
on a pinhead, his voice remains one of the loudest. In fact he himself is at
tacked by Jaron Lanier, as being a splendid example of a zombie. Lanier writes
It turns out that it is possible to distinguish a zombie from a person. A zombie
has a different philosophy. That is the only difference. Therefore, zombies
can only be detected if they happen to be philosophers. Dennett is obviously
a zombie.23
Speaking from the position of a computer scientist, Lanier accuses philos
ophers that in their speculations they forget about “the layers of abstraction,”
as he calls them, referring to concepts, platonic forms, cultural context or words,
20 Todd M oody, “C onversations with Z o m b ies,” w w w .im p rint.co.uk /M oody_zom bies.h tm l
o n lin e 0 0 -0 3 -1 4 , 17:26.
21 D an iel D enn ett, “The U n im agin ed P reposterousn ess o f Z o m b ie s,” w w w .ase.tu fts.ed u /
cogstu d /p ap ers/u n zom b ie.h tm on lin e 0 0 -0 3 -1 4 , 17:45.
22 D an iel D enn ett, “The Z om b ie Hunch: E xtinction o f an Intuition?” w w w .n yu .ed u / g sa s/
d ep t/p h ilo /co u rses/co n scio u sn ess/p a p ers/D D -zo m b ie.h tm l on lin e 0 0 -0 3 -1 4 , 17:22.
23 Jaron Lanier, “You C an’t A rgue w ith a Z om b ie,” w w w .w ell.com /u ser/jaron/zom b ie.h tm l
o n lin e 0 0 -0 4 -0 7 , 13:51.
without which neither brains nor any functionally similar to them systems exist.
Taking on the discussion o f computers Lanier argues that they are not distin
guishable outside a specific cultural context. He believes that to a Martian there
would be no difference between a computer, a toaster or a rock as there is no
possibility of detecting computers on the basis o f objective analysis, for “[w]hat
makes a computer a computer is our way o f thinking about its potential, not
its observed actuality.”24
Fascinating in their complexity as they are, such discussions seem beyond
the point from the cultural perspective. In cultural criticism there is no doubt
as to the existence of zombies, the zombie imagery assailing us from all the
directions. We have zombie movies, zombie music groups, zombie drinks...
Moreover, if I tell you that today I feel like a zombie, most of you are going
to be sympathetic or at least recognise the feeling. And this in itself is enough
to suggest the existence of a more or less unified cultural concept, let me call
it, the cultural icon of the zombie.
To discuss the cultural icon of the zombie I need to return to the definition.
As I said before, generally zombies could be defined as anthropomorphic
creatures (dead or alive) which are paradoxically identified by their lack of
identity. This definition accounts for all the 4 types o f zombies I have referred
to so far. The cultural icon, however, does not seem to take into consideration
those zombies which possess (even if limited) intellect. The reason for such
discrimination is very simple: icons depend on visual representation and the
multiplicity of forms adopted by the more intelligent zombies does not allow
for the successful clarification of the concept.
Smart zombies, for that instant, do not look different from ordinary humans,
although they do bear the mark of the Other, accentuated by their appearance
(the brooding look and the predominance of black/dark clothes). Their supe
riority is additionally strengthened by a plethora of macho attributes such as
black leather jackets, powerful motorcycles, or deadly weapons (mostly large
knives or guns as these seem to be considered most manly). This apparent
inability to distinguish smart zombies from humans gives us one more reason
why they should be treated separately.
Evil zombies may also present a certain problem when it comes to their
representation. Since the category blends with that o f demonic possession one
of the characteristics of evil zombies is their ability to shift shapes. It is thus
difficult to talk o f one clear image, which could be associated with all the evil
zombies.
When working on The Exorcist, probably the best ever picture o f demonic
possession, Friedkin was very careful in his choice of make-up for Linda Blair.
For the sake o f credibility o f the picture he refrained from overdosing on special
24 Lanier, “You C an ’t A rgue w ith a Z o m b ie.”
effects. His main aim was to make the audience believe that all the wounds
on the body of little Regan were self-inflicted, and resulted from the various
acts o f self-abuse to which she was pushed by the demonic entity possessing
her.
Similarly evil zombies often look very much like battered human beings,
covered with scars and bruises, or simply, if they were raised after they had
been buried, marred by the signs of corruption. Evil radiates from their eyes,
which often acquire some uncanny shades of yellow, red or green. Rotating
heads, speaking in voices or an ability to mimic other people may come as an
extra but these are the demonic rather than zombie properties.
With such a variety o f forms, however, it is obvious that in order to arrive
at the clear cut icon of the zombie we need to concentrate rather on the two
first categories, leaving their intelligent cousins to their fate. And since both
random zombies and slave zombies can be further characterised as brain dam
aged creatures, the search for their representation brings us into a new terri
tory - the representation o f mental disease.
In the 18th century a Swiss preacher-author Johann Lavater introduced a new
way of seeing the insane - physiognomy. He suggested that people should be
examined on the basis of their inherent features, such as the shape of their nose,
the colour o f their eyes or their bone structure. These features were seen as
predetermining character, and since mental illness was believed to be “merely
a reflection of character” the conclusions were drawn as to the correlation of
certain physiognomy and proneness to mental afflictions.
Lavater’s work was accompanied by a number of plates by Daniel Chodo
wiecki. Among many depictions of the “mentally weak” we find drawings of
idiots, characterised by their sloping foreheads and fixed facial expression.
Similarly in Philippe Pinal’s M edico-philosophical Treatise on Mental Alien
ation, or Mania (1801), who returns to the idea, idiocy is characterised by the
small size of head, sloping forehead and a fixed, empty expression on the face.
The small size o f idiots skulls and the facial expression characterised as “stu
pid and without meaning” returns again, this time in connection to phrenol
ogy, in Johann Gaspar Spurzheim’s Observations on the Deranged Manifes
tations o f the Mind, or Insanity (1817).25
From the very beginning of the scientific interest in that affliction, idiocy
was strongly associated with degeneration, in the 19th century overtly linked
to sexuality. It was then the placement o f idiocy as the cause or effect o f
“masturbatory insanity” was suggested. It was also then when idiocy (or in
deed degeneration) began to be understood in terms o f regression to a more
primitive human form, and the idiot started to be perceived as the child.
25
Sander L. G ilm an, D is e a s e a n d R e p re se n ta tio n : Im a g e s o f Illn e ss fr o m M a d n e s s to
A id s (Ithaca and London: C ornell U n iversity P ress, 1988), pp. 2 4 - 3 0 , 3 3 -3 4 .
Sander L. Gilman remarks on B. A. Morel’s generalised typology of the
cretin on the basis o f a 23-year old woman:
The cretin here is the child and the primitive. The cretin physiognomy is that
o f the child, her sexual attitude that o f the child and the primitive. The
unrestrained sexuality o f the cretin, the cretin’s childlike appearance, the
geographical and familial isolation o f the cretin provided the ideal cases upon
which to base the portrayal o f retrogressive sexuality. For Morel [...], the
presence o f shame is the proof o f adult and therefore civilized sexual be
haviour. The cretin stands apart from civilization, as does the deviant, in
a world inhabited by the sexual Other, the primitive and the child.26
And the zombie, we might want to add. If we take a closer look at the
zombies, as we know them from the movies or books, we will be struck by
the similarity of description. For the sake of clarity let us eliminate from the
discussion all the zombies in which the process of corruption went too far to
talk of discerning any facial features at all. We are left with a strangely uni
form vision of beings not that different from what is depicted on the plates of
the 19th-century medical books. Fixed facial expression, eyes dulled and fo
cused on one point, slowness to their moves, difficulty to control their body
movements, jerking limbs, disarrayed clothes reminding us, in fact, of the loose
garments of the mentally ill patients, sleek hair, sloping foreheads. The white/
grey pallor of their skin and sunken eyes coincide with the book images of
masturbatory insanity. Their heads often seem small in contrast with their un
naturally stiff bodies. And let us not forget about their “childlike” lack of shame.
One of the heroines o f The Return o f the Living D ead tells her friends of
a peculiar sexual fantasy she has, which involves being tom into pieces by
a crowd of hungry zombies. Aroused in her vision she actually undresses and
begins to run naked around the cemetery only to have her vision realised. Within
seconds we see her again, this time leading a horde of brain-hungry zombies
and looking relatively happy in nothing but her high heels.
A character created as relatively brainless from the very beginning she did
not actually change that much after her transformation. She has acquired,
however, a new credibility and a purpose. As a person her behaviour seemed
odd to say the least. As a zombie she does not surprise anyone with her nudity.
Moreover, her body has ceased to be considered as potentially arousing and
is now but a biological confirmation that she used to be human.
The 1999 film of Lars von Trier, The Idiots, advocated getting in touch with
one’s inner idiot and told a story o f a group o f people, who made such self
26
Sander L. G ilm an, “ S ex o lo g y , p sych oan alysis, and degeneration: from a theory o f race
to a race to theory,” in D e g e n e r a tio n , The D a r k S id e o f P r o g r e s s , ed s. E. C ham berlin
and S.L. G ilm an (NY: C olum b ia U P ), p. 74.
induced idiocy the essence of their lives. What was a method of healing one’s
psyche for some group members was also pure escapism for others. Regres
sion to idiocy proved an effective way of coping with the stresses o f adult life,
but at the same time, as a habit, it turned out to be difficult to break with. In
the western civilisation of the end o f 20th century, where stress and neurosis
come as standard, idiocy has become a desirable category.
Searching for one’s inner child is supposed to be a successful trauma-relieving psychoanalytical technique. Similarly isolating the primitive in man has
been an aim o f scientists since time immemorial. Regression into a zombie state
allows for both and offers an inviting prospect of a retreat from the restraints
o f social conventions.
A zombie does not need to take responsibility for its actions, for blatantly
ignoring the rules of the society. Blaming external conditions for one’s unseemly
behaviour is a desirable solution to many problems. At the same time it puts
the culprit in the position of the victim of circumstances and it is a human thing
to sympathise with victims rather than with oppressors.
In the earlier part o f this paper I defined zombies as creatures lacking
identity. Similarly, identity crisis may be seen as an inevitable side effect of
living in a multicultural society. Now, imagine what would happen if, instead
of pondering over our misplaced national or cultural identity, we were to opt
for erasing our identity altogether? Clearly by the rules o f logic we would have
to be then perceived in terms o f zombies. But would it be necessarily so bad?
In her book on masochism Masse describes it as “a psychic strategy that
makes the best of bad business.”27 She sees it as more than a resignation to
one’s fate or stubborn resistance against cultural traumas. In fact she believes
that masochism can form a coherent identity, assure continuity for the ego, and
allow the person to control both the self and the external reality - a necessary
means to ensure the survival of an individual.
Masse is not the only one to see submission as a technique o f dominance.
Jessica Benjamin similarly notices that “[t]he individual tries to achieve free
dom through slavery, release through submission to control,”28 and reminds us
that in order to understand submission we need to see it also as a desire to be
dominated and not just concentrate on depicting the miserable fate o f the
submissives.
Taking it even further Robert Stoller explains that
Masochism is a technique o f control, first discovered in childhood follow
ing trauma, the onslaught o f the unexpected. The child believes it can pre
vent further trauma by re-enacting the original trauma. Then, as master o f
27 M ich elle A . M asse, In th e N a m e o f L o ve. Women, M a so ch ism a n d th e G o th ic (Ithaca
and London: C ornell U n iv ersity P ress, 1992), p. 42.
28 Jessica B enjam in quoted after M asse, p. 45.
the script, he is no longer a victim; he can decide for him self when to suffer
pain rather than having it strike without warning. Or, when we have more
o f the hidden text, we can see masochism as an attack (‘suffering is my
revenge’).29
“Letting go” and becoming a zombie as a means to taking control over the
harsh reality o f life and a way of resisting its ploys is certainly a tempting
prospect. Unconditional submission to the external conditions places the zom
bie beyond any sort of conventions and releases it from the burden of imme
diate decision-making. Since the zombie has waived its right to decision-making
and it does not take the initiative, the cause-effect relation becomes suspended
and the zombie can no longer be held responsible for its actions.
James Sacksteder sees masochism in terms o f a negative identity, which
“represents for some individuals their best possible effort at creating and
maintaining a separate and autonomous sense of self, one that salvages for them
a modicum of satisfaction, security, and self-esteem.”30 The only person the
masochist has to worry about is himself/herself, the responsibility towards others
being suspended from the moment of accepting the masochistic identity. By
doing that, by fully embracing one’s masochistic self, a person voluntarily steps
into the realm o f the zombie. And as we have seen it in numerous movies, we
know what becomes of such a person: sooner or later s/he is bound to turn out
a zombie as well.
The realisation that one’s actions go unnoticed because everybody around
is not more but an unimportant piece of some vast machinery may evoke bouts
of individuality. Any anti-utopian work where the moloch o f the system top
ples because of the action o f one man who wanted to remain individual could
be an example of that. But the individual would not even think o f rebelling
if it were not for the thousands o f zombies who, by their meekly submissive
behaviour, made it obvious that the system was flawed.
Surely no system that turns humanity into a flock o f brainless zombies can
be good and the hero who brings it down deserves fame. But the 1990s are
the decade o f victims rather than victors (it is enough to tune into any o f the
numerous talk shows to see that), and inertia has found justification. While some
people still like to act others begin to notice that loud protests with their slo
gans, attacks and fights are equally efficient as those silent sit-ins, whose
participants do nothing knowing that their strength lies in numbers.
As a society o f masochists we are a society o f zombies, even though our
zombiehood is self-induced and totally reversible, provided we feel like it. But
being a zombie is an easy option not requiring much work on our side and luring
us with a promise of stress-free life. “When there is no room in Hell, the dead
29 Robert S toller qu oted after M asse, p. 46.
30 Jam es Sacksted er quoted after M asse, p. 45.
w ill w alk the Earth.” O n ly they should hurry, for the Earth is already sw arm
ing w ith the liv in g zo m b ies.
Filmography
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Beyond, The (Lucio Fulci, 1981)
Braindead (Peter Jackson, 1992)
Changeling 2, The (Lamberto Bava, 1987)
Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town (Dan Hoskins, 1989)
City o f the Living D ead (Lucio Fulci, 1980)
Crow, The (Alex Proyas, 1994)
Dawn o f the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978)
Day o f the D ead (George A. Romero, 1985)
Dellamorte, Dellamore (Michele Soavi, 1994)
Evil Dead, The (Sam Raimi, 1982)
Evil D ead 2: D ead by Dawn (Sam Raimi, 1987)
Evil D ead 3: Army o f Darkness (Sam Raimi, 1992)
Exorcist, The (William Friedkin, 1973)
Ghoul, The (T. Hayes Hunter, 1934)
Graveyard Disturbance (Lamberto Bava, 1987)
Idiots, The (Lars von Trier, 1998)
I Walked With A Zambie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)
Nightbreed (Clive Barker, 1990)
Night o f the Living D ead (George A. Romero, 1968)
P et Sematary (Mary Lambert, 1989)
Return o f the Living Dead, The (Dan O ’Bannon, 1985)
Serpent and the Rainbow, The (Wes Craven, 1987)
Sometimes They Come Back (Tom McLoughlin, 1991)
Two Evil Eyes (Dario Argento/George A. Romero, 1990)
White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1933)
Zombie Flesh Eaters (Lucio Fulci, 1979)
Am I My Lover's Keeper? Identity
and Possession in Emmanuel Levinas's
"Phenomenology of Eros"
What Levinas says about love is programmatically conflicted. He piles up
contradictions in his description of Eros which for him is neither reducible to
egology (ontology), nor equal to the ethical life proper. The relationship be
tween the ego and the beloved (the feminine, i.e. the Other) is at times shown
as absolute transcendence and sometimes as a mere prelude to a truly ethical
relationship.
Levinas does not allow his description of love to crystallise into a unified
meaning but keeps it in constant motion. Thus, love has two incommensurable
motifs: need and desire. The former springs from the lack of something that,
once found, brings satisfaction. The latter (desire) aims at what can never be
objectified, i.e. at alterity itself, at the ungraspable. Need is finite; desire is
infinite and insatiable. The description of love through need and desire means
that love aims simultaneously at the beloved and beyond the beloved. Love
weaves egoism (the return o f the self onto itself) and the attempt to transcend
selfishness. In “Phenomenology o f Eros”- Levinas’s most fully developed
account o f love - the erotic relationship is described as motivated in equal
measure by the irremissible selfishness (by the immersion o f the ego in itself)
as well as by the genuine devotion to the beloved other. Love is characterised
here as the paradoxical simultaneity o f “concupiscence and transcendence” and
as the parallelism between “the avowable and the unvowable.”1 Levinas’s idea
1
Em m anuel L evin as, “P h en om en ology o f E ros,” in T o ta lity a n d In fin ity: A n E s s a y on
E xteriority, trans. A lp h on so L in gis (London: K luw er A cad em ic P ublish ers, 1991), p. 255.
of love vacillates between the unselfish transcendence tow'ards the other and
the egocentric pleasure-seeking; between ethics and ontology, self-effacement
and self-affirmation. For Levinas (and in Levinas) love is “ambiguous.”2
The ambiguity produced by the juxtaposition o f mutually exclusive terms
may be described as the ambiguity generated by the “split register o f dis
courses.”3 The paradox that haunts “Phenomenology of Eros” consists in the
co-presence of the recourse to and the questioning of logical and objective dis
course. Thus, when Levinas announces that the erotic is “the equivocal par
excellence ,”4 he both essentialises Eros (because he identifies ambiguity as
love’s distinctive feature) and unsays it (in that he undermines the possibility
of defining love). In “Phenomenology of Eros” Levinas combines ontological
discourse with the less stable - shall I say more poetic? - language. He ex
presses love, but he expresses it lovingly, which means that he conveys its
ambiguity ambiguously. “Phenomenology of Eros” is both a thorough account
of love and an elusive love story; it juxtaposes philosophical rigour with “the
trope of lyricism: to love by telling one’s love to the beloved - long songs,
the possibility of poetry, of art.”5
The strategy through which Levinas tries to disentangle him self from
possessing, controlling his writing is, in fact, risky. As one critic notes, “Levinas’s attempt to deal with two features at once - a reasoned, critical, assertive
2 Ibid. p. 254.
5
A liso n A in ley, “A m orous D iscourses: ‘The P h en om en ology o f E ros’ and L ove S tories,”
in The P ro v o ca tio n o f L evin a s: R eth in kin g the O th er, eds. Robert Bernasconi and D avid Wood
(L ondon and N e w York: R ou tled ge, 1998), p. 74.
4 L evin as, “P h e n o m e n o lo g y o f E ros,” p. 255.
5 Em m anuel L evinas, O th e rw ise than B e in g o r B e y o n d E ssen ce, trans. A lp h on so L in gis
(Pittsburgh: D u q u esn e U n iversity Press, 1998), p. 199, note 10.
M y c la im s here run p arallel to w hat D errida sa y s in “ V io le n c e and M e ta p h y sic s” :
“ L e v in a s’s w ritin g, w h ich w ou ld m erit an entire separate study itse lf, and in w h ich stylistic
gestures (e sp e c ia lly in T otality a n d In fin ity) can less than ever be d istin gu ish ed from inten
tion s, forbids the prosaic disem b od im en t into concep tual fram ew orks that is the first v io
lence o f all commentary. Certainly, L evinas recom m ends the good usage o f prose w h ich breaks
D ion ysiac charm or v io len ce, and forbids poetic rupture, but to no avail: in Totality a n d Infinity
the u se o f m etaphor, rem aining adm irable and m ost often - i f not alw ays - b eyond rhetorical
abuse, shelters w ithin its pathos the m ost d e c isiv e m ovem ents o f the discourse. [...] In T otality
a n d In fin ity the them atic d evelop m en t is neither purely d escrip tive not purely d edu ctive. It
proceed s w ith the in fin ite in sisten ce o f w aves on a beach: return and rep etition , alw ays o f
the sam e w a v e against the sam e shore, in w h ich, h ow ever, as each return recapitulates itself,
it also in fin itely ren ew s and enriches itself. B e ca u se o f all th ese c h a lle n g e s to the co m m en
tator and the critic, T otality a n d In fin ity is a w ork o f art and not a treatise.” (Jacques Derrida,
“V iolen ce and M etap h ysics,” in W riting a n d D ifferen ce, trans. A lan B ass (London: R outledge,
1978), p. 3 1 2 , note 7.
The m o tif o f the constant (and rhythm ical) return o f m etaphors sign alled by Derrida in
the fragm ent quoted ab ove w ill be d evelop ed further in m y reading o f L e v in a s’s “P h en om
en o lo g y o f E ros.”
space and more ambiguous or uncertain one - means that this ‘double strat
egy’ is always open to the accusation that is capable of being reincorporated
into existing structures.”6 Indeed, it has become very common to accuse Levinas
o f a relapse into the structures which he tried to abandon. In the recently
published article Lucy Irigaray argues that in “Phenomenology of Eros” Levi
nas “clings [...] to the rock o f patriarchy,”7 and “scarcely unveils the disfig
urements brought about by ontotheology.”8 It is true that Totality and Infinity
(of which “Phenomenology o f Eros” is part) is founded on ontology and
ontological discourse.9 But what Irigaray says about the status of disfigurement
in Levinas’s text cannot be accepted as trustworthy because disfigurement in
“Phenomenology of Eros” is a consciously used - and hence never veiled device with which Levinas tries to prevent the reduction o f alterity to a stable
expressible identity. Ontotheology does not bring about disfigurement; rather,
ontotheology feeds on the flawed (but repeated) attempts to disfigure, erase
ontology.
In this paper I will examine the non-possessive character o f love as thematised in “Phenomenology of Eros.” I will also look closely at the language in
which this non-mastery is announced. I hope to show that although Levinas’s
rhetoric seeks to disengage itself from the desire to capture (to possess) the
meaning of Eros, the pattern through which this disengagement is sought namely, the rhythmical alterations of figurations and disfigurations10 - reinstates
the possibility of possession and captivation. I will argue that the ambivalenc
es to which Levinas clings are, in fact, embedded (contained) into a unified
totalisable pattern which I identify as belonging to art.
6 A in ley, “A m orous D isc o u r se s,” p. 74.
7 L ucy Irigaray, “Q u estion s to Em m anuel L evinas on the D iv in ity o f L o v e ,” in R eR e a d in g L evin a s, eds. Robert B ernasconi and Sim on C ritchely (B loom in gton and Indianapolis:
Indiana U n iv ersity P ress, 1991), p. 113.
8 Ibid. p. 114.
9 This opin ion w as v o ice d b y L evin as him self. In one o f his in review s he said, “ T otality
a n d In fin ity w as m y first book . [...] There is the on to lo g ica l term inology: I sp ok e o f being.
I have sin ce tried to get aw ay from that langu age. W hen I speak o f b ein g in T otality and
Infinity, w hat rem ains valuab le is that, above all, it indicates that the a n alyses should not
be taken as p sy ch o lo g ic a l. W hat is described in these hum an states is not sim p ly em pirical,
but it is an essential structure. It is as i f it w ere an on tological structure.” (Em m anuel L evinas,
“The Paradox o f M orality,” in The P ro v o ca tio n o f L evin a s: R eth in kin g th e O th er, eds. Robert
B ern asconi and D avid W ood (L ond on and N e w York: R ou tled ge, 1998), p. 1 7 0 -1 7 1 .
101 d ecid ed to use the term s f ig u r a tio n and d isfig u ra tio n rather than f ig u r e m e n t and
d isfig u re m en t to em p h asise that the shaping and un shaping that occu r in L evin as are rooted
in figures o f sp eech. The m eaning o f fig u ra tio n and d isfig u ra tio n has b een exp lain ed b y Paul
de M an in the fo llo w in g w ay: “Figuration is the elem en t in langu age that a llo w s for the
reiteration o f m ean in g b y su bstitu tion [...] T he rep etitive erasures by w h ich langu age per
forms the erasure o f its ow n position s can be called disfiguration.” (Paul de M an, The R h etoric
o f R o m a n ticism (N e w York: C olum b ia U n iversity P ress, 1984), p. 114, 119.)
Possession is always a feature of the ego who has not yet encountered the
other, who is totally engrossed in the perseverance o f his own being and who
revels in the gratification o f his needs. Possession is connected with the ego’s
early attitude to the world - enjoyment. To constitute itself the ego has to
separate itself from the undifferentiated and anonymous existing. This happens
through the individuation of existence - the event Levinas labels “hypostasis”
in which the ego masters its own existence by departing from the elemental
background. Says Levinas, “the appearance of an existent is the very consti
tution of a mastery,”" “the existent is master of existing.”12 The specificity of
possession at that stage lies in the fact that the ego constitutes itself (masters,
possesses its being) while at the same time is contained (possessed) by the
elements from which it separates itself. In Totality and Infinity Levinas observes
that “in enjoyment to possess is also to be possessed and dependent on the
impenetrable depth [...] o f the element.”13 The ego engenders itself, becomes
the unquestionable locus of being and exalts in the world. For the ego the world
is an enjoyable place before it is a context of useful tools or the object of
comprehension. The ego relishes in the life it lives not because “of some thing
or deed brought about by the subject, rather, the subject is himself brought about
as a relishing of life, as a naive and happy sensibility - the subject is its own
stimulant.”14 The ego possesses as far as it has a “grip on existing”15 and is
possessed to the extent that through its bodily existence it is submerged in the
elements. The ego is “shut up within the captivity of its identity”16 unable to
unchain itself from itself, incapable of departing from its moment o f consti
tution, from the present. The ego is “riveted to itself,” locked in the “hypostatised time”17 which has neither history nor the future. In Levinas’s words, “the
present has tom the fabric of infinite existing; it ignores history; it comes starting
out from now.”18
Possession is also implicated in Levinas’s description o f labour. Labour
(made possible by dwelling) neutralises being, releases the grip the elements
have on the ego. The worker’s hands grasp being, subjugate it and - literally
- domesticate it. Time structure changes slightly here. The ego does have
a relationship with the future but the relationship is still pivoted on mastery.
" Em m anuel L evinas, Time a n d the O th er, trans. Richard A . C ohen (Pittsburgh: D uquesne
U n iv ersity P ress, 1997), p. 52.
12 Ibid. p. 54.
13 “P osseder en jo u issa n ce, c ’est aussi etre p ossed e et etre livre a la profondeur insondable
[...] de 1’elem en t.” Em m anuel L evin as, T otalite e t In fin i, p. 131.
14 Richard A . C ohen, “E m m anuel L evinas: H app in ess Is a Sensation al T im e,” P h ilo s o
p h y T oday, Vol. 25, N o. 3 (1 9 8 1 ), p. 202.
15 L evinas, Tim e a n d th e O th er, p. 54.
16 Ibid. p. 57.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid. p. 56.
The future for the working ego never goes beyond a project, beyond the pre
dictable, or outside the anticipation o f what will happen. In labour “to think
about the future, about I’avenir is to anticipate, pre-venir.”19 The potentially
threatening future is domesticated, tamed and possessed in the ego’s plans. One
might say that the only future known to the ego at that stage is the future of
the if-clause, the future turned into the present by the ego who prepares itself
for all eventualities. Labour is the movement of an odyssey20 in which the ego
steps out into the world, appropriates it and returns to himself.
The ego who makes plans and achieves its goal is bathed in the uninter
rupted present in which the rips produced by departure are always stitched back.
The e g o ’s existence forms a continuum, sameness, in which the incessant
upspringing o f new undertakings is already embedded within the rhythm21 of
making, working through and completing projects. In ego’s solitary life eve
rything prefigures that what will come, announces that what will follow and
indicates the direction.
Possession, control and mastery do not have to apply to the whole o f the
ego’s life. Levinas postulates that the turning point for the ego is the encounter
with alterity, with the other’s face, with the woman. Here, the future is given
by the other and not assumed by the ego. In the face-to-face the ego experi
ences the limits o f its power to assume, understand, control. A special case of
19 L evinas, T otality a n d In fin ity, p. 192.
20 “Le travail [...] vien t de la m aison et y retourne, m ouvem ent de 1’O d yssee ou l ’aventure
courue dans le m onde n ’est que l ’accident d ’un retour.” L evinas, T otalite e t Infini.
21 I u se the w ord rh ythm here in the c o lloq u ial sen se, w h ich m eans that it is not the sam e
as the rh ythm characteristic for art, w h ich w ill be pivotal in the later part o f this analysis.
I b eliev e that neither labour nor enjoym en t cou ld be aptly described b y the con cep t o f artistic
rhythm . It is not app licable to labour becau se the w orking e g o is never enchanted, transported
or p o sse sse d by the p u lse o f his labour. L evin as assures that even i f w ork is don e m ech an i
cally, there is still som e degree o f sk illfu ln ess needed w h ich w ou ld control and direct w orker’s
habitual action s (E m m anuel L evin as, C a ło ść i n ie sk o n c zo n o ść : E se j o z e w n ę trzn o śc i, trans.
M ałgorzata K ow alsk a (W arszaw a: W ydaw nictw o N au k ow e P W N , 1998), p. 193.) H e also
em p h a sises that the d escrip tio n o f rhythm in art a p p lies nether to “hab its, r e fle x e s, nor
in stin cts.” (E m m anuel L evin as, “R eality and Its Shadow ,” in C o lle c te d P h ilo s o p h ic a l P a
p e r s , trans. A lp h o n so L in gis (Dordrecht: M artinus N ijh o ff P ublishers, 1987), p. 4). W hen
Tina Chanter w rites about “the rhythm o f w ork” w h ich rep laces “the im m ed iacy o f e n jo y
m ent” (Tina Chanter, “F em in ism and the O ther” , in The P ro v o c a tio n o f L ev in a s: R e th in kin g
the O ther, eds. Robert B ernasconi and D avid W ood (London and N e w York: R outledge, 1998),
p. 4 0 ) she is not u sin g the term rhythm in the sen se o f the rh ythm in art. The m eaning w ith
w h ich she in vests the con cep t is the on e o f w h ich L evin as sa y s that it is frequently invok ed
but left in “the state o f a vagu e su g g estiv e notion and catch -all” (L evin as, “R eality and Its
Sh adow ,” p. 4).
E njoym ent is not properly rhythm ical b ecau se in that state the e g o never relap ses into
anonym ity, is never stripped o f intentionality and identity (w h ich is the effect o f the rhythm ).
O nce the e g o is estab lish ed , it rem ains as “a standpoint.” (A lp h on so L in gis, “Translator’s
Introduction,” in C o lle c te d P h ilo s o p h ic a l P a p e r s , p. xi).
such a relationship is Eros through which the ego for the first time experiences
the failure to control. The erotic relationship is exceptional in that it is neither
a clash o f two disparate beings nor a fusion of two opposites nor a knowledge.
It is not a fusion because the ego retains its identity, i.e. is not dissolved within
the Other. Eros does not comply with the law o f participation where every term
contains a grain of sameness thanks to which the two beings can merge into
a unity. The masculine and feminine are not two complementary terms because
this would mean they presuppose a pre-existing totality. Eros neither neutral
ises alterity nor effaces egoity; it cultivates them.
What happens in Eros is that the virility o f the conquering, self-fulfilling,
possessive ego is questioned by the discrete, “withdrawing into her future”22
woman. Eros is the relationship with futurity itself, with future as such, with
“future never future enough.” The future implicated in Eros is not a future fact
or one future among many possible futures I might one day accomplish. It is
neither totalisable, nor possessible nor consumable.
Such an approach to temporality is rooted in Levinas’s rejection of total
ising concepts of time, i.e. o f those concepts in which the future and the past
are brought back to presence. Levinas criticises Hegelian description o f time
because in Hegel time becomes a property of reason in which it is appropri
ated, reconciled, ordered within the totality of (ever unfolding) historical truth.
Historical time trims subjective viewpoints to their essences, distils the essence
of individual moments of time and arranges them into the universal “mobile
image of immobile eternity.” Levinas also repudiates the representationist
character o f Husserl’s theory of time saying that in searching for “the presence
o f what is already past or o f what has not yet come about”23 it levels out the
irreducible diversity of temporalised existence. For Husserl the ego re-presents
itself to itself through the consciousness o f time flux - the ego reflects on the
passing time and retains it in a modified form as “that which has just happened”;
the ego also reflects on the fact that the now is continually being replaced with
new nows that come from the future. Because passing time does not collapse
abruptly into the past but is retained within the present reflection o f the ego,
and because the actual now has its necessary horizon within the oncoming
stream o f nows, the ego is able to form a unity or totality - or self-identificatory sameness. Thanks to re-presentation the ego knows itself; it is conscious
of its presence and identical with itself. Levinas observes that the intentionality o f retensions and protensions “reduced the time o f consciousness under
22 L evin as, “P h en om en ology o f E ros,” p. 2 58. It is essential to note that becau se L evinas
id en tifies the w om an as the other w h o is alw ays is high er and prior than the e g o , the above
d escrip tion o f the fem in in e cannot be read as con d escen d in g. “L evin as is upsettin g, not ac
cep tin g, the traditional v a lu es w h ich id en tify the e g o ism o f m ale dom inan ce as superior to
fem ale su ffera n ce.” (Tina Chanter, “ F em inism and the O ther,” p. 36 .)
23 Ibid., p. 100.
stood as the consciousness of time to the re-presentation of the living present
- that is, still as the re-presentation o f presence: ‘the being of beings,’ which
it signifies.”24 Remembrance and expectation unite the future and the past in
the eternal now that encompasses all time within its suprapresence.
Levinas is equally sceptical of Heideggerian concept o f time. Although
Levinas acknowledges that Heidegger should be credited with deformalisation
of time (i.e. with the rejection of purely conceptual solutions to the problem
of time and with grounding his analyses in a concreteness prior to the pure form
of time), he also believes that Heidegger’s temporality is not radical enough.
Levinas claims that Heidegger’s discussion of time does not break the imma
nence of subjectivity. The author of Sein und Zeit characterises time only in
terms of the subject’s ecstatic projection into the world, which does bear witness
to the subject immersion in Dasein, but which - as Levinas argues - never goes
beyond the sphere o f sameness. For Levinas “Heideggerian temporality, while
not sacrificing time to abstract and unified present o f prepositional knowledge,
nonetheless sacrifices time to the ecstatic self-presence o f an existential or
ontological unity, to the prepredicative fore-structure o f understanding.”25
Levinas rejects Heideggerian ego-centred view of temporality, in which a being
is a being-towards-its-own-death, i.e. a being heading for its most own possi
bility.
It is striking that despite many statements that in Eros there is no room for
possession26 and that erotic temporality is never mastered by the ego, Levinas
fails to protect himself from reincorporating possession into his writing. Pos
session reappears in “Phenomenology of Eros” through the artistically rhyth
mic mastery o f the feminine futurity. The rhythm through which the woman
is squeezed into a comprehensible pattern is the rhythm measured by the
emergence and erasures of figures. The feminine in Levinas’s writing is “im
mobilised in the instant or in its periodic return. Poetry substitutes a rhythm
for the feminine life.”27
The future to which femininity belongs cannot be fore-seen - cloaked in
“the night o f the erotic,”28 it remains impervious to the light of comprehen
sion; it does not even scintillate in the light of knowledge. The futurity im
24 Ibid., p. 102.
25 Richard A . C ohen, “T ranslator’s Introduction,” in Tim e a n d th e O th e r, p. 13.
26 “Can this relation sh ip w ith the Other through Eros be characterised as failure? O nce
again, the answ er is y e s i f one adopts the term in ology o f current descrip tion s, i f one wants
to charcterise the erotic b y ‘gra sp in g ,’ ‘p o s se ssin g ,’ or ’k n o w in g .’ But there is noth in g o f
all this, or the failure is all this, in Eros. I f one cou ld p o sse ss, grasp and k n ow the other,
it w ou ld not be other. P o sse ssin g , k n ow in g and grasping are syn on ym s o f p ow er.” (L evin as,
Time a n d th e O th er, p. 90.)
27 L evin as, “P h en o m en o lo g y o f E ros,” p. 263.
28 Ibid., p. 258.
plied in love exceeds the scrutinising look of ontology. What has-not-been-yet
wanes before the ego’s eyes, becomes dispersed, disfigured, effaced.
However, the nocturnal life, which blocks the access o f the clarity-hungry
eye to the feminine, does not do away with shaping altogether. Although the
permanently elusive (the Beloved) cannot be seen or pictured, it can be groped
for and caressed. The caressing hand never tightens into a grip, it identifies the
shape of the body immersed in darkness. For Levinas the movement of the
caress epitomises the radical exteriority o f the future in Eros. The caress never
grasps the Other; rather, it carves the shape of the otherwise invisible body,
it separates the non-light of the beloved from the darkness o f the rest of the
world. “Beyond the consent or the resistance of a freedom the caress seeks what
is not yet, a ‘less than nothing,’ [...] dormant beyond the future, consequently
dormant quite otherwise than the possible, which would be open to anticipa
tion.”29 The erotic caress is making contact with the other who always exceeds
contact.
The language of “Phenomenology of Eros” oscillates between the rhetoric
o f touch, which “[i]n a certain sense expresses love, but suffers from an in
ability to tell it,”30 and the rhetoric of the hampered vision, in which the fig
uration produced through the touch is undone.31 The tactile shape is disfigured,
dissipated and the caress-engendered contour is erased. The figuration through
the touch is always counterpointed by the disfiguration performed by the
crippled sight. The figuration and the disfiguration appear interchangeably and
make “closed wholes whose elements call for one another like the syllables
o f a verse.” 32
In the opening section of “Phenomenology o f Eros” Levinas describes
femininity as on the one hand “fragility” and “soft warmth” and on the other
as the “dawn” and dissipation33 into radiance. Starting from the level of skinto-skin contact, i.e. from the Beloved’s tangibility, Levinas outlines, so to speak,
the feminine existence. Female softness and warmth are silhouetted against the
background o f harsh and cold environment. Yet, the figure o f the beloved drawn
in that way is immediately erased. The ephemeral dawn to which Levinas
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 N oreen O ’C onnor argues that “L evinas identifies the dom inant m etaphor o f v isio n with
that o f totalisin g ph ilosophy and he shifts to the metaphor o f touch - w here there is no ‘ob ject’
availab le to p o sse ssio n , [...] but diffu sion , disp rop ortion .” (N oreen O ’Connor, “The Personal
Is P olitical: D iscu rsiv e Practice o f the F a ce -to -F a c e,” in The P ro v o c a tio n o f L ev in a s, p. 67 .)
M y point is that the introduction o f the m etaphor o f touch d oes not acco m p lish the d iffu sion
O ’C onnor is talking about becau se touch is not totally d ivorced from the m etaphor o f v isio n
w ith w h ich it m akes a rhythm ical pattern.
32 E m m anuel L evin as, “R eality and Its Sh adow ,” p. 132.
33 L evin as, “P h e n o m e n o lo g y o f E ros,” p. 2 56.
compares femininity dissolves into the dazzling sunlight. By choosing the dawn
as a metaphor for the feminine Levinas denies the woman’s figure any perma
nence. The motion of the dawn consists in the incessant retreating, self-effacement, disfiguration, denying the accessibility to the eye.
A similar cadence of figuration and disfiguration extends over the whole
of Levinas’s account of erotic relationship. Thus, the characterisation of the
feminine as “at once graspable but intact,” “the untouchable in the very con
tact,”34 is followed by the statement about the woman’s being dissipating “as
though into an impersonal dream.”35 The ego cannot lay hold of his beloved.
What he grasps is only the little that yields to the touch and beyond which there
is withdrawal which refrains from touching. The hand delineates the limits, the
contours o f the female tangibility. The contours, however, are again bound to
perish in the manner similar to the fading of the dream.
The woman is said to have her own “mode of manifesting”36 herself. Its
particularity lies in the rejection o f the pictorial and the reliance on the pal
pable. Significantly, Levinas chooses the term manifestation to describe the
feminine appearance - manifestation derives from the Latin word which epit
omises the action of the hand, i.e. the movement related to touching. This
meaning of manifestation is stressed when it is stated that the manifestation
which occurs in voluptuousness remains “a blindly experience.”37 It is totally
concealed to the eye also because the ego’s knowledge o f the other, his eye
of cognition, is “on all sides [...] envelop[ed]”38 by the other. Love is like “the
community of sentient and sensed” and not like the community o f two observ
ers looking at “a common landscape.”39 The ego feels rather than sees the
existence of his beloved; this time the figure of the feminine is tightly pressed
against the ego’s body.
Yet, the figure vanishes again. Levinas talks about the “disfigurement that
refers to the face”40 and about the feminine quitting her status as a person. The
disfigurement proceeds through ef-facing, the erasure of the feminine face, in
the course of which femininity is reduced to irresponsible animality. “The face
fades, and in its impersonal and inexpressive neutrality is prolonged, in am
biguity, into animality.”41 The human face of the beloved is dissolved within
the inhuman, animal image.
34 Ibid., p. 258.
35 Ibid., p. 2 59.
36 Ibid., p. 2 61.
37 Ibid., p. 2 60.
38 I b id , p. 2 6 2 .
39 Ibid., p. 2 65.
40 Ibid., p. 2 62.
41 I b id , p. 2 63. The com parison o f fem in in ity to anim ality or infacy sh ould not be read
as a sign o f L evin as m iso g y n y or con d escen d in g attitude to w om en . The O ther e v en w hen
Reading the text at face value one might conclude that the perpetual vac
illation between figuration and disfiguration effectively protects femininity from
being captured and immobilised. Paul Moyaert (who locates the appearance
o f the face and its subsequent erasure on the level o f argument rather than on
the level o f language) argues that the shifting between the personal and the
impersonal protects love from collapsing into perversity and guards the belov
ed from being reified. Says he, “The erotic takes place in the infinite transition
between the face that remains present in disappearing and the already imper
sonal underside that breaks through the ripple of facial expressions, or in the
infinite between of the face and its disfiguration.”42 Yet, the rhythmicity with
which figures of the feminine are produced and cancelled, the language through
which “the infinite transition” is rendered, is precisely what exposes the fem
inine to the ego’s violence. All Levinas says and hastens to unsay belongs to
the predictable and masterable pattern, forms a continuous flow of beats and
counter-beats. The language o f “Phenomenology of Eros” arrests the meaning
of femininity at the point where it desperately tries to let the feminine hover
above the reductive language. Just like the artwork so criticised by Levinas,
“Phenomenology o f Eros” “immobilised [the Other] in the instant or in its
periodic return, [...] substitutes rhythm for the feminine life.”43 The work of
art is characterised in Levinas’s essay “Reality and Its Shadow” by the “rhythm”
and - paradigmatically - by “musicality” in which the detachment from the
object is full (“in listening we do not apprehend a ‘something’, but are without
concepts”44), but in which totalities or “closed wholes whose elements call for
one another like the syllables o f a verse”45 are formed. The rhythm establishes
a “commerce with reality,”46 a circulation or swarming unable to “shatter the
fixity of im ages.”47 This means that rhythm and musicality form a peculiar
continuity, a bizarre universum whose “history is never finished it still goes on,
but makes no headway [...] something somehow completed arises in it, as though
a whole set of facts were immobilised and formed a series.”48 Artistic repre
tum ed into “a youn g anim al” or a child remain the Other, the authority, m y master. O ne should
also read the quoted sen ten ce in the ligh t o f what L evin as says o f fem in in ity on e page later:
“ E quivocation con stitu tes the epiphany o f the fem in in e - at the sam e tim e interlocutor, c o l
laborator and m aster superiorly in telligen t, so often dom inating man in the m ascu lin e c iv ili
sation it has entered.” (Ibid. p. 2 6 4 .)
42 Paul M oyaert, “The P h en o m en o lo g y o f Eros: A R eading o f T otality and In fin ity,” in
The F a c e o f th e O th e r a n d the T race o f G od. E ssa ys on the P h ilo so p h y o f E m m an u el L evin as,
ed. Jeffrey B lo e c h l (N e w York: Fordham U n iversity Press, 2 0 0 0 ), p. 34.
43 L evinas, T otality a n d In fin ity, p. 2 63.
44 Ibid., p. 133.
45 Ibid., p. 132.
46 Ibid., p. 134.
47 Ibid., p. 139.
48 Ibid., p. 139.
sentation stops time, congeals the delay, pacifies the normally restless instant
and strips it of “the essential characteristic of the present, its evanescence.”49
In that respect, art could be perceived as a cognate of the copula - the tem
poral change that resonates in sounds, words, forms used in art is frozen,
nominalised, as it were, within the finitude of an artwork. In Otherwise than
Being Levinas argues that the modulations of time in the work o f art are
synchronised within its structure, be it a book, a sculpture, a painting or a song.50
Thus, time in artworks never actually moves into the future, never explores
the future possibilities but becomes a prisoner of the network of necessities.
The rhythm o f Levinas’s account in “Phenomenology o f Eros” is not
anarchic or unruly; on the contrary, just like the rhythm of artworks, it suc
cumbs to measurement, does not shatter sameness but adheres to it. The rhythm
masters the postulated futurity of the beloved, it makes the woman’s time
foreseeable, i.e. accessible to the intellectual eye. It identifies and possesses
what was allegedly beyond identification and possession.
The rhythm which haunts “Phenomenology of Eros” not only divests the
feminine o f her nocturnal existence but also exerts an unwanted influence on
the masculine ego who decides to tell the story o f Eros. The rhythm enchants
and transports him, relinquishes the ego’s initiative and freedom. The rhythm
possesses the ego and inscribes him into its pattern. “This is captivation. [...]
It is a mode of being to which applies neither the form of consciousness, [...]
nor the form of unconsciousness.”51 The ego’s initiative is replaced with a role52
in which the ego does not assume anything but dutifully follows the prepared
stage directions. The ego re-enacts the mythical story of Eros and Psyche whose
love was spoilt by the violation of the law announced by Eros at the begin
ning: my beloved cannot see me, there is no point in keeping an eye on me.
Eros himself sees to whether the law is observed and acts like his beloved’s
keeper. He foresees Psyche’s transgression (that she will not conform to the
pattern) and embeds her deed in his love scenario. The ego neither consents
nor takes initiative when learns about the violation of his rule. It is part of Eros’
role to be merely “carried away.”53
49 Ibid., p. 138.
50 Levinas, O th e rw ise than B ein g , p. 40.
51 L evin as, “ R eality and Its Sh adow ,” p. 4.
52 L evinas, T otality a n d In fin ity, p. 203.
53 L evin as, “R eality and Its Sh adow ,” p. 4.
K a t a r z y n a B ork o w sk a
Property and Identity: Heaney as an Example
The following article considers Seamus Heaney’s search for his place within
the dual cultural, linguistic and literary tradition of Ireland. In the focus of
attention is the relationship between the physical entity of Ireland and forma
tion o f Heaney’s poetic identity, based on the condition o f belonging to and
being rooted in. This question would not be complete without discussing an
other crucial dilemma, namely that o f linguistic dispossession, not at all an in
nocuous one in the Irish context.
Bom into a Roman Catholic family in the Protestant north of Ireland, Heaney
grew up on a farm in County Derry bordered on one side by a stream that marked
the frontier with the predominantly Roman Catholic Irish Republic (Eire) to the
south. The cultural dichotomy of his background, surrounding the poet since early
childhood, may be deemed to have caused serious confusion, if not acute an
guish, all the more it proved unavoidable and of far-reaching consequences.
One half o f one’s sensibility is in a cast o f mind that comes from belonging
to a place, an ancestry, a history, a culture, whatever one wants to call it. But
consciousness and quarrels with the self are the result o f what Lawrence called
“the voices o f my education.” Those voices pull in two directions, back
through the political and cultural traumas o f Ireland, and out towards the
urgencies and experience o f the world beyond it. At school I studied the
Gaelic literature o f Ireland as well as the literature o f England, and since then
I have maintained a notion o f m yself as Irish in a province that insists that
it is British. Lately I realized that these complex pieties and dilemmas were
implicit in the very terrain where I was bom .1
1
Seam us H eaney, “B e lfa st,” in P re o cc u p a tio n s: S e le c te d P ro se 1 9 6 8 - 7 8 (L ondon: Faber
and Faber, 1984) p. 35.
As it was, this divided territory provided a significant point o f departure
for his artistic development, and also became a constant and valuable source
of literary material for his first and successive works.
Having finished his studies in Belfast with a first class honours degree in
English, Heaney started both lecturing on English literature and his creative
writing. Death o f a Naturalist, published over thirty years ago, brought him
widespread acclaim as a poet o f the northern Irish landscape, and established
him as a writer preoccupied with country details, seemingly insignificant in
themselves, but underlying so much o f the vocabulary and idiom of the region.
It is thus natural that the atmosphere and experience of his childhood in
the rural area, which his verse renders, are abundant in images of the hard, eve
ryday work of ordinary Irish people: digging turf and potatoes, picking black
berries, churning butter, ploughing the land. But to label Heaney as a poet of
the pastoral would be mistaken; his poetic and prose work deals with
a considerably wider scope of interests, amongst which, at the core o f the poet’s
concern is the difficult situation in Ulster. “Digging,” the poem opening the
first collection o f his poetry, is a particularly apt illustration o f his artistic
inclinations:
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun
Under my window; a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelled ground:
M y father, digging. I look down
[...]
The cold smell o f potato mould, the squelch and slap
O f soggy peat, the curt cuts o f an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with.2
Heaney himself admitted that this poem was a step in the right direction:
“This was the first place where I felt I had done more than make an arrange
ment o f words: I felt that I had let down a shaft into real life,”3 and indeed he
had. “Digging” - in literary and metaphorical sense - has become his verifi
able poetic declaration. The choice between two paths o f action, represented
by the gun and the spade, as well as their undisturbed, accepted coexistence,
2 H eaney, “D ig g in g ,” in N e w S e le c te d P o e m s 1 9 6 6 -1 9 8 7 (London: Faber and Faber, 1990),
pp. 1-2 .
3 H eaney, “F eelin g into W ords,” in P re o c c u p a tio n s, p. 41.
stresses the fact that people in that region were brought up with the awareness
o f a history in which sectarian conflict was frequent and bitter in equal meas
ure. Furthermore, written in 1964, this piece seems to have possessed certain
prophetic properties: it anticipated the outbreak of violence in Northern Ire
land that followed five years later and, regrettably, has not been extinguished
since.
Heaney’s attempt to give poetic expression to the historical unease that still
troubles the province is a natural consequence o f the initial association of the
pen and the spade. The poet’s declaration “I’ll dig with it” announces his
propensity for return to origins, as well as confirms the inevitable, yet pow
erful link between the Irish soil and creative imagination.
The question as to which literary tradition, the original Gaelic or the later
Anglo-Saxon Heaney actually belongs, is probably best expressed in their
sounds, the guttural Gaelic and the alliterative English. This omnipresent
dualism is visible even in the name of the poet’s home: “(o)ur farm was called
Mossbawn. Moss, a Scots word probably carried to Ulster by the Planters, and
bawn, the name the English colonists gave to their fortified farmhouses.
Mossbawn, the planter’s house on the bog. Yet in spite of this Ordnance Survey
spelling, we pronounced it Moss bann, and ban is the Gaelic word for white.
So might not the thing mean the white moss, the moss of bog-cotton? In the
syllables o f my home I see a metaphor of the split culture of Ulster.”4
The political tensions o f his native place are approached from the perspec
tive of his dialect through the poems of Wintering Out filled with ghostly shapes.
Not surprisingly, it is the Irish language that is the pre-eminent spectre appear
ing there; almost no longer spoken by the Irish, it only remains in dialect words
and place names, the names o f fields, townlands, and rivers, places laden with
heavy historical and sometimes personal connotations:
Broagh, The Long Rigs, B ell’s Hill; Brian’s Field, the Round Meadow, The
Demesne; each name was a kind o f love made to each acre. And saying the
names like this distances the places, turns them into what Wordsworth once
called a prospect o f the mind. They lie deep, like some script indelibly written
into the nervous system.5
An old Irish tradition of writing Dinnseanchas, or place-name poems, which
relate topographical details to spelling and pronunciation, is used by the poet
in order to transpose the resonance of the Irish language into English, his own
first language. An excellent example o f Heaney’s delightful fascination with
Gaelic addresses Anahorish. The melody o f anachfhior uisce provides not only
a description o f a hill near the farm where he attended school, but actually
4 H eaney, “B e lfa s t,” in P re o c c u p a tio n s, p. 35.
5 H eaney, “M ossb aw n ,” in P re o c c u p a tio n s, p. 20.
a vivid illustration of the slope with its mildness and blurred contours. On the
other hand, its emotional quality evokes a memory and importance of the place
where Heaney must have met his very first vowels and consonants, coalesced
clearly not only in language. Curiously enough, he overtly lays claim to this
territory, treating it as his personal property, thus further augmenting his at
tachment:
My “place o f clear water,”
the first hill in the world
where springs washed into
the shiny grass
and darkened cobbles
in the bed o f a lane.
Anahorish, soft gradient
o f consonant, vowel-meadow,
after-image o f lamps
swung through the yards
on winter evenings.6
In his presentation o f Broagh, a riverbank, Heaney imitates the sound of its name
by the long “o”s o f the following verse:
its low tattoo
among the windy boortrees
and rhubarb-blades.7
The guttural sound which “almost suddenly” ends the word, “the strangers
found difficult to manage.”8 The speech o f the landscape, the “forgotten Gaelic
music in the throat,”9 establishes a distinctive, regional identity o f the “demesnes
staked out in consonants,”10 thus language constitutes a means o f isolation of
the native community, and perhaps the only insurmountable barrier for English
invaders.
Echoes and repercussions of the fateful historic decision to send English
troops to conquer and subdue Ireland to the Crown, are approached by Heaney
in a more explicit manner. The “Act of Union” sarcastically describes the
creation of Ulster in terms o f the male/female relationship between “imperi
ally male” Great Britain and exposed to oppression helpless Ireland, the shame6 H eaney,
7 H ean ey,
8 Ibid.
9 H eaney,
10 H eaney,
“A n ah orish ,” in N e w S e le c te d P o e m s 1 9 6 6 -1 9 8 7 , p. 21.
“B roagh,” in N e w S e le c te d P o e m s 1 9 6 6 - 1 9 8 7 , p. 25.
“B elfa st,” in P re o c c u p a tio n s, p. 36.
“A N e w S on g,” in N e w S e le c te d P o e m s 1 9 6 6 -1 9 8 7 , p. 27.
ful and malevolent illegitimate offspring, or rather product, of which, is inside
Ireland’s womb; the father as the speaking persona not a little responsible for
his predatory colonial instinct. He seems, however, to realise vaguely that the
consequences he himself will have to bear, appear inevitable and dire alike to
those suffered by Ireland:
To-night, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
[...] I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither cajole nor ignore.
Conquest is a lie. I grow older
Conceding your half-independent shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably.
[...]
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they’re cocked
At me across the water. N o treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like open ground, again."
In “Ocean’s Love to Ireland” the motif of land, accompanied by the “dense
and deliberate”12 combination of historical, linguistic, and sexual elements,
recurs through another violent sexual union: Raleigh’s rape o f a young Irish
girl, so movingly depicted:
Speaking broad Devonshire,
Raleigh has backed the maid to a tree
As Ireland is backed to England
And drives inland
Till all her strands are breathless:
“Sweesir, Swatter! Sweesir, Swatter!”13
" H eaney, “A c t o f U n io n ,” in N e w S e le c te d P o e m s 1 9 6 6 -1 9 8 7 , pp. 7 4 - 7 5 .
12 B lake M orrison, S ea m u s H e a n e y (L ondon: M ethuen, 19 8 2 ), p. 65.
13 H eaney, “O cea n ’s L ove to Ireland,” in N o rth (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 40.
Sir W alter R aleigh (1 5 5 2 -1 6 1 8 ); poet, historian, courtier and colon ist; in 1580 he fough t
After her desperate appeals to her oppressor proved abortive, the ruined girl
instinctively moans her loss and misery in Irish; her native language being the
only means o f consolation left. Her dignity may be restored only by asserting
her national identity. As Raleigh exercises his supposed male prerogative, his
vulnerable “rape victim is, in reality, ‘the divine mother Eriu conceived antrophomorfically,’ and her mistreatments ensure not fertility but blight.”14 Both
Raleigh’s barbarous contribution and the conquest of Ireland, virtual and
metaphorical, remain faits accomplished.
Iambic drums
O f English beat the woods where her poets
Sink like Onan.
[...]
The ground possessed and repossessed.15
The poignant truth of the territorial dispossession suffered by the Irish may
be diagnosed as traumatic and perhaps incurable, at least as long as the “two
Irelands on one island”16 exist without a kind o f tolerable, let alone peaceful,
coexistence of its Catholic and Protestant communities, or rather as long as there
is enmity “between the cults and devotees of a god and a goddess.” As Heaney
explains, “(t)here is an indigenous terrtorial numen, a tutelar of the whole island,
call her Mother Ireland, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the poor old woman, the Shan
Van Vocht, whatever; and her sovereignty has been temporarily usurped or
infringed by a new male cult whose founding fathers were Cromwell, William
of Orange and Edward Carson, and whose godhead is incarnate in a rex or
caesar resident in a palace in London. What we have is the tail-end of a struggle
in a province between territorial piety and imperial power.”17
The potential necessary to safeguard the endangered distinctiveness o f the
Irish identity, desecrated by the factual and cultural imposition by the English,
may be found prevailingly, yet not solely, in Gaelic; another essentially Irish
constituent fixed in minds of the native people is tremendous, peatland resources,
the images of which were employed by Heaney for example in “Digging” and
“Act of Union.” Let us trace the reasons why they are so vital for the common
notion of Irishness.
against the Irish reb els in M unster. H ea n ey ’s poem iron ically recalls R aleigh and his p oem
“The O cean to C yn thia,” d ev o ted to Q ueen E lizabeth after he had sed u ced (and later mar
ried) on e o f her la d ies-in w aitin g, and thus lost the q u een ’s favour.
14 Karen M. M olo n ey , “H e a n e y ’s L ove to Ireland,” T w entieth C e n tu ry L iteratu re, Vol.
37, N o . 3 (1 9 9 1 ), p. 2 74.
15 H eaney, “O ce a n ’s L o v e to Ireland,” in N orth , p. 41.
16 H eaney, “Frontiers o f W riting,” in The R e d re ss o f P o e tr y (London: Faber and Faber,
1996), p. 189.
17 H eaney, “F eelin g into W ords,” in P re o c c u p a tio n s, p. 57.
Ireland can boast vast expanses of bogland: soft, shaky, slippery, danger
ous, unpredictable ground; these are the most popular connotations. Country
people who know the bog well may find nothing especially pleasing or beau
tiful about it, a bleak wilderness, a brown monotony; were it not for its prac
tical value and the multiplicity o f uses which bog offers, they would probably
show little interest in its mysterious charm, which does, nevertheless, exist.
To most Irish people, the bog was synonymous with hardship and the
poorest way o f life, though it has often guaranteed its continuity. Peat bri
quettes have traditionally been obtained by hand-cutting with a special type
o f spade called a slean, just as described in “Digging.” When dried, slabs of
peat supply a common, domestic fuel, and have been used as such for around
a thousand years.
Apart from fuel, peat provides many materials needed by a farming fam
ily; sods could be used to cover the roof o f a cottage, and large sloping pieces
o f wood preserved by immersion in the bog used to support that roof. Som e
times dried peat sods were a building material for cabins; bog could also
provide fertiliser and lime. Finally, it may be used by farmers for rough
grazing (sheep farming). Owing to this, and to the fact that farming bogland
was free of rent, quite a few families, especially Catholic, managed to sur
vive times of poverty.
Among practical applications o f bog resources there are also some rather
unusual ones resulting from another crucial characteristics of wetlands: their
unique and astonishing ability to preserve. Bog used to serve as a storehouse
or natural fridge for perishable goods, especially food. Turfcutters still happen
upon wooden casks with butter; thanks to the preservative power that peat
possesses, the colour and freshness of such butter could last almost unchanged
for several hundred years.
The secret o f bogland’s uniqueness is the lack o f oxygen. The anaerobic
conditions prevent organic materials (like wood, leather, textiles) from putre
faction. As a result, abundant evidence o f the past has survived in near perfect
condition. It contains man’s tools, weapons, houses, ancient jewellery (e.g. gold
ornaments from the Bronze Age), and even, in some upland areas, remains of
the ancient field system .18 The excavation of bog allowed for the discovery
of the past, the bogland proving to be an invaluable source o f information about
different cultures from the prehistoric era up to the present day. Thus attempts
at gaining insight into and reconstructing the life o f ancient societies, inhab
iting not only this island, were possible, and bog itself has acquired the name
o f “the memory o f the landscape.”19
18 Catherine O ’C on n ell, “e d , ” The Irish P e a tla n d C o n serva tio n C o u n cil G u id e to Irish
P e a tla n d s (D u blin : IPPC, 1987), p. 36.
19 H eaney, “F ee lin g into W ords,” in P re o c c u p a tio n s, p. 54.
As well as its practical uses described above, bogland is characterised by
its soft fertility and delicate beauty, as movingly depicted by M. Viney in his
essay “The Inspiration o f Peatlands”: “Where I live, on a hillside above the
Atlantic, bogland is wrapped around the highest mountain in Connacht like
a great brown rug around the knees o f an old man [...] If you look closer into
the rug, you find it woven of rich fabrics - velvety mosses of black and bottlegreen, brocaded lichens in gold and rose, filigree trimmings o f grey-green
lace.”20 It is scarcely surprising that those who are perceptive enough to
appreciate such artistry of nature should find some inspiration there.
Heaney became acquainted with bog in his early childhood, as many Irish
children must do. An awareness of the bog is ingrained into their minds, for
they are taught that Ireland is shaped like a saucer, with a mountainous coast
and a bog at the centre. There is also an interesting superstition, which holds
that the centre of the bog is bottomless. The above statement has some basis
in geography: there is no rock foundation under Ireland, only the Atlantic Ocean,
but for the Irish it would probably be true even without any scientific valida
tion. Since the ground is often unsteady, children are warned to keep away,
but for the same reason their curiosity about wetland is awakened. Heaney’s
memory o f bog is as follows: “[...] it is a landscape that has a strange assuag
ing effect on me, one with associations reaching back into early childhood. We
used to hear about bog-butter, butter kept fresh for a great number of years under
the peat. Then when I was at school the skeleton o f an elk had been taken out
of a bog nearby.”21
All those factors connected with the omnipresence and significance o f bog
have contributed to the birth of another crucial piece of Heaney’s poetry,
conceived also as an counterbalance to the American myth o f the vast and
unlimited prairie:
I had been vaguely wishing to write a poem about bogland. [...] So I began
to get an idea o f bog as the memory o f the landscape, or as a landscape that
remembered everything that happened in and to it. In fact, if you go round
the National Museum in Dublin, you will realize that a great proportion o f
the most cherished material heritage o f Ireland was “found in a bog.” I had
a tentative unrealized need to make a congruence between memory and
bogland and, for the want o f a better word, our national consciousness. And
it all released itself after “We have no prairies [...]” - but we have bogs [...]
the line “We have no prairies” drifted into my head at bedtime, and loos
ened a fall o f images that constitute the poem “Bogland,” the last one in D oor
into the D ark [...] At that time I was teaching modem literature in Queen’s
“ M ich ael V iney, “The Inspiration o f P eatlands,” in O ’C on nell, “e d .,” The Irish P e a tla n d
C o n serva tio n C o u n cil G u id e to Irish P e a tla n d s, p. 1.
21 H eaney, “F eelin g into W ords,” in P re o cc u p a tio n s, p. 54.
University, Belfast, and had been reading about the frontier and the west as
an important myth in the American consciousness, so I set up - or rather,
laid down - the bog as an answering Irish myth.22
We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encroaching horizon,
Is wooed into the cyclop’s eye
O f a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights o f the sun.23
“Bogland” announces the theme which is to dominate Heaney’s writing for
years, that of the deepest, unexplored and unexplorable, lost or neglected areas
of memory and imagination. The poet’s resolution to “dig” with his pen is
executed in this poem as he delves into the darkness that underpins his second
collection of verse. Personal memory widens here into national memory, a shift
that is marked by the communal persona of “we” and “our.” Negative state
ments and paradox provide a linguistic correlative for the hidden area of the
bog:
Melting and opening underfoot
M issing its last definition
B y millions o f years
They’ll never dig coal here [,..]24
According to Heaney’s account, the poem itself has emerged from Heaney’s
subconscious: “What generated the poem about memory was something lying
beneath the very floor o f memory, something I only connected with the poem
months after it was written [...],”2S and here he makes a reference to the warn
ing against the depths o f the moss-holes. The menacing forces o f the natural
world are represented by the vague mystery o f darkness, summarised in its turn,
by the bottomless centre o f the bog. The writing conveys the atmosphere of
strenuous effort applied to a hidden secrecy, now opening at last, those per
forming this activity are “our pioneers” who
[...] keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
22 Ibid., pp. 5 4 - 5 5 .
23 H eaney, “ B oglan d ,” in N e w S e le c te d P o e m s 1 9 6 6 -1 9 8 7 , p. 17.
24 Ibid., p. 17.
25 H eaney, “F ee lin g into W ords,” in P re o c c u p a tio n s, p. 56.
Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.26
Entering the realm o f the past, one undertakes a never-ending activity;
regardless of how hard one may try, there is no absolute point of origin that
might be reached. There are, however, layers with well-preserved evidence of
the past.
With ‘Bogland’ Heaney has opened the “door into the dark.” Darkness
appears occasionally in earlier poems, but it may be perceived as relatively little
frightening or intrusive (e.g. “I loved the dark drop [...] I rhyme/ To see myself,
to set the darkness echoing.”27) As if to satisfy Heaney’s curiosity and stim
ulate his poetic imagination, an amazing coincidence occurred: P. V. Glob’s
study incidentally entitled “The Bog People” was published in 1969. Written
by a Danish archaeologist, this documentary preoccupied with recent discov
eries made in the bogs o f Jutland, which once again were connected with the
amazing power o f that type o f ground. Those outrageous discoveries, whether
accidental or archaeological, have revealed bog’s darkest side - its function as
a burial ground.
Corpses found in bog were first supposed to be o f recently murdered vic
tims, but, as it turned out, they had been stored there for several hundred years.
They met their death not always by chance, though the ground itself is dan
gerous and deceptive, but dramatically indeed, by hanging, strangulation or
decapitation. Bodies recovered from bog have an astonishing nearly lifelike
appearance. Their skin texture resembles leather and, because o f a tanning
process in the peat, is rather dark. Often the hair colour and type can be
distinguished, similarly the clothing, which is usually woollen. After the peat
cover had been carefully removed, the exposed corpses underwent detailed post
mortem examination, their stomach contents including.28
The very subject of digging (in peat and in memory), introduced by Heaney
in “Digging” and in “Bogland,” is thus further transformed and unified in
a sinister dimension it has unexpectedly gained: digging up the Iron Age
corpses. In one o f his most tender and affecting poems, “Punishment,” Heaney
commemorates the fragile teenage victim who had to die having (reportedly)
committed adultery:
“ H eaney, “B o g la n d ,” in N e w S e le c te d P o e m s 1 9 6 6 -1 9 8 7 , pp. 1 7 -1 8 .
27 H eaney, “Personal H elico n ,” in N e w S e le c te d P o e m s 1 9 6 6 -1 9 8 7 , p. 9.
28 O ’C on nell “e d , ” The Irish P e a tla n d C o n serva tio n C o u n cil G u id e to Irish P e a tla n d s,
p. 41.
Little adulteress
[•••]
My poor scapegoat,
I almost love you29
In spite of his deep compassion and understanding, pity nearly turned into love,
Heaney is aware of his own human weaknesses. His self-accusation culminates
when he describes him self as “the artful voyeur,”30 and confesses deriving
a perverse sexual thrill from his observation of the girl’s naked body with her
intimate parts revealed. Having neither protested nor intervened when her
“betraying sisters”31 were penalised, he is overcome by a sense o f guilt, yet
still aware of his belonging to the community, on the one hand, and on the other
of his instinctive sympathy for the ancient urge o f retribution. He admits that
he also would :
[...] connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.32
Other poems of the sequence are also concerned with Heaney’s explora
tion of the theme, especially that the correlation between the tribal past and
contemporary Ireland is much closer than might be expected. “The Tollund
Man,” the very first poem generated directly from Heaney’s reading of “The
Bog People” with painful sincerity displays the poet’s perception of those links.
As J. Stallworthy observes, “the lucky near-pun Aarhus/our house”33 super
imposing Ireland on Jutland is not coincidental, all the more bitter, however,
that the last lines of the poem make Heaney’s attitude utterly explicit:
Something o f his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names
Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
O f country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
29 H eaney, “P unishm en t,” in N e w S e le c te d P o e m s 1 9 6 6 -1 9 8 7 , pp. 7 1 -7 2 .
30 I b id , p. 72.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Jon Stallw orthy, “T he P oet as A rch aeologist: W. B. Y eats and S. H ean ey,” R e v ie w o f
E n glish S tu d ie s, Vol. 33 (1 9 8 2 ), p. 166.
Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I w ill feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.34
The poet’s confrontation with the Tollund Man was a peculiar one; on writ
ing this poem he was overwhelmed by a sense of fear, hence his vow “to pray
to the Tollund Man and assist at his enshrined head.”35 By this vow Heaney turns
the poem into a sacred promise or a prayer (his recitation of the names o f Danish
town, evocative of his celebration of Gaelic names, introduces a kind of med
itative rhythm), despite the fact that by worshipping a pagan divinity he trans
gresses the Christian code. Supposedly, this unconventional reverence stemmed
from the conviction that the Tollund Man had been sacrificed to the earth god
dess, “who needed new bridegrooms each winter to bed with her in her sacred
place, in the bog, to ensure the renewal and fertility of the teritory in the spring.”36
His head is bestowed with a vegetable texture by its resemblance to “peat”
and seed “pods,” imagery that is echoed by the presence o f undigested winter
seeds in his stomach.
Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,
She tightened her tore on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint’s kept body.37
A certain ambiguity implied in this excerpt, introduced in the third line with
the first person narration, allows for a moment o f reflection. Once again, like
in “Punishment,” Heaney exhibits astonishing empathy, and may even be
deemed to identify himself with the victim. Elucidating perhaps as for the reason
why such close affinity occurred, could be an event from his youth. Having
experienced a very personal, nearly intimate relationship with the Irish ground
himself, Heaney reveals this particular sensation and the lasting impress it left
on him:
To this day, green, wet comers, flooded wastes, soft rushy bottoms, any place
with the invitation o f watery ground and tundra vegetation [...] possesses an
34 H eaney,
35 H eaney,
36 Ibid., p.
37 H ean ey,
“The Tollund M an,” in N e w S e le c te d P o e m s 1 9 6 6 -1 9 8 7 , p. 32.
“F eelin g into W ords,” in P re o c c u p a tio n s, p. 59.
57.
“The Tollund M an,” in N e w S e le c te d P o e m s 1 9 6 6 -1 9 8 7 , p. 31.
immediate and deeply peaceful attraction. It is as i f I am betrothed [italics
supplied] to them, and I believe my betrothal happened one summer evening,
thirty years ago, when another boy and m yself stripped to the white country
skin and bathed in a m oss-hole, treading the liver-thick mud, unsettling
a smoky muck o ff the bottom and coming out smeared and weedy and
darkened. We dressed again and went home in our wet clothes, smelling o f
the ground and the standing pool, somehow initiated.38
The sinister femininity of the land of Ireland is reiterated in “Kinship.” On
the one hand, Heaney preaches the virtues of the bog, asserts and celebrates its
fundamental Irishness through a linguistic exploration of the place. Since the word
and its meaning are untranslatable into modem English, the only effective trans
lation is made through the use of a series of Anglo-Saxon kennings:
But bog
meaning soft,
the fall o f windless rain,
pupil o f amber.
[...]
Earth-pantry, bone-vault,
sun-bank [...]39
On the other hand, he seems trapped between the sacrificial demands of
his allegiance to the soil o f Ireland and the past and present loss of human life
this cause irrevocably entails.
Our mother ground
is sour with the blood
o f her faithful,
they lie gargling
in her sacred heart
as the legions stare
from the ramparts.40
Despite this unresolved ambivalence Heaney’s involvement with the Irish
soil is ineluctable:
I grew out o f all this
like a weeping willow
inclined to
the appetites o f gravity.41
38 H eaney,
39 H ean ey,
40 I b id , p.
41 I b id , p.
“ M ossb aw n ,” in P re o c c u p a tio n s, p. 19.
“K in sh ip ,” in N orth, p. 34.
38.
37.
Further evidence may be found in his understanding of poetry as “a dig for
finds that end up being plants”42 and poems as “elements o f continuity, with
the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds,”43 as well as in his confes
sion: “I don’t think of (the territory that I know) as the Irish landscape. I think
of it as a place that I know is ordinary, and I can lay my hand on it and know
it, and the words com e alive and I get a kind o f personality when they’re
involved with it.”44
42 H eaney, “B e lfa st,” in P re o c c u p a tio n s, p. 34.
43 I b id , p. 34.
44 H ean ey, “ P oets on P oetry”, The L iste n e r, X C , 2 .3 2 8 , (8 N ov. 1973), p. 629.
On the Way to Nowhere - Reflections Upon
the Impossible of Identity
The primacy of reason and the primacy of faith, Athens and Jerusalem these are centuries-old oppositions between which human thought has been os
cillating through history. The choice of one opposite stance triggers the nega
tion of the other. Leo Shestov suggests abandoning o f all doubts and calls for
absolute commitment to Jerusalem, or in other words, for absolute faith. The
search for rational solutions to problems of existence and the need to escape
from uncertainties resulted in the development of critical thinking in relation
to what Shestov terms the Crisis of ratio.1
In his book titled Apotheosis o f Uncertainty Shestov verbalises his convic
tion that what underlies all philosophical systems is the desire of “understand
ing.” He claims that human vocation is not to “understand” the unknown but
to become acquainted with that unknown through experience. Shestov points
1 T w entieth century has b een a tim e o f great and radical ch an ges, it has been a tim e o f
p h ilo so p h ica l doubts and hesitations; it has been a tim e o f search for the spiritual salvation
o f m ankind. T h is fever o f look in g for reasonable solu tion s and escap in g from the chaos o f
thoughts and uncertain ties, from “the death o f G od ,” “the agon y o f C h ristianity,” “the tw i
ligh t o f the W est,” “the fall o f c iv ilisa tio n ,” “reb ellion o f the m a sses,” from “the fa llin g night
o f the new M id dle A g e s ” — resulted in the critical m anner o f think ing, the thinking in rela
tion to the C risis. S h estovian thought p laces it s e lf in that canon o f p h ilosop h ical sp ecu la
tion, in the canon o f thinking tow ards the C risis. It o sc illa te s b etw een the q u estion o f the
w h y (s) and the w h erefore(s) o f this id e o lo g ic a l “r ec essio n ”, and the answ er w h ich is to point
out sen ses w h ich w ou ld change the hitherto ex istin g paradigm o f intellectu al perception. This
act o f thinking in relation to the C risis is the constant search for the prim itive a rc h e — the
su bstructure o f the w h o le E uropean culture o f reason (s e e C ezary W odziński, A ten y,
J e ro zo lim a , R zym
in L ew S zestow , A ten y i J e ro zo lim a (K raków : Znak, 1993, s. 8)). A li
qu otation s in the article and in the footn otes w ere translated into E nglish by the author.
out that “no knowledge, no science can give that, what is brought by darkness.”2
Light is not able to reveal what lurks in the cracks of our existence. Light may
only set in order what is on the “veneer” of reality. Such a tension, the tension
between the emotional and the rational, between the expressible and the in
effable may culminate in liminal experience, the experience of the sphere
beyond a discourse, one that does not lend itself to discursivisation. Such an
experience, reminiscent of the experience of the Kantian sublime, seems to
propel the intellectual efforts of such thinkers as Kierkegaard, Duns Scotus,
St. John of the Cross, and Melville. Shestov writes that in the world organised
by logos two forces influence every human being: centripetal and centrifugal.3
The former enables us to situate ourselves in the context of the “visible” world.
Everything that leads to this self-placement is desirable. Only those experi
ences which activate the centripetal force, such as fear of the ineffable or the
ordering power of tradition, are cultivated. The centripetal force is the factor
that enables us to believe in the possibility of “recognition,” “explanation” and
“definition.” It calls into being the sphere of the “understood” and of the
“defined.” Everything that casts a shadow upon the structure of the world is
marginalized. Conversely, the centrifugal force allows one to acknowledge the
shadowed sphere, the sphere in which ratio proves impotent.
In order to exemplify his theory, in The Overcom ing o f the Obvious, Shestov
quotes a parable about the Angel of Death. The Angel of Death, who comes
to a man to take his soul, is all eyes. It happens, however, that the Angel of
Death4 comes too early. He leaves the soul in the man’s body intact but before
‘ L ew S zesto w , Apoteoza nieoczywistości (Londyn: Kontra, 1983), p. 88
3 L ew S zestow , Sola Fide. Tylko przez wiarę (W arszawa: Znak, 1993), pp. 5 8 -5 9 .
4 “In one old b ook o f w isd om it w as said [...] that the A n g el o f D eath w h o c o m es to
a man so as to separate the soul from the body, is all covered w ith e y es. W hy? W hy does
the A n gel n eed so m any e y e s — H e, w ho saw in H eaven everyth in g, he, w h o has nothing
to see on the earth? A nd so [...] H e has those e y e s not for h im self. It happens that the A n gel
o f D eath, w ho c o m es to take a sou l, co n v in c es h im se lf that H e has appeared too early, that
the tim e has not com e yet to m an, so as to lea v e the earth. H e d oes not touch the soul; He
d oes not ev en com e into sigh t o f that sou l, but before the departure, H e im p ercep tib ly lea v e s
that man one m ore pair o f e y e s from H is innum erable o n es. A nd then, suddenly, the (g ifted )
man starts to se e m ore than the others, m ore than h e/sh e can se e w ith his/h er old eyes; he/
she starts to se e som eth in g c o m p lete ly new. A nd h e/sh e se e s the n ew in the n ew w ay, (but)
not like (ordinary) p e o p le se e but lik e the creatures from “other w o r ld s” (s e e ), in such
a m anner that this new is not “the n ecessa ry ” but “the free” — it m eans that it is and at the
sam e tim e it is not, it appears w h en it disappears and disappears w h en it appears. G iven by
birth, the former ey es, “as in all o f u s” testify about that “new ” som ething co m p letely different
than the e y es left by the A n g el. But, as the other sen ses and our reason are associated w ith
the ordinary se e in g , and every personal or c o lle c tiv e “e x p erien ce” o f man is a lso associated
w ith the ordinary seein g , that new seein g se e m s to be la w less, absurd, fantastic — sim p ly
a phantom or hallu cin ation o f sw in g in g im agination. It se e m s to be that the n ext m om en t
m adness w ill com e: not the p oetic one — the inspired m adn ess about w h ich even the course
his departure, He leaves the man an additional pair of eyes. And then, sud
denly, the (gifted) man starts to see more than others, more than he could see
with his old eyes. He sees the world in a new way, his vision is no longer human:
it is a perspective of an alien visitor, of a stranger from out of this world. What
he sees is and at the same time is not; it appears when it disappears and it
disappears when it appears.5 What he sees is not a substance from which a shape
emerges. It is pure negation because there is nothing in what he sees. What
the man sees with his new eyes is chaos because his gaze is not a differentiating
vision. As Jolanta Brach-Czaina suggests in Cracks in Existence the very idea
of differentiation is based upon the act of separating objects from the back
ground.6 Therefore, the eye of recognition,7 the rational eye, does not pene
trate, while the new pair of “angelic eyes” allows penetration. They bring the
man to the sphere of the new. The necessity that results from the unrejectable
angelic gift is the approval of difficult imperfection. That necessity of entering
the sphere beyond ratio requires the suspension of the old gaze and, at the same
time, isolation from the vision of old.8 Therefore, centripetal force makes the
act of opening oneself so difficult. The new eyes usher in a period of new life.
Such an opening, such a “birth” of sorts, is the active waiting for the unknown.
A continuous and permanent movement towards the unreflecting is constitut
ed. Such waiting gives uncertainty and guarantees it.9 The Angelic gift, the
b ook s on aesth etics and p h ilo so p h y speak and w h ich under the nam e o f Eros, M ania or e c
stasy w as d escrib ed and ju stifie d w here (it) sh ould be and by w h om , but that m adn ess for
w hich they put p eo p le into the m adh ouse/lunatic asylum . A nd then, the fight betw een the
natural and non-natural (supernatural) sight b egin s, the result o f w h ich se e m s to be as prob
lem atic and m y ste rio u s as its b e g in n in g .” (L eo S h estov, Na wiesach Iowa, trans. A n eta
Z acharz, Paris: Y M C A -P ress, 1975, p. 27 .)
5 S e e L ew S zestow , “P rz ez w y c ięż en ie o c z y w is to ś c i,” Na wiesach Iowa (Paryż: Y M C A Press, 1975), p. 27, in Apoteoza nieoczywistości, p. 2 19.
6 The background is “the undersoil on w h ich som eth in g m ay com e to ex isten ce . But it
is not the one that is fertilised but the one that is the naked so il o f even ts and occurrences
yet unknow n. In the background lurks the uncertainty. The background is a substance from
w h ich a shape em erges. It is pure n egation becau se there is noth in g in it and i f there w ere
anything that cou ld appear becau se o f the nature o f the background, it w o u ld not b elo n g to
it. It is ch aos b ecau se it d oes not differentiate anything and b ecau se the very idea o f d if
ferentiation appears as the act o f separation from the backgroun d.” (Jolanta B rach-C zaina,
Szczeliny istnienia (W arszaw a: PIW, 1992), p. 108.)
7 R e co g n itio n is on ly id en tification based upon one to one relations.
8 A s Jolanta B rach -C zain a w rites: “ [ .. .] there is no n eed for op en in g up to the even ts
that attract us b ecau se w e are alw ays open to them and ready to participate in them . The
n e c essity o f o p en in g a ssu m es the p receed in g c lo sin g and isolation - that m eans lack o f ac
ceptance. I f being requires op en in g to its e lf as the absolu te con d ition , it m eans that im per
fection is its indispensable feature. Therefore, it is so difficu lt to open o n e s e lf onto it.” (Jolanta
B rach-C zaina, Szczeliny istnienia, pp. 3 4 - 3 5 .)
9 “The exp erien ce o f the first ex it as the exp erien ce o f p assin g from w hat is kn ow n and
d om esticated to w hat is unknow n and strange, as the exp erien ce o f initiation into destiny.
acceptance of which is an act of initiation, imparts to the man of Shestovian
parable knowledge about himself as of a being that longs for the unknown and
who dwells in uncertainty. This in-between sphere is a liminal sphere between
the dark and the light, but belongs nowhere; it is and it is not, it appears when
it disappears and disappears when it appears. Finding himself in the sphere of
unknown the Shestovian man dwells in the realm of verbal and mental silence.
To be bom as the author of Cracks in Existence says means to accept our own
separateness.10 To be born means to manifest oneself in one’s identity, an
identity “that not only allows for a multiplicity of incarnations, but also de
mands it.” 11 In its strangeness, the domain of the uncertain appears to be hostile
because it may blur the sight of the real in terms of I-see-what-I-know.12 The
discourse of hierarchized structures makes it difficult for us to see “beyond”
the ratio. Categorical discourse postulates thinking in terms of necessity.
Dwelling in the world of ratio, one necessarily follows the rules of ratio, whether
reflectively or unreflectively. According to Shestov such behaviour takes its
root in amartology, the reflection upon the original sin.13 The sense of the
original sin lies in illegality of insight, which took place when the Tree of Death
threw a shadow upon the Tree of Life and rendered man obliged to entrust his
orientation to reason. By that breach, man lost the opportunity of participating
in the Absolute. This eradication from the absolute left man with a language
incapable of expressing and describing what lies beyond “the formed” and “the
explained.” Such a rational paradigm of thinking places us in a being towards
death. The incapacity of language becomes a tangible manifestation of absence,
which is best illustrated by the Levinasian concept of the Other. Thus, in order
to make possible human access to Meaning, language must annihilate what it
A con tin u ou s and perm anent m ovem en t towards the u n co n scio u s is by then constituted. It
g iv e s uncertainty. It guarantees it. From the very b egin n in g in the existen tial con d ition a n x
iou sn ess is inscribed. That is taught by the act o f initiation. So, the original initiation im
plants in us k n o w led g e about o u rselv es as creatures that m iss the unknow n and w h o d w ell
in uncertainty. Tem pted by the m ystery, aw akened by its alluring radiation, w e are confronted
with the u n k n ow ab le.” (Jolanta B rach-C zaina, Szczeliny istnienia, p. 37 .)
10 “To be born m eans to accept and confirm our ow n separateness but also to exp erien ce
strangeness. To m o v e from place to p lace - alw ays as i f not our, to be aware that separate
ness or even strangeness o f the particular b ein gs m ay be good that is inscribed into the w h ole,
to w h ich w e b e lo n g .” (Jolanta Brach-C haina, Szczeliny istnienia, p. 4 0 .)
"Jolanta Brach-C zaina, Szczeliny istnienia, p. 69.
12 S ee Jolanta B rach-C zaina, “W n ik an ie,” in Szczeliny istnienia.
13 “T he sin is k n o w le d g e . T h e m om en t w h en the first hum an co n su m ed the fruit o f
co g n isa n ce, he gained k n o w led g e but he lo st freedom . M an d o e s not need co g n isa n c e . To
p ose q u estion s and problem s, to dem and facts and answ ers, m eans that m an is not free. To
c o g n ise m ean s to c o g n ise n e c essity . K n o w le d g e and freed om are not c o m p a tib le .”
(B . F ondane, “R econ tres avec L ew C h esto v ” (Paris: 1982), pp. 1 2 6 -1 2 7 , in L ew S zestow ,
Ateny i Jerozolima, p. 31 .)
describes in a way that would render the encountered being as emptiness and
inexpressibility. Understanding in the categories of ratio, is tantamount to the
death of meaning. By labelling being, man annihilates truths present in those
beings, and by that, he sentences them to exile from the world of discourse.14
Only in that exile do beings acquire a distance from discourse and they are
placed in the context of uncertainty. Thus, language is a negation of meaning.
In its original sense the negation results from the Levinasian desire because
it is not language that is asked questions or searched but it is itself that, searches
and asks.15 In this way distance bestows sense upon language. The absence
of one to one relations between word and object breeds our desire to move into
the sphere of negation. To say nothing is the only hope of saying everything.16
Realisation of apophatic thinking is not simple because we feel safer when
operating in a cataphatic paradigm. Even if we put the subject of a word to
death, there remains an idea of that subject functioning in, one-to-one relation
with the word. Then, the absent becomes present by transformation of the absent
into language. Blanchot writes that language of literature, which combines in
itself both uneasiness and contradictions, tries to talk about things and prob
lems that cannot be talked about. By this means, language tries to go beyond
all limitations even if its user is “aware” of them. Such a language is “aware”
that “the infinite absence of understanding could not be equal to the limited
and defined presence of a word.” 17
The aim of the “centrifugal” language would be to evoke “understanding
of the movement that escapes definitions.”18 It would like to reach the ideal
absence of sense, completely present in that absence and for that absence. The
awareness of that language opening towards the absent is the starting point for
the act of thinking towards and from death. Language then, becomes the
execution of negation. By that, its principle is the lack o f w hat it lacks. The
sentence “when I talk, death talks inside me” 19 is an attempt to express the
indispensable distance between the speaker and what is being described. That
14 A s M aurice B lan ch ot says: “ [...] a w ord g iv e s b ein g but it g iv e s b ein g lack in g being.
A w ord is the ab sen ce o f that being', it is its noth in gn ess, it is w hat had b een left w h en it lost
being. It m eans, a w ord is o n ly a fact that a w ord is ab sen t.” (M aurice B lan ch ot, Wokół Kafki
(W arszaw a: W yd aw n ictw o K R, 1996) p. 28 .)
15 S ee M aurice B lanchot, Wokół Kafki (W arszaw a: W yd aw n ictw o K R, 1996), p. 30.
16 B y m eans o f the ab sen ce o f one to one relations this extant breeds a desire o f liv in g
in the sphere o f negation b ecau se “ i f about things one sa y s o n ly w hat m akes them nothing,
then to say noth in g is the o n ly hop e o f sayin g everything. L angu age p e r ce iv e s that it o w e s
its sen se not to w hat e x ists but ju st to the distan ce against the e x isten ce and it fe e ls the tem p
tation o f stop p in g at that distan ce o f gettin g to the very e sse n c e o f negation. It is tem pted
to m ake w ith noth in g everyth in g.” (M aurice B lanchot, Wokół Kafki, p. 30 .)
17 I b id , p. 31.
18 Ibid.
19 I b id , p. 29.
can be explained in terms of centrifugal force, which pushes our identity towards
a new sphere of semiotic and semantic sensation. Semiotic, because of the
symbolic nature of language experienced during the centrifugal movement;
semantic, because of the multitude of transformations of relations holding
between language and a “sign” which allows us to perceive “reality” in
a number of ways. Owing to that, the experience of inexpressibility results in
acts of thinking in terms of the search to sense beyond sense. Consequently,
in the light of the desire to experience the ineffable what is Athenian falls in
value. Athens and Jerusalem metaphorically parallel the Levinasian opposition
between the myth of Odysseus and the parable about Abraham.20 The expe
dition of Odysseus, having for its aim the return to Ithaca, is a parable of
language in the Hellenic style. The searching language finds its arche of sense
in itself. The journey of Odysseus is propelled by the centripetal force. Because
it knows its destination, the journey is in fact passivity and a defined sojourn.
It appears to be a parallel to the Levinasian “need.”21 This need results from
an emptiness that can be quenched by the object of that need. Thus, only knowl
edge appears to be a fulfilment of the need of the human mind because it fills
the empty space of the question with discursive structures, it domesticates the
object of its transcendence and comes back to itself. The need of reason is
appeased with the assimilation of the Other in the Same: what is known
embraces what is unknown. Odysseus knows the answer to the question: where
am I going? Conversely, Abraham does not know the answer but he abandons
the search for what can be known and takes a road towards the unknown. “He
initiates an uninterrupted movement towards the Other of the sense - different
than the sense as a lingual ‘event’.”22 The experience of language in the bib
lical way is a renouncement, repudiation and negation. The wandering of
Abraham is the search for the source of the sense “beyond-the-outspoken.”
Therefore, the journey of Abraham is desire. As Levinas claims: it is a “reversed
need” that cannot be satisfied. It assimilates the Same in the Other, transcends
hierarchized discourse and transforms it to the ineffable. The only knowledge
of Abraham is a no-know ledge of place.
Thus, the birth towards death is the rejection of the language that speaks
about what is. At the same time the language of apophatic discourse is the search
for the moment, which precedes language itself and which now is more than
negation. Shestov seems to suggest that it is the search for the amartological
pre-source. This language says that it does not represent. It is. So the aim of
20 S e e E m m anuel L evin as, O Bogu, który nawiedza myśl (K raków : Znak, 1994).
21 Em m anuel L evin as, O Bogu, który nawiedza myśl, pp. 1 4 -1 9 .
22 “ A braham in itia te s an uninterrupted m ovem en t tow ards the O ther o f the se n se —
different than the sen se as a lingual ‘e v en t’ - uninterrupted m eans im p o ssib le to break in
the regress o f the return to the starting point” . (C ezary W odziński, Hermes i Eros (W arszawa:
IFIS PAN, 1997), p. 130.)
that language is in the reverse of concepts, in understatements and unremitting
interpretation and translation of what is written “with” a letter of the indistinc
tiveness. Deliverance towards death is not tantamount to the awakening in death.
It is rather the act of closing oneself to the unknown; as the immanent delimits
the transcendent, the language of reason delimits mutuality. Therefore, it is
possible to say that mystical experience, which we go through using angelic
eyes, brings knowledge, but this knowledge does not have a systemic charac
ter. It is a certain kind of intuition, vision or picture that cannot be transformed
into a discourse. Such knowledge is silent. But paradoxically, this silence can
be expressed, though partially, only by means of the words rejected earlier. Such
calmness of words leads to transcendence, the absolute identity, that emerges
from the dark and the absent (and) achieves triumphs in darkness and absence.
The idea of the Infinity of transcendence leads thinking beyond itself and thus
places our identity beyond itself. Thus, the more profound the revelation of
the centrifugal force is, the more shapeless the illumination is. Such an illu
mination has a direct character, one of mystical experience. There is no room
for any discourse because as Shestov writes, “[...] the Lord said that (He) would
live in the dark. (His) native element is thus darkness of which man is afraid
more than of any other thing.”23 Therefore absolute identity can be gained only
in the dark. According to Shestov contemplation of the “Divine” needs an un
justified transition from the state of ratio to the state of the ineffable. Such
a transition becomes the experience of the not-articulated and leads to the
domain where identity can be arrived at.
Birth towards death and from death delimits the sphere of spiritual hesi
tation. It sanctions the true use of the language of negation as the mediator,
one that should express doubts about human existence. Being bom towards
death and from death means abandoning the tame world of discourse that is
no longer, if it ever was, able to tell the story about what lies beyond the already
crossed border. We no longer dwell in the frames of cataphatic paradigm. We
start to look at the reality yielding to the centrifugal force that opens us to the
mystical experience. And this mystical experience becomes the sphere where
the search for identity can find its fulfilment. This identity is not the identity
of Odysseus that knows its starting point and its end-point. It is the absolute
one which could only be found outside Plato’s cave. It is the identity of Ab
raham that knows its beginning but which unremittingly, unceasingly and con
stantly asks about its “where.” It is the identity of the ceaseless wandering.
Therefore, the place of our “real” arche, telos, identity lies beyond what is
brought by the rational, in what is apophatic, in the sphere of uncertainty. Thus,
the question about identity is absolute and ultimate and it calls for an absolute
and ultimate answer - it requires the impossible. Shestov seems to suggest that
23 L ew S zestow ,
Sola Fide, p. 249.
to gain the absolute identity one has to abandon speech, and in silence has to
enter the “negative” stage of life.
*
*
*
Answers to such questions as “what is your name?” “where do you come
from?”, “what do you like?” depicts our place in the world of ratio. Answers
to these questions can tell us about nothing but about our place of living or
they can name or constitute our identity in the world of discourse. These answers
imprison identity in the sphere of the visible, possible, and explainable and point
out that the question about the “where” of identity - that is, about the sphere
where identity is constituted, cannot be posed and answered while using the
tools of ratio. Dwelling in the world of ratio, beings can talk only about identity
of cataphatic order provoked to the centripetal force that pulls us to the tra
dition of logos and its rationalistic discourse. This order appears to be a realm
in which there is nothing beyond the category. Therefore, the questions which
arise are whether it is possible to distance ourselves from the tradition of ratio
and from the language that is brought along by that tradition, whether we are
able to reach the place in which the discursive identity falls in value, and
whether it is possible to describe that very place. In the course of my argu
ment I use elements of Shestovian, Levinasian, Blanchotian philosophies and
the elements of Brach-Czaina’s thought so as to put forward the thesis that the
place in which identity is constituted is the sphere of absence, liminality that
calls to existence the realm of negation. It is performed in the way of the
transformation of the possibility of language and perception of the world into
the impossibility of that language and perception of the world and their an
nihilation.
The Word, the Self, and the Underground
Estate of Pierce Inverarity in Thomas
Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49
Not least among the possible forms of dychotomization to which Pynchon’s
fiction lends itself is the division into the “overground” realm of the visible
and various forms of the underground. Thus in V., Benny Profane, tired of the
street, the spurious alternative to the hot-house of paranoid speculation and
a metaphysical cu l-de-sac , is offered a chance to try his luck under the arid
thoroughfares of the West: he literally climbs down under the streets of New
York, and his peregrinations in the sewers of this city are not free of antic
ipatory desire for some sort of soteriological revelation. On a less literal level,
Malta, with its supposedly rich deposits of myth and ancient wisdom, stands
in opposition to the superficiality of a civilization where people tend to oscil
late between self-induced mindlessness and self-created faęades. Godolphin
makes his terrible discovery under the gaudy skin of reality, and Stencil’s quest
centers upon a conspiracy whose alleged aim is to undermine the metaphys
ical foundations of the West. In all cases, whether they are imagined or real,
and whether their message appears to be hope-inspiring or frightening, Pyn
chon’s murky underworlds lure with the promise of transcendence, of going
beyond the predictable mendacities of daylight.
In Pychon’s second novel, The Crying o f Lot 49, the possible existence of
a mysterious underground is also pitted against the outward appearance of
things, and again the reader’s picture of events is mediated through the mind
of a protagonist. The mind at the centre of the story (the mediation in this case
is complete, and the reader is not allowed even such ambiguous ventures outside
the subjectivity of a particular consciousness as in the case of V.) is that of
a young Californian, Oedipa Maas. One day she learns to her surprise of hav
ing been named the executrix of the estate left by her dead lover, the billion
aire Pierce Inverarity. The news arrives in the form of a letter from a law firm
in Los Angeles and, as the narrative begins, Oedipa can be seen standing in
the living room alone, “stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube” (Lot
49, l) ,1 trying to come to terms with such unwelcome surprise. The TV set
which communicates nothing, the letter which communicates something, its
addressee, helpless, alone, and trying to feel more drunk than she really is all of these suggest that the novel may have something to do with the prob
lems of communication and information, perception and loneliness. And in
deed, what immediately follows bears this assumption out. The image of Oedipa
deliberately attuned to the sounds of Muzak - music to do things by and forget;
her recollection of the last telephone conversation with Inverarity when, phon
ing her from some distant place at three in the morning, he tried to commu
nicate something but failed; the way in which she and Mucho, her disc-jockey
husband trafficking in worthless babble of pop, “throw” at each other bits of
information concerning their most recent respective disasters; the pathetic
inadequacy of Oedipa’s attempt to console her oversensitive spouse (“Yeah,
there was so much else she ought to be saying also, but this was what came
out” (3)): the interwoven th r ^es of communication and isolation quickly
establish themselves as a dominant motif in the story, finding, at the end of
the first chapter, a symbolic expression in two poignant images of solitude and
confinement. These two images come from Oedipa’s most private iconogra
phy. The first of them, a likening of her own making, shows Oedipa in “the
curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl somehow, magically, prisoner
among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret, looking for somebody to say hey,
let down your hair” (10). This image of a girl anxiously waiting for a Knight
of deliverance conflates in her mind with another, a painting by the Spanish
artist Remedios Varro, showing
[...] a number o f frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair,
prisoners in the top room o f a circular tower, embroidering a kind o f tapes
try w hich spilled out o f the slit w indow s and into the void, seeking hope
lessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the w aves,
ships and forests o f the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tap
estry w as the world. (10)
The second image is especially important, as it shows human isolation to
be the consequence of the inability to face the world directly, viz., without the
dubious mediation of the self. In the picture by Varro, the world is almost
1
A ll page num bers in parentheses refer to T hom as P ynchon,
York: Bantam B o o k s, 1967).
The Crying o f Lot 49 (N e w
entirely a product of man who, faced with unfathomable vastness, keeps im
posing on it patterns of the mind’s invention. In effect, instead of being con
fronted with unmitigated truth, man deals with the elaborately embroidered
tapestry produced by his consciousness: we are back in Baedekerland of
Pynchon’s first novel. In Oedipa’s case, however, the irony directed against
“tourism” as a mode of evasion is missing, and the stress is laid upon the tragic
inevitability of distortion in all cognitive acts, as they can lead to an acute feeling
of separateness from other beings - human or otherwise. Unable to leave the
lonely tower of her mind, Oedipa is nagged by “the sense of buffering, insu
lation, [noticing] the absence of an intensity, as if watching a movie, just
perceptibly out of focus, that the projectionist refused to fix” (10). Not that
she never tried to escape; her affair with Inverarity was nothing if not an
endeavour to put an end to her isolation. However, “all that had gone on between
them had really never escaped the confinement of that tower” (10), and on a trip
to Mexico (where they happen upon the Varro exhibition) Oedipa is unexpect
edly reminded that people can travel to the end of the world and yet remain
prisoners of their selves. Standing in front of the picture, she breaks into tears.
And yet, dismayed at the prospect of life-long confinement, Oedipa nev
ertheless toys with the idea of preserving that particular distortion of vision
which has come about in consequence of her tears coming in contact with the
lenses of her sunglasses:
Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front o f the painting and cried. N o one had
noticed; she w ore dark green bubble shades. For a m om ent sh e’d wondered
if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears sim ply
to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She w ould carry
the sadness o f the moment with her that w ay forever, see the world refracted
through those tears, those specific tears, as i f indices as yet unfound varied
in important w ays from cry to cry. (10)
One can detect that same ambivalence on the part of Oedipa with regard to
the ideal of unmediated perception. The prospect of willfully and permanently
settling in a particular “mindscape” is tempting indeed - particularly for some
one groping for the elusive truth in the darkness of an underground.
This temptation keeps growing as Oedipa’s amateurish attempts to execute
Inverarity’s will develop into a Pynchonian quest, the letter initiating a series
of apparent encounters with a secret system whose essential concern seems to
be the same as hers: communication. The coincidence is striking, and it soon
occurs to Oedipa that the Tristero, the mysterious postal organization at the
centre of her quest, might be the result of Inverarity’s elaborate plan, an in
trigue set up in order “to bring to an end her encapsulation in her tower” (28).
If so, the task must have been enormous. As Oedipa gathers more and more
information about the organization, the proofs of its shadowy existence appear
to crop up everywhere, stretching back to the 16th century, when Tristero, its
alleged founder, began violently challenging the Thurn and Taxis postal
monopoly in Europe. By the middle of the 19th century the Tristero seems to
have already infiltrated into America; once there, it continued in its alternative
function, a rival of the Pony Express, determined to spread subversion in the
“overground” channels of communication. In the 1960s (when the action of
Lot 49 takes place) it appears to be still very active, signalling its presence to
those in the know through the sign of the muted post-horn and two acronyms:
death and waste. As night (blackness) constitutes its ambience and death part
of its image, the Tristero seems to be standing for something silently sinister.
However, it is also an anti-establishment force, inimical to everything official
and superficial, a system belonging to and serving the needs of those who have
withdrawn from the American society.
The ambiguous nature of the Tristero (perhaps a message in its own right,
a sign to be deciphered) adds to the central ambiguity of the story, that which
concerns the dubious epistemological status of Oedipa’s discovery. Not only
is she uncertain about the true meaning of the Tristero, but, right through the
end of the novel, she remains confused in regard to the question of its very
existence. But whether it is in fact a real organization, a performance staged
by Inverarity, or only a hallucination, Oedipa’s experience is not a trap in the
sense Stencil’s V. manifestly is.
In this respect, Oedipa differs not only from Stencil, but also from some
other characters she meets or hears about, notably the members of the Peter
Penquid society and the Scurvhamites: allegedly an extreme right wing organ
ization, and a radical puritan sect adhering to a Manichean worldview. In ei
ther group, the idea of an adversary “fixes” the minds or believers. It is par
ticularly true of the sectarians in question. Is the Scurvhamites’ belief “in the
brute Other, that kept the non-Scurvhamite universe running like clockwork
(117) (the Other, it should be added, identified by them with the Tristero) to
be construed as an instance of bad faith? Can the true purpose motivating this
“Godly and purposeful society” (116) be seen as identical with their determi
nation to put an end to the continuous process of becoming and assume a stable
identity - first by defining themselves in simple contradistinction to their arch
enemy and then, fascinated with “a brute automatism that lead to eternal death”
(116), by defecting to the Other side? It would seem so inasmuch as what the
Scurvhamites are really interested in is this “brute automatism,” the state of
forgetfulness of man’s true ontological status. The defections point to their desire
to belong and obey; it is the splendid unequivocalness of “being for” or “being
against” that matters - morality has nothing to do with it.
The way in which Oedipa herself, in an unguarded moment, flirts with the
idea of succumbing to the Tristero’s attractive power betokens the strength of
the temptation. For her, confronted with so many indications of its existence,
this jump into faith would be tantamount to a jump into death. Not the real death,
certainly, but the rigor mortis of the in-itself.
She was meant to remember. She faced that possibility as she m ight the toy
street from a high balcony, roller-coster ride, feeding tim e am ong the beasts
in the zoo - any death w ish that can be consumm ated by som e minimum
gesture. She touched the edge o f its voluptuous field, know ing it w ould be
lovely beyond dreams sim ply to submit to it [...]. She tested it, shivering:
I am meant to remember. (87)
However, as there is always something to make her wonder when she appears
ready to do so, Oedipa never jumps. She never dwindles into a mere “she who
looks for the Tristero” and, staying open to various interpretations of the
revelations which come her way, intrigued and confused, hopeful and despair
ing, never stops trying to get behind the screen separating her from the “cen
tral truth itself’ (69).
In her quest, Oedipa is acutely sensitive to the presence of the ocean a mysterious force always felt behind the pathetic actions of Californians. In
its hugeness and power, the Pacific dwarfs the “irrelevance” of the life on the
coast, and the two realms seem to be completely apart. And yet Oedipa can
“feel” the ocean before it can be seen, heard, or smelt:
Som ew here beyond the battening, urged sw eep or three-bedroom houses
rushing by their thousands across all the dark beige hills, som ehow im plicit
in an arrogance or bite to the sm og the m ore inland som n olen ce o f San
N arciso did lack, lurked the sea, the unim aginable P acific, the one to which
all surfers, beach pads, sew age disposal schem es, tourist incursions, sunned
hom osexuality, chartered fishing are irrelevant, the hole left by the m oon ’s
tearing-free and m onument to her exile; you could not hear or even sm ell
this but it w as there, som ething tidal began to reach feelers in past ears and
eardrums, perhaps to arouse fraction o f brain current your m ost gossam er
m icroelectrode is yet too gross for finding. (3 6 -3 7 )
The Pacific seems to be sending out signals which can still be received by means
of some primeval faculty capable of rousing sensations “banned” by the “of
ficial” senses and, unexpectedly, Oedipa restores a bind which seems to have
been lost forever. The sensation, however, is short-lived and immediately
followed by a feeling of uncertainty as to its true character:
Oedipa had believed, long before leaving Kinneret, in som e principle o f the
sea as redemption for Southern California, [...] som e unvoiced idea that no
matter what you did to its ed ges the true P acific stayed in violate and
intergrated or assumed the ugliness at any edge into som e more general truth.
Perhaps it w as only that notion, its arid hope, she sensed as this forenoon
they made their seaward thrust, w hich w ould stop short o f any sea. (37)
Not only does Oedipa remain awestruck in the presence of “that vast sink
of the primal blood the Pacific” (122); to her, all intimations of transcendence,
of going beyond the faęade of boredom and predictability, are possessed of
a distinctively religious flavour, so that on her quest she feels “as if [...] there
were revelation in progress all around her” (28). Sometimes the revelation seems
to be lurking under the thick layer of meaningless informational noise; some
times it is the intriguing layout of Californian settlements that promises sal
vation. Driving into San Narciso, Inverarity’s headquarters, Oedipa recalls the
moment when, having opened a transistor radio, she saw a printed circuit for
the first time:
The ordered swirl o f houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her
now with the sam e unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had.
Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians,
there w ere to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense o f con cealed
m eaning, o f an intent to com m unicate. There’d seem ed no lim it to what the
printed circuit could have told her / i f she had tried to find out/; so in her
first minute o f San N arciso, a revelation also trembled just past the thresh
old o f her understanding. (13)
Although San Narciso, “like many named places in California,” is “less an
identifiable city than a grouping of concepts” (12), the pattern of its buildings
and streets seems, nevertheless, to contain an important message. In her un
certainty vis-a-vis its puzzling “swirl,” the causal relation between the demise
of the Cartesian Guarantor of True Knowledge and the feeling of being always
apart from reality is particularly evident. As the divine order, “the deep struc
ture” formerly present in the human mind and shaping all its products, no longer
obtains, the words (if any) “spoken” by San Narciso cannot reach her. In the
implied contrast to the inhabitants of the older, especially European cities which,
always built around centre, reflected the confidence of people living in a Godcentered, comfortably totalized comprehensible reality,2 Oedipa is left entirely
to herself.
In L ot 49, the problem of language, of the true relationship between words
and things, constitutes an important aspect of the human predicament; Oedipa
strains her ears in order to hear mysterious, transcendent words spoken on some
other frequency; for Driblette, words are but “rote noises,” not so much a means
of communication as a trigger for sollipsistic fantasies. Words are often use
less and misleading, empty of meaning (Oedipa speaking the name of God),
or pointing to a reality which cannot be contained within a name (“many named
places in California”). Language and reality seem to exist hopelessly apart, the
2
C f. Johan H u izin ga, Jesień średniowiecza, trans. T adeusz B r z o sto w sk i (W arszaw a:
P a ń stw ow y Instytut W ydaw niczy, 1974), p. 30.
latter ignoring the former despite human efforts to bring them together. Com
ing in between man and the world, words contribute to man’s encapsulation
insofar as the human mind operates through language. This repeated emphasis
on the role of language in the process of “projection of worlds” indicates the
marked influence of Wittgenstein’s ideas on the concept of man’s confinement
as put forward in L ot 49. For to see things through language, claims Wittgen
stein, means to remain within unbreachable bounds; it means to exist inside
a closed system, whose boundaries coincide with the boundaries of the formal
ized system of communication that one has adopted: “The world is my world;
this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which
alone I understand) mean the limits of my world. The world and life are one.
I am my world. (The microcosm).”3
In this system there is no place for metaphysics: “All Wittgenstein’s doctrines
are related to his idea that language has limits imposed by its internal structure
[...] and he places religion and morality beyond the limits because they do not
meet the requirements of what can be said.”4 This is exactly what Oedipa can
not and will not accept. Aware of the powerlessness of language in the situations
which demand bursting its limits (“With coincidences blossoming these days
wherever she looked, she had nothing but a sound, a word, Tristero, to hold them
together” (80)), she wants to express her intimations not by means of ordinary
words, but through the power of the lost, although - (she hopes) recoverable
“direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night” (87).
In her hope, Oedipa exhibits a poetic sensibility. What she shares with poets
is the characteristic belief which David Daiches attributed to all versifiers of
genius: the conviction that language is “not only expressive but cognitive and
exploratory” and that “the nature of reality could be probed by the very fact
of rendering it in poetic speech.”5 Poetic, visionary, or simply mad; Pynchon
(apparently recording Oedipa’s thoughts) makes his own list of those who speak
in order to express the unspeakable:
The saint w hose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant w hose lapse in recall
is the breath o f God, the true paranoid for w hom all is organized in spheres
joyfu l or threatning about the central pulse o f him self, the dreamer w hose
puns probe the ancient fetid shafts and tunnels o f truth all act in the same
special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering,
to protect us from. (95)
3 L u d w ig W ittgen stein , Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D . F. Pears and B . F. M e
Q uinn ess. Q uoted in W illiam M . Plater, The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon
(B loom in gton : Indiana U n iv. P ress, 1970), p. 6.
4 D avid Pears, Wittgenstein (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 12.
5 D avid D a ich es, A Critical History o f English Literature, 2nd e d . Vol. 2 (London: Seeker
and Warburg, 1 9 7 1 ), p. 307.
“The act of metaphor,” Oedipa realizes, may be but “a thrust at truth and lie,”
a strenuous effort to transcend, “a trembling unfurrowing of the mind’s plow
share” (95). But though in her quest for the Word she is to remain “unfurrowed,”
sometimes a peculiar phrase, the double meaning of an expression can facil
itate a peek through the veil. Thus holding an old sailor who suffers from
delirium tremens, Oedipa is suddenly made aware of the uncanny potential lying
in the fact that the abbreviation DT’s is liable to more readings than one: “She
knew that the sailor had seen worlds no other man had seen if only because
there was that high magic to low puns, because DT’s must give access to dt’s
of spectra beyond the known sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness
and fright.” (96)
For Oedipa, however, this is not enough. The direct Word she is after, the
cry which she is unable to utter, hold out the hope of doing away with all forms
of mediation, once and for all. The tower in which she is imprisoned can also
be described as The Tower of Babel, the many languages spoken by humanity
being but poor substitutes for the one sacred language capable of piercing into
the heart of being. On such religious longings, “the yearning after a lost lin
guistic paradise,” Leszek Kołakowski offers the following comment:
We find in m any civilizations evidence o f a nostalgic b e lie f in an intrinsic,
essential kinship between word and m eaning and o f an unending quest for
the “true” m eaning and the “true” language spoken at the beginning o f time.
L inguistically this is nonsense, to be sure: the m eaning o f words is deter
m ined by convention and historical accidents and, apart from actual usage,
there is no “genuine” tongue, no veritable m eaning and no m ysterious af
finity betw een things and names. Yet the myth o f Babel is deeply rooted in
our linguistic consciousness; w e want to recover the lost, original, God-given
speech in which things are called by their names, their celestial proper names.
This b e lie f and this quest m anifest them selves and can be traced in m agic,
in rituals, in Cabbalistic explorations, in the entire esoteric tradition, in the
very concept o f the h oly language.6
Oedipa’s hopes for finding that one revealing Word which would free her
from confinement do not seem to have much to do with the Word in its tra
ditional Christian sense: she is not interested in the message contained in the
Gospel and incarnate in Jesus Christ. Instead, her hopes point to an intuitive
grasping of some Fundamental Truth concerning the nature of reality. That
Oedipa’s expectations are not oriented towards the integrating vision of the sort
which Christianity used to provide is further suggested by Pynchon’s recourse
to overtly Eliadean phraseology, such as for example: “Some immediacy was
6
L eszek K ołak ow sk i,
p. 1 8 3 -1 8 4 .
Religion: I f there is no G od ... (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1982),
there again, some promise of hierophany” (18). The character of her antici
patory desire signifies a tendency toward the mystical and the archaic, the lost
capacity for what Rudolf Otto called the “numinous” experience,7 the hope for
the rediscovery of the Sacred in the wasteland of the Profane. The Word of
the Puritans, like that of the literary critics (117), is not her game; rather than
impose totalizing patterns on reality she would becom e reality. The attainment
of this goal seems within reach: if she could only be incited by someone or
something possessed of the Information she needs, if she could only find “the
trigger for the unnameable act, the recognition, the Word” (136), Oedipa would
“get through” at last.
Throughout the story, the Tristero seems to be fulfilling the function of such
a trigger, a fearful depository of negentropic surprise. It penetrates easily through
the walls of the Tower of Babel: its milieu consists of the “nameless” of the
American society (136) and the language it speaks is that of silence. The
blackness of the clothes worn by its emissaries melts with the blackness of “their
exile: the night” (120), and the black deeds they commit accumulate into “dark
history” which remains “unseen” (122). In the Tristero the medium (silence
plus indistinctiveness of contour) appears to constitute at least part of the
message, a wordless communication from “the separate, silent, unsuspected
world” (92), whose very existence requires that it remains beyond language
and out of sight. In Lot 49, whiteness and light tend to connote aridity of the
modern world (not unlike in V .: Weissmann, but also Antarctic Vheissu with
the terrifying absence of colour under its skin), and “the fluorescent bulbs
[which] seemed to shriek whiteness” (90) stand in contrast to the silent dark
ness of “ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth.” If the Tristero has in fact
been set up by Inverarity in order to let Oedipa attain a higher state of con
sciousness, then a revaluation of blackness - together with the heightened
awareness of death - may have been among his objectives.
One can advance such speculation even further: is the blackness of the
Tristero a sign pointing to the richness of vision directly opposite to what
Heidegger calls “the metaphysics of light” - a mistaken concept, based on the
assumption of the transparency (or manifestness) of truth understood as con
tinuous presence, and of the separate existence of the human consciousness
vis-a-vis that ultimately disclosable presence?8 For it is in the philosophy of
Heidegger that the Cartesian dichotomy, still present in the ontology of Sartre,
is finally invalidated, and the concept of human Dasein, the primary openness
making the mind/world dichotomy possible, is put forward as the true mode
7 N in ian Smart, The Religious Experience o f Mankind (London: Fount Paperbacks, 1983),
p. 49.
8 Cf. K rz y sz to f M ich alsk i, Heidegger i filo zo fa współczesna (W arszaw a: P a ń stw o w y
Instytut W yd aw n iczy, 1978), p. 205.
of man’s being in the world.9 Does the Tristero point the way to the recog
nition of man’s true ontological status, something beyond the conceptual frame
work of the West and therefore “unnamable”? Is the awaited Word, possibly
“a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life” (128),
to be understood as the Heraclitean Logos which “speaks the most surprising
message” and “says that all beings are one, all beings happen together in
Being”?10
For the reader to answer these questions in the affirmative would be tan
tamount to deciphering the Tristero’s message, and thus attaining what Oedipa
cannot attain. But the Tristero, in spite of the fact that some of its character
istics provoke such Heideggerian interpretation, eludes all attempts to reduce
it to a coherent pattern. What, for example, is one to make of the repeated
references to its cruelty and malevolence? The Tristero may, after all, be an
evil force, threatening an even worse form of imprisonment, and thus confirming
Oedipa’s suspicions about the supernatural provenance of her encapsulation.
In Lot 4 9 blackness can also denote exitlessness: the Word Oedipa keeps looking
for is to abolish the night. And while suggestions to this effect may sound
somewhat perfunctory (in the entropie world populated by prisoners for life,
the mysterious organization offers at least a chance for change), this aspect of
the Tristero cannot be ignored.
Not only is the character of the Tristero open to various contradictory
interpretations. Underlying all ambiguities is always the key question of its
existence: dream or reality, transcendence or nothingness? But, perhaps,
a question formulated in this way cannot be answered. Near the end of her quest
Oedipa gives vent to her frustration over the necessity of always having to select
one of the two mutually exclusive possibilities. Faced with the entropie non
choice of an either/or situation, Oedipa would rather not choose at all:
She had heard all about excluded m iddles, they w ere bad shit, to be avoided;
and h ow had it ever happened here, w ith the chances on ce so g ood for
diversity? For it w as now like w alking am ong m atrices o f a great digital
computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced m obiles
right and left, ahead, thick, m aybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets
there w ould either be a transcendent m eaning, or only the earth. (136)
When we see her for the last time, Oedipa is anxiously awaiting an auction
to begin. It is an event which might result in the final disclosure of the Tris
tero’s true identity meaning and intent. With her quest approaching its end,
Oedipa, deserted by everybody, feels even more isolated than before. Nothing
has been solved - no exit from the tower of her mind has been found.
9 Cf. M ich alsk i, pp. 1 2 0 -1 2 6 .
10 Jam es L. Perotti, Heidegger
on the Divine (A th en s: O hio Univ. Press, 1974), p. 78.
J a c e k M ydlą
"Lust in Action"
Possession, Transformation,
and the Exorcising of Eros
Culture generates eroticism as a form of discourse; I would like to propose
this statement, combining as it does the insights of Bataille (cultural geneal
ogy of eroticism) and Barthes (eroticism’s discursive potential),1 as a motto for
my essay, which is intended to focus on the overwhelming ontological com
plexities of eroticism. The occidental cultural legacy is marked by an ascend
ancy of the idiom of possession and transformation which, with respect to Eros,
towers over other discourses. Eros and possession seem to have been chained
together and used to define one another, even if by way of privation. It was
of course Plato who initiated this bonding for it was Plato who, in the Sym
posium , defined Eros or Love as “the everlasting possession of the good.” Thus,
if Emmanuel Levinas, centuries later, seeks to disengage Eros from the pos
session idiom (“Nothing is further from Eros than possession,”2 in contradic
tion to Sartre’s statement that even “the caress is an appropriation of the Other’s
body”3) he still moves within the same paradigm, and the apparent disparity
can be reconciled. A typical sorting out is found in Ortega y Gasset, who defines
1 C f. G eorges B ataille, Eroticism, trans. M ary D a lw o o d (P en gu in B o o k s, 2 0 0 1 ); also:
G eorges B ataille, Eroticism, in The Bataille Reader, eds. Fred B o ttin g and S co tt W ilson
(B la ck w e ll P ublish ers, 1998), pp. 221 ff.; R oland Barthes, A Lover s Discourse. Fragments,
trans. Richard H ow ard (L ondon: Jonathan C ape, 1978).
2 Em m anuel L evinas, Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A lp h on so L ingis
(Pittsburgh: D u q u esn e U n iv ersity Press 1995), p. 265.
3 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H azel E. B arnes (L ondon: R ou tled ge
1995).
sensual desire (lust?) as desire to take possession of the object, to make it part
of our being4; this completed, desire goes away. Love, on the other hand, is
an everlasting yearning for satisfaction.
Indeed, the way in which the possession idiom infiltrates and even satu
rates our thinking about erotic love almost defies critical detachment. The
English language, for instance, makes eroticism qua possession obvious to the
point of obscuring all traces of conventionality and arbitrariness which perplex
the inquiring mind. The verbal repertoire that is always on hand when one wants
to describe the sexual act or an erotic liaison is nearly ineluctably suggestive
of appropriation, conquest, captivation, etc. To have, to enjoy, to take, to use,
to possess, to conquer - such and suchlike are ideas and metaphors society
lives by in all kinds of configurations of amatory relationships. Having shaped
the dominant discourse of sexuality for centuries, they are capable of gen
erating a near-inexhaustible verbal gamut, as literary specimens can very
amply illustrate.
Of course, no literary sedimentation of the possession idiom will enlighten
us on the underlying ontological substructure, which itself can be treated as
yet another product of vibrant cultural interaction. On the contrary, the insin
uated and rhetorically exploited onto-theology (one must not forget, to give an
example, of the propping up that ontology offers the doctrine of chastity) has
been oftentimes twisted out of its indigenous bedding, its categories dislodged,
freely shuffled around and arbitrarily reassembled in the service of an artistic
“whim.” One thinks here of the semantic entanglements of poems such as
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 (“The expense of spirit in a waste of shame | Is lust
in action [...]”).5 Overflowing as it does with the possession idiom (vide the
unbelievable compression of the two lines: “[lust is] Mad in pursuit and in
possession so; | Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme”), which lends it
its rhetorical nerve as well as its sting of moral chastisement, the sonnet
denounces lust, or illicit sexual pleasure, for transgressing the boundaries of
righteous humanity in so many devious ways. Being much more than a fleeting
whim, literary sedimentations and consolidations are a living catalogue, as in
Barthes, of discourse-mediated impulses, appetites, forces that will not be
tranquillised by theories or straitjacketed by rigid systems.
For centuries, lust was both denigrated as well as firmly circumscribed by
an ontologically underpinned system of morals. The argument that is going to
unfold here will aim at exposing certain shortcomings of the essentialist (“objectivist”) approach, which affixes sexual gratification in general and lust in
4 Jose Ortega y G asset, Estudios Sobre El Amor (L ectorum Pubns, 1984), P olish trans.
K r z y sz to f K o m y sz ew as Szkice o miłości (W arszaw a 1989).
5 S h ak esp eare’s son net is quoted from the fo llo w in g edition: Shakespeare’s Sonnets , ed.
S tephen B ooth (N e w H aven and London: Y ale U n iversity Press, 1977).
particular to firm sources (gradually in the course of centuries re-defined with
recourse to scientific categories: cf. Foucault’s analysis of scientia sexualis).
A refutation of the onto-scientific approach can pick up and follow sundry
leads, from Marcuse (his utopian delineation of Eros liberated from genital
gratification), to Foucault (his genealogy of sexual pleasure), to Fromm (his
attempts at vindicating matriarchy as a gesture against the partriarchal dis
tribution of property, hence also of possessive sexual behaviour).6 The an
tagonisms which lie at the foundation from which gratification springs have
always been given some ontological framing, as exemplified by the discrep
ancy, evolved in the modern era, between biological drives and the super
structure of moral evaluation.
This superstructure was in the first place provided by classical ontotheology. Thus the traditional moral lore of, among others, the Church goes far
beyond a mere condemnation of adultery. Lust is denounced as a capital sin
or vice, capable of playing havoc with the souls of men. None the less, the
problem of transformation, for all the rigidity of the classical metaphysics, arises
here with utmost intensity. Reason and will, the two higher faculties that make
up the human-ness of a person are endangered if an individual stoops to lust
and allows the lower instincts, which should naturally obey the guidance of
the spirit, sneak out of control and get the upper hand. With the resulting
metamorphosis of a reasoning animal into an unthinking and wayward beast
the transformation process, re-enacting the original Fall of humanity, reaches
completion. The decrepitude wreaked by lust, which consists in upsetting the
moral order, can only be restored by the divine intervention of God’s Grace.
However, also here the beguiling force of the within-natural-limits-totally-acceptable sexual drive (“concupiscence”) and its potentially corruptive agency
remain perhaps as obscure as the great mystery of Evil itself. Before we
refocus on lust, let us run a closer examination of the idea of possession, as
well as the accompanying ones of penetration and intrusion.
Possession hardly seems to qualify for an ontological category sensu stricto. It is easily thrown together with categories describing “mere belonging” of
attributes to its “substance” (the inhering of accidents or adjuncts), and hence
seems too volatile to have any ontological weight. On the other hand, it seems
to have a strong economic, hence also political and eventually ideological,
colouring, a fact which has often meant relegating it to an area of enquiry
outside metaphysics proper. To put it briefly, according to classical ontology,
existence precedes attribute and relation; thus, one has to be in order to pos
sess (or be possessed by another), and hence the problem of possession does
not arise as one affecting the firmness of ontological categorisation. If one insists
6
Cf. Erich From m , Love,
P ublish in g C orporation, 1997).
Sexuality and Matriarchy About Gender (From m International
that possession does raise a problem, one leaps beyond essentialist thinking and
substitutes relations or structures for substances. The latter being the case in
post-Hegelian, post-Nietzschean, and post-Foucauldian thought, one cannot help
noticing affinities between literary dislodgement of possession and the mod
em substanceless dialectic of appropriation and dispossession. Besides dialec
tical dynamics they share strong determination to burst the confines of essen
tialist ontology by shifting focus to larger structures, of which an interpersonal
relation such as that of sexuality is an example. Here enters Hegel’s dialectic
of subordination, Nietzsche’s theory of instincts as a handgrip for the will to
power, Foucault’s idea of sexual pleasure as a product of colliding solidifications of power. The literary engrossment with erotic love, whether denunci
atory or apologetic, has conventionally followed in the footsteps of the Pla
tonic paradigm according to which the human condition is ridden by acute
deprivation of good, and which makes Eros emerge into the world as if from
an orifice of that radical ontological deficiency.
The above-described situation makes for the notorious ambiguity of pos
session. If placed at the lower ontological shelf of an attribute, possession
becomes an elusive relation between two discrete entities; however, if promot
ed to a higher position of a self-standing category, it transforms into
a defm iendum in search of a complement. The modern ontological promotion
of possession turns it into a category which, without losing anything of its
central position, is doomed to a never-ending search for a fixed meaning. Luck
ily, as we have already pointed out, the idiom of possession with respect to
Eros is firmly established in numerous cultural contexts, which bestows on it
the sense of a signified of near-tangible solidity. A given social practice often
accompanies such materialisation: as in the case of the wedding ceremony,
where the man and the bride ‘take’ one another to become each other’s
exclusive possessions.
In this essay, exemplary literary configurations of the possession idiom,
which I have earlier on referred to as “sedimentations,” will be used to shed
sidelight upon the main train of the argument. We shall move from possession
to transformation in search of a sharpened insight into the production of Eros.
The analysis will hopefully reveal the dynamics of erotic possession which will
in turn furnish prospects of a more comprehensive understanding of whatever
falls under the bizarre term “lust.”
There is an aspect of possession (after Marcel and Levinas, let us call it
phenomenological) which ought not to elude consideration. The sexual act can
be seen as the enactment of a person’s physical identity (close to Sartre’s
“incarnation”). Levinas insists that sexuality presupposes nudity, the latter being
also a product of an identity-bestowing process, of the creation of a psycho
physical totality. One is tempted to state authoritatively that at least a minimum
of physical exposure is needed for the erotic experience to get a grip on. This
demand may be twined with the notion of vulnerability, implied in Levinas’
concept of the face. Nudity here would mean exposure to another’s penetra
tion, with submission and appropriation by another as possible consequences.
Scarcity or denial of physical exposure can, in turn, be interpreted as prereq
uisites for the initiation of an effective appropriation of one person by another.
Thus denial of physical exposure also becomes constitutive of the erotic ex
perience, which entangles us in apparent contradictions.
As we can see, a possession-centred argument is apt to make artful U-turns.
It is for that reason that the notion of possession becomes coupled with the
idea of penetration. Penetration can be and indeed has been redefined with the
aim to make it fit for an analysis of the sexual act along the general guidelines
of existential ontology, as is the case in Brach-Czajna. In her book titled
Szczeliny bytu [“The Orifices of Being”],7 one finds such an existentially driven
phenomenology of the erotic where the central category, penetration (the Polish
word wnikanie) is forged into a key to the enigma of the human condition.
According to Brach-Czajna, one ought not to mistake wnikanie for any act of
possessive, unauthorised, and forceful appropriation; and that is why she draws
a sharp terminological distinction between penetration and intrusion (w ejście )
as a step on the way to establishing the authentic meaning of the sexual act.
In seeing the erotic experience as an act of transcendence, of breaking down
the barriers of isolation (in the words of Bataille’s narrator, “[we were] very
remote from anything we touched, in a world where gestures have no carrying
power, like voices in a space that is absolutely soundless”8) separating one
individual from another, Brach-Czajna is close to Levinas. Her analysis cer
tainly offers a handful of insights which could be helpful in redefining lust as
intrusion (vide below, the analysis of the E xorcist episode) rather than pene
tration. One has to note, however, that possessiveness is here inextricably allied
with vulnerability. The teleological alliance of possessiveness and vulnerable
passivity to make up an existential ideal is a repercussion of the Platonic
definition of Eros. There is then an aspect of erotic possession that could be
dubbed self-sacrificial. The assumption is that the sexual act is capable of
transcending the solid opacity of one’s body in the hope that such exposure
of vulnerable nudity will help to secure a firm hold on the object. This act of
de-solidifying sacrifice does not however perform the expected leap into al
terity; one inevitably collides with the impenetrable facade of another’s body.
Since, according to Brach-Czajna, penetration implies a continuing search
for crevices, openings in the unwelcoming texture of another’s body, the dis
tinction between penetration and intrusion becomes vague. Instead, one can see
7 Jolanta Brach-C zajna, Szczeliny bytu [“O rifices o f B e in g ”] (K raków 1999).
8 G eorges B ataille, Story o f the Eye, trans. Joachim N eu grosch al (P en gu in B o o k s, 2 0 0 1 ),
p. 44.
here yet another tension-building antagonism, one of many that make for the
goal-oriented dynamics of erotic desire. Levinas states with extra emphasis that
nothing drives us farther away from Eros than possession. Ownership, i.e. any
actual and stable possession of an object, unlike penetration, institutes a distance
between the owner and the object that is owned. Ownership, within this par
adigm, precludes gratifying erotic fulfilment for when two people enter the
relation of ownership estrangement is inevitable. Yet bondage in the service
of sensuality seems to go along with social and political liberation. In the words
of Tolstoy’s narrator acerbically commenting on female emancipation:
A t bottom fem inine servitude con sists entirely in her assim ilation w ith
a means o f pleasure. They excite woman, they give her all sorts o f rights equal
to those o f men, but they continue to look upon her as an object o f sensual
desire, and thus they bring her up from infancy and in public opinion. She
is alw ays the hum iliated and corrupt serf, and man rem ains alw ays the
debauched Master.9
As we shall see more clearly later on, the tension between enslavement and
freedom, or between ownership and independence, is one of many antagonis
tic configurations that spark off an erotic relation. In this particular case, physical
and social distance could be needed to liberate mutual gratification, which in
its turn is generated by an effort to overcome such estrangement.
Contrary to an optimistic view, it is difficult to determine the nature of
physical love in such a way as to foreclose it becoming a tool of reinforcing
the barriers of individual confinement. To quote again from Tolstoy:
The im pression o f this first quarrel w as terrible. I say quarrel, but the term
is inexact. It w as the sudden discovery o f the abyss that had been dug between
us. L ove w as exhausted w ith the satisfaction o f sensuality. We stood face to
face in our true light, like tw o egoists trying to procure the greatest possible
enjoym ent, like tw o individuals trying to m utually exploit each other.
Whatever social intercourse achieves in the way of removing barriers of
estrangement and distance, its physical counterpart secures them back in place.
With respect to Eros, possession and the verbal idioms it churns out cannot
be penned into a restive ontological framework. Erotic possession is a thing in
motion, purposefully, if madly, chasing its goals, as we have seen. Hence no
ontological pigeonhole is ever able to contain it entirely. The frantic and ul
timately futile nature of penetration was alluded to by Marcuse, for whom
genital gratification was a mode of alienation: “The existing liberties and the
9
Count L eo T olstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata, on lin e ed ition b y the G utenberg Project at
w w w .p ro m o .n et/p g /. A ll qu otes from T o lsto y ’s story are from this source.
existing gratifications - writes Marcuse in his Eros and C ivilization - are tied
to the requirements of repression.” 10 Marcuse looks ahead to the day when
genital sex will be replaced by a more comprehensive type of gratification
involving the entire human body. Contrary to this utopian belief, no spatial
extension of the field of sensation can radically solve the impasse; rather, it
will aggravate the sense of isolation, proportionally to the increased demand
of fulfilment that our bodies make on the prostrate object.
We have already mentioned the goal-orientedness of desire. As it is clearly
stated in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, gratification derives from keen anticipa
tion rather than actual fulfilment: “Past reason hunted, and no sooner had | Past
reason hated, as a swallowed bait.” The futurity of Eros radically precludes the
firm grasp one would like to have on things. Levinas states this very clearly,
which, regrettably, does not stop him playing down erotic teleology. For Freud,
however, “being is striving for pleasure” (as paraphrased by Marcuse). Or more
radically: pleasure, which is being, is striving for pleasure. Anticipated pleas
ure contains the seeds of gratification, and lust, a thing in the making, forever
fails to congeal into a full-fledged entity. Little wonder that this fact condemned
sexual gratification to a subterraneous existence of an ontological anathema.
In other words, erotic transformation, being the ecstatic coming out of one’s
shell, is destined to remain incomplete. Hence lust can only be an untiring
pursuit of a mirage, an “unreasonable project,” inasmuch as it entails an ad
mission of defeat already at the starting point. At the same time, lust does upset
the salutary balance between pleasure principle and reality principle, between
the entropie expenditure of energy and its possible justification. To resort once
more to Shakespeare’s words, lust is “Mad in pursuit, and in possession so |
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme.” The insanity of lust consists in
the fact that the pursuits it initiates never terminate in any effective appropri
ation of the object. Lust forever leans into the future, a future that lustful pursuits
themselves misconstrue into a stagnant present: “La, tout n’est qu’ordre et
beaute’ | Luxe, calme, et volupte.” - “There all is order and beauty / Luxury,
calm, and sensuousness.” (Baudelaire quoted by Marcuse).
To return to the idea of penetration, if gratification partly consists in sur
rendering the opacity of one’s body by making it an object of possible explo
ration, then this act inaugurates a bountiful reciprocity that all too soon re
solidifies the participating subject. The resulting object-like passivity is a signal
of denial which precludes gratifying participation. Let us conclude, as we
proceed to discuss the next subject: the possessiveness of Eros, which makes
up a central facet of lust according to what we have said, would make little
sense if the idea of transformation did not bring it into higher relief.
10
Herbert M arcuse,
B eacon Press, 1974), p. 92.
Eros And Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud (B oston :
It should have begun to transpire from the forerunning overview of some
ontological vagaries it unleashes that an analysis of Eros, and let alone that
of lust, entails an examination of its constitution within a larger cultural con
text. Any variation in the sense-generating social mechanism can affect the idea
of lust ever so totally, perhaps even to a point where its meaning becomes dim
and starts to vanish altogether. Nowadays, in the wake of the “sexual revolu
tion,” lust as a notion seems not to carry any specific content at all. As we shall
see, however, an internment of lust would be premature. Domesticated sexu
ality would exclude that specific kind of gratifying sensation which arises from
the breaking of taboos (one of which could be, as we have seen, property as
the foundation of social relations). As long as there are taboos to break any
such attempt at laying “old lust” to rest must needs prove futile. Or, which is
perhaps a metaphor better tuned to the voice of our times, the forever-transmogrifying lust is on the prowl searching for new hunting grounds. The fol
lowing conversation between two of David Lodge’s sex-bedevilled characters
glibly delineates this impasse:
Polly herself, w ho had been an early apostle o f the sexual revolution, w as
beginning to w onder whether things hadn’t gone too far. She had o f course
been happily doing n things with Jeremy for years, but when he showed signs
o f w anting to do them with n partners, she jibbed. They received an in vi
tation to a sw inging party at a country house ow ned by a film producer Jeremy
knew; he pressed her to go, and sulked w hen she refused. A n x io u sly she
strove to show more gusto in their lovem aking, proposing gam es and vari
ations that she knew he liked, though she herself found them a little tedious,
bondage and dressing up in kinky clothes and acting out little scenarios The M assage Parlour, The Call Girl, and Blue Lagoon. These efforts diverted
Jeremy for a w hile, but eventually he began pressing her again about going
to sw inging parties.
“W hy do you want to go?” she said.
“I’m just curious.”
“You want to have another w om an.” He shrugged.
“A ll right, perhaps I do. But I don’t want to do it behind your back.”
“W hy do you want to? D o n ’t w e have fun in bed?”
“O f course w e do, darling. But let’s face it, w e ’ve been right through the
book together, there’s nothing new w e can do, just the tw o o f us. It’s time
to introduce another elem ent. You know, som etim es when w e ’re fucking, my
mind wanders com p letely o ff the subject, [...] That worries m e. And you
needn’t look at me like that. It’s nothing personal. It’s the nature o f the beast.”
“Beast is the word.” P olly felt a cold dread at her heart. Was it possible that
the flam e o f sex could be kept burning only by the breaking o f more taboos?
After group sex and orgies, what then? Rubber fetishism? Fladge? Child pom?
S n u ff m ovies?
“W here does it end?” she said.
“It ends with old age,” said Jeremy. “Im potence. Death. But I don’t intend
to give in until I absolutely have to.” 11
A similar predicament, let us note, is retraced in Roman Polanski’s film
B itter M oon of 1992, and the fact that lust continues to make popular movies
also testifies to its vivacity and will have to be addressed separately.
That an Eros-focused discourse involves transformation is suggested by the
multiple tensions that pull at it from different directions. Lust-building tensions
obtain between pairs of antithetic, conflicting qualities, and we have already
looked upon those of union vs. estrangement, and liberty vs. bondage. How
ever, there are others: sacred/profane, pure/defiled, feral/human, spiritual/phys
ical. To these could be added, if one disentangles the knots of desire with
Bataille, boredom and inaction vs. ferocious expenditure of energy. Further still,
here too belongs the conflict that we have touched upon when talking about
penetration, that between inside and outside, between the inner and the outer,
etc. in all possible shades of meaning. No matter how doggedly carried out,
attempts at minimising the pull of the minus pole of each antithesis always leave
an ontological gap between the two dialectically joined qualities. If one takes
into account the temporal dynamics of desire, they are poles between which
desire and lust are played out. Thus erotic desire, especially with regard to the
teleological aspect (the goal-orientedness or single-minded pursuit of gratifi
cation) implies transformation. Perhaps it is better to put it like this: transfor
mation makes up the dynamics of desire. A further implication of the above
is the ontological ambiguity of the human being.
It is now time to home in closer on the subject of this essay. The standard
denunciation of lust has partly been presented: lust is conceived as stray (ram
pant, runaway, immoderate; “inordinate” as theological tracts have it) hunger
for carnal pleasure, for sexual gratification, for the satisfaction of the flesh. This
may sound archaic in the era of sexual liberation yet for the time being we
can ignore this tinge of antiquity. The inherited disapproval harbours an anx
iety over instability that unsettles the very kernel of an ontological fixation of
sexuality. Anxiety over lust is in its depth a sense of uneasiness about the threat
of a radical transformation that the human person repeatedly proves to be
capable of. In short, this anxiety is at heart trepidation caused by man’s pro
tean mode of being. If capable of lust - the argument goes - that is to say:
of conduct that makes man “ecstatically” go over the confines of reason-endowed humanity, the protean mode of being unmasks the conventional and
arbitrary character of ontological-ethical frames imposed on his existence. Lust
makes the metaphysical “substance” of man open up inside to expose the horror
of vacuous indeterminateness.
11 D avid L od ge,
How Far Can You Go? (P en guin B o o k s, 1981), pp. 1 5 6 -1 5 7 .
If it is true to say that, paraphrasing Foucault, sexual gratification (hence also
lust!) is a product of a certain configuration of power, then no train of “sober
reasoning” will prove impartially that carnal pleasure is something to abstain from.
Let us look at one or two examples characteristic of the “objectivist” approach.
Sexuality refers generically to the sphere of activity of a living organism that
ensures the biological preservation of its species. This definition however shuns
any specifically human involvement (constitutive of eroticism). The traditional
biological-moral harness put on the sexual act, i.e. regarding it as justified only
if conducive to the propagation of the human species, institutes a divide between
the function and the accompanying sensual gratification; obscurity envelops the
connection between these two, or perhaps one is missing altogether. Is gratifi
cation secondary to biological function? Does gratification derive from the fact
that a creature endowed with reason, merely on account of sensible judgment,
espouses the procreative function of sex? Or alternatively: Does pleasure stand
alone as something self-substantial, something that claims recognition in virtue
of its unique properties? That the latter seems to be the case has always been
the hope of libertines and voluptuaries, and the terror of moralists.
The denunciation of lust on the principle that the sexual act should not be
divorced from the procreation function hurtfully rebounds on its proponent: it
effectively denounces the order of Nature itself for having made such disso
ciation at all possible. If sensual pleasure and propagation of the species are
“naturally” separable and different, then yoking them forcefully together can
only sound uselessly autocratic.
The procreation principle fails a second time, namely in branding lust as
socially destructive. According to another conception similar to the previous
one, lust is a monster on the loose, guilty of demolishing serene and steady
relationships. Shakespeare in his lust-defaming sonnet condemns its excesses
but also calls it “perjured,” which points to the potentially fornicating, adul
terous drives dormant in human sexuality. One of the most ferocious indict
ments is found in Tolstoy’s K reutzer Sonata, where time after time narration
collapses under the weight of principled exposure of vice.
If we turn to inner experience, i.e. if we adopt Bataille’s method of approach
ing the erotic, we soon discover that no awareness, no matter how acute, of
the procreative goal of sex is able to engender the intense sense of gratifica
tion that comes with the sexual act. Again, it seems to lie in Nature’s bounty
(or bane?) to have allowed for sensation of supreme intensity (one thinks of
Simone’s orgasms being compared to “long-lasting spasms [of the savages],
with all parts of the body in violent release, and they go whirling willy-nilly,
flailing their arms about wildly, shaking their bellies, necks, and chests, and
chortling and gulping horribly”12) coupled with an ostensible lack of an exter12 B ataille,
Story, p. 46.
nal purpose or justification that would lie outside the actual performance of the
act. Is the natural man “lustful” by a decree of Nature, pleasure transcending any
conceivable purpose? To give a literary illustration of the shabby nature of the
naturalist attitude, let us quote from the tirade of Tolstoy’s inflamed narrator:
“The felicities o f the honeym oon do not exist. On the contrary, it is a period
o f uneasiness, o f shame, o f pity, and, above all, o f ennui - o f ferocious ennui.
It is som ething like the feelin g o f a youth w hen he is beginning to smoke.
He desires to vom it; he drivels, and sw allow s his drivel, pretending to enjoy
this little amusement. The vice o f marriage” [...]
“What! V ice?” I said. “But you are talking o f one o f the m ost natural things.”
“Natural!” said he. “Natural! N o, I consider on the contrary that it is against
nature, and it is I, a perverted man, w ho have reached this conviction. What
w ould it be, then, i f I had not known corruption? To a young girl, to every
unperverted young girl, it is an act extremely unnatural, just as it is to children.
M y sister married, w hen very young, a man tw ice her ow n age, and w ho was
utterly corrupt. I remember how astonished w e were the night o f her w ed
ding, when, pale and covered with tears, she fled from her husband, her w hole
body trembling, saying that for nothing in the world w ould she tell what he
wanted o f her.
“You say natural? It is natural to eat; that is a pleasant, agreeable function,
w hich no one is ashamed to perform from the tim e o f his birth.
From our considerations, lust indeed emerges as utterly unbridled, devoid
of a naturalist justification, adrift, self-contained and self-seeking, a for-itself
and an in-itself at the same time.
Here also lie some of the reasons why a philosophy of pleasure, thus also
of sexual gratification, is not forthcoming. To be sure, there has always reigned
a peculiar dearth of knowledge in this department, which has not been radi
cally overcome to this day. Marxist-Freudian social critique, for instance,
maintains that the restrictive and alienating impact that the ethos of communal
labour has on human instincts initiates the rule of reality principle over pleas
ure principle. For Marcuse, ontological transformation also becomes an issue,
as he inquires: “Is the conflict between pleasure principle and reality principle
irreconcilable to such a degree that it necessitates the repressive transforma
tion of man’s instinctual structure?” Yet it seems to me that on the whole this
approach tends to dilute sexual gratification into a pitifully slippery category
as ethereal as - why search any further? - happiness. Liberated thus, gratifi
cation easily turns into a political slogan before being tested for solidity in the
crucible of philosophical debate. This puzzling semantic volatility in
a roundabout manner confirms Foucault’s suspicion that gratification has been
a by-product of the transmission of power. On the other hand, pleasure in general
and sexual gratification in particular seem to stand aloof among other simple
phenomenal qualities and hence to defy breaking down into elementary com
ponents or deducing from more fundamental ones. It certainly puzzles us if
compared with other sensations, such as that of satiety after a meal or a surge
of vital forces after taking a nap. Here the fulfilment of a function does not
generate a specific kind of sensation, satisfaction deriving largely from the
removal of discomfort. This, interestingly, does not mean that eating cannot
be abused and morally addle into gluttony. To sum up and illustrate: When
a Freud-inspired Marxist embraces the possibility of “transformed libido be
yond the institutions of the performance principle,” there is no guarantee that
such liberating transformations will generate anything even vaguely reminis
cent of pleasure.
The recognition of the fickleness of sexual gratification within an “objective”
(biological, physiological, etc.) framework, of its dependence on a particular
disposition of negative and positive qualities and values, makes room for other
discourses, such as Bataille’s insistence on phenomenal affinity between religious
and erotic experiences. Eros, regarded as a cultural product, owes its objective
lodging to a specific cultural process. In short, to resort once more to Foucault’s
genealogy, one ought to say that bio-physiology of sexuality is doomed to re
main a shaky endeavour, being little more that an after-product of the more basic
cultural production of Eros. Let us illustrate this on a rather disturbing example,
an episode taken out of William P. Blatty’s Exorcist.''
The passage of the book that I would like to refer to come at the end of
the second part of “the most famous novel of Satanism and possession ever
written” (as the cover boldly announces) which records the story of demonic
possession of a teenage girl called Regan. The shocking scene, rather faithful
ly adapted for the screen, features the possessed teenager masturbating with
a crucifix to the horror of her anguished mother, whom the incarnated demon
tries to force to participate in the act. The book itself would be of little interest
for our analysis, being in fact yet another weary bead on the long string of
D racu la- like, tedious works of fiction each seeking to outdo its predecessor
with the help of outrageous episodes of the kind mentioned; in D racu la,
defloration by a personified profanity has also been considered ideal for per
petuation on film. It would not then have any title to extensive analysis if it
were not for the fact that in its own queer way it summons the ideas we are
discussing and fashions them into yet another sedimentation of the Eros-possession-transformation archetype. However, even a cursory view of the said
passage of The Exorcist will expose its double-layered structure and add an
extra edge to the assumption of the culturally-determined nature of Eros.
13
The p assage d ev o ted to The Exorcist has been inspired b y the d isc u ssio n that fo llo w ed
the d elivery o f m y paper at the 2 0 0 0 con feren ce in Szczyrk, and e sp e c ia lly by the problem s
raised by m y u n iversity c o lle a g u e K atarzyna A n cu ta, to w h om I hereby exten d m y gratitude.
Possession and transformation both play their part here, perhaps even too
obtrusively. An element we have ignored in our analysis of erotic transforma
tion, as well as in the criticism of the conventional denunciation of lust, is “the
fear of the automaton.” Lust in action is the human organism set off to pursue
its singular goals. The body changes into an automaton that has outmanoeu
vred the surveillance of the reason and the will, and thus reduced the person
to a passive observer: “Regan now, eyes wide and staring, flinching from the
rush of some hideous finality, mouth agape shrieking at the dread of some
ending. Then abruptly the demonic face once more possessed her, now filled
her, the room choking suddenly with a stench in the nostrils, with an icy cold
that seeped from the walls as the rappings ended and Regan’s piercing cry of
terror turned to a guttural, yelping laugh of malevolent spite and rage trium
phant while she thrust down the crucifix into her vagina and began to mas
turbate ferociously, roaring in that deep, coarse, deafening voice, ’Now you’re
mine, now you’re mine, you stinking cow!’”14
I have to ask the reader’s forgiveness once more, but there seems to be an
analogy between religious ecstasy, analysed by Bataille in E roticism , and the
demonic rape-masturbation incident in The Exorcist. In both cases, the profane,
the saint’s body in the former, undergoes penetration by the sacred. The re
sults, however, are different; sanctification in the case of St. Theresa, profa
nation in the case of the defiled victim of possession. Generally, Bataille’s
concept of eroticism falls very near the traditional denunciation of lust. He
insists on restricting the term to those uniquely human acts where pleasure is
derived from the breaking of taboos or moral boundaries laid out by culture.
At the same time, Bataille takes recourse to the animal element in order to make
sense of transgression: transgression implies and involves transformation or
swings vehemently between the extremes of what’s regarded as human and what
as subhuman: “A bull’s orgasm is not more powerful than the one that wrenched
through our loins to tear us to shreds [...]” (Story o f the Eye)\ “in an instan
taneous flash her expression and features were hideously transmuted into those
of the feral, demonic personality that has appeared in the course of hypnosis”
(The Exorcist). In its sweeping defiance of all boundaries, lustful transgression
sucks in all and reigns absolute: “My kind of debauchery soils not only my
body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is
to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.”15
The satanic rape episode conforms to this profile of lustful Eros (or should
we rather call it m ania!). As shown above, it meets the transformation condition
of lust: an illusory heaven leading - as in Shakespeare’s sonnet - misguided men
to hell, lust is always ungodly. It hurls damnation on the perpetrator transform
14 W illiam P. B latty, The Exorcist (London: C orgi B ook s, 1993), p. 183.
15 Bataille, Story, 42.
ing him into a demon. This process however is never complete. Due to the
constitutive antagonism, the perpetrator/victim is always afoot, suspended between
angelic purity and devilish tarnish. Debauchery increases in proportion to the
distance between the poles of the antagonism, hence Bataille’s “angelic” Simone
is also capable of acts of utmost obscenity. No erotic possession is ever consum
mate. Lust is never at rest; it is bound to remain a tug-of-war. Can we then finally
try to answer what seems to be the basic question: Where is lust found in the
Exorcist episode? Or, who is guilty of it? In a sense the satanic intent is beyond
blame for the possessor is already damned past redemption and turns to wan
tonness and sacrilege in order to further solidify and multiply his damnation. All
this makes us realise that lust comes into being as an in-between thing, suspend
ed as it is between two extremes, innocence and wickedness being two of many
pairs, for ever oscillating between them.
As for possession, it fits perfectly the profile of lust as oscillation. Death
and entropy are posited as the ultimate goal, yet at the same time one that is
infinitely elusive. The mission of taking-possession-of is never completed:
“Oh, please! Oh, no, please / ” she was shrieking as her hands brought the
crucifix closer; as she seem ed to be straining to push it away.
“Y ou’ll do as I tell you, filth! Y ou’ll do it!”
The threatening bellow, the words, cam e from Regan, her voice coarse and
guttural, bristling with venom , w hile in an instantaneous flash her expres
sion and features were hideously transmuted into those o f the feral, dem onic
personality that had appeared in the course o f hypnosis. And now faces and
voices, as Chris watched stunned, interchanged with rapidity: “N o!”
“Y ou’ll do it!”
“Please!”
“You will, you bitch, or I’ll kill you !”
“Please / ”“
Any actual possession such as that we claim of our bodies, transforms the
sexual act into an autoerotic feat being an endless, futile pursuit of alterity within
a barren, totally appropriated area where the blissful sting of unpredictability
has been removed. And this is perhaps the Hell wherein Regan’s demon is
hurled to languish if its are to typify acts driven by self-condemning lust.
And further, the idea of sacrilegious defloration can be reapplied to a deeper
layer of meaning. Namely one can and should perceive the book, the film etc.
as a specific cultural product. To do that we have to broaden the area of crit
ical appreciation and take into account the realities that surround the product’s
release into mass, “popular,” reception. In The Exorcist, into the life of the
female protagonist, Regan’s mother, the rejected sacrum storms its way back
16 B latty,
The Exorcist, 182.
uninvited through the kitchen door of “superstition” to unsettle her secular
complacency. This is however also the meaning of the outrage that screams at
us from the pages. The antagonism which emanates erotic tension here holds
between the distant poles of the profane and the sacred, poles which, no matter
how radically separated, continue to attract one another with all the vehement
potency of opposite electric charges. The mock-scientific and clinical approach
to demonic possession that dominates the first two parts of the book is a means
to lure a sceptic into a situation which later vents at him the suppressed energies,
the “canned heat” of “superstitions.” The result is the shattering of a mother’s
dreams of her daughter’s smooth sexual initiation. To achieve a wider critical view,
one has to advance historically with Horkheimer and Adorno from culture to
culture industry and from sexual gratification to mass entertainment, thus from
the “good old” anathema of lust to more recent breeds of psychological and sociotechnical manipulation. Seen in this light, The Exorcist, novel and film, brings
to mind the following observation from The D ialectic o f Enlightenment: “The
enjoyment of the violence suffered by the movie character turns into violence
against the spectator.” 17 Thus the “real” rape (masturbation?) occurs due to the
violation that the fiction inflicts on the mind of the reader/spectator, reduced, along
with the girl’s helpless mother, to the passivity of an observer assailed by goings-on which strike both of them dumb. Why then, does the reader find it
impossible to chuck the “electrifying bestseller” in the trash?
Along the itinerary we have chosen for this analysis we have stopped by
but a few out of a profusion of landmarks: Plato’s transcendental idealism,
Shakespeare’s poetic alarm, Tolstoy’s acerbic ascetism, Bataille’s rampant
abandon, Marcuse’s Freudian eschatology. Having now travelled so far, we still
face the lingering problem: Has lust been exorcised out of existence with the
advent of our allegedly unprejudiced times? Shall we profit from the clues that
have presented themselves? Shall we propose a redefinition of the sexual
revolution as liberation into transformed, lust-free pleasure or into transformed
lust? Would any progress towards a reconciling conquest of culturally-embedded antitheses, if at all feasible, attenuate to a zero point the existing moral and
social tensions and the accompanying existential anxieties. This seems far from
being the case. Let a very pedestrian as well as symptomatic example suffice:
the world wide publicity of the Oval Office scandal, perhaps to the same extent
as the purported acts themselves, is to be treated as a sign of the changing times
on a truly global scale. Not allowing us to make hasty predictions as to the future
transformations of lust, it shows, along with other symptoms we have looked
at, that the afflicted mind is well aflame searching the surviving sanctuaries
for penetration, intrusion and violation.
17
M ax H orkheim er and T heodor W. A d orn o,
C ontinuum , 1995), pp. 1 3 8 -1 3 9 .
Dialectic o f the Enlightenment (N e w York:
Transforming Europe:
Landscape and Domesticity
in English Literature of the 1930s
The 1930s in Britain are a peculiar decade of aesthetic unrest, social anx
iety, and political frustration. The memory of World War I lingers on and
burdens the thirties’ generation of poets with a sense of guilt related to what
they see as their unheroic lives. It is their fathers who went to war, and it
is their ancestors who experienced an unprecedented displacement of thought
and feeling finding its way into Wilfred Owen’s memorable words: “The
Poetry is in the pity [...] all a poet can do today is warn.” 1 Owen’s statement
marks off a great divide in artistic consciousness, the divide announcing an
irreversible farewell to the Victorian world and to the Romantic sentiments.
Art means now a search for a language that would be capable of rendering
experiential concreteness, that would allow the poet to see deep into life’s
shocking tangibility, and that would thus enable him to take stock of his
position.
The generation of Wystan Hugh Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen
Spender (to mention only the major literary figures of the period) seems to be
considerably dejected after taking stock of its position, as the political and eco
nomic world, more and more encroaching upon private territories, undergoes
transformations whose consequences become unpredictable. The poets of the
decade create their works in critical times that defy the powers of the imag
ination significantly disavowing the Modernist faith in art’s salvaging role.
1
Q uoted in The Routledge History
M cR ae (London: R ou tled ge, 1977), p. 361.
o f Literature in English, eds. R on ald Carter and John
Stephen Spender mouths this disenchantment in his The Struggle o f the
M odern, thus commenting on the modem, substantially technological situation:
M an’s m ost recent invention, atomic fission, is scandalous to the life o f the
im agination, because it su ggests an obscene union o f perverted w ill with
power to disturb the im m ovable centres o f nature, against which change could
be measured. It outrages the imagination by introducing the picture o f a world
in which there is nothing solid left that, for purposes o f metaphor, can be
referred to. The Future allied to the past has been the Prom ised Land towards
which he poets guide their poem s. Today, the m ost potent im age o f the Future
has becom e the abyss. The im agined has becom e the unim aginable.2
Conspicuously, the modern self as described by the modern poet is not in
a position to imagine things. In other words, it is not able to construct an image
of the world it inhabits or rather it has stopped inhabiting, the “Promised Land”
being no longer depictable. Spender sees man’s inventiveness as culture’s
failure, and appears to read the lines of modernity as an apocalypse signifying
time cut off from a place.
The theme of things transformed beyond control and beyond the capacity
for imagining the change serves as an aesthetic background to several lyrics
of the eventful decade. Spender’s “The Sign Faehre nach Wilm” becomes one
of the finer poetic attempts at narrating modernity in troubled times. Journey
ing by train (the decade’s frequent icon of displacement and uneasiness), the
poem’s speaker voices his fascination with the technological world as he
considers the Romantic and Victorian aesthetics to be no longer valid in their
confrontation with the modem experience, his praise of the modern mixed with
a premonition as to where his culture is travelling. Gradually associating the
sense of uprootedness with the artificial domesticity, he remarks that “The pink
cottage by the lake, shone brilliant, yet unreal.”3 The train journey significant
ly comes to stand for a route of self-discovery that now seems to rest on the
experience of loss. The speaker observes that
Real were iron lines, track sm ashing the grass,
W heels on w hich w e rode, and, on our wrists, time.
Unreal were cattle, w ave-w inged storks, the lim e.
T hese glow ed in a lost planet seen through glass,
Like “R ose” or “Friend” in a forgotten rhym e.4
These lines poignantly record what can be interpreted as a modem emancipa
tion of reason claiming nature as its irretrievably subjugated territory. Spend
2 Stephen Spender, The Struggle o f the Modern (London: M ethuen, 1965), pp. 1 4 6 -1 4 7 .
3 S tep h en Spender, Collected Poems 1928-1985 (L ond on: F aber and Faber, 19 9 0 ),
p. 31.
er’s lyric persona expresses the sentiments of a baffled consciousness, of an
identity travelling from the reality of Romantic organicism towards the apoc
alypse of (post)modem fragmentization. The landscape transformed by “iron
lines” and “track smashing grass” appears to involve an emergence of a new
narrative, as the old words symbolic of a lost unity cannot cope any more with
the intensity of the modern experience.
The poem can be said to reflect a moment of transition from the organic
sensibility (its permanence evoked by “cattle,” “wave-winged storks,” and “the
lime”) to the fragmented vision which is formed in and by a narrative gap, its
narrative character gesturing towards the emancipated self.
Yet the most important aspect of Spender’s lyric seems to reside in a feeling
of powerlessness that creeps upon the speaker as he collects the aesthetic
fragments and attempts to put them together in order to intuit a whole that would
designate a place, and thus a moment of integrity and comprehensibility. There
is no locus though that he may identify with; it turns out that his selfhood cannot
be narrated otherwise than in transition, in displacement, which ever seem to
entail a recognition of a loss.
The speaker’s position in its relation to the problematics of selfhood ap
pears to be charged with even more meaning when one reads the image of the
modern journey in the terms of what Charles Taylor enumerates as inescap
able features of human agency in his Sources o f the Self. He claims that to talk
about one’s selfhood is to agree upon the existence of three crucial constitu
ents: an idea of the good; a narrative of it; and a community in which this
narrative can be told. Taylor says that “making sense of one’s life as a story
is also, like orientation to the good, not an optional extra; that our lives exist
also in this space of questions, which only a coherent narrative can answer.”5
When viewed in the context of Taylor’s proposal, the predicament of the
speaker in Spender’s lyric is that of an individual unable to clarify the mean
ing of his selfhood’s narrative, unable to experience a security of a vantage point
from which he could take stock of his position. Markedly, he realizes whom
he is - a subject in transition, undergoing a constant displacement - yet he
cannot see where he is going. In other words, Spender’s lyric I experiences
a discontinuity of a narrative, which entails a breakup of his selfhood, the
comprehensible world of being contrasting starkly with the confounding world
of becom ing. The contrast between the two realities becomes inescapably
connected with the idea of the good absent from the poem’s universe, which
seems to constitute the core of the transformative powers of culture and his
tory as they constantly transform one’s idea of the good. The absence of the
good involves in a way the absence of the self as the sense of direction be
5
p. 47.
Charles Taylor,
Sources o f the S elf (Cam bridge: C am bridge U n iversity P ress, 1998),
comes an absolute postulate for the experience of selfhood. To revoke Taylor
again, “since we cannot do without an orientation to the good, and since we
cannot be indifferent to our place relative to this good, and since this place is
something that must always change and become, the issue of the direction of
our lives must arise for us.”6 And Britain’s cultural identity at the time undoubt
edly embraces rapidly transformed and transforming places that in turn signify
new perspectives and new narratives of the self.
This has to do in the first place with a peculiar dissatisfaction of the dec
ade’s writers as to their social position, the dissatisfaction reflected most viv
idly perhaps in the myth of “going over,” which means going over to the other,
proletarian side and becoming one with a working class individual. George
Orwell, for instance, decides to live with coal miners and to experience their
shabby housing, the experience of poverty allowing him only to state later that
“there is always that accursed itch of class-difference, like the pea under the
princess’s mattress.”7 Orwell’s fantasy is only one among many other exam
ples of the utopian myth resulting in a sad knowledge of being exiled into one’s
own class and of a class badge never wearing off. The middle-class background
as experienced, rejected and transformed in the 1930s can be read as a cul-desac of bitter sentiments and a mark of social isolation which cannot be trans
formed into a more satisfactory social configuration.
The wish for transformation in the social pale intricately conditioning self
hood corresponds to the aesthetic sphere, and more precisely to landscape de
signing at the time. That a sense of belonging to a community and to a particular
place is more and more uncertain becomes well illustrated in an architectural and
at the same time a sociological phenomenon that may be read as a cultural
invention of the troubled decade, namely garden cities. In an attempt to bring
together the country and town, and thus to bring closer to each other the em
ployed and the unemployed, the civilized and the rough, social reformers and
landscape designers create garden cities in Letchworth, Liverpool, and Welwyn
(to mention only the major realizations of the project) - pastoral-industrial hybrids
that fulfil a dream of reconciling the artificial and the natural.
Inhabiting a garden city can be read as a restoration of the fragmented
identity of the speaker in Spender’s The Sign Faehre nach Wilm. Now, in what
appears to announce a modem idyll, one can live with one foot in the organic
unity of nature and with the other in the amorphous recalcitrance of the urban
scene. Unlike in the world presented in the poem, the garden city offers a locus,
a moment of rest, away from the p o lis always demanding a purpose, an excuse,
or a project. The clash between the two modes of life is suggestive of the two
concepts of the good. On the one hand, one may live a complete, organic, and
6 Ibid.
7 G eorge O rw ell,
The Road to Wigan Pier (London: H arvest B o o k , 1958), p. 156.
simple life in the country, but on the other one is challenged to deploy a strategy
of survival in the city which is “where modernity happens.”8 Moreover, the
garden, being an enclave of nature, stands also for the self unspoiled by choice,
theatricality, and rationalization that determine life patterns in the city, “where
a daily life becomes a highly-coloured moral drama,” the urban stage tending
to “polarities, extremes, excess and caricature, which become not just modes
of existence but modes of recognition, ways of perpetuating and asserting the
precarious sense of personality that carries identity in the maelstrom of urban
life.”9 The transformation of landscape as viewed in the context of garden cities
can be thus interpreted as an attempt to cancel the movements of rationality
and, more significantly, to overcome the uncertainty about what modernity
offers and how it changes the self.
This motif of renegotiating the powers of cogito, of seeking out a place
where a reconciliation of feeling and intellect would be possible, informs Letters
from Iceland, a travel book written in collaboration by Wystan Hugh Auden
and Louis MacNeice. For Auden, travelling to Iceland means an occasion for
voicing whom he has become as he revisits the landscape and culture of myths
and sagas that have powerfully shaped his poetic persona. As he confesses,
A ll things considered, I consider Iceland,
Apart from R eykjavik, a very nice land.
The part can stand as sym bol for the whole:
So ruminating in these last w eeks,
I see the map o f all m y youth unroll.
The mental mountains and the psychic creeks,
The towns o f w hich the master never speaks,
The various parishes and what they voted for,
The colonies, their size, and what they’re noted for.10
Auden treats the Icelandic travels as delineating a route of self-discovery that
becomes a path of free thought away from the cultural matrixes. Similarly, for
MacNeice, Iceland epitomizes some pleasurable seclusion in a private location
that enables him to come to grips with his selfhood opening up a vista towards
a sense of direction. “The reason for hereness seems beyond conjucture,” he
writes in L etter to Graham and Anne Shepard, “There are no trees or trains
or architecture,/ Fruits and greens are insufficient for health/ And culture is
limited by lack of wealth.”11
8 John Jervis, Exploring the
(O xford: B la ck w e ll, 1998), p. 65.
9 Ibid., p. 68.
Modern. Patterns o f Western Culture and Civilization
10 W ystan H ugh A u den and L ouis M ac N e ic e ,
Faber, 1985), pp. 1 9 8 -1 9 9 .
" Ibid., p. 29.
Letters from Iceland (L ondon: Faber and
Both Auden and MacNeice read the map of Iceland as that of a province
where one can see plainly and therefore can specify where one stands and where
one’s culture is going. Their journey becomes importantly a quest of baffled
reason as “This complex world exacts/ hard work of simplifying; to get its focus/
You have to stand outside the crowd and caucus.”12 And Iceland indeed be
comes a sanctuary of unhurried thought, “not jostled by the throng”; it emblem
atizes a wished-for territory for those who feel they “must mortify/[their] blowsy
intellects before [they] die,” for those who “feed [their] brains on backchat and
self-pity/And always need a noise, the radio or the city.”13
As their Icelandic experience seems to be founded on a critical stance
towards rational modernity and modern rationality, Auden and MacNeice
assume a critical stance towards their nationhood that cannot be limited to
England or Ireland (MacNeice’s origin being Irish), but rather concerns the
European identity at large. What they incorporate into L etters from Iceland and
what appears to be the text’s focus can be seen as a narrative that operates along
the lines of a critique, if “critique,” as Michel Foucault puts it, suggests “not
wanting to be governed.” 14 Interestingly, Auden and MacNiece seem to real
ize artistically what Michel Foucault associates with the movement of free minds
discovering what and how far they can know. “Critique will say,” claims
Foucault
that our freedom rides less on what w e undertake with more or less courage
than in the idea w e ourselves have o f our know ledge and its lim its and that,
consequently, instead o f allow ing another to say “obey,” it is at this moment,
w hen one w ill have made for o n ese lf a sound idea o f o n e’s know ledge, that
one w ill be able to discover the principle o f autonomy, and one w ill no longer
hear the “obey”; or rather the “obey w ill be founded on autonom y itself.”15
The Icelandic journey of Auden and MacNeice can in fact be read as the
movement of critique and of the transformation of their civilized vision away
from the chaos of the city and from the political turmoils of Europe at the time,
fascism portending an ultimate defeat of reason. When experienced from the
point of view of a dislodged and gradually disowned European, Iceland rep
resents an enclave of restorative powers of the imagination that aids reason by
building up a distance, for “islands are places apart where Europe is absent.” 16
12 I b id , p. 31.
13 I b id , p. 30.
14 M ichel F oucault, “W hat is C ritique?”, in What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century
Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. Jam es S ch m id t (B e rk eley : U n iv e r sity o f
C aliforn ia P ress, 1996), p. 385.
15 I b id , p. 3 87.
16 Letters from Iceland, p. 24.
In their Icelandic book, Auden and MacNeice significantly traverse the
landscape of reason in its flame-out phase as they look critically at the enlight
ened narrative of the mind that proves to be a monstrous, double-minded
overachiever. And to be double-minded is to despair, a familiar state which is
creeping up nearer and nearer all over Europe, and which puts the unimagi
nable (to use Spender’s term again) into practice.
That the illness of Britain and Europe has reached its terminal stage is
perhaps best expressed in a scene Auden witnesses during his voluntary Ice
landic exile. Exploring the sublime roughness of the island, he comes across
a whaling station where he spots a huge body of a whale. Auden normally
considers the whale to be as “the most beautiful animal” since “it combines
the fascination of something alive, enormous, and gentle, with the functional
beauties of modern machinery.” 17 This whale-icon is for Auden a source of
sublime feelings that are now theatrically shattered to pieces as he sees the
workers skin the beautiful animal. Somewhere, there is the radio playing “I
want to be bad” and “Eat an apple every day,” the tunes accompanying Au
den’s apocalyptic observation as the poet tells us that ‘T he body remained alone
in the sun, the flesh still steaming a little [as] it gave one an extraordinary vision
of the cold controlled ferocity of the human species.” 18
And it is the coldness of the intellect transforming things beyond control
and exiling the imagination, it seems, that horrifies Auden most in what be
comes the image of seeing deep into the recesses of reason off the leash.
17 Ibid., p. 147.
18 Ibid., p. 148.
Postmodern Auto Conversions
Postmodern American Beauty
This will be about cars, bodies, and postmodern texts. Recent cars, real and
fictional, conceal their drivers. The car seems to have no body, and its near
invisibility makes the driver nearly invisible also. This is quite a recent devel
opment in car design, dating back no earlier than to the seventies. A recent film
in which cars figure prominently, Am erican Beauty, deals with the transition in
the seventies from early to late postmodernism. The action of the film takes place
in the present, but there are at least two specific references to the early seven
ties: one in which Lester comments on the high price of marijuana saying that
things have really changed since 1973 (apparently the last time he got high); and
another in which Lester sells his Toyota Camry and buys a red 1972 Pontiac GTO
with black racing stripes. The contrast between Lester’s vintage Pontiac and his
wife’s platinum-coloured Mercedes-Benz ML 320 signals much about changes
in the postmodern scene. The Pontiac is a car with a body. Its colour and racing
stripes draw our attention to its lines. The Mercedes, by contrast, has a shiny,
metallic surface that acts almost as a mirror, reflecting, for example, the trees that
line the quiet suburban street where the Burnhams live. The Pontiac also is meant
to draw attention to its driver, and this is how Lester means to use it, as he is
busy building up his own body to match his car. The Mercedes, meanwhile, has
tinted windows that are useful for concealing the identity of the owner. Lester’s
wife uses her car to isolate or even hide herself, as when she uses it to cry in
or to drive to and from her secret meetings with her lover. The Pontiac is clearly
a car that would be driven by a man, while the Mercedes could just as well be
a man’s or woman’s car. As Mercedes says, the ML 320 is “A trend setter, whether
it’s your everyday shopping or an adventure.”1
1 h ttp ://w w w .m erced es.com
The 1972 Pontiac is an early postmodern car, and the Mercedes ML 320
(which has been on the market since 1997) late postmodern. The filmmaker’s
obvious bias is for the early postmodern. The Pontiac is one of the many
examples of beautiful American bodies in the film, which include Angela’s
body, Lester’s dead body, a dead bird, and a floating plastic bag. This strong
preference for the beautiful entails a rejection of the sublime. Screenwriter Alan
Ball’s notion of American Beauty competes with Harold Bloom’s concept of
the American Sublime. If we turn to literature, we see more openness to the
sublime, including the possibility of a sublime relationship with one’s car.
Thomas Pynchon and John Updike both record a shift in the relationship
between car and driver without expressing nostalgia for an earlier type of
relationship, as the film Am erican Beauty does. By comparing the presenta
tion of cars in the early and later works of Pynchon and Updike we will see
how the car went from being modern, to being postmodern, to being late
postmodern.
From the Ore in the Hills
It is necessary to begin with the modern cars, or the very first cars. In Dos
Passos’ The Big M oney we can read about Henry Ford:
Ford ow ned every detail o f the process from the ore in the hills until the car
rolled o ff the end o f the assem bly line under its own power; the plants were
rationalized to the last ten thousandth o f an inch as measured on the Johansen
scale; in 1926 the production cycle w as reduced to eighty-one hours from
the ore in the mine to the finished salable car proceeding under its own power,
but the M odel T w as obsolete.2
Dos Passos draws attention to Ford’s complete control over the process of
creation. It is not surprising then that we call his cars “Fords,” which is the
example Paul de Man uses of metonymy:
The inference o f identity and totality that is con stitutive o f m etaphor is
lacking in the purely relational m etonym ic contact: an elem ent o f truth is
in volved in taking A c h ille s for a lion but none in taking Mr. Ford for
a m otor car.3
2 John D o s P assos, The Big Money, U .S .A . (1 9 3 8 ) (reprinted London: P en gu in B o o k s,
1966), pp. 7 7 4 -7 7 5 .
3 Paul de M an, Allegories o f Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke
and Proust (N e w H aven: Yale U n iversity P ress, 1979).
According to de Man, when we say of a car coming off the Ford assembly line
“this is a Ford,” we are not making a claim which is true or untrue, for we are
simply putting the two (creator and car) in relation, without claiming that there
is a similarity between them.
Already in these two passages which establish the “relational metonymic
contact” between the car and its maker we have the undoing of the metonymy.
In Dos Passos’ text we learn that the Model T was obsolete, and he goes on
to describe an aging Ford, nostalgic for the days before cars:
When he bought the Wayside Inn near Sudbury, M assachusetts, he had the
n ew highw ay where the new model cars roared and slithered and hissed oilily
past (the new noise o f the automobile)
m oved aw ay from the door,
put back the old bad road,
so that everything m ight be
the w ay it used to be
in the days o f horses and buggies4
The great Ford success, the Model T, had given way to newer, more powerful
and yet quieter cars. It turns out that there is an element of truth in taking Mr.
Ford for a motor car; the car’s being or not being a product of the Ford Motor
Corporation would be the criterion for determining the truthfulness of the
metonymy. De M an’s joke about taking Mr. Ford for a motor car is based on
the absurdity of such a confusion; but whereas de Man thinks that the confu
sion is of those who think metaphorically, it is actually de Man’s own, for when
we say that the car is a “Ford” we may just as well be referring to the Ford
Motor Corporation and not to Henry. It w ould be silly to say “This car is a Ford”
having in mind some similarity between the machine and the man, but it is
entirely understandable to say “This car is a Ford” and have in mind the
corporation and not the man. Certainly when we speak of “Fords” today we
are using a person’s name and also a company’s.
Automotive Projections
As the metonymic relationship between the car and its maker was weak
ening, cars were entering into a metonymic relationship with their owners. This
shift can be called postmodern, as it comes after the modern success of the
creation of the automobile. In Pynchon’s The Crying o f Lot 49, Mucho Mass
4 D os P assos, U .S .A ., p. 776.
sells used cars. He quits this job, in part because “he could still never accept
the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunc
tioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection
of somebody else’s life.”5 Each car refers metonymically to its owner’s life.
Mucho Maas’ unhappiness with this phenomenon is the typical postmodern
reaction to metonymy. He wishes that these malfunctioning cars were not linked
by proximity with their malfunctioning owners, but this is not a connection that
he can wish away.
Similarly, in R abbit Run, Rabbit has to deal with the unfortunate fact that
his car stands for him. He is forced to buy an expensive car in order to keep
up appearances:
He crosses in front o f the car, the ’55 Ford that old man Springer with his
little sandy Hitler m ustache sold him for an even thousand in 1957 because
the scared bastard w as ashamed, cars being his business he w as ashamed o f
his daughter marrying som ebody w ho had nothing but a ’36 Buick he bought
for $125 in the Arm y in Texas in 1953. M ade him cough up a thousand he
didn’t have w hen the Buick had just had eighty dollars’ worth o f work. That
w as the kind o f thing. They deserve everything they get.6
Rabbit does not want to have his car stand for him, but when he marries into
the Springer families he must drive a respectable car because Old Man Springer
is a car dealer. The relationship between having a car and having respectabil
ity is introduced on the very first page of the novel. When Rabbit walks up
an alley toward a group of boys who are playing basketball, the boys view his
with suspicion: “It seems funny to them, an adult walking up the alley at all.
Where’s his car? The cigarette makes it more sinister still. Is this one of those
going to offer them cigarettes or money to go out in pack of the ice plant with
him.”7 Even not having a car does not free one from the significance of cars.
Not having one says as much about Rabbit as having a clunky old one or an
expensive new one.
As was mentioned above, the signifying car (or lack of car) is not always
viewed in such a negative light. In the film A m erican B eauty there is even
nostalgia for the time when cars were meaningful, as well as beautiful. What
ever the attitude taken, the early postmodern car was either beautiful or ugly,
respectable or depressing, depending on its appearance. Late postmodern cars,
by contrast, are neither beautiful nor ugly. They attain to a state of sublimity
rather than beauty, of absence rather than presence. In different ways, postmod
ern cars aim toward invisibility. I have discussed one example of this already:
5 Thom as Pynchon, The
6 John U pdike, Rabbit,
7 Ibid., pp. 3 - 4 .
Crying o f Lot 49 (1966, N e w York: Harper and Row, 1986), p. 14.
Run (1 9 6 0 , London: P en gu in B o o k s, 19 9 5 ), pp. 2 2 - 2 3 .
the Mercedes ML 320 from Am erican Beauty, which tells us nothing about the
identity of the driver but rather hides her identity.
A Few Iridescent Fringes
Another example of late postmodern invisibility comes from Thomas
Pynchon’s novel Vineland. The narrator describes a nearly invisible car:
They blasted down to L.A ., heading back to the bam only sem ivisible and
near as anybody could tell unobserved, Manuel and his auto alchem y team
at Zero P rofile Paint and B od y o f Santa R osa having com e up with
a proprietary lacquer o f a crystalline microstructure able to vary its index o f
refraction so that even had there been surveillance, the Trans-Am could easily,
except for a few iridescent fringes, have been taken for em pty roadway.8
This car is being used by two characters who are trying to hide from federal
authorities, and therefore invisibility is desired. Fortunately, the car makes them
invisible as well. In a novel in which characters have a very difficult time getting
away from federal agents, who descend on them seemingly out of nowhere in
helicopters, such a car is a great advantage. A similar effect is achieved earlier
in the novel by borrowing someone else’s car. The driver can then not be
identified, unless someone gets close enough to see the driver through the
window. Another strategy is conversion, which also allows one to act under
cover. As an example, the narrator describes an auto conversion shop called
Rick & Chick’s Bom Again:
The owners, Humboldt County twins, had found Jesus and their seed m oney
at about the sam e time, during the fuel panic o f the seventies, w hen, to get
a tax break for bringing out the first U .S. passenger diesel, GM took its 5.7-liter V -8 Cadillac engine and, in som e haste, converted it. It the season o f
purchaser disenchantm ent that follow ed , engine experts, including Rick and
Chick, found they could make on the order o f $ 2,500 per job reconverting
these ill-considered m ills from diesel back to gasoline again.9
The twins’ religious conversion (finding Jesus) serves as a kind of cover for
their unethical practice of reconverting the converted diesels. The reconver
sion allows one to take advantage of the tax break and still drive the pre-conversion, gas-driven car. It is not the car as a physical presence but the
possibility of converting the car, and thus also the driver, that gives the car value.
8 T hom as P ynchon,
9 Ibid., p. 43.
Vineland (1 9 9 0 , N e w York: P enguin B o o k s, 1991), p. 192.
A third example of the late postmodern “disappearance” of the car’s body
comes from a real television advertisement that is described in Updike’s novel
R a b b it a t Rest. Harry and Nelson discuss an advertisement for a line of cars
called Infiniti, which is a luxury line produced by Nissan. The Infiniti ad does
not show the car at all. It features a voice talking about the car while on the
screen there are unclear, moving images drawn from nature, as if we are in
a car looking out at them or seeing them reflected on the shiny surface of
swiftly-moving new car: “Among the commercials that keep interrupting is
that Nissan Infiniti one of crickets and lily ponds, no car at all, just pure snob
nature. The Lexus commercials he’s seen are almost as vague - an idyllic
road shiny with rain.” 10 Nelson compares this ad to what he sees as the outof-date advertising of Toyota’s Lexus line: “Look at the T.V. ads for the Lexus
compared with Nissan’s for the Infiniti: there’s no comparison. Infiniti’s are
fantastic, there’s no car in them, just birds and trees. They’re selling a concept.
Toyota’s selling another load of tin.” 11 Like the shiny, platinum-coloured
Mercedes in A m erican B eauty or the semivisible Trans-Am in Vineland, the
Infiniti in the commercial aims at invisibility. Even a more conventional car
ad has hints of the sublime. Harry remarks about a Toyota Corolla brochure
showing the car in the mountains: “I was looking at the Corolla one trying
to figure out if they really had driven that sedan and that wagon up into the
mountains or were just faking it, and I had to laugh. The cars were posed
in the snow but there were no tracks showing how they got there!”12 Here
again, advertising presents the dream of a car that makes no mark, that blends
into nature.
A car which strives to be invisible is engaged in the sublime, in a relationship
with the infinite (or with “infiniti”). In Pynchon this has a very positive sense,
as it is associated with escape from the constricts of an obtrusive and oppres
sive government. In Updike, a rather ambivalent attitude is expressed. Nelson
approves of the Infniti ad, while Rabbit, somewhat attached to his working class
roots even now that he’s rich, sees it as snobbish - “just pure snob nature.”
In Am erican Beauty, however, the late postmodern car is seen as lacking beauty;
it is a space rather than a body. The early postmodern resistance to the demands
of conformity is expressed through original or unusual cars.13 The red Pontiac
10 John U p dike, Rabbit at Rest (1 9 9 0 , London: P enguin B o o k s, 1991), pp. 4 9 8 -4 9 9 .
" I b id , p. 4 06.
12 I b id , p. 36.
|J A t a w eb site d evoted to the P ontiac GTO w e can read a n ostalgia and an anti
governm ent bias in an article on the history o f the GTO: “P ontiac, C h evrolet, Ford, D od ge,
C hrysler, A M C , B u ick , and O ld sm ob ile started w hat w as know n as the m u scle car era. B y
the early se v e n ties, w ith these cars b ecom in g m ore and m ore popular, big charges, d estroy
in g the m u scle car ear that w e can o n ly dream about to -d a y .” http :/w w w .g e o c itie s.c o m /
m otorcity/3471/h istory.h tm
with black racing stripes is one example; a different type of example would
be the Volkswagen Beetle, which also drew attention to its own body as a sign
of difference - its own difference from the standard big American cars and the
driver’s own difference from American standards. In R abbit a t R est Nelson
complains of Toyota:
Their cars don’t express anything. Good cars, classic cars - the Thirties
Packards, the little Jags with the long hood and spoked wheels, the Fifties
finned jobbies, even the VW bug - expressed something, made
a statement.14
The bug, like Lester’s Pontiac, expressed something with its body about its
driver; it made a statement for the driver. A person who bought a VW bug in
the sixties was clearly choosing not to conform with the rest of American
society. The same cannot be said of purchasers of the new beetle, which came
out recently. Looking at the new beetle, we know absolutely nothing about its
driver.
The above discussion has considered only a limited range of issues involved
in the late postmodern transformation of the car. The question of company
mergers and the ensuing confusion of a car’s “identity,” including its “national
origin”; the matter of methods of production, including the use of robots and
attempts to get away from the traditional assembly line to a team approach to
car construction (emphasized in the promotion of a line of cars called Saturn);
the question of the environment, which involves demands for more efficient
cars and attempts at making recyclable cars. The focus here has been on the
limited issue of the car as signifier: first as a signifier standing for its creator,
later for its owner, and finally a disappearing signifier.
Late Postmodern Invisibility
The disappearance of the signifier seems to inspire as much nostalgia as
it does hope. Lester Burnham learns the beauty of bodies, while Pynchon’s
characters find little beauty in Reagan’s America and search for a sublime
disappearance. Updike, as usual, expresses a high degree of ambivalence
through his narrator and characters. While he may not seek the sublime, he does
not necessarily try to do away with it. Harold Bloom writes of Updike: “A minor
novelist with a major style, he hovers always near a greatness he is too shrewd
or too diffident to risk. He rarely fails, but nothing is got for nothing, and the
14 John U p dike,
Rabbot at Rest, p. 38.
American Sublime will never touch his pages.” 15 It is true that Updike looks
at infinity with coolness that could be taken for diffidence. He seems to be
unwilling to give up the body, and yet he does not assert the importance of
the body by rejecting the infinite. In Am erican Beauty this is exactly what takes
place. A dead body, an empty bag - the bodies are containers that must be
emptied for their beauty to be looked at.
Asserting the importance of bodies is a form of postmodern nostalgia.
Berube finds this nostalgia, for example, in Baudrillard’s A m erica :
[...] the left - including Baudrillard - seem ed paralyzed by dreams o f days
when things were better, days w hen things were thingy. You know, w hen the
proletariat and the haute-bourgeoisie w ore recognizable uniform s, and sat
down facing each other at heavy, w ooden tables arguing about real w ages
- silver dollars, doubloons and florins. N one o f this “sim ulacra” nonsense,
none o f these credit rollovers and reinvested pension funds, and m ost o f all,
none o f these dang telecon ferences.16
Baudrillard and the makers of A m erican B eauty seem to stand on the side of
thinginess, identity, beauty and early postmodernism, and the Pynchon of
Vineland and the makers of the Infiniti advertisement on the side of invisibil
ity, anonymity, the sublime, and late postmodernism. Both the former and the
latter arouse much ambivalence. Privileging proximity as Baudrillard and de
Man seem to do may be a way of undoing the “inference of totality and iden
tity that is constitutive of metaphor,” as de Man puts it. Similarly, owning an
unusually beautiful or strange car may be an act of nonconformity and indi
viduality. On the other hand, driving a Mercedes, Infiniti or Lexus, or a new
Beetle may be a way of becoming invisible, of blending into our surroundings
and achieving a sublime loss of identity.
Late postmodernism moves beyond concerns with form to the political
consequences of invisibility. Infinity can be sold as a concept, as in the Infiniti
commercial, or it can be employed in resistance to limiting, controlling forces,
as in Vineland. The late postmodern sublime should be approached with sus
picion but not rejected. A nostalgia for beauty can bring with it a political
naivety of the kind we see in A m erican B eauty in the portrayal of Ricky Fitt’s
father, who is an army officer, collector of Nazi memorabilia, and a very re
pressed homosexual. The villain seems to have confused taste while his son,
one of our heroes, has an eye for beauty. In Vineland and the Rabbit novels,
in which television and advertising permeate people’s lives, everyone has
15 H arold B lo o m , Introduction to John Updike: Modern Critical Views, ed. H arold B lo o m
(N e w York: C h elsea H ou se, 1986), p. 7.
16 M ichael Berube, “P ublic A c c e ss”, in Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthol
ogy, eds. Paula G ehn et al. (N e w York: N orton, 1998), p. 601.
confused taste, so taste is not a criterion for judging character. Nor is partic
ipation in the American Sublime an end in itself. Harold Bloom is clearly early
in his postmodernism when he declares that we are in the age of Pynchon and
Ashbery because the sublime is to be found in their works while Updike is not
a great novelist because the sublime does not touch his pages.17 His postmod
ernism is early not because he privileges the sublime but because he treats the
sublime as something thingy. Kant taught that “the sublime does not reside in
anything of nature but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious
that we are superior to nature within, and therefore also to nature without us.” 18
The sublime does not reside in things, such as cars or texts. Also like cars, late
postmodern texts no longer stand for their creators (as in Modernism) or for
their owners, that is their readers (as in early Postmodernism). Early postmod
ern texts asked the reader to make them their own by participating in the process
of constructing the text. The early postmodern author willingly renounced
ownership of the text. A late postmodern strategy is to create a text that is no
one’s property and which no one identifies with. In this way late postmodern
texts aim at invisibility. This brings us close to the unpopular notion of
a transparent text, but if we recall the invisible car from Vineland we remem
ber that is was not transparent; rather, its lacquer varied its index of refraction
so as to seem invisible. The challenge for the writer is to make the text invis
ible but not transparent, not lacking thinginess. The invisible Trans-Am or the
Mercedes ML320 have, in fact, very substantial bodies, but they strive to make
their substance and contents (their drivers) invisible. How does a text achieve
this kind of invisibility?
The text must be hard to grasp without drawing attention to its difficulty
in the way The Sound a n d the Fury, U lysses, G r a v ity ’s R ainbow or even
Updike’s The C entaur do. Those texts draw attention to their own substance,
to the language of which they consist. Late postmodern texts like the last two
Rabbit novels, William Gaddis’ JR, Don Delillo’s White Noise and Underworld,
or Pynchon’s Vineland draw attention neither to their substance nor their con
tents. They are invisible texts that make the reader invisible. To use Delillo’s
metaphor, they are white noise, which is constant noise that we don’t hear. These
texts buzz with what is heard around us (television figuring strongly) and reflect
and refract what is seen, thus blending into the environment in which they occur.
We may occasionally perceive a few iridescent fringes of some kind of autho
rial voice, but for the most part we can’t tell the difference between these texts
and the world that they occur in. JR is perhaps the most obvious case, where
narration is dispensed with almost entirely, and in the dialogue of which the
17 H arold B lo o m , John Updike, p. 7.
18 Im m anuel Kant, Critique o f Judgment, in Critical Theory Since
A d am s (N e w York: Harcourt, B race and Jovan ovich , 1971), p. 396.
Plato, ed. H azard
book is made up we often do not know who is speaking. In the other texts as
well, although they have narrators, the narrator’s voice seems to emerge out
of the same environment that the narration describes. To take a mundane but
illustrative example from Updike:
A s her mother tucks her brother in, Judy settles before the television and flicks
from The Wonder Years to Night Court to a French m ovie, starring that lunky
Depardieu who is in all o f them, this time about a man who com es to a village
and usurps another m an’s identity, including his w ife. In a m om ent’s deci
sion the young w idow, besm irched and lonely, accepts him as her husband,
and this thrills Harry; there ought to be a law that w e change identities and
fam ilies every ten years or so. But Judy keeps flicking away from the story
and Pru finally yells at the kid and tells her to get ready for bed on the sofa,
they’ll all clear out o f the living room for her sake, though w hy she didn’t
accept Grandma and Grandpa’s nice offer o f a little room o f her ow n is
beyond her, Pru’s, understanding. The girl breaks into tears and this is a relief
for all o f them, givin g vent to their com m on unspoken sense o f abandon
m en t.19
While not a difficult passage to read, it is not easy to take hold of. If we look
back at what we have just read, the casual activity of flicking through the
channels blends with the drama of the film, which seems to hold Harry’s
attention more than the girl’s, who is soon rushed into bed by her upset mother.
We find out at the end that really they are all upset because Nelson, son, husband
and father to the group, has not come home yet. The “refractions” however
are multiple. The beginning of the second sentence shifts us into the film, but
it’s reference to a decision could make us think for a moment that it’s talking
about the action of Judy flipping through channels. Similarly, when the third
sentence begins with ’’But Judy...” this seems like a sudden shift out of the
film into the scene of watching the film (or at least the TV). Then in the middle
of the same sentence we shift to Pru’s point of view, so that the narration has
to include a parenthetical note, between commas, to let us know whose point
of view we are now in. Finally, from thinking that each of the characters is
in their own world, seeing things from an entirely different perspective, we come
to see at the end of the paragraph that they are all thinking about and feeling
the same thing: abandonment. This is not a passage which draws attention to
its own language (word choice, style) nor to ideas, which it does not really
contain. Rather, this is an iridescent passage, flicking (like the images on the
screen) from object to object, perspective to perspective.
19 John U pdike,
Rabbit at Rest, p. 85.
Conclusion
Two of the most frequent criticisms of Updike - or perhaps they are not
so much criticisms as examples damning the author with faint praise - are that
he is Modernist and that he is a craftsman. When Updike is called Modernist,
this means, among other things, that he is clearly the creator of his texts, while
we expect of Postmodern writers that we not see their lives through their texts.
The damning word “craftsman” suggests that Updike’s texts are too carefully
wrought, and that he is therefore engaged in the creation of beauty, and not
with the sublime. The passage quoted above is meant to suggest that Updike
is up to something else, namely, achieving invisibility. We may see some
refracted images of Updike’s own life, but they become only semivisible against
the background of the multiple refracted images drawn from everyday life in
Updike’s novels.
Modernism found significance in objects, which came to stand for the ideas
or emotions of the writer. Early postmodernism used objects to stand for readers.
The most obvious example of this is classic postmodern fiction like Barth’s
or early Pynchon’s in which the characters are interpreters, whose experience
in the novel stands for our experience of reading the novel. Late postmodern
ism tries to make objects invisible, to take away their marks of identity (their
color, shape) that make them stand for their owners. It does not reject bodies,
but it does not want anything - a car or a text - to stand for a person, be it
a maker or an owner. Just as late postmodern cars strive for an invisibility that
will render their drivers invisible, late postmodern texts aim at an invisibility
that will make the reader invisible.
Whether this is a desirable development is very much open to discussion.
Some groups have not yet achieved visibility, and therefore invisibility is a state
to be overcome rather than a goal to reach. Other groups may need to remain
visible until certain goals are achieved. Invisibility can only be treated as
a strategy and not an end. An awareness of this should bring with it an acknowl
edgement of the fact that identity, too, is a strategy and not an end. From the
standpoint of late postmodernism, modernism and early postmodernism both
look like attempts to assert the importance of identity to the exclusion of the
question of ends. This paper, too, has excluded the question of the ends to be
achieved by invisibility, which is a question worth taking up.
Netizens, Hive-minds; the Profiled:
New Wired Identities of the Communication
Revolution Era
The projects of con n ectivity haunt the modern man. The ability to be
connected decides over more and more aspects of life while those wn-wired
are being relegated to the margins of society that are possibly darker than any
known before. New environments of human communication have also intro
duced a new kind of (un)awareness of change - with all data - news, weather
reports, private communications, and spam - speeding indifferently through
cyberspace - the content and meaning seem to many to be lost.
From this context emerged new dilemmas - issues themselves all intercon
nected in a complex network of references, discussed within new interdisci
plinary fields of knowledge. Two notions are central to those recent disputes:
identity, what does it mean to be somebody (something?) in those new con
texts, and, lately, property, as the Net-discourse, as previously discourse of
virtual realities,1 moved from the marginal, technical and ideological grounds
to more, either academically and economically, central discourse of power
relations, race, gender, and economy. In this essay I try to present how the two
are inter-connected in creating new qualities in human subjectivity and transsubjectivity.
As I am totally aware that the issues addressed below have already become
the focus of numerous, usually interdisciplinary, researches, nowhere in the
1
C f. C hris C hesher. “ C o lo n iz in g Virtual R eality: C on stru ction o f the D isc o u r se o f
Virtual R eality, 1 9 8 4 - 1 9 9 2 ” (e n g lis h -w w w .h ss.cm u .ed u /cu ltron ix/ch esh er.h tm ).
essay to follow do I pose myself as an expert in these emerging fields; neither
am I able to, nor do I intend to do so. Rather, I believe this article is a collection,
already terribly dated (time passes now so quickly), of interrelated2 notes to
my search for a space to visit, a report from a reconnaissance into the space
that is fantastically multidirectional, plausibly also indescribable. Thus, in places
where my account becomes hazy I beg your tolerance, yet such seems the very
essence of places I try to depict.
If this work also appears to be excessively chaotic, it is so because, apart
from stylistic and methodological faults, its content may be truly desperately
misplaced, as it discusses the relatively recent mode of scholarship while making
use of the conservative medium. While hoping it will soon be “hypertextualized” and available for alternative reading on the Net, for the time being I must
expose this neither strictly linear nor hypertextual essay to the somewhat
uncomfortable conditions of voluntary detachment.
The Virus of Posthumanity
It is p erh a p s possible today to fashion software that could alter physical
qualities of the hardware on which it is run. An adeptly designed virus may
enter your system undetected and run the algorithm that is used to change
refreshing frequencies and display resolutions of the monitor. This algorithm
itself is rather handy as it renders changing those frequencies and resolutions
possible, without resetting the machine, that being a time consuming and trou
blesome necessity. Every time a change from one setting to another occurs
the monitor screen goes blank for a second and there is “an audible clunk
from inside of it as the resonating crystals inside lock on a different range
of frequencies.”3 If the virus caused this to happen several times in a row
the screen would go blank and after several clunks it would explode in your
face. “The front of the tube that is made of heavy glass [...] [would] frag
ment and speed into [...] [your] face, neck, and upper body. The very same
phosphors that glow beneath the sweeping electron beam conveying infor
mation to [...] [your] eyes, [...] [would] be then physically embedded in [...]
[your] flesh.”4
2 H en ce the ov erw h elm in g num ber o f en d n otes. T hey parad oxically try to im itate the
hypertextual intertextual spectrality. Paradoxically, since the hypertext w as originally to imitate
and augm ent fo o tn o te s’ and e n d n o tes’ intertextuality.
3 N eal Stephenson. Cryptonimicon (N e w York: A von B o o k s, 1999) p. 349.
4 Ibid., pp. 3 4 9 - 3 5 0 .
This happened to Pekka, or the “Finn Who Got Blown Up,” a character in
the novel Cryptonom icon by Neal Stephenson.5 Pekka, the first victim of the
Digibomber, suffered major injuries - amongst others, his voice box was
smashed by a hunk of broken glass. Supported by a geek group under the name
of Eutropians who paid all his medical bills, he was quickly equipped with
a computer voice box, “like Stephen Hawking’s,”6 thus acquiring a new iden
tity of being one with a machine. His thoughts may only be channeled by the
machine, without the machine his existence would be limited to an entity devoid
of the marvels of oral communication.
Until lately everyday discourse had positioned any such ponderings over
machine-as-being-one-with-human identity strictly in cyberpunk prose and
futurology. Today we find this culturally marginalizing policy questioned as
the cyborg theory and notion of the “posthuman” identity have moved from
the (military) margins to the mainstream of academic discourses and are be
coming central issues of a new (battle)field of interdisciplinary research: not
only cybernetics-inspired information theorists, the military men, neuro-surgeons, rehabilitation therapists, who have been doing that for years, but today
also sociologists, philosophers, theologists, students of culture, evolutionists,
ethicists, aestheticians, linguists, and possibly others, all look with interest into
possible developments of posthuman projects.
Comparable perhaps only to the fervor we see in modern genetics, many
of such often heated-verging-on-fiery interdisciplinary exchanges rely on vi
tuperation - condemning the other side for offences and peccant shortcomings
ranging, respectively, from technophobic conservatism and redefining - destruc
tively - the human selfhood and subjectivity, to anti-progress rampant ludditism
and neo-eugenic, ultra racist manipulations.7 Thus leaving the general audi5 The n o v el is interesting not on ly for its literary content. It is the first n ovel ever w rit
ten entirely on a Linux based w ord processor. A lso , a rather rare thing for a literary w ork, it
cannot (cou ld not?) be exported in its electron ic form outsid e the U S, as it features a rather
strong tw o d eck s o f cards based cryp tograp hic sy stem “ S o lita ir e ,” w h ich fa lls under the
M unitions E xportation A ct.
6 Stephenson, Cryptonomicon, pp. 3 4 9 -3 5 0 .
7 O ne o f the m ost intriguing u ses o f cyborg theory c o m es from D on na Haraway, w h o se
in flu en tial e ssa y c a lled short “C yborg M a n ifesto ,” first pu b lish ed in 1984, is so m e tim e s
regarded as the sacred text o f the em ergin g “c y b erfem in ists.” M ost gen erally, H araw ay c o m
m ents rather o p tim istica lly on h o w it is p o ssib le to construct o n e ’s identity, sexuality, even
gender im p lem en tin g tech n ology. (D on na H araw ay, “The Ironic Dream o f a C om m on Lan
guage for W om en in the Integrated Circuit: S c ien ce , T ech n ology, and S o c ia list F em in ism in
the 1980s or A S o c ia list F em in ist M an ifesto for C yb orgs,” w w w .ro ch ester.ed u /C o lleg e/F S /
P u b lications/H araw ayC yb org.htm l). The com p lete version appears in H araw ay’s book Sim
ians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention o f Nature (N e w York: R ou tledge, 1991), pp. 149—
181 and on the U n iversity o f Stanford based w e b site w w w .stan ford .ed u /d ep t/H P S /H araw ay/
C yb orgM anifesto.h tm l). Her latest extravagan tly titled b ook d isc u sse s in greater detail the
ence somewhat puzzled not only about the quality of the future but also, that
more unsettling, about the possibilities and feasibilities of the present, the
ongoing debate contributes to the nearly global confusion, fitting nicely with
its chaotic, paranoiac architecture the metaphorical intertwined natural and
technological spaces of the information driven cyborg and of the Internet, which
paradoxically was supposed to mirror and represent the real spaces.
In rehabilitation and transplantation robotics has been in use already since
1950s,8 thus Pekka may be a fictitious character, still Stephen Hawking is a man
of flesh and blood... and technology. He lives in the present, not in the future.
Even not at all eager to call the spectacular scientist a cyborg9 one could agree
that a step further in combining technology with the humans will surely require
a new moniker.10 Just how tiny or huge this step should be is impossible to
tell at this time - also because of our lately attained inability to define time
in any intelligent way.
The monitor-blasting virus might have sounded science fiction, yet is it really
true or false? - can you kill people via the Internet or not? That possibly the
mere idea that you could takes you by surprise is only partially caused by
w a y s in w h ic h b io lo g ic a l n etw ork s and b io te c h n o lo g y con stru ct hum an b o d ie s. D on na
H araw ay M odest___W itn ess@ S econ d _M illen n iu m . F em aleM anL’_ M ee ts_ O n c o M o u se B (N e w
York: R ou tled ge, 1997).
8 A heart-lung m achine w as used to control the b lo o d circu lation o f an 18-year-old girl
during an operation in 1953. A 43-y ea r-o ld man received the first heart pacem aker im plant
in 1958. The term “cyborg” - short for “cybernetic organism ” - w as coin ed by M anfred C lynes
and N athan K line as late as in 1960.
9 A lthou gh m any w ou ld in sist on ca llin g him so. W hile truly “ ‘pa ra llelism ’ ( dividing
the increased responsibilities among a number o f existing subsystems) and ‘integration o f
e ffo r ts’ w ere im p lem en ted b efore w e b ecam e hum ans - and actually w ere an im portant pre
req u isite for our e x is te n c e ” (A le x a n d e r C h isle n k o , “L e g a c y S y stem s and F unctional
C yb orgization o f H um ans,” 1995 w w w .lu cifer.com /~ sash a/articles/cyb orgs.h tm l. 1 5 .0 4 .2 0 0 0 ,
com m en ts added), it is also often argued that im plem enting tech n o lo g y in the form o f “ in
te n tio n a lly d esig n ed e x te n sio n s” (ib id .) - such as c lo th in g , to o ls, h o u se s, transportation,
heating, c o o k in g , etc. - into fu n ction in g o f the “con volu ted , un docum ented and structurally
in flex ib le b io lo g ic a l [hum an] b o d ie s” (ib id .) con stitu tes a natural evolu tion ary p rocess o f
b eco m in g a cyborg (or perhaps a functional cyborg, a “ fyborg” (ib id .)). Thus - w hat fo llo w s
- “the cyb orgization o f the hum ankind - the merger o f b io lo g ic a l and tech n o lo g ica l elem en ts
- has b een , and m ost lik e ly w ill b e, p r o ceed in g , accord in g to the usual scen a rio o f the
evolu tion ( upgrading) o f leg a c y sy stem s (i.e. ones basmg on the old inflexible, unreliable
'mainframe' ‘wetware’ and' meat')." (ibid., com m ents added).
10 For a p ersonal accou nt on plans “o f b ecom in g one w ith his com puter” y o u m ay ch eck
K ev in W arw ick ’s C yb org 1.0 h ttp ://w w w .w ire d .eo m /w ire d /a r ch iv e /8 .0 2 /w a r w ick _ p r .h tm l.
K ev in W arw ick ( k w @ cy b er.rd g .a c.u k ) is a p ro fesso r o f c y b e rn etics at the U n iv e r sity o f
R ead in g in the U K ( w w w .cy b er.rd g .a c.u k ). T h is m ay w e ll be ju st a starting p oin t for an
Internet su rvey on cyb orgs. I su g g est v isitin g cyborgs and other m ach in ic ad ven tu res’ w eb
site for a n ic e c o lle c tio n o f links: http://w w w .tO .or.at/m sguide/cyborg.htm
a limited and monitored access to information. The concern here is, of course,
not whether we are going to believe any accounts on the digital bombs or
functional cyborgs, because this is a subjective issue that needs to be addressed
in the intimacy of our own intelligence, experience, and gullibility. Much more
generally, what concerns us are the times which are nearly indiscriminate in
telling fiction from fact - in other words, the condition of information, space
and history under postindustrial postmodernity. The impenetrable spatial vast
ness of the archive is but one determinant of this impotence, deciding upon
the working definitions of intelligence as the ability to make valid selections.
The subjective nature of “the present” and the ratio in which changes occur,
define this condition just as accurately.
End of History Revisited
As it has become the working Silicon Valley ideology to separate the
elements of the ethical triad of Possibility/Feasibility /Usability and merge them
all into one catchy slogan: “Act first and request permission later,” the stra
tegic control (and hence panoptical information coverage) over ultramodern
technologies is disappearing. Phrases like “to be on the cutting edge of some
thing” or presenting “the state of the art” do not seem to mean much these days.
Although the cutting edge might still be quite sharp, just no-body knows what
it is cutting right now. Bill Gates and the “Wired” crowd may get more of the
possible directions of the Net’s developments, still they must have been sur
prised by the Blair Witch Project extravaganza that had shown for the first time
the N et’s real culture and market programming potentials. “Information is
power,” but who has the access to all information? History seems to have
reached yet another, more personal, dimension. This inability to predict change
have also perversely contributed to the return of “end of history” paradigms.
In what seemed its last leap, history played a tremendous trick on societies
of the turn of the century. The media reluctantly reported, with few in the public
truly amazed, that the coming of the 21st century was indeed nothing spec
tacular - after all it came down to a few big parties, without any honest de
votion to visions of revolutionary transgression or millennial Armageddon. It
happened so, amongst other things, because the 21st century had already come
the previous year. Possibly the last effort to establish a commonly agreed single
turning point of history (or 24 hours, rather) was 00:00:01am, Jan 1, 2000,
traveling with the Sun around the globe, as it was when the Y2K bug was
supposed to strike decisively. Lingering, erroneously, over millennial topics,
many professional commentators and consultants foresaw consequences rang-
ing from minor local blackouts to the annihilation of life on the planet Earth."
Nothing like that happened, and a lot of money - in the U.S. solely between
$100-600 billion12 - had been spent in the process of fixing a problem that
turned out not to be that serious. Luckily, what seemed to many to be abso
lutely beyond control was found tame the day after the New Year’s Day party.13
And nobody could have predicted it. Hanged over as some were, nobody could
either agree on the present day they were experiencing. The metaphorical
“information bomb” that “threatens to eradicate history and to subsume local,
disparate times into the ‘real time’ of the global network”14 of which Paul Virilio
writes, might have exploded and history “stopped,” dissolving into subjective
narratives.
In the essay „Pataphysics of Year 2000” (don’t be misled by the title originally published in 1992) Jean Baudrillard speculates on how history might
end with no regards given to the observer’s subjective viewpoint. He suggests
a universal yet paranoid “embrace all” theorizing, by showing how seemingly
incompatible physical explanations of change - entropie (driven by the energy
of centrifugal force) and those based on theory of relativity’s prediction that
saturation of energy and mass influence time - come to a common end (of
history). Baudrillard makes a claim that no matter what you say or do, history
ceased to be.
11 A list o f th ese prop h ecies is to be found, e.g. at: D eclan M cC u llagh , “W hat T h ey Said
w ith D read” Wired News, Jan. 4 , 2 0 0 0 w w w . w ir e d .c o m /n e w s/0 ,1 2 9 4 ,3 3 4 1 9 ,0 0 .htm. H ere are
som e sam ples:
T he Y ear-2000 p h en o m en o n [,..]w ill be m uch m ore perv asiv e and serious than m ost o f the
[d isasters] w e ’ve “ ex p erien ced in m odern histo ry ."
E d a n d J e n n if e r Y o u rd o n
E co n o m ic slow dow n [...] u n em p lo y m en t rises [...] interru p tio n s in u tilitie s [...] com m on use
o f h eaters, cook sto v es [...] increase in layoffs [...] som e n eig h b o rh o o d s form p u rch asin g
asso ciatio n s [...] [p ro b ab ility o f this o utcom e or w orse] is 65 percent.
C o n s u lta n t B ru c e W e b ste r
T he p ro b lem w ill not be fixed [...] . I ’m saying that it’s over. R ig h t now. It can n o t be fixed.
W h atev er it does, the M illen n iu m B ug w ill bite us.
C h r is tia n R e c o n s tr u c tio n is t G a ry N o r th , e a rly 1997
W e’re g o ing to su ffer a y e a r o f tech n o lo g ical d isru p tio n s, fo llo w ed b y a d ecade o f d ep res
sio n [...] W e’re likely to be living in an enviro n m en t m uch like th e T hird W orld countries
so m e o f u s h ave v isited , w here n o th in g w orks p a rtic u la rly w ell.
C o n s u lta n t E d Y o u rd o n , F e b r u a r y 1999
12 Joanna G lasner, “Y 2 K Still B u g g in g L aw yers” ( Wired News, M ay 2 2 , 2 0 0 0 , w w w .
w ir e d .e o m /n e w s/0 ,1 2 9 4 ,3 6 4 0 0 ,0 0 . htm ).
13 N aturally, w ith stock s o f w h o le large branches o f “survival industry” sk y rock eting on
the stock m arkets.
14 M ark A n drejevic. R e v iew o f John A rm itage, ed. Machinie Modulations ( w w w .o ta l.
u m d .ed u /~ rccs/b ook s/L evy/arm itage.h tm l).
First, following physical imagery of centrifugal force, he outlines how
the acceleration o f technology-, event- and media- driven modernity, as well
as the speed o f other economic, political and sexual exchanges have set loose
a tempo o f liberation whereby we have become removed from the sphere o f
reference to the real, to history.13
Once “atoms of meaning” go beyond the gravitational pull “that keeps
bodies in orbit,” propelled by the acceleration of technology and “all process
es in all possible senses and wherein”
each event, each narrative, each image gets endowed with the simulation o f
an infinite trajectory. Every political, historical, cultural fact is invested with
a kinetic energy which spreads over its own space and thrusts these facts into
a hyperspace where they lose all meaning by way o f an inability to attain
their meaning.16
This is already enough to declare the end of history, for history, being the
“potential re-narrativization of a sequence of meaning,” just as narration, has
become impossible.
The second hypothesis, opposite to the first one, also draws from physics
and states that history, similarly to physical time, is affected by the accumu
lation of matter. Says Baudrillard:
Our societies are governed by [...] [the] process o f the mass, and not only
in the sociological or demographical sense o f the word, but also in the sense
o f a “critical mass,” o f going beyond a certain point o f no-return. That is
where the crucially significant event o f these societies is to be found: the
advent o f their revolutionary process along the lines o f their mobility, (they
are all revolutionary with respect to the centuries gone by), o f their equiva
lent force o f inertia, o f an immense indifference, and o f the silent power o f
this indifference. This inert matter o f the social is not due to a lack o f
exchanges, o f information or o f communication; on the contrary, it is the
result o f the multiplication and saturation o f exchanges. It is borne o f the
hyperdensity o f cities, o f merchandise, messages and circuits... Neutralized
and bullet-sprayed by information, the masses neutralise history retrospect
and act as a screen o f absorption.11
This opposite vision creates a state in which history reaches its end, “not
because of the lack of actors or participants, not due to a lack of violence [...]
15 Jean Baudrillard. “Pataphysics o f Year 2 0 0 0 ” (Ctheory, http://www.ctheory.net/
printer.asp?id=53).
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid. [Emphasis added.]
not due to a lack of events [...] - but because of a slowing down or deceler
ation, because of indifference and stupefaction.”18
The third vision, relying on what Baudrillard calls a “stereophonic effect,”
points to high fidelity of perception, experiencing and consuming, where the
disappearance of history is accredited to ‘fa ctu a l and inform ation-al sophis
tication.”
Baudrillard’s end of history realizes best in societies stupefied by the
acceleration of technology:
These societies that no longer expect anything from a future succession o f
things and have less and less faith in history, societies that bury themselves
in the backdrop o f their futurological [...] technologies, behind their stock
piles o f information and in the cellular networks o f communication and where
time is finally obliterated in pure circulation - these generations may indeed
never wake up, yet not be aware o f it. Year 2000 may well not take place
- o f which they know nothing.19
Baudrillard’s text writes itself into studies set off by the French interdis
ciplinary researcher Paul Virillio obsessed lately with the “dromological,” that
is related to the study of speed, aspects of the latest political and technological
advancements. Ultimately negative, Virilio’s vision criticizes on what he calls
a “dromocratic revolution,”20 the third industrial revolution, the basis for
a “technical fundamentalism, a ‘cybercult’,” which confines physical spaces,
reducing real operational human spaces to the desktop area on the monitor,
experiencing in “real time” what once took movement and history to happen:
In fact, there is already a speed pollution, which reduces the world to
nothing. In the near future, people will feel enclosed in a small environment.
They will have a feeling o f confinement in the world, which will certainly
be at the limit o f tolerability, by virtue o f the speed o f information. If I were
to offer you a last thought - interactivity is to real space what radioactivity
is to the atmosphere.21
In the similar tone Baudrillard warns “There is no human language or speech
(langage) that could compete with the speed of light.”22
The stasis of such ahistorical approaches once what is put in the focus of
interest is the condition of “change.” That the change is hard to perceive hardly
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 “Speed Pollution” An Interview with Paul Virilio by James Der Derian (Wired Maga
zine, 4.06, May 1996, www .wired.com /w ired/archive/4.05/virilio_pr.htm ).
21 “Speed Pollution.”
22 Baudrillard.
convinces that it does not take place. A quick look at developments of tech
nology is enough - although we can’t intelligibly declare if it is today possible
to go to Mars, clone a human, transplant human head - with an illicit uneasy
dilemma - who is a donor and who is a recipient, it is also common knowl
edge that all of those events are just around the comer, and they, just as possible
developments of cyberspace into cyborgized networks, have to introduce so
cial changes. “The long tradition of the illusion of progress from the Enlight
enment, that history has a predetermined direction,”23 may be the one shared
by ahistorical commentaries.
Because of the dynamics of the developments in technology and information
the present may only be described as a state of a perm anent change , which dupes
ahistorical commentators into saying the change does not happen, because
a possibility to produce a snapshot, a thumbnail, or a map of the momentary state
of the reality, in any field of human activity, must be an illusion. Such inability
is scarily valid in humanities where it is also impossible to follow all of the latest
developments even in highly specialized fields. With the number of yearly (offline
and online) publications exceeding human life-long reading capabilities and
technological advances beyond the grasp of a strictly specialized mind, academ
ics must experience heavy dizziness and uncertainty about their own status.24
Some turn to hypertext and the Internet, seeking the interdisciplinary freedom
and communicative revolution the new media advertise so extensively.
Future/Present Shock
While already back in the late 1960s Alvin Toffler described a panic state
of knowledge and the uncanny uncertainty about what is to come that he named
the Future Shock,25 we may be in need of another notion here, that for the sake
23 “Dark Side o f the B oom .” An Interview with Manuel Castells by Jay O gilvy ( Wired
Magazine, 6.11, Nov. 1998, w ww .wired.com /w ired/archive/6.1 l/castells_pr.htm l).
24 The “godfather” o f hypertext Vannevar Bush already in 1945 in his Atlantic Monthly
article, „As We May Think,” [Atlantic Monthly, 176 (July 1945), pp. 101-108 - here quotes
after George P. Landow. Hypertext: The Convergence o f Contemporary Critical Theory and
Technology. (Baltimore & London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 14-19]
imagined a machine called mem ex, that should help scholars overcom e the “growing moun
tain o f research [...] that extended far beyond our present ability to make real use o f the
record.” M emex is supposed to mirror and amplify the human ways o f thinking in automatic
selection and retrieval o f information from a global archive, w hich is som ething present
information retrieval system s (search engines) are far from reaching, as they rely more on
brute force enumeration than truly interactive personalized “linking.”
25 A lvin Toffler, Future Shock (N ew York: Random H ouse, 1970).
of convenience and for the comfort of a direct reference could be named the
Present Shock or the Present/FutureShock. This Present/Future may be most
generally characterised as follows:
To set up objective borders separating the contemporary from the future is
virtually or fully impossible. We can only describe subjective guesses dividing
history into eras, ages, epochs, (as e.g. the pre Y2K and post Y2K era?), etc.
Thus “the present” is a subjective experience and feeling, a personal or group
illusion about what we have come to call “now.” If we do not know where
“now,” or “the contemporary” started and where it may end - we may never
know where the future starts. The difference between (science) fiction and fact
may be similarly only an illusion. By making subjective guesses about the future
(as about fiction) we are making guesses about the present (as about facts) and
by making guesses about the present we are making guesses about the future.
It is then highly tempting to conclude that it is in this Present/Future that
J. F. Lyotard’s vision of “the postmodern condition” is realized. Subjective
understandings of the present and attempts at describing it constitute metanar
ratives submerged in the context of (subjective) history, all equally important
and valid, provoking distrust varying as to its intensity due to subjective
experiences, intelligence, or ideology.
Still, disquietingly, due to the same dynamics of change and technical
complexity of telecommunications any ability of making correct guesses about
the momentary state of history - and making plausible guesses as to the future
- is an elitist privilege of the technically competent. Accordingly, humanist
definitions often may not apply, while quite efficiently technical metanarratives
(the visions of history) may become working scenarios. As all newly acquired
privileges, this one also redefines the social structure of power and thus is an
augury of ultimate technocracy26 in one form or another, which by definition
is a step of history.
The explicit inconsistency of the two visions - one claiming that no guess
es about the future can be made, and the other granting a class of technicians
such a privilege - Manuel Castells - an ex-Marxist-cum-anarchist sociologist
26
At least two opposite meanings o f the word “technocracy” are circulated by the m e
dia. According to one reading, technocracy is the system ruled by the experts who fight to
bring the future under control, manage it and plan. This kind o f technocracy it is often ar
gued, “not liberalism or conservatism , [...] has been the dominant ideology o f US politics
for most o f this century.” (Virginia Postrel, “Technocracy R.I.P,” Wired Magazine, 6.01, Jan.
1998. w w w .w ired.com /w ired/archive/6.01/postrel_pr.htm ). This visio n , deriving from
“managerism,” presents anti-evolution technocracy in which every change is to be verified,
and engineered by the ruling class o f experts. More plausibly, experts do not need to be granted
any official power as they are likely to control, merely by the privilege o f com petence, all
aspects o f political and social life anyway. Surely, this technocracy is more liberal-anarchist,
than anything else. It is the latter meaning o f “technocracy” that I use.
- would classify as not inconsistent at all. Inquired on his calls for social co
ordination, creating autonomously defined cultural identities, while at the same
time warning against all Utopias (technological included, of course) as “lead
ing to terror,” Castells says:
the process o f change needs knowledge, and research is a necessary tool. On
the other hand, to jump from having an analysis to establishing goals and
implementing the path toward these goals from a purely theoretical scheme,
be it ideological or research based, almost by definition will fail or build
a machine that by its rigidity will ultimately fail.27
In other words - applying this rather eloquent version of Murphy’s Law
to current technophobic anxieties - technocracy, as democracy, is a system in
which nothing works as planned, yet only technicians (experts), by a permanent
and uncontrolled research, acquire competence to deny quick societal disinte
gration possible in the turmoil of the constant change.
Is then any research of any value? Should we plan, when we cannot plan,
or not to plan? Castells, again, has a ready answer: he suggests “to plan the
nonplan : that is to equip yourself. If you have a goal in a very complex world
of interdependencies and then try to define all the actions that lead toward this
goal, you’re going to build a rigid bureaucracy that will collapse,”28 but we
“need Utopias - on the condition of not trying to make them into practical
recipes*
Such “complex world of interdependencies,” or the potsmodern archive, is
what Deleuze and Guattari call a rhizome, a network in which every point is
potentially connectible to every other point though there are no permanent
connections. Rhizome is a scary space to explore: “If everything is connected,
at once and without a fixed center, how do you choose and order the parts?
Nothing is as terrifying as a labyrinth without a center.”30 The rhizome must
be described by “a map, not a tracing,” in other words, a projection that is as
multi-directional, rhizomatous, as that which it describes, and not an attempt
to find and present a single narrative path. It is no longer spectacularly reveal
ing to say the Internet may be considered such a map - a working model that
itself can be only described by a different map. It may also be fair to argue
the rhizome is as much a model of the Internet as the latter is the model of
the rhizome. Hence, the Deleuze and Guattari paradigm has been distinctively
27 Castells.
28 Ibid. [Italics added.]
29 Ibid.
30 Jorge Luis Borges, „Citizen Kane,” in Borges a Reader: A Selection from the Writings
o f Jorge Luis Borges, eds. Emir Rodriguez M onegal and Alastair Reid (N ew York: Dutton,
1981), p. 139.
often incorporated in describing cyberspace and virtual spaces,31 them being
considered maps of the real spaces, as well.
As the rhizome paradigm attempts at describing the indescribable it is for
sure useful - still there exists a considerable limitation. A journey started from
any “plateau” of the rhizome, in any direction has only one possible conclu
sion - an epiphany that communicates the indescribable complexity of the
rhizome - the nearly panoptical vision of the “works of the world.” Such selffulfilling prophecy (you know of the rhizome because there is only rhizome)
presupposes that this stage is again the Hegelian “end of history” - every inquiry
must end with a “rhizome illumination,” not a new thesis. Rhizome may only
expand and boil - it may not be a hotbed of a quality change. The real every
day, permanent quality change, the “communication socio-technological rev
olution,” must deny this model.
Netizens, Hive-minds, the Profiled
This com m unication revolution we have already been witnessing for years
has introduced unprecedented new qualities to everyday life, such as the abil
ity to communicate freely and cheaply over the Internet with individuals oth
erwise reachable only at a considerable expense of time and/or money.32 This
revolution introduces new modes of spreading information, of entertainment
and, importantly, new modes of scholarship, already christened “cyberschol
arship.” Lately, however, the focus on the ‘Net’s use has shifted to conducting
business, e-commerce specifically being the flagship of the revolution in
progress. Wall Street had had for quite a time Dot-Com companies established
as the hottest and most “fashionable” stock,33 the most striking manifest of this
being the creation of the “new economy” index NASDAQ.
“If commerce rests on any single concept, it must be identity. There can
be no business without ownership, and no ownership without an ‘I’ to do the
31 For a collection o f links to Deleuze/Guatarri oriented cyber-studies researches check:
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/d-g_htm l/d-g.htm l
32 To defend from an obvious assault - I am aware o f the debate on how much this
revolution really affects everybody’s everyday life or, in other words, o f the discussion on
global tyrannies o f information markets over those “not wired,” living in the “fourth world”
“black h oles” - “areas o f social exclusion that can be marginalized and the system doesn’t
suffer at all.” (Castells) “T hey’re not valuable as producers, consumers - in fact, if they would
disappear, the logic o f the overall system would improve. If you are outside the network,
in other words, you don’t even exist.” (Ibid.)
33 In yet another instance o f the unpredictable constant change the dot-com stock took
a $2.8 trillion worth dive in the beginning o f April, 2000.
owning. To regulate that commerce, there must be a legal system with account
ability - and there can be no such accountability without very precisely iden
tified individuals.”34 Hence, to spell out what it means to be someone in
cyberspace has lately become the ambition not only of humanists but much
more effectively (especially in the US) of legislators and businessmen, who
call for and expect working market standards. Putting legal disputes aside, it
is already obvious that spontaneously the revolution era has created several new
identity types, a few of them counter-cultural,35 while some prowling towards
the mainstream - to dread of some and enthusiasm of others.
The risks of the Internet’s depriving individuals of their privacy have become
worldwide nightmare scenarios and have been put in the center of numerous
researches. “Soon, a combination of passwords, filters, cookies, pay-as-youview downloadable books and digital IDs tying users’ identities to their
machines could transform the Internet into a dark place, where important el
ements of privacy and freedom are erased by an emerging architecture of the
all-seeing eye.”36 Of course, the vision of a “transparent society,” whose ex
istence is anchored in constant surveillance and where all information is under
control is not a new one,37 still it is rather a matter of the Present/Future, though,
than any vaguely defined “soon.”
In D atabase N ation 38 Simson Garfinkle details insidious threats to privacy
that arise from the Internet, from public and private surveillance cameras, from
biometric devices and medical technology, from- spy satellites and computer
chips, and above all from the unrestrained gathering and unauthorized sharing
of personal information through computer databases. He speaks of the near
future.
34 John Brow ning, “I Encrypt, Therefore I A m ” ( Wired Magazine, 5.11, N ov. 1997.
w w w .w ired.com /w ired/archive/5.1 l/netizen_pr.html).
35 O f course two o f most w idely known types are “the hacker,” and “the cyberpunk,”
both featuring elem ents o f ideology, and both equally ill-defined by the mainstream media.
36 Carl S. Kaplan, “Software Code Has Power o f Law on the Internet, Author Says” (New
York Times, D ec. 3, 1999).
37Cf. D avid Brin, “The Transparent S o ciety ” ( Wired Magazine, 4 .1 2 , D ec. 1996.
www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/fftransparent_pr.html). Brin m uses on pros and cons o f
survedlance systems potentially used in future to protect citizens against crime and concludes
his essay with presenting an uneasy dilemma: “One o f the basic decisions w e all face in times
ahead w ill be this: Can w e stand living our lives exposed to scrutiny ... our secrets laid out
in the open [...] i f in return w e get flashlights o f our own, that we can shine on the arrogant
and strong? Or is privacy’s illusion so precious that it is worth any price, including surren
dering our own right to pierce the schem es o f the powerful? There are no easy answers, but
asking questions can be a good first step.” (Italics added.) See also David Brin, The Trans
parent Society. Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom (Read
ing, MA: Perseus Books, 1998).
38
Sim son Garfinkle, Database Nation: The Death o f Privacy in the 21st Century (N ew
York: O ’R eilly and A ssociates, 2000).
Earlier, though, Garfinkle described how the very much contemporary credit
report company Equifax archives credit history records of more than half of
American society.39
Another company, Abacus Direct, purchased lately by the Net targeted
advertising giant Doubleclick, runs databases that store records of buying habits
of more than 80 million American households.
Double Click just lately has withdrawn from the projects to combine Abacus
Direct database with information they gather through cookies.40
Cookies are small files that serve as unique identifiers for tracking user
movements across the Web and are markers indicating where a user last vis
ited or, if the site provides shopping, what a user last put in an electronic
shopping basket. Cookies can also be used to track users between distinct sites.
By stealthily tracking user movements between sites run by their respective
clients on their advertising networks, Doubleclick is able to serve up in real
time a unique ad for each user, depending upon a user’s interests as expressed
via their Web surfing. DoubleClick’s reach is extensive. There is a very small
chance that you ever visited DoubleClick’s website but it if you check your
cookies file a Doubleclick log would be there.
The individual, much before one is directly w ired as a cyborg would,
becomes a profile, a map of interrelated bytes of data - a sym bolic system as
com plex as a society o r natural o r com puter languages, a netw ork o f mea?iings. Personal, intimate sensual and intellectual experience is exactly as im
portant in this network as any other nods of what may be called a memome.
M e m o me is the set o f all m em es41 that define the physical reality o f
a carbon based R1ST. Memes can be divided into [...] genetic (DNA) [...]
propagated through normal biological reproduction [and] semantic [...] propa
39 Sim son Garfinkle. “Separating Equifax from Fiction” ( Wired Magazine, 3.09. Sept.
1996, vvww.wired.com/wired/archive/3/09/equifqaxpr.html).
40 The D ou b leclick scandal had a m assive coverage in American media. You may use
w w w .w orldnew s.com for browsing the archives o f all major online new s sites. D ou b leclick
set o ff a firestorm over privacy on the Internet when it announced plans to merge the vast
Abacus Direct database containing names, addresses and offline buying habits o f m illions
o f consum ers with information it anonym ously gathers about Internet users as they visit
w ebsites. The com pany’s merger plan resulted in a probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Com
m ission and M ichigan’s consideration o f a lawsuit. The controversy ended with D ou b leclick
withdrawing from the plans to use Abacus Direct database till the legislation regulates the
privacy issues. M eanwhile, during the Congressional Privacy Caucus in March 2000 Repub
lican Governor o f Texas Joe Barton predicted that "every major piece o f legislation consid
ered this year (2000) w ill have a privacy component.” (D eclan M cCullagh. “Privacy Perva
sive in Politics” (WiredNews, Mar. 24, 2000 w w w .w ired.com /new s/0,1283,35152,00_pr.htm l).
41 A handful o f definitions o f a meme can be found on the alt.m em etics w w w site:
w w w .lucifer.com \virus\alt.m em etics\what.is.htm l. A lt.m em etics is a usenet discussion group
focusing on the future o f mem etics.
gated by communications. [...] RIST, stands for Relatively Independent SubTotality. It can be used to refer to any entity that [...] seems to posses a clear
boundary separating it from the world (as do cells in a body) but that [...]
is inextricably linked with a larger totality (as do cells in a body). [...] RISTs
[...] can attain higher levels o f functioning insofar as they are embedded in
a larger society, the most logical evolutionary end-point o f which is a h i v e
mi nd.
A hive mind is a social organization o f RISTs that are capable o f processing
semantic memes (“thinking”). These could be either carbon based or silicon
based. RISTs who enter a hive mind surrender their independent identities
(which are mere illusions anyway).42
Though a work of fiction, Cryptonom icon depicts with flashing accuracy
what memetics tries to present in a more rigorous field: that it may well be
it is not humans who control and spread ideas, but it is ideas that use humans
as media, or more precisely, internally unimaginably complex (by communi
cation and telecommunication) “wetware” based computer used for propagat
ing information throughout the system.43
In his earlier novel Stephenson portrayed yet another means of communi
cation/calculation. John Hackworth, a brilliant nanotechnology engineer just
spent ten years as an involuntary member of the mysterious community of
Drummers. Briefed by the NeoVictorian secret service’s Major Napier, he finds
out about certain nanosites (nanometric parasitic devices) planted in his brain:
“We [...] found several million nanosites in [...] [the] brain [...] Very small
ones [...] They are introduced through the blood, o f course - the haemocules
circulate through the bloodstream until they find themselves passing through
capillaries in the brain, at which point they cut through the blood/brain barrier
and fasten themselves to a nearby axon. They can monitor activity in the axon
or trigger it. These ‘sites all talk to each other with visible light.’”
“So when I was on my own, my ‘sites just talked to themselves,’ ” Hackworth
said, “but when I came into close proximity with other people who had these
things in their brains
42 Stephenson, Cryptonomicon , pp. 3 5 6 -3 5 7 .
43 The main argument over mem etics seem s to focus on whether mem es are, as evolu
tionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined them in 1976, self-replicating ideas that evolve
like living organisms by natural selection, or, as som e o f their critics have suggested, “hack
social science” that im plies humans are “simply passive objects o f impersonal forces outside
o f our control.” Significantly, m em etics is being assaulted most often on ideological grounds,
and accused, e.g, .o f being “just another attack on the human subjectivity,” “bad science,”
the so-called “positivist m ysticism ,” and o f presenting neo-liberal version o f biological
reductionism , akin to “Social D arwinism and N azi race scien ce.” (Richard Barbrook,
“Nevermind the C yberbollocks” (www.ma.hre.wm in.ac.uk/kids/m a.theory.2.1.db)).
“It didn’t matter which brain a site was in. They all talked to one another
indiscriminately, forming a network.”44
Lingering more explicitly over sexual metaphor of communication Napier
goes on:
These particles had two functions: spread through exchange o f bodily flu
ids, and interact with each other [...] Each one is a container for some rod
logic and some memory [...] When one particle encounters another either in
vivo or in vitro , they dock and seem to exchange data for a few moments.
Most o f the times they disengage and drift apart. Sometimes they stay docked
for a while, and computation o f some sort takes place [...] Then they discon
nect. Sometimes both particles go separate ways, sometimes one o f them goes
dead. But one o f them always keeps going.45
Later Hackworth finds he was a (rather important) part of a “collective
mind”46 working unison on an equally revolutionary and mystical energysource.
This apparently47 distant model is in a way mirrored by thinkers who ponder
over redefining subjectivism. Pierre Levy, calling for creating peaceful com
munities of independent selves, declares - in a somewhat McLuhanesque style
- that “we will gradually create the technologies, sign systems, forms of social
organization and regulation that enable us to think as a group, concentrate our
intellectual and spiritual forces, and negotiate practical real-time solutions to
the complex problems we must inevitably confront.”48
Although he never mentions jacking-in, becoming a part of the network
literally, as a cyborg, in a more recent article outlining his argument Levy writes:
The human race becom es a superorganism building its unity through
cyberspace. And because this superorganism is becoming the principal agent
o f transformation and maintenance o f the biosphere, cyberspace grows, by
extension, as the biosphere’s nervous system. If w e can witness the evolu
tion - organic, sensitive and linguistic - as a sole movement, if we under
44 N eal Stephenson, The Diamond Age (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 337.
45 Ib id , p. 339.
46 Ib id , p. 455.
47 If you consider nanotechnology, for exam ple, purely science fiction, please read Bill
Joy’s, co-founder o f Sun M icrosystem s, and co-creator o f Java language, famous article on
how, as he guesses, in something like 50 years, thanks to the developm ents in nanotechnology,
robotics and genetic engineering, thinking m achines w ill be a real threat to human existence
on Earth. (B ill Joy. “Why the Future D o esn ’t Need U s” ( Wired Magazine, 8.04, Apr. 2000
w w w .w ired,com /w ired/archive/8.04/joy _pr.html).
48 Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence: M ankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, trans.
Robert Bononno (N ew York: Plenum Trade, 1997), p. xxvii.
stand the profound unity o f the cultural and biological evolution and their
interdependence, therefore we can discover that cyberspace is at the peak o f
this unified evolution.49
Thus, cyberspace, the agent and medium for the “collective intelligence”
- “a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordi
nated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills,”50 is
perceived very much in terms of the superstructure, mainframe of a huge
symbolic system - a global hive mind - an agent that uses meaningful sym
bols to represent the world around them so as to communicate and generally
act in the world. Earlier, optimistically, Levy adds a positive meaning to “con
necting,” understood rather naively not as “wiring” but in concordance with
the “etymological sense of joining together (inter legere), as uniting not only
ideas but people, ‘constructing society’.”51 Castells, seemingly seeing the
emerging collective intelligence as a threat to marginalized, not wired commu
nities suggests that the only source of resistance to „global instrumental net
works” is the attempt to develop “autonomously defined cultural identities.”52
The IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), a group of professionals re
sponsible for scheming and agreeing upon various working protocols used in
the Internet, appears to be a working hive-mind, working effectively in a very
much anarchistic (micro)society.53 The Apache project was set off by a group
of professionals that might easily be called a hive mind.54 Linux and other open
source projects are being developed by working and effective hive minds.
Individuals working on those projects rarely meet in person still the work they
offer is effective, probably more effective than work performed in vertically
structured organizations.
Implications of this new effective social organization, either eventually wired
or not, are huge, impossible to grasp, perhaps. To note just one example - if
45
Pierre
Levy,
“Meta
Evolution”
(http://ww w.otal.um d.edu/~rccs/books/Levy/
m etaevolve.htm l).
50 Levy, Collective Intelligence, p. 13.
51 Ibid., p. 10.
“ John Armitage, ed. “M achinic Modulations: N ew Cultural Theory & T echnopolitics,”
Special Issue o f Angelaki: Journal o f the Theoretical Humanities (4:2). London: Taylor and
Francis, Septem ber 1999. p. 36. Here after: http://w w w .otal.um d.edu/~rces/books/L evy/
armitage.html
53 For a convincing description o f how IETF functions see: Paulina B orsook, “How
Anarchy Works,” (WiredMagazine, Oct. 95, www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.10/ ietf_pr.html)
54 “Apache” is an open source freeware Web server application that is installed on over
half o f all publicly accessible Web servers. It was created by eight programmers - the Apache
Group - who contacted each other over the N et and took their name “out o f respect for the
N ative American tribe,” w hose societal structuring resembled that o f the project’s d evelop
ers. You may find more on the Apache project story on the Net, starting with the Wired N ew s
coverage (w w w .w ired.com /new s/linux/0,1411,34302,00.html).
the individual identity is surrendered, matters as copyrights, intellectual value,
plagiarism, and plenty of others need a similarly drastic redefinition.
How does one go about surrendering one’s identity, especially bearing in
mind that the digital world is all about personalization? “Personalization pro
vides comfort, security, and self-esteem. It is the means by which humans are
understood and expressed as individuals. The benefits of being unique can be
as mundane as getting greeted by name or as magical as ordering a full meal
with nothing more than a nod.”55 The new age of individualization brings with
it all kinds of personalized belongings - much more than vanity license plates
and shirts with your own created logo instead of Nike’s.
Still, the greatest paradox of the rise of the electronic markets promoting
a wide use of cryptography, is that it introduces tw o unprecedented qualities
in identification. “Public key encryption - a method for making virtually
unbreakable codes - has two crucial but sometimes contradictory capabilities:
securing privacy and anonymity (surrendering the identity) and establishing
a perfect undisputed electronic identity.”56
A wide use of electronic signature may already ensure such identity.
A gibberish of a PGP57 signature block is enough to tell without any doubts
whether the person at the other end of the line is the one s/he tells us to be.
Unlike the physical world, where “the rituals of recognition are both subtle and
complex,”58 cyberspace needs something much less sophisticated a mathematical sequence that without subtle theatrics of offline communica
tion tells beyond doubt: “I am what I tell I am,” which of course, on the other
hand, sophisticates “the rituals” of identification, as the once filled spaces sud
denly become empty, and once meaningful symbolic gestures become automated
sentimental meaningless folklore.
On the other hand however, the use of cryptographic protocols enables
assuming a totally new anonymous identity. A popular conspirational paradigm
has it that anonymous, private communication, where all information is encrypt
55 N ich olas N egroponte “B ein g A n on ym ou s” (Wired Magazine, 6 .1 0 , Oct. 1998,
w ww.wired.com /wired/archive/6.10/negroponte_pr.htm l).
56 Browning.
57 The program PGP (pretty good privacy), has reportedly been broken to date only twice,
after im plementing a tremendous calculation power. The “dogma” o f modern cryptography
states that it would always require hugely bigger financial and tim e effort to break any
cryptosystem than to develop a more reliable one. This means that practically no-one is able
to break the privacy o f the communication, all state’s secret services included - hence all
the attacks from the government against the program itself, and its creator, Phil Zimmerman.
For more information on cryptography and privacy policy see: EPIC (Electronic Privacy
Information Center) archives on cryptography p o licy (http://w w w .epic.org/crypto), EFF
(Electronic Frontier Foundation) Archives (http://www.eff.org/pub/Crypto/) and the PGP co.
w eb-site (w w w .pgp.com ).
58 Negroponte.
ed, business dealings counted, excludes the possibility of taxation and thus
brings closer the dawn of crypto anarchy. “Crypto anarchy will allow national
secrets to be trade freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be trad
ed. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent
markets for assassinations and extortion. [...] This will not halt the spread of
crypto anarchy."39
Contradictory conclusions
The so-called first law of cybernetics states that communication is only
possible between entities that are equal. The rise of new technologies may
enable such genuine communication - it may be the biggest revolution of the
times. Equal individuals who embark on a futile, to date, task of communica
tion have to share the condition of being private. Paradoxically, at the same
time any rights and liberties that are commonly regarded as the foundations
of any political system that is considered fair, may no longer be valid in a crypto
anarchist networked transparent society, though may be all virtually shared by
one “superorganism,” consisting of replaceable subsystems assimilated and
wired by the global neural network
*
*
*
Kranzberg’s law says “Technology is neither good, nor bad, nor neutral.”
The somewhat political declaration from one of the grandparents of the Inter
net goes: “We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough con
sensus and running code.”60 Cyberpunks say: “information wants to be free,”
and thus crypto anarchists make appeals: “Arise, you have nothing to lose but
your barbed wire fences around intellectual property!”
*
*
*
This essay tried to outline the visions that I think present in total only
a confusion verging on pain. With most accounts canceling the others it would
be rude and inaccurate to present still another model - thus I chose a chaotic
and relatively unchained report from the Present/Future, not following a specific
method. Yet the search for the method must nonetheless remain ultimately
important. The scenarios for the future are sliding dramatically out of reach
59 Timothy C. May, “Cryptoanarchist M anifesto” (www. www.austinlinks.com /Crypto/
crypto-anarchist.html).
60 Borsook.
- even for the trained techno-professionals. One of the most important ques
tions for contemporary humanities seems to be “How can [humanities] [...] keep
up with the digitally enhanced acceleration of the technoculture?”61
With copyrights and intellectual value taken off balance, the selfhood
redefined and other critical societal changes at hand, introduced from within
the purely economic interactions, the readiness for discourse is of highest
importance. The issue even more relevant in societies that may likely be
marginalized in the outskirts of the “fourth world”:
*
*
*
“To plan the nonplan, that is to equip yourself?”
*
*
*
Consider the final remark: for reasons that are described as collectors’ drive,
paranoia, or preparatory, the professional group that has lately been intriguingly active on the firing weapons market are the Silicon Valley tekkies.
Choose the weapon?
61 Andrejevic.
Plagiarism in the Contemporary Academia:
Identity and Ethics
It would be difficult to consider the problem of plagiarism without entan
gling oneself into the web of relations that it forms with the structure of the
institution of academia. The complexity of those relations surfaces when it is
realised that plagiarism, broadly perceived as a breach of honest scholarship,
infringes simultaneously upon several established and approved social orders.
The internal rules of the most conspicuous of those orders, the judicial, the
economic and the ethical, cannot accept plagiarism within their boundaries,
discerning it respectively as criminal, unprofitable and immoral. The analysis
of the question of plagiarism performed from those angles would almost
certainly prove to be fruitless, at the risk of being obvious. However, the study
of the actual guidelines for the proper conduct of a student or a scholar, which
are published by almost every university, may point towards a direction quite
different from the axiomatic presuppositions as to the reason for the apparent
vice of plagiarism.
In order to illuminate the essence of this dilemma, it is not enough to
perceive plagiarism as a mere disturbance of the orders or codes to which the
academic structure answers and by which it functions, for those orders or codes
are largely universal in the western society and may apply in case of almost
every social phenomenon. Plagiarism must be regarded as a parasite burrow
ing into the very foundations of the academic construction. It is the task of the
present paper to suggest certain dangers to the modern day academia and to
demonstrate how the self-defence mechanism of the academia reacts to those
dangers by issuing discursive practises which are directed at what may be
considered as the identity of a scholar and which construct this identity upon
moral and ethical basis.
The word “advancement” connotes the term “progress,” a notion which from
the post-modern perspective is simply unacceptable. As Ihab Hassan writes,
the post-modern period is characteristic of decanonisation which “applies to
all canons, all conventions of authority. We are witnessing [...] a massive
‘delegitimation’ of the mastercodes in society, a desuetude of the metanarra
tives, favouring instead 'les petites h istoires’ [...]. Thus from the ‘death of god’
to the ‘death of the author’ and ‘death of the father’, from the derision of au
thority to revision of the curriculum, we decanonise culture, demystify knowl
edge, deconstruct the languages of power, desire, deceit.” ' This “incredulity
towards metanarratives” applies to the narrative of Progress, the leading no
tion of the Enlightenment period. Reason, the ultimate instrument in the search
for Truth, ensured the reciprocating progress of the human sciences. We recall
the unshakeable belief in the human faculties in the words of Marquis de
Condorcet, one of the leaders of the movement:
We have already seen reason lift her chains, shake herself free from some of
them, and, all the time regaining strength, prepare for and advance the mo
ment o f her liberation. It remains for us to study the stage in which she fi
nally succeeds in breaking these chains, and when, still compelled to drag
their vestiges behind her, she frees herself from them, one by one; when at
last she can go forward unhindered, and the only obstacles in her path are
those that are inevitably renewed at every fresh advance because they are
the necessary consequences o f the very constitution o f our understanding o f the connection, that is, between our means o f discovering the truth and
the resistance that it offers to our efforts.2
The current period of revision progresses (!) by the movements of reflec
tion, duplication, reiteration. The structuralist bricolage does not produce - it
only restructures. The poststucturalist critique affixes the “s” to the word
“criticism” inviting potential analysis from many different perspectives. His
tory is rewritten, literary works undergo the same process. In this light, the word
“knowledge” becomes highly suspect and probably a concept easy to under
mine. The current methodological trends, such as the critical pedagogy, for
example, reflect the aforementioned attitude and are characterised by the belief
in the relativism of knowledge and truth.
The Enlightenment notion o f reason needs to be reformulated within a critical
pedagogy. First, educators need to be sceptical regarding any notion o f rea
1
Ihab Hassan, “Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective,” in Postmodernism: A Reader, ed.
T. Docherty (Hertfordshire: Harvester W heatsheaf, 1993), p. 196.
‘ Marquis de Condorcet, “Sketch for an Historical Picture o f the Progress o f the Human
M ind,” in From Modernism to Postmodernism: an Anthology, ed. L Cahoone (Oxford:
Blackw ell Publishers Inc., 1996), p. 73.
son that purports to reveal the truth by denying its own historical and ideo
logical principles [...] This suggests that we reject claims to objectivity in
favour o f partial epistemologies that recognise the historical and socially con
structed nature o f their own knowledge claims and methodologies.3
The difficulty with the critique of meta-narratives lies in the persistent
question whether such a critique is not a meta-narrative itself. The belief in the
socially constructed knowledge is most certainly also a socially constructed
belief, a fact which many post-modern critics conveniently chose to ignore.
Regardless of this problem which calls for a separate discussion of its own,
knowledge, nowadays, is sought in a relentless movement backwards; a re
examination rather than creation. The modern humanities move within the
sphere of re-drafting. The words “creation” or “invention” are substituted with
a term from a vocabulary of industry - “production.” The production of mean
ing, the production of texts, the production of interpretation; an assembly line
jargon heralds the era of re-production, the reality of simulacra and the copy
without the original.
Stripped of the safe ideal of progress and reason, the humanities become
much more susceptible to the dangers of self re-production. In a world-philosophy of the Enlightenment, plagiarism would be an offence against the very
principles of the movement, yet paradoxically it would seem a far lesser dan
ger than today. Two main reasons account for this fact. Firstly, the search for
truth through the faculty of reason is a dynamic movement fo r w a rd ; plagia
rised work as an encumbering repetition presents in such situation only a minor
hindrance in the context of the drive of the epoch, which is strong enough to
overcome momentary procrastination. Secondly, plagiarism and progress form
a distinct dichotomy, a polarity where the first term is an obvious negation of
the other. Within this opposition, the right and the wrong are implicitly defined
and, in a certain sense, stand as axiomatic conclusions of this particular ide
ology. In such a predicament, plagiarising is not so much an offence against
the community or an institution but a crime against the very ethos of the epoch.
Ethical branding becomes therefore far easier and does not call for a specific
set of rules or guidelines.
The so-called post-modern times are to a far greater extent open to the
danger of plagiarism. The mood of relativism, represented to the extreme in
the faction of the postmodernist “anything goes,” eventuates in any firm ethos
being, if not far weaker, than at least much more difficult to locate or ascer
tain. In the situation where diffusion, dispersion and finally decapitalization of
truth and knowledge replace the forward movement under the banner of
3
Henry A . Giroux, “Towards a Postm odern P edagogy,” in From Modernism to
Postmodernism: an Anthology, ed. L Cahoone (Oxford: Blackw ell Publishers In c , 1996),
p. 693.
progress, there lurks the shadow of angst at the pitfall of self-duplication. The
humanities become the area of compilation where creativity constitutes, as
Michel de Carteau ironically points out “the act of reusing and recombining
heterogeneous materials. Meaning is tied to the significance that comes from
this new use. [...] Central here is the cultural act that is part and parcel of the
“colage,” the invention of forms and combinations, and the procedures that
allow such composite shapes to be multiplied. A technical act p a r excellence.”4
The obsession of the academia with the referenced functions as a safe-guard
against the possibility of stagnation. While it became unfashionable to speak
of progress or advancement, there still remains the necessity of meaningful
expansion in order for the academia to function. Without the concrete and
focused Project and left instead with the prefix “re-,” contemporary scholar
ship is vulnerable to the virus of repetition or “the same.” It becomes thus vitally
important to protect the “soundness” of research via strict university policies
on plagiarism.
The problem is amplified through the fact that the academic structure does
not undergo any radical metamorphosis. Even though the notions behind the
current subjects of scholarship may be radically post-modern, the structure
within which they are practised does not appear to correspond to the content.
Apart from the phenomenon of “political correctness” and the modified atti
tude towards the so-called minorities, the system remains a system which must
function, grow and, to use once again the industrial terminology, produce.
Essays, thesis and articles must be created and originality is one of the prime
requirement for their approval in the scholars’ community. Thus we are faced
with a confrontation of silencing of philosophies based upon the notion of
progress with the essential demand for originality and uniqueness.
In such light, the act of plagiarising in its strictest, literal sense stalls and
inhibits the process of expansion. In the Baudrillardian era of hyperreality and
above all of dis-chronic re-production and repetition, the academic work par
adoxically stands as a bastion of the concept of the individual. Working within
the definition of individual as something unique and original, one may easily
envisage the academic work as a manifestation of the concept which has the
notion of singularity written into its very core. The collaboration of the two
factors, the academic work and the expansion, may perhaps be easiest to find
in the case of the experimental sciences, particularly the areas of physics and
chemistry. Yet evoking such an instance may cause a shadow mistrust to loom
from the direction of the contemporary humanities over the physical sciences
burdened by the prodigal affliction of the Enlightenment. Plagiarism heralds
the death of knowledge, and constitutes an act where movement of revision
4
M ichel de Certeau, Culture in the Plural (M inneapolis: U niversity o f M innesota Press,
1997), p. 49.
turns inwards, a gesture of procrastination for the sake of unproductive rep
etition. For even at the heart of Baudrillardian exhilaration with hyperreal
absence of originals, the submergence into the world of the copy, lies the
nagging notion of multiplicity which through its mere presence turns one’s
attention to the previously mentioned, subtle yet significant, difference be
tween the concepts “production” and “creation.” And it would appear proper
to advocate that academic works are created rather than produced, as “cre
ation” contains within it an innate notion of origin ality, an essential ingre
dient of every academic work but not necessarily a notion implied by the word
“production.”
Plagiarism poses a threat precisely towards creation, an event responsible
for the expansion of the academic universe. Even though “creation” and “pro
duction” may be used interchangeably and may perhaps in some context be
treated as synonymous nouns which describe the process of something com
ing into existence, “production” points towards socio-economic connotation
while “creation” contains within it the trace of the metaphysical. “Production”
may mean the making of a copy, while “creation” conceives the original. And
it is the event of creation that must move to the foreground in the academic
world of compilation and referencing.
Michel Foucault thus characterises the modern scholar:
It seems to me that what must now be taken into account in the intellectual
is not the “bearer o f universal values.” Rather, it’s the person occupying
a specific position - but whose specificity is linked, in a society like ours, to
the general functioning of the apparatus o f truth. In other words, the intel
lectual has a three-fold specificity: that of his class position [...]; that of his
condition o f life and work, linked to his condition as an intellectual (his field
o f research, his place in the laboratory, the political and economic demands
to which he submits or against which he rebels, in the university, the hospi
tal, etc.); lastly the specificity of the politics o f truth in our societies.5
Of particular interest in context of this article are the latter two character
istics, especially if examined in the light of Foucault’s following remarks from
the same text:
“Truth” is to be understood as a system o f ordered procedures for the pro
duction, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation o f statements.
“Truth” is linked in a circular relation with systems o f power which produce
and sustain it, and to the effects o f power which it induces and which ex
tend it. A regime o f truth.6
5 M ichel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in From Modernism to Postmodernism: an
Anthology, ed. L Cahoone (Oxford: Blackw ell Publishers Inc., 1996), p. 380.
6 Ibid., p. 380.
The scholar is deeply submerged into the network of power relations with his
home institution, a situation which implies a great degree of potential influence
of such institution over an academic. Foucault’s remarks on truth being
a subjective product of a system of power may lead to the conclusion that certain
“axiomatic” laws of scholarly conduct are but a discursive construct of the order
of academia. This inference combined with the previous remarks about the acute
necessity of preserving originality suggest an employment of tools designed
to forge the identity of a scholar according to the blueprint intended for the
purpose of sustaining the advancement, or more preferably, the extension of
the academic knowledge. The remaining part of this paper will highlight that
through plagiarism policies, the universities implicitly construct the expansion
of knowledge as dogmatically ethically grounded, and that those ethical tenets
are implicitly written into the foundations of one’s identity as a scholar and
insubordination towards them ultimately leads to erasure or dissolution of that
identity. As Nietzsche would say: “You shall obey - someone and for a long
time: else you will perish and lose the last respect for yourself.”7
An extensive study of university guidebooks available on the internet re
sults in the possibility of distinguishing three separate groups of reasons for
the necessity of avoidance of plagiarism, each one appealing to a different facet
of scholarly experience. The examples presented below are the most represent
ative of those groups, where the phrasing of the arguments leaves no doubt
as to the intentions of their creator.
The first group may be seen as presenting plagiarism as an offence against
the “self.” It would appear that the manipulative discourse is directed at one’s
personal interests and it plays its persuasive role through the appeal towards
one’s aims, ambitions and values. The arguments presuppose a certain already
existing set of prerogatives, built into one’s code of behaviour as an innate part
of the psyche. The following citations exemplify this reasoning.
If you plagiarise, your are cheating yourself. You don’t learn to write out
your thoughts in your own words, and you don’t get specific feedback geared
to your individual needs and skills. Plagiarising a paper is like sending a friend
to practise tennis for you - you’ll never score an ace yourself.8
Each o f us must learn how to declare intellectual debts. Proper attribution
acknowledges those debts responsibly, usefully and respectfully. Attribution
is responsible when it comes at a location and in a fashion that leaves read
ers in no doubt about whom you are thanking for what.9
7 Friedrich N ietzsch e, “The Natural History o f M orals,” in From Modernism to
Postmodernism: an Anthology , ed. L Cahoone (Oxford: Blackw ell Publishers In c , 1996),
p. 107.
8 http://sja.ucdavis.edu/SJAyplagiarism.html
9 http://w w w. nwu.edu/uacc/p 1agi ar. htm 1
[...] an attribution is respectful when it expresses our appreciation for some
thing done well enough to warrant our borrowing it. We should take pride in
the intellectual company we keep. It speaks well o f us that we have chosen
to use the work o f intelligent, interesting people, and we can take genuine
pleasure in joining our name with theirs.10
The first citation appeals to the individual’s desire for improvement.
A student or an academic, through a thoughtless gesture of duplication, deprives
himself of the possibility of inner development which, as the passage seems
to imply, can only be achieved through original production and intellectual
effort.
The second quote appeals to the individual’s innate sense of justice, by the
means of conjuring socially favoured, predominant and acknowledged values
of responsibility, honour and respect. A good scholar ought to be a person of
high moral and ethical standards for whom the obedience to such code of
conduct is far more important than the temptation of the perspectives of illgotten, unfair advantage.
The third quote appeals to one’s individual sense of pride and achievement.
The extract lends itself towards the interpretation in which a doubtful benefit
of successful deception is far outdone by the satisfaction of including VIP’s
of the academic world in your work, thus enlarging your ego by seeing your
own name amongst the famous.
The second group of reasons for avoiding plagiarism relates to the realm
of community and suggests that other scholars receive the blunt of your wrong
doings. Here, the act of plagiarism threatens the social structure of the academia
and is portrayed to disturb the rules upon which this construction rests and by
which it is propelled to function.
Plagiarism devalues other’s original work. Submitting a professional writer’s
work is taking an unfair advantage over students who do their own work.11
Plagiarism is dishonest because it is an attempt to claim an undeserved credit
which rightly belongs to another author. Plagiarism is an intellectual equiva
lent o f stealing and will absolutely not be tolerated.12
Here, we find the most widely encountered response to plagiarism - an appeal
for an ethical academic stance towards others. In the first instance, other stu
dent’s or scholar’s work pales in comparison with the seemingly effortless, and
voluminous writings of high quality “produced” by the cheating party. The
second case makes a stand against, once again, intuitively wrong notion of
10 http://www.nwu.edu/uacc/plagiar.html
11 http://sja.ucdavis.edu/SJA/plagiarism.html
12 http://gamet.acns.fsu.edu/~msanders/plag.html
feeding upon other’s effort in order to further one’s own reputation and aca
demic position. Both of those examples upset the processes of fair academic
competition and disturb the structure of the mutual exchange of knowledge
essential to the advancement of scholarship.
The third group entails reasons which connect directly to the institution
alised form of academia, namely the university structure.
universities reputation affects the value o f your degree; [...] dishonesty hurts
(its) standing.13
Universities have several functions, including training for various vocations.
But at all times they are expected to teach in a way which helps and requires
students to acquire the skills o f intellectual inquiry. To this end, universities
are expected to assess their students to see whether this expectation had been
met. By the awarding o f a degree the university is guaranteeing to the pub
lic, amongst other things, that the graduate has made the grade in this re
spect. Where students attempt to deceive their assessor as to the level o f
achievement they have actually reached, this is not only immoral but puts
the universities reputation at risk.14
Those two citations exemplify the final ethical argument, namely the sin of
disloyalty towards the institution which raised the individual as alm a m ater and
towards whom one ought to feel greatly indebted. The act of plagiarism is
a gesture aimed against the parent-institution, by all means a most unethical deed.
Thus the policies on plagiarism present certain rigid models and obedi
ence of those standards is deemed necessary for the modern academic. Proper
scholarship entails therefore three distinct groups of qualities and expectations
of behaviour: Firstly, high personal standards, such as constant strive for
improvement, the sense of responsibility and honour and intellectual pride.
Secondly, a responsibility to maintain and support the social structure of the
academia, which includes the proper ethical approach of compliance with the
rules of fair competition and moral obligation towards other academics. Third
ly, the expectation of loyalty towards the institutionalised form of academia
that is the home university.
Those three aspects of the practice of scholarship are more than just rules
of conduct; instead they actually constitute the basis, the foundation upon which
each individual scholar’s identity is raised. These ethical bounds, establish
a universal identity-pattern, an archetypal form which functions upon three
plateaux, as exemplified by the three categories described a moment ago - the
13 http://sja.ucdavis.edu/SJA/plagiarism.html
14 Study Guide: Structure Thought and Reality (Perth: Murdoch U niversity Press, 1994),
p. 74.
level of the “self,” the level of the “community” and the level of the “insti
tution.” Those three aspects are exhaustive of the possible modes of function
ing as an academic or even, it may be valid to say, as a human being. Any in
dividual scholar personality/identity will be a mixture resulting from the inci
dents and actions occurring within those three overlapping realms. The academic
guidebooks concerning plagiarism precisely set the acceptable moral standards
of behaviour for each of those realms and as such transport those realms into
the dimension of ethics. The identity of a scholar will thus have ethical sub
structure and its possible unsettling may cause the individual identity to col
lapse or be taken away. It is essential to stress once again, that any potential
coming to being of an individual identity is heavily embedded into the moral
plane and bound to function within the mechanism of constructed values for
the zones of the “self,” the “community” the “institution.”
It must be noticed, therefore, that while any of the aspects of the conduct
of a scholar may be broken, such an occurrence does not necessarily end one’s
career. Plagiarism, on the other hand, definitely and permanently discredits him/
her, thus effectively removing their identity from them. For example, if an
academic produces no work of value, or no work at all, he/she is simply a bad
scholar. If he/she is arrogant and unpleasant towards colleagues or disloyal
towards their department or university, he/she simply earns a bad reputation.
In all of those cases a scholar is still able to function with more or less hin
drance and is still identified with the role/image/position of an academic.
Plagiarism, however, ruins in practice the whole career, bestowing brands which
are impossible to get rid off.
The conclusions may be formulated as follows: through the ethical implica
tions of the postulated justifications of the wrongs of plagiarism, the academia
builds and enforces a basic identity structure of a scholar and the premises
contained within that skeleton, working on the principle of opposition, promote
the advancement of knowledge by arguments no other than those of strong ethical
and moral reason. The statement may be illuminated from yet another angle,
namely the examination of the individual identity coming into being. As it was
stated previously, this process occurs according to the foundation composed of
the ethical principles which govern the main plateaux. Those principles were seen
as being derived from the arguments against plagiarism and plagiarism is their
chief, simultaneous undoing. Now, the opposite, or should one say, the only
alternative to plagiarism is original work. If plagiarism unmistakably works against
the three aspects of the “self’ “the community,” and “the institution” then cre
ation of an original work, obeying the principle of opposition, is the proper mode
of functioning and as such harvests merits on each respective level.
Being original means creating something new, thus sustaining the expan
sion of knowledge. Mere stagnation, the lack of production is still potential
originality while the true enemy of uniqueness is repetition and this is precise-
ly the nature of plagiarism. One may equate here the term “repetition” with
the breakage of the three identity corner-stones and at the same time equate
it with the prevention of the growth or expansion of the academia. The scholar
then moves within the sphere outlined by the oppositions originality/repetition
and forced by the ethical arguments present within the dichotomy is always
destined towards paying homage to the first of the two terms. In any other case,
he/she is threatened by no less than a perspective of further inability of iden
tification with the concept of the scholar. What results is a ceaseless develop
ment of the academia, implicitly justified and at the same time caused by the
ethical measures constructed by the university policies.
The discursive practise found underlying the relationship of scholarly
conduct and plagiarism may thus be summarised to entail the following
mechanisms. Most importantly, university conduct rules construct the founda
tion of potential identity of a scholar to be raised upon proper moral attitude
towards “the self,’’the “community,” the “institution.” In this context, plagia
rism is the way of ultimate shattering of all of the three corner-stones and it
results in a disqualification of a scholar and as such a denial of further claim
to that particular identity. The identity itself can only be built and maintained
through originality and creativity which benefits the academia with the circu
lation and expansion of knowledge. The defence against the stagnation of this
progress is ultimately based upon arguments of strongly ethical nature, which
are, at the same time, construed to be an integral part of the scholar’s identity.
The ideology of plurality ultimately shifts the responsibility of maintaining
the academic integrity to the individual scholar. Lacking a sharply defined ethos
of progress, the modem academia is forced to revert to discursive practises, which
direct the construction of scholar’s identity in such manner that originality is an
essential prerequisite of any academic work. The ironic element of this phenom
enon surfaces in the fact that the pragmatic arguments employed by the univer
sities invoke ethical values which current curriculum of many departments may
call into question. The relativism of the modem humanities, stripped of the firm
doctrines of Reason, Truth and Progress, and above all threatened by the pre
viously discussed dangers, moves the “universal” ethical principles from the realm
of philosophical dogma or mood of the epoch to the realm of university admin
istration. The advancement of the academia is thus no longer officially motivat
ed and protected by the discarded ideals of the Enlightenment but promoted by
the network of judicial, economic and most-importantly, ethical constructs woven
into the social and communal fabric of a scholar’s identity.
Dana, Eire, Cesair: The Fluctuating Identity
of the Irish Chthonic Goddesses
The mythical thinking, apprehended as a propensity of the human mind to
accommodate metaphysical aspect of human existence, determines the shape
of numerous, culturally vital concepts. The workings of myth, understood as
enwrapping the metaphysical concepts with a veil of a concrete, narrative
apparition, are most evident within the realm of mythology. Thus mytholog
ical accounts substantiate the ineffable messages rendered in the process of
mythical creation. This should lead us to a constatation that an analysis of
mythological protagonists, motifs and settings necessitates a mythical perspec
tive which outreaches standard literary interpretation. Genuine identity of the
mythological character will be revealed only by posing questions about its
cultural symbolism, genesis, and the purpose it serves or used to serve. These
three factors already foreshadow the most important aspect of the mythical
perspective, that is its fluctuating nature. Myth is not a static entity, on the
contrary, owing to the arbitrary exterior conditioning, it alters in the processes
of complex transformations. Therefore, a mythographic interpretation should
proceed in search of a deep meaning hidden under the narrative accretions added
by the flow of time and the changing human preconceptions.
The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how the psychological devel
opment of the early humanity reshaped the profile of the Gaelic chthonic
goddesses. The exemplar of Dana, Eire and Cesair, three generations of the
Gaelic chthonic deities, attests to the inner progress of this paradigm. The
juxtaposition of the three figures, seen as three realisations of the same pattern
enables to pinpoint the re-workings of the original motif entwining with the
later, newer elements so as to produce an amalgam of a very diversified struc
ture. I shall proceed with an analysis of the chthonic goddess theme along the
three stages of its mythological progress. It evidently parallels the religious
development presented as a three-levelled scheme by Gilbert Murrey and
developed further by Ernst Cassirer in his influential work E ssay On Man.'
Cassirer sees the first level in the emergence of religion as a formative phase
during which the mythical mood evolves into the more systematic cult. This
is followed by the stage of anthropomorphisation responsible for substantiat
ing the divine in human form. The progress of religious evolution culminates
in the emergence of monotheistic religions which initiated moral interpretation
of metaphysical issues. The three figures of the goddesses, Dana, Erie and
Cesair, operate as mythological equivalents to these three stages. I intend to
demonstrate how their identity evolved according to the global changes in the
religious consciousness of the Gaels.
The initial stage at which the prototype of the chthonic figures emerged is
tantamount with the formation of the early religious cults. When categorising
the primordial Gaelic faith, the most outstanding trait that comes into focus
is its maternal, chthonic character. Certainly, this feature is not uniquely Irish
as, most probably, it can be ascribed to the mythical stage of the global re
ligious development. Mircea Eliade motivates the chthonic characteristics of
the early cults as follows:
The first, and perhaps the most important, consequence o f the discovery of
agriculture precipitates a crisis in the values o f the Paleolithic hunters: reli
gious relations with the animal world are supplanted by what may be called
the mystical solidarity between man and vegetation. If the bone and the blood
until then represented the essence and the sacrality o f life, from then on it is
the sperm and the blood that incarnate them. In addition, woman and femi
nine sacrality are raised to the first rank. Since women played a decisive part
in the domestication o f plants, they became the owners o f the cultivated fields,
which raises their social position.2
Even if we accept the truth that the development of the chthonic feminine
cults proceeds along the same pattern in all civilisations and cultures, we must
allow some margin for the divergences from the common scheme. This global
matrix, or using the Jungian phrasing, an archetype of the mother goddess, was
re-enacted differently owing to local conditioning. Therefore, it does not suf
fice to rely solely on the general theory of religious evolution. One has to take
into account the specifically Irish factors: the rurality of the Gaelic commu
nities and their peculiar amalgam of the maternal and the chthonic symbolism,
which indubitably had a great impact on the indigenous religious visions.
Miranda Green stresses the rural character of the Gaelic society which, in fact,
1 Ernst Cassirer, An Essay On Man (N ew York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), p. 120.
2 Mircea Eliade, A History o f Religions Ideas, Vol. 1 (London: C ollins, 1979), p. 40.
managed to avoid Romanisation and, together with it, urbanisation of life.
Surely, the rural conditions of everyday life enabled Gaels to maintain close
bonds with the natural habitat. It would seem legitimate, that in search of the
numinous, they ascribed their landscape with the sacred element and, in con
sequence, their preconceptions of the divine gave prominence to the nature
deities.3 This conjoined argumentation of Eliade and Green works very pro
ductively as it unfolds the relationship between the chthonic and the female
imagery employed in the early visions of the Irish supernatural beings. We can
suppose that the veneration of nature, together with the need to concretise the
numinosity, must have directed the antiquarian Celts towards the most obvi
ous metaphor - that of a protective mother, which, in turn, gave rise to the idea
of the great divine mothers, their children being both gods and people. The
concept of the feminine category employed in the early conceptions of divin
ity appears as the most legitimate in view of Ann Ross’s argument that “[t]he
function of the goddess must, to a certain extent, reflect the function of the
woman, and her most potent and striking characteristics.”4 The Irish context,
however, impressed its own idiosyncratic character on the shape of the cult in
the sense that it merged the female deity with the land in a double perception,
as a chthonic and as a native concept. From the very beginning of the Gaelic
there existed a very strong tripartite relationship representable as land/goddess/
mother. The feminine, maternal metaphor of Ireland, the land, and its sacred
status signify the emergence of the chthonic female deities.
The earliest realisation of the Gaelic chthonic beliefs is concerned with the
goddess Dana.5 Her profile is created mostly on the basis of the mythological
sources since not much is known about Dana’s cult. A certain aid might be
offered by some territorial eponyms since her name was preserved in many
European geographical names, e.g. the Danube, the Don. This may suggest that
her cult was not circumscribed to Ireland, although it is not confirmed by
archaeological fieldwork. This entails a scarcity of iconographic materials
concerning Dana and, on that basis, we can conclude that her cult belongs to
the earliest phases of religious beliefs. Nevertheless, she is identified in the
mythological L ebor G abhala Erenn as a m ater deorum hibernensium .6 Dana
was a primary goddess and a mother of the Tuatha De Danaan, the supernat3 Miranda Green, Celtic Goddesses. Warriors, Virgins and Mothers (London: British
Museum Press, 1995), p. 203.
4 Ann R oss, Pagan Celtic Britain. Studies in Iconography and Tradition (London:
Routledge, 1968), p. 204.
5 Her name is som etim es given as Danu or Anu. Peter Beresford Ellis, A Dictionary o f
the Irish Mythology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p .78. Other sources join her
with other goddesses such as A ine and Grainne. M ichael Dames, Mythic Ireland (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1996), pp. 6 2 -6 3 .
6 In fact, this is the name given to her in Cormac Glossary, cited in D am es, p. 62.
ural tribe inhabiting Ireland at the time of the invasion of Milesians - the
“historical” Gaels. Trying to place the Danann tribe in real chronology, they
are believed to be the Neolithic and Bronze Age pantheon.7 In mythology, Dana
does not appear as an active character featuring in the mythological sagas. Her
presence serves the purpose of providing genealogy of the supernatural, scion
generation of gods. They are depicted as skilful craftsmen, talented musicians
and poets and above all, magicians. Ward Rutherford offers an inseminating
interpretation of this mythological characteristics contributing a vital insight into
the origin of the chthonic cult of Dana:
The M ilesians, on their arrival on Irish shores, found an existing popula
tion practising agriculture, perhaps metal-working, but, at any rate, more
advanced than the newcomers in significant ways. After the customs o f the
agriculturists, the religious practice o f the autochthonous people centred
on the Earth Mother. Whatever her original name may have been, the in
vaders equated her with one o f their own whom they called Danu or Dana,
in much the same way as the Romans were later to equate Celtic gods with
theirs. Accordingly to the original inhabitants they came to be called the
“Tuatha De Danaan.”8
There is, also, a specifically Irish evidence pointing to the earthly, eponymous
associations of Dana. This name and its another version Danu, is linguistically
proved to be cognate with Anu appearing mostly in Munster, where she was
especially venerated. Munster is the southern province in Ireland, where there
are still some topographical names alluding to the past cult. The most prominent
feature is situated near Killamey in Co. Kerry and it is a peculiar kind of a twin
summit mountain, called The Paps of Anu (Da Chich Anainne). The peculiarity
of this place lies in the topographical shape of double tops which, observed from
afar, bear a striking semblance to female breasts. The aesthetics of cultural
geography allows us to interpret this venue as a visual representation of the earth
goddess. Dana, lying in a gentle posture invades the eyes of the onlookers with
a compelling suggestion of a feminine metaphor, presiding over the local land
scape. The Paps of Anu seem to account for the missing passages in mythology
concerning this chthonic Goddess. She did not require a verbal celebration as her
everlasting topographical presence provided an axiomatic certainty. Dana, resid
ing in, and represented by the Paps inspires both the sacredness of the concrete
place and motivates the feminine and maternal metaphor rendered by the reli
gious beliefs. She was mothering the worldly reality by her protective visual
presence, providing a safe, because sacred, habitat.
7 M ichael D am es , Mythic Ireland (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), p. 67.
8 Ward Rutherford, Celtic Mythology. The Nature and Influence o f Celtic Myth - From
Druidism To Arthurian Legend (London: Thorsons, 1995), p. 125.
Alongside the mythographic research one should make an attempt at recon
structing the psychological motives guiding the Gael imagery when conceiv
ing an image of a goddess - land. Dana visualised as an island may be just
an intriguing aesthetic conceit, however as a symbol, she expresses human
nostalgia for the tangible, concrete image of god. If one accepts the hypothesis
of the mythical origin of the chthonic cults, it becomes plausible that the
topographical representation might have foreshadowed a later anthropomorphisation. Even though deprived of human physiology, the goddess, substan
tiated as an island, provides a sense of close contact which must have been
comforting for her confessors. This topographic vision reveals a vital insight
into the psyche of its authors; the fact that the highest goddess is enclosed in
the shape of Ireland, confirms the insular identity of Gaels, for whom the island
was a substitute for the Universe - the island was their world. Concluding, the
topographic representation of the goddess is extremely significant as it testi
fies to the identify of her followers.
The real power exercised by this mother goddess can be fully realised when
taking into consideration other aspects of her cult. Dana/Anu or Aine are both
derivatives from the Gaelic aine. On the linguistic basis one may assume that
there existed a close affinity between these two figures. We may suppose that
Aine is the name of another goddess, sometimes identified as an alter ego of
Dana. Equally valid is the thesis that Aine was an independent local goddess
sharing chthonic features with the more prominent Dana. The lack of conclu
sive material evidence necessitates an analysis of the symbolism of these two
figures in purely hypothetical terms. The psychoanalytical approach and the
structural studies of Levi-Strauss allow to formulate a premise that Dana and
Aine are two variations of the same goddess archetype. Levi-Strauss claims
that successive repetitions of a myth produce versions of lesser intensity which
we can observe comparing Dana/Anu with Aine. The first is characterised
mostly as a fecundity deity assuring the prosperity of both the land and its
inhabitants. The later version featuring Aine renders the original symbolism
only partially: Aine is a love goddess and the sole reference to her fertility is
her vivacious sexuality as she is known to conspire with mortals in passionate
love affairs.9 We may assume this mutation of the original theme to be a much
later accretion. On the other hand, her cult also originated in Munster which
would point to the common origin of both divine personae.
A linguistic analysis of her Gaelic name aine brings about a new set of as
sociations corresponding with the character of Aine; as a common noun it would
denote: delight, joy, pleasure, agility, expedition, swiftness, play, sport, music,
harmony, melody, experience, truth, brightness, glow, radiance, splendour, glory,
brilliance.10 The most important is the last semantic group denoting solar
9 Peter Beresford Ellis, p. 27.
10 Dames, p. 62.
affinities. The Munster location, owing to its southern exposure, intensifies the
solar associations signalled by the name of the goddess. Some sources claim
that Aine was a consort of two male gods: the sun god Echdae and the sea god
Mannannan. By this mythological matrimony Aine joined the elements of water
and the sun in her daily walk across the skies from one spouse to the other."
The theory of Aine/Dana as a solar myth seems to find a confirmation in the
opinion of T. F. O ’Rahilly quoted by R MacCana: “[...] the Sun-goddess of
Celtic belief was also the goddess of earth and of its springs and rivers; or,
to put the matter in different words, the Earth - goddess shared the attributes
of the Sun-god, whose consort she was.”12 T. F. O’Rahilly, apart from the solar
quality, associates the chthonic deity with the aquatic powers accentuated in
the myth of Aine by her other consort - the sea god. Whether we accept this
eponymous variation or not, we can still rely on the place-names which
commemorate the aquatic theme of the Aine cult. Ann Ross mentions the two
venues in Tyrone and Derry called Tobar A in e 13 (the well of Aine), which
suggests that, in the north of Ireland, her cult was associated with holy springs
and curative w ells.14 The diversification of the Dana belief into the solar,
chthonic and aquatic cults accrues her cosmic symbolism. The connections
with water, land, and the sun strengthen the chthonic associations by a direct
reference to these factors providing the fecundity of the land. As a result, Dana
is tantamount with the landscape in its totality which assures her position as
the primary maternal deity who presides over the procreative and regener
ative cycles of life.
Topography and eponym coalesce anew in the figure of Eire, epitomizing
a later archetypal mutation of the Gaelic chthonic goddess. If Dana symbolism
arose mainly from the matters of a religious cult, the figure of Eire is preserved
substantially by the mythological sources. Due to this feature and her epon
ymous characteristics one may formulate an assumption that her cult is less
mature than Dana/Aine, in terms of mythological chronology. Eire appears in
the L eabhar G abhala as an author of the covenant between her people Tuatha
De Danaan and the Milesians - the new-coming invaders. The mythological
genealogy places her in the third generation of the Danaan gods as she was
" Ibid., p. 69.
12
Proinsias MacCana, “A spects o f the Theme o f King and Goddess in Irish Literature,”
Etudes Celtiques, 1 (1956), p. 89.
u Ann R oss, p. 219.
14
The relations between the sovereignty figures and the aquatic cult w ill be manifested
in the figure o f the goddess Boann. She is the eponymous goddess mentioned in Dinnshencas
responsible for the emergence o f the river Boyne. She exhibits both the features o f the early
fecundity cult as water sym bolises the life force but also the myths recorded her numerous
marriages, which is characteristic o f the later version o f sovereignty figures. Green, Celtic
Goddesses, p. 82.
married to the grandson of the Dagda, hence the great-grandson of Dana. The
distinct family relations depicted by the mythic author indicate that this myth
ological figure already belongs to the anthropomorphic deities, perhaps retain
ing the chthonic identity under a new guise. Nevertheless, the significance of
this figure lies in her eponymous character as she is the mythical goddess who
gave name to the island (Eiru, a genitive form Erenn, which evolved into Erin,
meaning Ireland). After the Sons of Mil (most probably the Gaels) defeated
the Tuatha De Danaan, they proceded to Tara, the seat of the High Kings. On
their way, they were greeted in turn by Eire and her two sisters, all of whom
promised their supernatural care over the land in return for a favour. All sis
ters demanded to have her name commemorated in the name of the island. Eire’s
prophesy, that Ireland will belong to the Milesians for ever, pleased their Druid
Amairgen so much that he accepted her offer and named Ireland after her.15
The covenant between the humans and the supernatural tribe divided Ireland
in two parts so that the Milesians took the land into their possession and the
Tuatha De Danaan were pushed underground to the subterraneous reality.
Patrick K. Ford joins this mythical division with another motivation for the
feminine metaphor of Ireland. The holy mounds, sidhe, which were believed
to have become the abodes of the Danaan tribe, evolved in the common tra
dition into the “fairy-mounds,” associated with the female wizards. In the course
of the myth deterioration the supernatural goddesses were degraded to the range
of fairies and enchantresses.16
The myth of Eire requires a special examination since it introduces a new
constitutive quality - it initiates the triplicate representation of the eponymous
goddess. The Mythological Cycle mentions Eire together with her two sisters:
Banba and Fótla. The fictional device relating the three figures by means of
close family bonds is a pretence which, in fact, conceals and hints at their true
relationship on the religious level. All the sisters are three realisations of the
same goddess. Out of the three, Eire is the most prominent figure since she
became the eponym for Ireland. One should remember though, that the names
of the other sisters were used as poetic synonyms for the island. The Irish
mythology does not preserve much information about these figures, which
attests to their pre-anthropomorphic origin.17 Nevertheless, the three sisters enter
the recorded history of beliefs and they are the protagonists of the mytholog
ical story owing to the fact that they were married to three brothers, sons of
Ogma, the Danaan god of eloquence. Eire was married to Mac Greine, Fótla
to Mac Cecht and Banba to Mac Cuill. The three kings decided to divide Ireland
15 Peter Beresford Ellis, p. 97.
16 Patrick K. Ford, “Celtic Women the Opposing S ex,” Viator, Vol. 19 (1988), p. 425.
17 Although the name o f the Scottish district Atholl is an A nglicised from o f Aith Fhotla
- N ew Ireland, w hich most probably preserves the name o f Fótla. E llis, p. 127.
between themselves but they did not reign long as in a short time, due to the
killing of their Milesian advisor, the successful invasion of the Sons of Mil on
Ireland intervened. In view of this story, the three goddesses become the link
ing characters between the two epochs in the mythological history of Ireland.
Their Danaan husbands mark their supernatural origin, but at the same time,
their covenant with the Milesians denotes the human era on the island. At this
point we observe an emergence of the regal aspect of the chthonic deities, later
developed as a sovereignty theme. The sovereignty goddess grants prosperity
of the land to its king, which in the myth resulted in a long succession of royal
marriages attributed to particular sovereignty characters. We can see that,
although defeated militarily, Eire is the dominating party in the conflict, en
suring that the land becomes hers for ever. That it happened can be confirmed
by referring to the Dinnsenchas, a collection of myths recording the topograph
ical history of the island, in which the anonymous author compares this proc
ess metaphorically to the growth of a woman: “Growing as grew the woman
[...] so gloriously grew the hill above earth’s bright surface. [She said:] ‘I am
heaved up on high so that the sun scorches me’ [...] - unless she said that the
peak would have grown until Ireland was full thereof.” 18 This personified de
scription of the topographical evolution facilitates the classification of Eire as
the first, full-fledged, eponymous character, who conjoins successfully the top
ographical associations with the sacredness of the land through her supernat
ural, divine status.
Having expanded on the characteristics of Eire, who dominates over the
other two divine sisters I shall now turn to the triplicate shape of the goddess.
The idea of triune goddesses is not typically Gaelic, we can assume that the
insular mythic conception of three goddesses was imported from the Romano-Celtic Europe.19 Nevertheless, the mythological Gaelic triune deities match
the iconographic representations found in Germany and France. Triplicate
female images are associated with the cult of Mothers implying again their
concern with fecundity of people or of land, which surely induced the chthonic
relations in Ireland. However, research concerning the Continental cults sig
nals a variation of the fecundity theme, which developed so as to embrace the
matters of healing and, in a wider context, the subject of life and death. This
diversified scope of associations given to the triplicate Mothers is further con
firmed by the remaining iconography. The female images are often presented
with the attributes of motherhood, like a figure of a child, napkin, and basin
and sponge;20 or of the chthonic fertility, like cornucopian symbols: fruit, grain,
18 Cited in Dam es, p. 232.
19 Ann R oss, p. 209.
20 Attributes o f m other-goddesses presented on the stone plaque, found in the RomanoGaulish settlement at Vertillum, Burgundy. Green, Celtic Goddesses, p. 81.
and coins.21 The multitude of emblems indicates the complexity of this cult,
and so the exact imagery of the women presented. They are not triple repe
titions of the same image since they vary in age and personal features. Such
a representation works effectively in an attempt to render the idea of sisters,
who surely are not mere a triplicate replication. Miranda Green presents a valuable
analysis of the triplism symbolism.22 For sure, one of the reasons for the trip
licate images, she maintains, is the intensification of the power exercised by
the goddesses. But it is not solely the repetition of the images but their diver
sification into three aspects that amounts to the vision of a powerful deity.
The extended theory of triplism symbolism may turn out very constructive
in our analysis of the Eire/Fótla/Banba triad. As Green suggests the diversi
fication of the divine identity into three aspects may enrich our perception of
this mythical figure. Their sisterly relationship denotes differentiation of the
age of three women, which in turn, may symbolise both the three stages of
womanhood and the intensification in time to past, present and future.23 The
complex structure of Eire/Fótla/Banba - a trinity as one is stressed, on the
narrative level of the myth, by their matrimony to three brothers but it is the
linguistic analysis of their names that produces a constructive inference about
their complementary nature. Michael Dames proves that the consorts of the
goddesses were not accidental and their mutual relationships enhance their
chthonic properties.24 Eire was wedded to Mac Greine, whose name grian
denotes “sun,” which constructs a tandem of eponymous and solar associations,
identical with those we detected when discussing the figure of Aine. Here
likewise, the goddess acquires the solar quality by marrying the sun god, hence
her divine capabilities are diversified. A similar process intervenes in the case
of the second goddess, however, here we encounter merely an intensification
of the Fotla’s chthonic cult. It was achieved by her nuptial union with Mac
Cecht whose name (checht) denotes “ploughshare” conveying obvious asso
ciations with the fecundity of the land and its regenerative abilities.
More enigmatic is the union connecting Banba with her consort Mac Cuill,
translated as “a son of holly.” Dames deciphers the puzzle of his name by joining
it with the winter season, traditionally associated with the supernatural beings
lurking out of their sidhe, “subterraneous dwelling place,” and taking over the
power of the human realm, which proceeded with the turn of the autumn and
winter, on the Samhain, or the Halloween Eve. Following this interpretation
we can draw two conclusions as to the identity of Banba. On the one hand,
2lAttributes o f goddesses excavated in Bonn, Germany, first or second century A D. Ib id ,
p. 72.
22 Ibid.
23 Ib id , p. 116.
24 Dames, pp. 2 0 3 -2 0 4 .
her connection with the winter/underworld concepts enhances her supernatu
ral origin of a sidhe woman. On the other hand, this collusion of her chthonicity with the winter season enables us to draw together the aspect of fecun
dity with the winter time of incubation, the underground growth and, so to speak
metaphorically, the pregnancy of the land in anticipation of the spring and
a delivery of new life. My interpretation meets Dames’ argument when he
recalls the cult of pigs, the animals traditionally associated with Banba (banb
- a small pig, or banban - a young pig). This cult originated in the agricul
turist Neolithic Age, when the pig was seen as an embodiment of a fast growth
of nurturing goods, and due to this feature, it came to symbolise the earth itself.25
On the basis of this twofold argumentation we can conclude that Banba pri
marily symbolises the chthonic values, however, her domain is the mystery of
regeneration, the process itself rather than its productive outcome. On the whole,
the picture of this eponymous goddess constructed and intensified by adjoin
ing her three aspects confirms its relations with the fecundity of the land: Banba
mothers the pregnancy of the soil whereas Fótla presides over the prosperity
of the harvest. Eire - the island is the dominant and unifying power binding
together the subterraneous reality of Banba with the superficial realm of Fótla.
Although the triad of Eire/Fótla/Banba bears a seeming semblance to the
Romano-Celtic concept of the Three Mother Goddesses, it does not exclude
another source of inspiration contributing to the triplicate representation of the
divine. The Gaelic mythographic evidence may direct us to a hypothesis that
alongside the Continental tradition, the Gaelic culture worked out a similar
pattern of a multiple representation. A purely Gaelic origin of the divine triplism is detectable in chthonic cults preceding this of Eire/Fótla/Banba. Let us
refer back to the Dana characteristics; I hope to have demonstrated that she
is presented as a singular deity whether she symbolised the chthonic, solar or
aquatic forces. The three different realms associated with her constitute a unified
concept only when interpreted within the triplism symbolism. It operates as
a totalising idea binding the three aspects in a singular image of a triune deity.
The triune preconception of a deity may have been a factor which elevated the
goddess to a primary position owing to its all-encompassing, nature. Perhaps,
such a cosmic scope denoted a specific efficacy of the deity which, in turn, could
be one of the reasons responsible for the popularity of her cult both among
the Insular and Continental Celts.
Having succeeded, I hope, in showing the origin of the chthonic pattern
guiding the Celtic female deities, I shall now proceed to the last exemplum,
without which the cross-section of the chthonic goddesses would be incom
plete. The mythological figure of Cesair belongs to the same category, yet it
transforms considerably the theme of the eponymous goddesses. It is a late
antiquarian offshoot from the core of the chthonic paradigm, which was trans
formed owing to the Christian context. Undoubtedly, the Cesair legend advances
the thesis that the evolution of the chthonic category is correlated with the
general progress of religious forms. The most original form of the chthonic
goddess Dana/Aine corresponds with the mythical stage in the development
of religion and it was further developed by adding the aspect of the triune
representation. The emphasis put on the humanised triplicate image points to
the anthropomorphic background of this operation. Consequently, as the Celt
ic religion evolved into the monotheistic stage, it would seem natural to detect
an example which would accommodate the component of the chthonic/eponymous conception within the Christian context. This, I hope to explicate
analysing the theme of Cesair.
Anthropologically, Dana/Aine figure renders the earliest features of
a religious cult which is not, however confirmed by the Irish mythological
sources. According to the Mythological Cycle, it is Cesair and not Dana, who
is presented as the mother to Ireland and her people. The most common version
of the myth26 has it that Cesair, a daughter of Bith, son of Noah, led the first
invasion on Ireland forty days before the Flood. Noah advised her to go to the
western outskirts of the Earth so that she can survive the Flood. Her company
consisted of three men: her father Bith; Landru the steerman, or in some versions
her brother; and Fintan, who had been chosen to marry Cesair. The men were
accompanied by fifty women, who after the landing were distributed among
the three of them. In a short time, all women were left abandoned by their
husbands - both Landru and Bith died and Fintan fell into a magical dream,
out of which he was roused much later by God to certify the ancient past. The
whole story ends with a death of Cesair who, being abandoned by her men,
died out of grief, as did the other women. This was followed by the waters
of the Deluge overwhelming the island.
On the textual level we can observe an interference of two mythological
qualities: the original Gaelic elements intermingle with the components orig
inating from the common Christian mythology of the Old Testament. The
questions to be posed and discussed refer to the purpose and origin of inter
mingling the two streams of mythical thinking and its impact on the alterations
done to the quality of the chthonic goddess. There are certain premises bind
ing the origin of this myth with the Gaelic background. Primarily, it is the pre
eminence of the female leader and the feminine character of her invasion that
bears a vague semblance to the other early Irish myths joining the local cos
mology with the female characters. Therefore, on the symbolical level, Cesair
is the first proprietor of Ireland. Her femininity, together with the regal asso26
Jonh Carey presents at least a few versions contributing to this legend. John Carey,
“Origin and developm ent o f the Cesair Legend,” Eigse, Vol. 22 (1987).
ciations and the aspect of conquering the island, present an image of Cesair
as the ancestral originator of the eponymous characters. This concept is inten
sified by the presence of women-attandants, which grounds soundly the fem
inine metaphor ascribed to the island.
Such a condensation of the female, chthonic associations in the apocryphal
story of Cesair colludes with the original Gaelic imagery. John Carey, who is
equally dubious of the coincidental semblance between Cesair and other fe
male goddesses, analysed the story in search of the pagan elements. Besides
the cosmogonal mood of the narrative, Carey detected a visible convergence
between the story of Cesair with some other early myths comprising the various
dinnsenchas. Among these topographical legends, stories relating to the places
Tuag Inbir, Tonn Chlidna and Ess Ruaid repeat the themes either of a primal
landing at Ireland of three men, or of a female party. Some include the motif
of a wave bringing destruction to all of the characters or only the female
protagonists.27 This disclosure brought Carey to the following conclusion:
To reduce all o f these legends to a single hypothetical prototype would be
a futile and a rather suspect exercise; taken collectively, however, I believe
that they represent the matrix from which the Cesair tale arose [...] the
dindchenchas [dinnsenchas] stories provide parallels for almost all o f the de
tails o f the Cesair legend, furnishing it with a context well established in Irish
tradition [...] it should be emphasised the story appears to be a local legend,
with no necessary connection to traditions either o f world deluge or o f pri
meval migration.28
The original pagan source of the story exemplified by Carey provides us
with another link joining this female character and her alleged relations with
mythical chthonic goddesses. Interestingly enough, one of the more primitive
versions of the story preserved in the Book o f Ferm oy presents such an open
ing: “This is what the Book of Drimm Snechta says: that Banba was the name
of the first maiden who took Ireland before the Flood, and that it is from her
that Ireland is named Banba. She came with thrice fifty maidens and three
men.”29 This fragment motivated Miranda Green to characterise Banba as an
ancestral goddess, operating as an alter ego of Cesair.30 If we accept the
amalgam of these two figures, regardless of the mutual relations between them,
the chthonic associations become self-evident. The first human woman-invader is the most legitimate possessor of the island as she renders the idea of the
Great Mother. Perhaps this literary device is a pagan equivalent constructing
27 John Carey, passim.
28 Ibid., pp. 4 5 -4 6 .
29 Ibid., p. 39.
30 Green, Celtic Goddesses, p. 82.
a genealogy which would certify the continuity and homogenity of the Gaelic
tradition. The complex Eire/Fótla/Banba is a sufficient ancestry to be referred
to, although it introduces a chronological mess to the sequence of myths.
According to the apocryphal history, Cesair should precede the Danaan inva
sion which brought about the characters of Eire and her sisters, who in more
authentic Gaelic sources are founding goddesses themselves.
Even though the Gaelic sources enable us to accommodate the legend of
Cesair within the indigenous tradition, the remaining Christian elements shed
some doubts on the purely Irish origin of the story. Regardless of the Christian
intrusions into the text, like the figure of Noah, a direct reference to the bib
lical Flood, and to the monotheistic God who rouses Fintan from his sleep, it
is the absence of this story from the H istoria Brittonum, an early record of Irish
invasions, that works against the theory of its Irish origin. The anti-Gaelic view
that the story must have been added to the original collection was widely
supported by such experts on the Irish myth as Arbois de Jubainville, van Hamel
and Thumeysen who, as John Carey summarises: “[...] saw Cesair as an al
most mechanical extension of the scheme of Irish history, concocted simply
in order to claim an antediluvian settlement for Ireland.”31 This might have been
an aspect of a wider process since, we have to bear in mind, the original my
thology concerned with the dawn of the Gaels in Ireland does not include any
passage referring to the cosmological issues of the island such as the creation
of the Universe or of the first people. This, most obviously, disturbing absence
coerced the diligent medieval redactors to provide a story which would join
the Gaelic presence in Ireland with the heritage of Christendom so as to enhance
the common origin from the same ancestors. Such a confabulation was aimed
at, on the one hand anchoring the history of the Irish in a more or less rec
ognised timing (Ireland was conquered before the Flood), and on the other hand,
at elevating their own mythology from mere paganism to the respectful status
of a Christian documentary. Therefore, one may identify Leabhar Gabhala (The
Book o f Takings o f Ireland) as a source which underwent “biblicisation” and
produced an apocryphal history of the island synchronised with the Christian
cosmology. The synchronisation would require an opening passage depicting
a creation of the Universe and proceeding to the story o f the Flood, thus
associating the descent of the Irish Gaels with Noah. An outcome of such
a literary manipulation is a mythological compound merging the native Gaelic
elements with the Hebrew mythology and interlocked with the medieval
legend.
Additionally, Alwyn and Brinley Rees conclude that the process of further
mythologising the myth, by accreting foreign themes, is part of cultural growth
and unification with the dominant cultural system: “For the early Christian Celts
[...] the acceptance of the new Faith, which has a cosmogony of its own, in
evitably involved severing the stem of native tradition at some point or other
and grafting it on to the Christian roots through which it would henceforth draw
its sustenance.”32 In other words, the story of Cesair documents the process
of synthesising the history of a nation out of miscellaneous, indigenous ma
terials into the framework of the “official” Christian mythology.
In view of this argumentation, we may assume Cesair to have become
a character central to the apocryphal cosmogony of Christian Gaels. Her de
scent from Noah granted the most revered genealogy, grounding the Irish history
in the beginning of time. What is more, joining the antediluvian chronology
with the Irish setting produces a powerful metaphor of an island born to life
out of the primeval waters of the Deluge. There are several aspects mentioned
in the story which indicate the relations of Cesair with the cosmogony of the
island. On the symbolical level, the cosmogonal character of Cesair is enhanced
by her aquatic associations. She is associated with the waters of the Deluge
symbolising the re-birth or a subsequent re-creation of the world, which after
a period of submergence under water re-emerges anew. The Christian metaphor
of the Flood should not overshadow the universal symbolism of water as an
arche conditioning the creation of the Universe and the indispensable nourish
ment of life. The elemental oppositions of land and water become reconciled
in the character of Cesair who, having emerged from the sea/flood waters to
the land, becomes a mould of life permeated with the chthonic symbolism,
enhanced further in the myth by the pre-dominant feminine element. Simul
taneously, the significance of her invasion lies in the fact that, as she is the
first one to conquer the island, she acquires a maternal status in cosmogonal
terms, binding together the local with the universal, and, in quasi-historical terms
- as she is a mother to the Gaels and the human realm.
This can lead us to the metaphorical analysis of Cesair’s participation in
the “creation,” of the island. Her name is cognate with C esair meaning “car
ries, brings forth, draws out,”33 which emphasises the growth and development.
Her name signifies, therefore, that she possesses the features of a maternal
creator and constructor, which can provoke a conclusion that she is the figure
presiding metaphorically over creation. This act of creation differs, however,
from the biblical, god-centred pattern. On the reverse, the story presents cre
ation viewed from an anthropic perspective. In the myth Cesair embarks on
the shore and by this event, Ireland achieves substantiality, or in other words,
it enters recorded human history. Such an interpretation allows us to reconcile
the apocryphal cosmogony with its lack among the early Celtic myths. Sym32 Alwyn Rees and Brinley Rees, Celtic Heritage. Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales,
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), p. 95.
33 Dames, p. 147.
bolically, Ireland was brought to life by the very fact of its mythological
discovery by men. This, however, does not deny the everlasting status of the
eternal entity. The island was already there, undiscovered yet, waiting for those
who would mark its presence on the sea maps and in literature alike.
The anthropic perspective of the insular conception may be expanded further
since Alwyn and Brinley Rees interpret an act of creation as cognate with
a division. This brings them to the conclusion that Cesair embodies such di
viding powers. The Rees motivate their interpretation by her first act, which
was to divide the women retinue among three men travelling with her. This
was followed by the three parties going in three directions which marked the
partition of the realms, being the first geo-political division.34 The distribution
of women and the successive division of the land among men resembles the
primeval separation of the whole into parts, thus conceiving the cosmic mul
titude. The local repetition of the creation ceremony is presided over by the
female character - Cesair, who thus becomes associated with the beginnings
of the human history of Ireland and is therefore commensurate with the insu
lar dimension. Closing this section, it should be accentuated that regardless of
the foreign mythological framing Cesair joins the eponymous goddesses who
preceded her. The figures of Dana/Aine, Eire/Banba/Fótla together with Ce
sair certify that an element of the feminine predominates in the mythological
accounts endeavouring to re-create the origin of Ireland.
Finally, the general argument of the following pages may be summed up
as follows: A mythographic analysis of the chthonic deities points to their
incontestable generic homogeneity. Their two primary features: the feminine
metaphor and the eponymous character testify to their belonging to the same
archetypal pattern. The differing minor distinctive features co-creating their
profiles ensue from the changing cultural context, which produced these var
iations. The chthonic paradigm is an amalgam of three interchanged influenc
es: of the pre-Gaelic culture, the Gaelic paganism and the Irish Christianity.
The outcome of these moulding cultural forces constitutes an evolution of the
chthonic pattern and may be presented in the following way: although the female
substantiation of the deity is not an indigenous Gaelic feature, it was success
fully accommodated by the Gaels since this concept renders their fascination
with the mystery of nature regeneration, naturally related to the female factor.
The early chthonic goddess, in the course of the cult development, evolved into
the triplicate representations of the mother-goddesses which intensified the cult
by means of its diversification into three aspects. Along with the feminine
metaphor, at this initial stage of the myth formation the eponymous characters
are inseparably related to the topography of Ireland. The land itself may func
tion as substantiation of the goddess, as it was with the Dana deity, but in the
later transformations of the topographical aspect, the goddess symbolises the
land. Eire is certainly a transitional character who shares the features of the two
aspects - she is both the land and its emblem, however in the quasi-myth of
Cesair, we witness a considerable shift towards the symbolical representation
of the goddess/land inference. Therefore, restating, the identity of the Gaelic
chthonic goddess illustrates how winding the path directing the myth transfor
mation can possibly be.
The Identity of the Commander Nomad Organization Against the State
In Geronim o, a film by Walter Hill, there is a scene in which a detachment
of US cavalry encounters in the mountains of Arizona a small group of Chiricahua Apache warriors. The Indians, single file as usual, appear unexpectedly
on the left at a distance of a few hundred metres, a kilometre perhaps, and for
a minute or so the two parties ride parallel to each other slowly and gingerly.
Suddenly the Indian who heads the file starts galloping towards the US cav
alrymen. Their commander, lieutenant Charles Gatewood, raises his hand to
stop the column and alone rides forward about a hundred metres, then stops.
The galloping Apache also stops and begins to shout to Gatewood.
In the column behind Gatewood there is a young lieutenant who has re
cently graduated from a military academy and has been in the field for a few
weeks only. He is puzzled by the situation, so he asks an Apache scout
employed by the US army about what is happening. The scout explains that
the warriors they have just encountered are a raiding party that has split off
from Geronimo, and that the warrior who has left the file and galloped towards
them challenges Gatewood to fight; he wants to show the others that he is
brave.
Gatewood neither moves nor says anything. The Apache draws out his pistol
and shoots at him but they are too far away from each other for the shot to
be accurate. So the Apache spurs his horse and continuing to fire his pistol
at Gatewood starts galloping towards him. Gatewood waits a few seconds, then
forces his horse to lie down, hides behind the animal, draws out his rifle, takes
careful aim and kills the Indian with a single shot. The duel is over. Both the
Apaches and the Bluecoats remain silent and motionless for a while, then the
Apaches ride away.
If we examine the duel in the context of the film’s plot, we may come to
the conclusion that the scene is redundant; the story would not lose any of its
coherence if the scene were cut out. But on the cultural and political plane the
scene appears to be of crucial importance, almost indispensable to the under
standing of the film, because it reveals one of the essential differences between
the nomad organization and the State, and in this way gives us an insight into
what happened when the USA expanded west of the Mississippi River, into
the Great Plains - the land of the North American nomads.
We are told in the film that the Apache who challenged lieutenant Gate
wood wanted to show the others that he was brave. But what he did, and
especially the way he did it, looked very reckless, almost suicidal. The ques
tion, then, is whether he wanted to do it, or whether he, in a sense, had to. The
answer that imposes itself is that he did have to if he wanted to remain in
command.
In an attempt to explain the Apache’s apparently reckless behaviour, ref
erence to Elias Canetti’s analysis of the command (order) may prove useful.1
He looks for the origins of the command in the animal world. According to
him “Commands are older than speech. If this were not so, dogs could not
understand them. Animals can be trained because they can be taught to un
derstand what is required of them without understanding speech.”2 The orig
inal command is that given by a stronger animal to a weaker one of a different
species on which the stronger one preys. It is a command to flee. If the weaker
animal does not escape, it will be eaten. The original command developed from
a threat of death;
For the roar o f the lion is a death sentence. It is the one sound in its lan
guage which all its victims understand; this threat may be the only thing they
have in common, widely different as they otherwise are. The oldest com
mand - and it is far older than man - is a death sentence, and it compels the
victim to flee. We should remember this when w e come to discuss human
commands. Beneath all commands glints the harshness o f the death sentence.3
Though we may find parts of Canetti’s argument not entirely convincing, we
have to admit that what he writes about the link between the command and
the death sentence is undoubtedly true in the case of the armed forces - es
pecially in wartime, when it is made clear to all soldiers that there is a court
martial with its threat of death behind almost every command.4
1 Cf. the chapter entitled “The Command” in E. Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans.
C. Stewart (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981).
2 Ibid., p. 351.
3 Ibid., p. 352.
4 Canetti is aware, o f course, that human commands are more com plex and that the obey-or-die situations are rare. We may also point here to other easily distiguishable forces behind/
It is crucial that we mention the court martial in our analysis, because it
shows that the army detached the death sentence from the body that issues
commands; in effect, the power of a command does not come from the officer
who gives the command. He may even be incompetent and despised by his
soldiers, yet his orders will still be obeyed; instances of insubordination are
statistically very rare.5 To use Canetti’s simile we could say that if a command
is a roar, then it is certainly not the officer who is the lion. At best, he might
be the lion’s throat. It is the court martial that has in part assumed the role of
the lion (“in part” because it is not the source of a command).6
Canetti’s analysis is certainly very interesting and seminal too, but from our
perspective it has a serious shortcoming: it fails to distinguish between two basic
types of commanders - the officer and the chieftain. By failing to make this
distinction Canetti did not realize that in fact he was not writing about the
command in general, but only about one type of command.
The officer holds office; he is part of an institution. He was placed in his
position by his superiors, literally by the people “from above” (Latin superus
means “placed above”). The power of his commands is thus the power of the
institution; it is not his power. Very often he does not even give commands
himself but only passes down those he has received from above, and then it
becomes clear that he is a transmitter (a new kind of herald), a representative,
a proxy. The State, especially in its modern form, turns the whole army into
a proxy. The commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful army, that of
the USA, is the President, i.e. a civilian, and the head of NATO, the world’s
most powerful military organization, is a civilian too. The officer of the highest
rank in the armed forces is still only a recipient of commands. Indeed, the State
puts a lot of effort into preventing the army from becoming the source of
a command - into averting the danger of the army turning itself into a true lion.
/beneath the command. For exam ple, a soldier may feel com pelled to obey orders out o f pa
triotism - to defend his motherland invaded by enemies; or he may understand that a group
o f which he is a member w ill survive in a dangerous and traumatic situation only through
joint and w ell-organized action, which often means obeying the orders given by an experi
enced commander (a situation not infrequent at sea, which becam e one o f Joseph Conrad’s
favourite themes). But no matter how complex the forces behind a command may be, the
threat o f death never disappears: “Am ongst men they [commands] have becom e so system a
tized that death is normally avoided, but the threat and the fear o f it is always contained in
them; and the continued pronouncement and execution o f real death sentences keeps alive the
fear o f every individual command and o f commands in general.” Crowds and Power, p. 352.
5 One can argue that it is largely due to their rareness that instances o f group insubordi
nation - such as the mutiny aboard HMS Bounty - became w idely known and are stored in
popular imagination as adventure stories, as i f they were equally improbable.
6 We should not be misled here by the fact that in the past officers were som etim es given
the right to kill soldiers on the spot for their disobedience. It only means that the officers
were allowed - always for the time being only! - to act in the name o f the court martial.
The idea of officership implies that the three elements of a command which
appear together in the lion are distributed among three bodies: the officer, who
is the giver, often nothing more than a pronouncer, of commands; the court
martial, which is the death-threatener, sometimes the executioner; and the State,
which is the source of a command.
However, Canetti’s lion theory, though original and inspiring, is not appli
cable to chieftainship. To explain why let us refer to a brief note about the
Bedouin which Immanuel Kant makes in his essay on history. Kant is worth
quoting at this point not because he can be regarded as an expert on nomadism
and chieftainship, but because he was one of the first to say very explicitly
that the nomad organization opposes the State. If so, then we can assume that
the chieftain, who is an essential part of the nomad organization, must stand
in a similar opposition to the officer, who represents the State. The note reads
as follows:
The Bedouins o f Arabia still describe themselves as children o f a former
sheikh, the founder o f their tribe [...] But the sheikh is by no means their
master, and he cannot force his will upon them as he chooses. For in a nation
o f herdsmen, no one has fixed property which he cannot take with him, so
that any family which is discontented with its tribe can easily leave it and
join forces with another.7
To make the picture of the sheikh a little more complete, we can supplement
Kant’s remarks by saying that in Bedouin communities the leader is elected,
7 1. Kant, “Conjectures on the Beginning o f Human History”, in Kant: Political Writ
ings, ed. H. R eiss, trans. H. B. N isbet (Cambridge: Cambridge U niversity Press, 1991),
p. 230. And in order to demonstrate that what Kant says about the Bedouin sheikh is in fact
true o f any chieftain in a nomadic community, let us quote a passage describing the prob
lems which Red Cloud, a famous Sioux chieftain, had with his warriors:
A g a in R e d C lo u d r e f u s e d to in te rfe re . H e w a s n o t s u rp r is e d w h e n m a n y o f th e p r o te s te r s p a c k e d u p , d is m a n
tle d th e ir te p e e s , a n d s ta r te d b a c k n o rth to s p e n d th e w in te r o f f th e r e s e r v a tio n . T h e y h a d p r o v e d to h im th a t
th e re w e re s till S io u x w a rrio rs w h o w o u ld n e v e r ta k e lig h tly a n y in v a s io n o f P a h a S a p a , y e t a p p a re n tly Red
Cloud did not realize that he w ay losing these young men forever. They had rejected his leadership fo r th a t o f
S ittin g B u ll a n d C ra z y H o rs e , n e ith e r o f w h o m h a d e v e r liv e d o n a re s e r v a tio n o r ta k e n th e w h ite m a n ’s h a n d
o u ts.
D.
Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (London: Vintage, Random House, 1991),
p. 278. [Italics mine.]
The State does not tolerate in its army any such “rejections o f leadership”. They are la
belled desertion or treason and are punishable by death. Even the civ il administration o f
a democratic country - though it grants one a lot o f freedom - makes one obey the com
mands o f those who have won the elections, and it does not matter in the least whether one
has voted for them or not. It is even quite possible that one may spend o n e’s w hole life be
ing governed by people w hom , personally, one has never accepted as leaders; the same may
be true o f on e’s workplace.
and that his position is seen as that of the “first among equals” ; his power
consists in arbitrating rather than issuing commands.8
The chieftain of a nomadic tribe is not their master, he cannot force his will
upon his people. The difference between the chieftain and the officer begins
to manifest itself already when we try to choose the right words to describe
the two commanders. For example, we have called the recipients of the chief
tain’s commands “his people,” because in no way could we refer to them as
“his subordinates” or “his inferiors” (Claude Levi-Strauss, for example, when
writing about chieftainship in Mato Grosso, calls the recipients of the chief’s
commands “his fellow-members of the group” and “his companions”). It is
enough to take a look at a picture of any Cheyenne or Sioux warrior and try
to think of him as somebody’s subordinate to see that one cannot help but laugh
at the preposterousness of such an idea.
The chieftain’s commands do not contain a death threat, often no threats
at all, because he himself is not a threatener and there is no authority above
or behind him that would attach such a threat to his commands. A chieftain
cannot be characterized as powerful. Deleuze and Guattari say that within
communities which have chiefs there are “diffuse, collective mechanisms” or
“mechanisms of inhibition” that prevent the chief from acquiring stable power
and make it impossible for him to become a man of State.9 In practice, such
mechanisms radically reduce the power of his commands.
One of these preventive mechanisms, essential to our analysis, is the dis
persion of wealth - a complete reversal of what we find among the sedentaries
of the State. In the note about the Bedouin, Kant makes it very explicit that
there is a close link between the command and property (a link which Canetti
seemed to have overlooked, though it is no less important than the one between
the command and death). A command appears to be a kind of blackmail, the
use of which is possible only among the owners of immovable property. Those
who have not got such property cannot be forced to obey orders.
It is never, of course, as simple as that, but basically Kant is right. The
problem is that he did not enquire fully into the consequences of the blackmail
nor did he ask who the blackmailers were. Perhaps he found the answer to be
8 Cf. B. Lew is, The Arabs in History (Oxford: Oxford U niversity Press, 1993). I use the
Polish translation: B. Lewis, Arabowie w historii, trans. J. Danecki (Warszawa: Państwowy
Instytut W ydawniczy, 1995), p. 36. Bernard Lewis also writes that in the nomadic com m u
nities o f Arabia the sheikh did not have at his diposal any means o f coercion, and that in
fact such notions as power, rule, public punishment, etc. were regarded with abhorrence among
the Arabian nomads. Ibid., pp. 3 6 -3 7 .
9 Cf. G. D eleuze and F. Guattari, “ 1227: Treatise on N om adology - the War M achine”,
in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Shizophrenia, trans. B. M assumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1992), pp. 3 5 7 -3 5 8 . The exam ples given by D eleuze and Guattari com e from the
works o f P. Clastres, J. Meunier, and I. S. Bernstein.
all too obvious: they have always been those who managed to accumulate much
more than their neighbours. The reign of William the Conqueror is a good
example (in fact the reign of almost any feudal king could be used as an
example). William was very generous and granted a lot of land to his knights,
but at the same time he saw to it that he possessed much more than anybody
else. He understood very well that in order to be in effective control of the
country, he had to be the chief possessor, the first landlord.
Nowadays we find it difficult to imagine that property could be the source
of almost unlimited power, which really turned commands into death sen
tences.
In 1194 the crusading knight, Henry o f Champagne, paid a visit to the head
quarters o f the Assassins at the castle at al-Kahf [...] Henry was sumptuously
received. In one o f the more impressive entertainments a succession o f the
loyal members o f the cult, at a word from the Sheik, expertly immolated them
selves. Before and ever since, the willing obedience o f a household coterie
has been a source o f similar satisfaction to those able to command it. Wealth
has been the most prominent device by which it has been obtained . 10
Real property, then, creates not only the recipients but also the issuers of
commands. Most people, of course, would prefer to be on the issuers’ side
because no one likes receiving commands: “an action performed as the result
of a command [...] is experienced and remembered as something alien, some
thing not really our own.” 11 The sedentary, however, is left with little choice.
In order to move from the position of the recipient of commands to that of the
issuer he has to accumulate wealth. Although there is no clear dividing line
between those who obey and those in authority, a certain general tendency is
easily discernable: the more one accumulates, the fewer commands are direct
ed at the person, until finally one becomes a master.
Within the areas controlled by the State accumulation of wealth has always
been the sedentary’s dream irrespective of social class. The aristocracy had the
force to divide among themselves the whole land of their native and conquered
countries. Those of simple birth could not do it but they wished they could:
in folktales the hero, a humble peasant boy, is very often rewarded with
a kingdom, or at least half of it, for his acts of bravery. Fame, admiration,
respect, etc. are not a sufficient reward. Ultimately, it is only the possesion of
land, real(!) property, that counts. The king’s daughter, who is part of the reward,
10
J. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962), pp. 8 1 82. [Italics mine.] Galbraith speaks o f wealth in general, but it is obvious that among the
sedentaries it has always been the im movable property that counted most. Even now, at the
end o f the 20th century, investments in real property are said to be the safest ones.
" Crowds and Power, p. 353.
only confirms the hero’s new status - now he is the master. Likewise, the middle
classes, who came into existence as a result of accumulation of wealth, told
their stories in the novel, in which the theme of becoming rich was for a long
time a central one.12
Expressions of the sedentary’s aspirations to achieve a leading position
through the accumulation of wealth are indeed very numerous, but few people
put it as bluntly as Tevye the milkman in F iddler on the Roof. Tevye sings that
if he were a rich man, he not only would not have to work hard, but would
also become a highly esteemed figure in the community. “If I were a rich man,”
says Tevye, then “the most important men in town will come to fawn on me.
They’ll ask me to advise them like a Solomon wise. [...] And it won’t make
one bit of difference if I answer right or wrong - when you’re rich, they think
you really know.”
The position Tevye dreams of attaining is something extreme; there is no
exaggeration in the way he describes it. In their societal development the
sedentaries have reached a stage in which accumulated wealth makes such an
overwhelming impression that people no longer have to be forced to obey
commands, they ask for them .13 Apparently, it is advice that they seek, not
12Ian Watt in his essay on Robinson Crusoe analyses the way in w hich the novel re
flected the drive towards accumulation o f wealth:
D e fo e ’s p lot, th en , expresses some o f the most important tendencies o f the life o f his time, a n d it is th is w h ic h
se ts h is h e ro a p a rt fro m m o st o f th e tra v e lle rs in lite ra tu re . R o b in so n C ru s o e is n o t, lik e A u to ly c u s , a c o m m e rc ia l
tra v e lle r ro o te d in an e x te n d e d b u t still fa m ilia r lo ca lity : n o r is h e , lik e U ly sses, an u n w illin g v o y a g e r try in g to
g e t b a c k to h is fam ily a n d h is n a tiv e lan d : profit is Crusoe's only vocation , a n d th e w h o le w o rld is h is territo ry .
The prim acy o f individual economic advantage has tended to diminish the importance o f personal as well as
group relationships,...
I. Watt, The Rise o f the Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 74. [Italics mine.]
13 Claude Levi-Strauss gives an account o f a master-servant relationship that is even more
extreme. In the poverty-stricken comm unities in India, where the huge gap between the rich
and the poor is justified and made unbridgeable by the caste system , anybody who appears
to be fairly w e ll-o ff is literally forced to accept the position o f a master. There is som ething
weird in the relationship, as the “servants” command the “master” to give them commands:
T h e g u l f s e p a r a tin g e x tre m e lu x u ry a n d e x tre m e p o v e rty d e s tro y s th e h u m a n d im e n s io n . [...] E v e ry E u ro p e a n
in In d ia fin d s h im s e lf s u rr o u n d e d , w h e th e r h e lik e s it o r n o t, b y a fa ir n u m b e r o f g e n e ra l m a n s e r v a n ts , c a lle d
b e a re rs . I c a n n o t s a y w h e th e r th e ir e a g e r n e s s to s e rv e is to b e e x p la in e d b y th e c a s te s y s te m , th e tra d itio n o f
s o c ia l in e q u a lity o r th e d e m a n d fo r s e rv ic e on th e p a rt o f th e c o lo n iz e rs . H o w e v e r, th e ir o b s e q u io u s n e s s v e ry
q u ic k ly h a s th e e ffe c t o f m a k in g th e a tm o s p h e re in to le ra b le . I f n e c e ssa ry , th e y w o u ld lie d o w n o n th e g r o u n d
to let y o u w a lk o v e r th e m , [...] E a c h tim e , th e y a re th e re a t o n c e , b e g g in g f o r o rd e rs . [...] A n d i f y o u r b e h a v
io u r d o e s n o t c o rr e s p o n d to th e ir e x p e c ta tio n s , i f y o u do n o t b e h a v e on a ll o c c a s io n s lik e th e ir f o rm e r B ritish
m a s te rs , th e ir u n iv e rs e c o lla p s e s .
C. Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. J.& D. Weightman (London: Picador C lassics,
Pan Books, 1989), pp. 1 74-175. Levi-Strauss claim s that any attempt to change the relation
ship, to treat a fellow human being as your equal, is im mediately rejected: “If one tried to
treat these unfortunate wretches [beggars] as equals, they would protest against the injustice
o f on e’s doing so; they do not want to be equal; they beg, they entreat you to crush them
with your pride, since it is from the widening o f the gap between you and them that they
expect their m ite.” Ibid., p. 172.
commands. But at the same time they accept a rich man as their leader, which
turns his pieces of advice into commands, though subtler in form and degree
than those in the army.14
A chieftain may also use property to gain power, but in a radically oppo
site way: by giving away instead of accumulating. Dispersion of wealth is one
of the distinctive features of chieftainship. Anthropologists who write about
chiefs often mention a ceremony called potlatch as an example of such dis
persion. “A potlatch is a public distribution of goods and the holder of a potlatch
makes a claim to status on the basis of his power to give. [...] The system is
fiercely competitive with each holder trying to outdo rivals in generosity.”15
At the end of such a ceremony, which may last for a number of days, its holder
can be deprived of his property altogether, but his gain in honour and prestige
is by far bigger.16
Potlatch is a ceremony organized among the Kwakiutl, who were not
a nomadic tribe (not at the time when the first colonists reached the west coast
of Canada), but the same give-away mechanisms not only are to be found among
nomads, but are crucial to their social organization. The Mongols, for exam
ple, had a law which stated that all the spoils of war belonged to the commu
nity and not to the chief or any other individual. Claude Levi-Strauss reports
that among the Nambikwara, a (semi-) nomadic tribe of the Mato Grosso
Plateau, the chief’s “primary and principal instrument of power lies in his
generosity.” 17
Although the chief does not seem to be in a privileged position as regards
material belongings, he must have at his disposal a surplus o f food, weap
ons and ornaments [...] When an individual, a family or the group as a whole
feel a desire or a need for something, they turn to the chief. It follows that
generosity is the main quality expected o f a new chief. [...] There can be no
doubt that, in this respect, the ch ief’s capacities are exploited to the utmost.
[...] as a general rule, the chief remained just as poor as he had been when I
arrived. Everything he had been given [...] had already been extorted from
him .18
14
J. K. Galbraith says that “Broadly speaking, there are three basic benefits from wealth.
First is the satisfaction in the power with which it endows the individual. Second is the physi
cal possession o f the things which money can buy. Third is the distinction or esteem that
accrues to the rich man as the result o f his wealth.” The Affluent Society, p. 80. [Italics mine.]
Since wealth brings the sedentary both power and esteem, the distinction between his com
mands and pieces o f advice w ill, at least in certain situations, be blurred.
lD “Potlatch,” in The Fontana Dictionary o f Modern Thought, eds. A. B ullock,
O.Stallybrass, and S.Trombley (London: Fontana Press, 1988).
16 Cf. the chapter on the Indians living on the north-western coast written by Victoria
Wyatt, in Native Americans, ed. R. Collins (Salamander Books Ltd, 1991).
17 Tristes Tropiques, p. 408.
18 Ibid., p. 408. [Italics mine.]
You are what you give, one is tempted to say. The chief has a surplus and yet
remains poor; this was something the European colonists could not possibly
understand. Victoria Wyatt writes that when in the early 19th century, in the
northwest, trade in fur skins increased the Indians’ affluence, they used the
wealth to support their rites and cultural activities: in the first few decades after
the trade had developed they organized more potlatch ceremonies than ever
before.19 The more they got, the more they gave away. C hieftains use a ccu
m ulation o f wealth only to increase its dispersion.
But to say that a chieftain is generous is not sufficient: we would still not
be able to tell the difference between the chief and the king, who also had the
obligation to be generous. We have already mentioned William the Conqueror,
and Canetti gives us a vivid account of the reign of Muhammad Tughlak,
a Sultan of Dehli, who used to make a dazzling display of his generosity:
On one o f his [the Sultan’s] entries into the capital I saw three or four small
catapults placed on elephants throwing gold and silver coins amongst the peo
ple from the moment he entered the city until he reached the palace.20
The king’s generosity and that of the chieftain are two different things. The
king has to be both generous and greedy. If he allows anybody in his kingdom
to possess more than he does, then he is almost sure to be overthrown. In some
cases it may lead not only to a change on the throne but also to a disintegration
of the state. (The Poland of the 18th century is a particularly good example
of such a disintegration caused to a large extent by the fact that some of those
who were nominally the king’s vassals became more powerful - i.e. they
possessed more - than the king himself.)
There is, then, a clearly defined limit to the king’s generosity, while there
seems to be no limit to his greed. This greed is in fact the greed of the State,
and it does not really matter who represents it, the king or a democratically
elected president. If it is true that the surplus produced by agriculture was one
of the decisive factors that sparkled the development of the sedentary’s civ
ilization, it may also be true that the tendency towards accumulation has re
mained a permanent feature of this civilization, especially within the State,
where the tendency is most conspicuous. It is tellingly significant that the word
weal, now out of use, meant both w ealth and the State.
In the film G eronim o a conversation occurs between the chieftain and
general Crook. Geronimo has escaped from a reservation and keeps fighting
against the white settlers. Crook tries to persuade him to surrender, which to
Geronimo means being sent from Arizona to a reservation in Florida. Geroni19 Cf. Native Americans, the chapter on the tribes o f the north-western coast.
:c Crowds and Power, p. 496. The passage com es from a description made by Ibn Batuta,
a famous Arab traveller.
mo asks why in such a huge country there is no room for the Apaches, why
it is that the white man wants all land.21 A long silence follows; Crook does
not answer the question.
Geronimo, a war chief, does not understand a culture that was founded on
the accumulation of wealth. He himself possesses nothing and yet he is a chief.
(The ye t in the sentence indicates that it has been written from the perspective
of a man of State, because one does not become a chief in spite o f having
nothing. A nomad would say: he is a chief so/therefore he has got nothing.)
Though anthropologists often speak of the chief’s generosity, it is probably
imprecise to say that a chief is generous because generosity, as our brief analysis
of kingship has revealed, does not exclude greed. Chieftainship, in fact, im
plies total greedlessness, sometimes even a kind of reversal of greed a necessity to possess nothing, or very little.22
A chieftain can threaten his people with neither death nor loss of property.
If we accepted as generally true what Canetti and Kant say about the mech
anisms of a command, we would have to admit that a chieftain is not able to
give a single command, but that is obviously not the case. A chieftain is in
command of his people. The question is what makes this command possible.
To find the answer we shall again refer to potlatch. I have presented the
ceremony as a preventive, negative mechanism that makes it impossible for an
individual to become a certain type of leader - one with stable power based
on the accumulation of wealth. But potlatch has also a creative, positive func
tion: it gives the individual the opportunity to assume leadership of a different
kind. This other kind of leadership, however, is not based on dispersion; to the
holder of a potlatch distribution of goods is only a means; the objective, as has
already been mentioned, is to gain prestige.
21 On the last page o f Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee there is a photograph o f ch ief
Red Cloud in old age with the follow ing quotation: “They made us many promises, more
than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they
took it.”
Today the State may appear to be less greedy for land, but that is because all the land
has already been taken. If, however, a state is threatened with a loss o f a tiny bit o f its terrtory,
it im mediately m obilizes its force in order to defend it. Recent history provides enough ex
amples, such as the war over the Falkland Islands or the conflict over the Kurile Islands. In
Russia the idea o f returning the islands to Japan is unthinkable, though obviously Russia would
profit a lot from such a deal, because it would normalize the relations between the two coun
tries and make it possible for the Japanese capital and technology to flow into Russia.
22 Leonard Cohen, in his song The Night Comes On, gives a poetic account o f what can
be called a reversal o f greed, a state o f mind, a mode o f being perhaps, which cannot be
equated with generosity because generosity is only a “by-product”, a kind o f positive side
effect o f such a state:
I n e e d e d so m u c h
T o h a v e n o th in g to to u c h
I’ve a lw a y s b e e n g re e d y th a t w a y
Whenever one reads about chieftains, one also reads about prestige: “Clastres describes the situation of the chief, who has no instituted weapon other
than his prestige, no other means of persuasion, no other rule than his sense
of the group’s desires.”23 Levi-Strauss writes that “Personal prestige and the
ability to inspire confidence are the basis of power in Nambikwara society.”24
It is not out of politeness that travellers and anthropologists speak of chiefs
as exceptional individuals. Prestige is a conditio sine qua non for chieftainship:
a chieftain m ust be held in high esteem by his tribe, otherwise he simply ceases
to be the chief. Personal prestige is not what merely helps him to achieve the
position of the leader; prestige is indispensable, first to attain the position, then
to maintain it. The chieftain can never take his leadership for granted; he has
to invest continuous effort into maintaining it.
In this respect Canetti’s theory of the command again stands in sharp contrast
to chieftainship. According to Canetti
The power behind a command must not be open to doubt; if it has fallen into
abeyance it must be ready to prove itself again by force. But it is astonish
ing how seldom fresh proofs are called for, how long the original proof suf
fices. Success in conflict is perpetuated by commands; every command
obeyed is an old victory won again. The power o f those who give commands
appears to grow all the time.25
Among the nomads it is exactly the other way round: the power behind
a command is open to doubt; it is not allow ed to prove itself by force. It is
astonishing how frequently fresh proofs are called for, how the original proof
does not suffice. Success in conflict is not perpetuated by commands. The power
of those who give commands does not grow all the time. It is really striking
how diametrically opposed the two types of leadership are; this opposition very
well confirms Deleuze and Guattari’s argument when they question the evo
lutionary model according to which there was some sort of linear or nonlinear
passage “from clans to empires” or “from bands to kingdoms.” When chiefs
become kings, when a band changes into a kingdom, it is like the swing of the
pendulum; it is certainly not an evolutionary change from the lower-worse-less
organized into the higher-better-more organized.26
Needless to say, the adoption of the nonevolutionary model changes quite
considerably our views on the origins and development of the mechanisms of
power. For example, we can no longer follow Levi-Strauss when he places
23 “ 1227: Treatise on N om adology - the War M achine,” p. 357.
25 Crowds and Power , p. 363
26 Cf. “ 1227: Treatise on N om adology - the War M achine,” pp. 3 5 9 -3 6 0 . “[...] bands
and clans are no less organized than empire-kingdom s.”
chieftainship among “the most rudimentary forms of power” and claims that
the Nambikwara represent a “simple form of social organization.” Such a view
is untenable, especially that Levi-Strauss himself provides us with a strong
argument against his theory. He has it that “underlying the most rudimentary
forms of power, there is an essential feature which is something new in com
parison with biological phenomena: this new element is consent. Power both
originates in consent and is bounded by it.”27 (Consent of the governed;
a chieftain, as we know, has to be accepted by his people because he has no
powers of coercion.) Then, however, as society developed, things apparently
got worse: “unilateral relationships, such as those characteristic of gerontoc
racy, autocracy or any form of government, can arise in groups with an already
complex structure. They are out of the question in simple forms of social
organization, [...]”28 In other words despotism, for example, should be seen as
a product of a higher complexity of social organization. Now, according to the
evolutionary theory it is parliamentary democracy that seems to be the most
complex and advanced form of social organization, and its basic, fundamental
feature is consent. All that amounts to saying that humanity placed consent at
the basis of its societal development, then scrapped it and for millenia kept
experimenting and making all kinds of mistakes, such as despotism, only to
return to the original idea. Such a thesis is far from being plausible. More
convincing is the theory according to which bands and kingdoms developed
simultaneously, side by side, permeating and “contaminating” each other,
perhaps forming all kinds of hybrids, but nevertheless remaining distinct.29
The State is not characterized by consent but by “voluntary servitude.”30
Though one may argue that this servitude is a kind of consent too - a person
voluntarily renounces his freedom - it is obviously an entirely different con
sent, and Levi-Strauss is well aware of the difference:
It is true that Rousseau’s analysis differs from the quasi-contractual relation
ships which exist between the chief and his fellow-members o f the group.
Rousseau was thinking o f a quite different phenom enon, nam ely the renun
ciation by individuals o f their particular independence in the interest o f the
general will. [...] Rousseau and his contemporaries displayed profound so
28 Ibid., p. 413.
29 D eleuze and Guattari argue that “there has always been a State, quite perfect, quite
com plete. The more discoveries archaeologists make, the more empires they uncover. [...] It
is hard to imagine primitive societies that would not have been in contact with imperial States,
at the periphery or in poorly controlled areas. But o f greater importance is the inverse hy
pothesis: that the State itself has always been in a relation with an outside and is inconceiv
able independent o f that relationship.” “ 1227: Treatise on N om adology - the War M achine,”
p. 360.
30 Ibid., p. 359.
ciological intuition in grasping the fact that cultural attitudes and features
such as “contract” and “consent” are not secondary creations, [...] they are
the basic material o f social life, and it is impossible to imagine any form of
political organization in which they would not be present.31
Levi-Strauss admits that the consent given by a subject (citizen) is “a quite
different phenomenon,” that it has nothing to do with the consent which char
acterizes chieftainship, and yet he ends his argument with general statements
in which the differences disappear: “contract and consent are [...] the basic
material of social life,” and a few lines below he continues in the same vein
by saying that “consent is the psychological basis of power.” To Levi-Strauss,
the differences between the two kinds of leadership are of little importance
because he adheres to the evolutionary model according to which chieftain
ship (primitive statelessnes) evolved into kingship, which makes it logical to
assume that the State was to a large extent founded on the consent of the
governed.
Let us repeat that we find it hardly possible to agree with the evolutionary
approach. Firstly because kingship (institution) and chieftainship (prestige)
actively oppose each other. It is true that sometimes the State “makes use” of
prestige, but when we analyse the way in which the State functions in extreme
situations, for instance during the war, we realize that prestige is not only
unnecessary but may even be an obstacle to the functioning of the State. A good
example is the situation in which a state’s existence is threatened. When in
September 1939 Poland was invaded by the Nazi and Soviet armies, it very
quickly became obvious to the Polish authorities that the country was not able
to defend itself, and that the best if not the only way to save the state was to
evacuate its institutions. In this way the government, which was internation
ally recognized, was still able to represent the state, i.e. to continue its foreign
policy, to recruit a new army, etc. But the decision to evacuate the state’s
institutions was a very dramatic one because the government was immediately
accused of abandoning the country’s people; political opponents, then and after
the war, even spoke of treason. The choice which the Polish authorities faced
was either to save the state or personal prestige, they could not have it both
ways. Since their loyalty was to the state, they chose to give up personal
prestige. The State can function without prestige, but it cannot without its
institutions. Within the nomad organization, on the other hand, it is simply
impossible that the chieftain will be forced to choose between prestige and
something else. He will not be able to maintain his position without prestige.
The other reason why we cannot accept the theory that chieftainship evolved
into kingship is because we have seen how easily the State slips from any kind
31 Tristes Tropiques, pp. 4 1 3 -4 1 4 .
of democracy (government legitimatized by consent) into the purest forms of
despotism and dictatorship, e.g. changes such as in ancient Rome, from the
republican government into that by the emperors, or in 20th-century Germany,
from the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich. A reversed process - a change
from despotism to democracy - takes much more effort and time. Even today
democracy is still a fragile construction that must be constantly defended. The
consent of the governed can in no way be thought of as immanent in the State,
whereas coercion certainly can.
C onsent is im manent in the nom ad organization. It is, to a large extent, in
any community led by a chief, but with nomads it is most conspicuous. The
social organization of the Nambikwara tribe is particularly interesting to study
as it reveals that consent among nomads means a lot more than it has ever meant
within the State. It can already be deduced from what Kant says about the
Bedouin that consent is given by the community to the chief but always tem
porarily, that “The chief [...] is always in danger of being disavowed, aban
doned by his people.”32 Levi-Strauss writes that “The Nambikwara chief has
a difficult part to play; he has to exert himself in order to maintain his posi
tion. What is more, if he does not constantly improve it, he runs the risk of
losing what it has taken him months or years to achieve.”33 But again we are
imprecise, or even wrong, when we say that consent is given by the commu
nity because consent is what forms the community:
In the initial community, there are men who are recognized as leaders: it is
they who form the nuclei around which the groups assemble. The size o f the
group and its greater or lesser degree o f stability during a given period are
proportionate to the ability o f the particular chief to maintain his rank and
improve his position. Political power does not appear to result from the needs
o f the community; it is the group rather which owes its form, size and even
origin to the potential chief who was there before it came into being.34
Consent, then, cannot be given, i.e. it cannot be voiced, because it precedes
the com m unity, it is the formation of a community or a group that indicates to
the chief that the consent is already there. That is why we say that consent is
immanent in the nomad organization. What Levi-Strauss writes about the nature
of power - that it both originates in consent and is bounded by it - is true only
of the nomads.
32 “ [ 227 ; Treatise on N om adology - the War M achine,” p . 357.
33 Tristes Tropiques, p. 415
34 Tristes Tropiques, p. 404. [Italics mine.] A few pages below Levi-Strauss repeats the
observation in a more terse manner: “ [...] the c h ief is seen as the cause o f the group’s desire
to exist as a group, and not as the result o f the need for a central authority felt by som e al
ready established group.” Ibid., p. 407.
And once more it appears that our vocabulary is inadequate. If the chief
tain is a noncoercionist - the exact opposite of the despot - then we cannot
associate him with power. “P o w er is the ability of its holders to exact com
pliance or obedience of other individuals to his w ill, on whatsoever basis.”35
The chieftain is not able to exact compliance, he “is more like a leader or a star
than a man of power.”36 Star is a very appropriate word to describe the chief
tain because he can be in command only when he is admired. Prestige, which
is his principal instrument of command (we can no longer use the word “pow
er”) is defined by The O xford English D iction ary as “blinding or dazzling
influence.” The chief “shines”; he is a star.
Let us now return to the scene of the duel from G eronim o with which we
began this essay. What the young Apache does seems reckless; it is an unnec
essary display of bravery, which costs him his life. We asked why he should
risk his life in such a way. His opponent, a US cavalry officer, behaves in a way
that we perceive as much more sensible. But we have to realize that this
perception, or perspective, is that of the man of the State, it is not a universal
perspective from which all actions can be judged. The perspective of the nomad,
and especially the nomad warrior, involves entirely different principles.
Let us try to find out what the young Apache could do if he wanted to be
a (war) chief. He was among his equals. He could not threaten them with death
or loss of property. He had got nothing so he could not be generous and was
not able to “buy” their loyalty. He was not even older than his fellow warriors,
which excluded any form of gerontocracy. To put it briefly, he was completely
powerless. The only thing he could do was to live up to his warriors’ expec
tations of him, which meant he had to be brave (actually, the word for a North
American Indian warrior is a brave). That is how Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Gall,
Crazy Horse, and many others became chieftains. They were intelligent and
talented individuals but they also surpassed others in bravery.37 It is indeed
a wonder that some of them managed to live to a ripe old age, especially that
they were confronted with a powerful state apparatus that was determined to
crush them. Nana, an Apache chief, who “had been fighting Spanish-speaking
white men and English-speaking white men as long as he could remember”
surrendered when he was in his seventies. Even at this age his bravery and
35 “Power,” in The Fontana Dictionary o f Modern Thought.
36 “ 1227: Treatise on N om adology - the War M achine,” p. 357.
37 “[...] the warrior h im self is caught in a process o f accumulating exploits leading him
to solitude and a prestigious but pow erless death.”
“ 1227: Treatise on N om adology - the War M achine,” p. 357.
The scene o f the duel from Geronimo show s that the US cavalry officer, lieutenant
Gatewood, does not have to prove that he is brave. His refusal to take up the A pache’s chal
lenge does not affect his position as a commander; his commands w ill be obeyed anyway.
He shoots the Indian warrior in self-defence.
determination to fight made it still possible for him to recruit a guerrilla army.38
Fight was the only “commodity” he could offer to his followers.
It is, then, quite plain that Canetti was mistaken when he thought that he
had discovered the basic forces behind a command. Roughly speaking, the scope
of his archaeology of command is limited to the State. His main thesis that
there is a death threat behind every command is untenable when we examine
the position of the chieftain. And in the case of the war chief it is actually the
reverse that is true, namely it is, as we have seen, the war chief who is threat
ened with death, not his warriors: he has to risk his life in order to be accepted
as a commander.
Despite some obvious shortcomings Canetti’s analysis is very important as
it is one more confirmation that the nomad organization can by no means be
regarded as merely a stage in the history of mankind, one which preceded
sedentarism. Canetti, as we remember, argues that the history of the command
is very long, longer than speech. But the fact that his presentation of this history
is coherent, though it leaves the nomad out of account, indicates that there can
be no such concept as the history of the command; there are at least two parallel
and distinct histories. The other history, overlooked by Canetti, must have had
a completely different beginning and an equally alternate development.
38 Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, p. 401.
Subject in Difference; or on (Feminine)
Becomings: Deleuze and Guattari's
and Cixous' Concept of Subjectivity*
Is it possible to develop a debate on subjectivity without the familiar no
tions of the “mind,” “body,” “emotions” or “reason”? This is the case of
A T housand P lateau s. Deleuze and Guattari, in their extensive account of
subjectivity, speak as if the pillars of human subjectivity did not exist at all;
they allude only to the concept of the body, yet with a queer notion of the “Body
without Organs,” which sounds like a blatant provocation (and is often mis
takenly received so). To be precise, Deleuze and Guattari do not give an account
of human subjectivity; they speak of “monsters and machines”; for them, the
human subject should not be separated from the mineral, plant, animal or
demonic realms. Their account of subjectivity proliferates with vampires,
wolves and rats; they quite seriously pose the questions of becoming-veg
etable, becoming-music or becoming-sleep; there is no mention of the tasks
of thinkers or philosophers (whom Deleuze and Guattari are, after all) but
instead we learn that “writing is traversed by strange becomings” and writ
ers are “sorcerers.”
Yet a sense of artificial horror which accompanies Deleuze and Guattari’s
theories (G reat A m erica of philosophy?) should not eclipse their theoretical
significance. Bernardo Alexander Attias warns against taking literally the
“rhetorical excesses” of A nti-O edipus (the other extremely influential book
Deleuze and Guattari wrote together) and makes it plain that these ought to
* This article is reprinted after: M. Zając, The Feminine o f Difference: Gilles Deleuze,
Helene Cixous and Contemporary Critique o f the Marquis de Sade (Frankfurt: Peter Lang,
2002), pp. 9 1 -1 0 9 .
be understood as “rhetorical strategies rather than theoretical elaborations.” 1
(After Aristotle, he defines rhetoric as “the art of persuasion.”2) Attias’ view
about A nti-O edipus applies even more to A Thousand P lateaus. A prominent
theory Deleuze and Guattari try to persuade us of in A Thousand Plateaus is
the theory of “becomings.”
The paradox of becomings - as a theory of subjectivity - consists in the
fact that it promotes a view of the subject which apparently brings about its
end. (Deleuze said in an interview: “Felix and I, and many others like us, don’t
feel we are persons exactly.”3) Yet, when Deleuze remarks, “[y]ou have to take
the work as a whole, to try and follow rather than judge it,”4 he suggests
a practical (pragmatic) rather than purely theoretical (abstract) approach. “For
Deleuze, real thinking is inseparable from acting”5 his critics insist. The task
of this argument is to show the connections between the mechanism of becom
ings and the “feminine” reality of the texts by Helene Cixous. It is to feminists
that the theory of becomings appears particularly disquieting and upsetting,
when mistaken for an account of dispersed and polymorphous subjectivity. And
it is also for feminists that the theory of becomings offers useful tools for the
political improvement of the social scene.
Writing on “becomings” poses a few problems. First, one deals with ma
terial which is, on an unprecendented scale, abstract, even obscure. This is partly
due to the mentioned exclusion of many concepts that discourse on subjectiv
ity commonly relies on. The notions of reason, mind, emotions, sensations,
perceptions, etc., the aid-kit of psychology, are abstract but familiar, and thus
facilitate the presentation of problems - even though they hardly affect the way
we comprehend them. Deleuze is certainly right in saying that one has to accept
the end of a given concept, the moment of its exhaustion, sterility, or impotency. Whatever the name, concepts die - they conceive nothing. Deleuze and
Guattari’s enterprise is not a matter of replacing one set of concepts with another,
and disguising the old content with brand-new wrapping paper, in shocking
colour and design. Each of the theoretical concepts they work, tell their stories
with, displays some complicated relation with the familiar. However, to expli
1 Bernardo Alexander Attias, “To Each Its Own Sexes. Toward a Rhetorical Understanding
o f M olecular R evolution,” in Deleuze and Guattari. New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy,
and Culture, eds. Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller (M inneapolis, London: M innesota
University Press, 1998), p. 103.
2 Ib id , p. 96.
3 G illes D eleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (N ew York, 1995
[1994]), p. 141. Quoted after Ian Buchanan, “Introduction,” The South Atlantic Quarterly,
special issue: A Deleuzian Century?, ed. Ian Buchman, Vol. 96, No. 3 (1997), p. 385.
4 D eleuze, Negotiations, p. 85. Quoted after Buchanan, “Introduction,” p. 387.
5 Aden Evans, Mani Haghighi, Stacey Johnson, Karen Ocana, and Gordon Thompson,
“Another A lw ays Thinks in M e,” in Deluze and Guattari..., p. 279.
cate those relations is simply out of point. The primary task of this argument
remains to suggest the conceptual, paradigmatic, affinity between Deleuze and
Guattari’s and Cixous’ thought. One cannot argue, however, for the practical
and political significance of becomings thus conceived before the very mech
anism is introduced. The argument on becomings will be then preceded by
a section meant to produce a mere outline of the theory.
Becomings
Whatever the level considered, becomings never follow natural connections.
Deleuze and Guattari exclude from becomings mental processes of mediation,
biological processes of evolution, and social relations of filiation.6 The rela
tions of resemblance, imitation, and identification between concepts imply
a certain pre-existent “natural” ground for their relatedness, which is then only
recognised and realised. Similarly, evolution and filiation represent the most
“natural” and “regular” modes of relating individuals. Becomings, in contrast,
flout the demands of both regularity and naturalness. Becomings provoke an
encounter between entities whose intimacy has no natural basis. They develop
through “unnatural participations” and rely upon “contagion.”7 They are like
a contact with a vampire, bonds of intimacy established against nature, ties of
blood that have nothing to do with family relations: “[t]he vampire does not
filiate, it infects ,”8
Instead of a linear, thread-like, process of transition from one entity to
another, becomings involve a moment of the encounter between heterogene
ous, unrelated entities. Deleuze and Guattari name this encounter involution,
which is a useful term as it combines two familiar concepts, “evolution” and
“to involve.” Involvement is an extra effect, a product of interest or desire.
Involution relates as evolution does, but on different grounds and on different
terms. Involution draws two unrelated concepts together. Becoming is an event
of the middle:
A line o f becoming is not defined by points that it connects, or by points
that compose it; on the contrary, it passes between points, it comes up through
the middle [...] a line o f becoming has neither beginning nor end, departure
6 “A becom ing is not a correspondence [...] neither is it a resem blance, an imitation, or
[...] an identification [...] Finally, becom ing is not an evolution, at least not an evolution by
descent and filiation.” G illes D eleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian M assum i (London: The Athlone Press, 1992), pp. 2 3 7 -2 3 8 .
7 Ibid., p. 242.
8 Ibid., pp. 2 4 1 -2 4 2 .
nor arrival, origin nor destination [...] A line o f becoming has only a middle
[...] A becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation o f the two; it is the
in-between.9
Even though the activity of the middle endangers the integrity of the subject,
becomings do not spell the end of subjectivity as such. Deleuze and Guattari
insist upon the co-existence of two dimensions of the subject, the “molar” and
“molecular” ones, which correspond to two planes of the real, the plane of
immanence and the plane of transcendence, respectively. Becomings activate
the molecular dimension. “All becomings are molecular,” 10 we read.
The plane of immanence is being in its raw, dynamic, and, in a sense,
anarchic state:
[...] a pure plane of immanence, univocality, composition, upon which every
thing is given, upon which unformed elements and materials dance that are
distinguished from one another only by their speed and that enter into this
or that individuated assemblage depending on their connections, their rela
tions o f movement. A fixed plane o f life upon which everything stirs, slows
down or accelerates [...] a plane o f consistency peopled by anonymous mat
ter, by infinite bits o f impalpable matter entering into varying connections."
It is the function of the plane of transcendence to provide the spontaneous,
palpitating compositions of the plane of immanence with clear outlines. On the
plane of transcendence, which breeds notions like form, figure, design, ground,
end, project, etc.,12 being settles down into a concrete shape and state. The plane
of transcendence is a plane of organisation, “a hidden principle [...] a plan(e)
of organisation [...] of development [...] a teleological plan(e), a design, a mental
principle.” 13 Becomings are spontaneous and unpredictable. (” [T]he idea of
mapping encounters on the plane of immanence rather than organising them
according to a pre-given plan, surfaces most forcefully in Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of ‘becomings’,”14 Aurelia Armstrong remarks.) While the
plane of transcendence is the foundation of the finite subject, on the plane of
immanence the self is nothing but “a threshold,” a “door,” an interstice through
which new identities slip, a stream of molecular compositions which undermine
the solid ground of once assumed identity.
9 Ibid., p. 293.
,u Ibid., p. 275.
" Ibid., p. 255.
12 Ibid., p. 254.
13 Ibid., p. 265.
14Aurelia Armstrong, “Som e R eflections on D eleu ze’s Spinoza. Com position and
Agency,” in Deleuze and Philosophy. The Difference Engineer, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson (Lon
don: Routledge, 1997), p. 55.
The distinction between the two planes breeds the distinction between two
bodies: the physical body, which is a fact, and the so-called Body without
Organs, which is a ’’practice”15 and a ’’program.” 16 The organisation of the plane
of transcendence manifests in the unity of the physical body, the organism, the
organisation of organs. The Body without Organs - a ’’connection of desires,
conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities.”17, “a Collectivity (assembling
elements, things, plants, animals, tools, people, powers, and fragments of all
of these,”18 is a ’’body of composition,” what we are on the plane of imma
nence. In the Body without Organs, the organisation of organs and functions
gives way to the composition of flows, intensities and desires. “Deleuze’s [...]
view of the body [...] is not at all biological,” 19 Scott Lash rightly observes.
However, the molar and molecular distinction, upon which this two-dimen
sional view of the subject relies, does not end in a series of familiar dichot
omies: the centre opposed to the fringe, the essence opposed to the margin,
or the inside opposed to the outside. The plane of organisation and the plane
of composition do not stay in an either-or relation. This point, however, is often
overlooked, and if so, it causes major problems. “[T]he two types of organ
isation are always intermixed in any concrete manifestation,”20 John Mullarkey argues in response to common but mistaken readings of Deleuze as
a prophet of dissolution. The two planes co-exist and interact. (”[M]olar clus
ters affected by becomings,”21 Ian Hamilton Grant names the relation between
the two planes.) The radical claims which Deleuze and Guattari make, like
“[y]ou have the individuality of a day, a season [...] a climate, a wind, a fog,”22
are signs of the emphasis they put upon the molecular, instead of molar, di
mension of the subject, upon its permanent openness, responsiveness, recep
tiveness, and kaleidoscopic design. Yet this stratum has to be completed with
a general sense of unity (belonging), a contour of sanity drawn around the
fluctuating and rebellious formative fringe of the subject.
The intricacies of the relation between the two planes of the real (the plane
of composition and the plane of organisation), between their effects (individ
uations and individuals), and between two bodies (a Body without Organs and
15 D eleuze and Guattari, A Thousand..., p. 150.
16 Ibid., p. 151.
17 Ibid., p. 161.
18 Ibid.
19 Scott Lash. "Genealogy and the Body: F oucault/D eleuze/N ietzsche,” in The Body,
Social Process and Cultural Theory, eds. M ike Featherstone, M ike Hepworth, and Bryan S.
Turner (London: Sage Publications, 1991), p. 269.
20 John Mullarkey, “D eleuze and Materialism: One or Several Matters? in The South
Atlantic Quarterly, p. 444.
21 Ian Hamilton Grant, “ ‘At the Mountains o f M adness’. The D em onology o f the N ew
Earth and the Politics o f B ecom ing,” in Deleuze and Philosophy
pp. 109.
22 D eleuze and Guattari, A Thousand..., pp. 2 6 1 -2 6 2 .
the body as an organism) can be clarified with the image of an island: the
marriage of two elements: the earth and the water. After Carlos Castaneda and
his Tales o f P ow er, Deleuze and Guattari bring the Tonal, the island, to meet
its Nagual, the sea that surrounds the island. The tonal stands for solid con
cepts, for all that is “organised and organising [...] signifying or signified [...]
susceptible to interpretation, explanation [...] the Self (M oi), the subject [...]
God, the judgement of God.” In other words, tonal is everything; but, nagual,
“[f]lows of intensity, their fluids, their fibers, their continuums and conjunctions
of affects, the wind,”23 the sea that surrounds the island, is also everything. The
island, unless it allows the waves and the wind to caress its coastline, will tower
above the sea like a dead bone, a monument to its own hard-core and rock-tough
existence. The crucial thing is that the island cannot be destroyed, submerged
in the sea; Deleuze and Guattari insist after Castaneda, “[t]he tonal must be
protected at any cost,”24 and add, “a nagual that erupts, that destroys the tonal,
a body wihout organs that shatters all the strata, turns immediately into a body
of nothingness, pure self-destruction whose only outcome is death.”25 The stra
tum of organisation, of subjectivity, is necessary as a protection against death.
The dictatorship of the plane of immanence spells death - reality precipates into
chaos; the dictatorship of the plane of transcendence spells death as well - reality
gets immobilised. The lack of balance between tonal and nagual is like mad
Medusa and her petrified victim: death is at work on both sides.
Despite the impression Deleuze and Guattari’s expositions produce, the
elements of the plane of immanence, the components of the Body without
Organs, are not particles, molecules, or atoms, but degrees and intensities the “individuations” of the plane of composition opposed to “individuals” of
the plane of organisation. (Deleuze and Guattari use the name “haecceity” for
the individuations of the plane of immanence.26) An “individuation” (a hae
cceity) can be a simple quality, or an attribute like “a degree of heat,” or “an
intensity of white.” Besides, individuations include shapeless, formless and
insubstantial “beings” like the wind, fog, a climate, and sleep. Finally, a play
of degrees and intensities (simple individuations) constantly builds up to new
compositions (complex individuations) that intersect the boundaries of finite
forms, and whose ever-changing nature never gets fixed by naming procedures:
23 Ibid., p. 162.
u Carlos Castaneda, Tales o f Power (N ew York: Sim on and Schuster, 1974), p. 125.
Quoted after D eleuze and Guattari, A Thousand ..., p. 161.
25 D eleuze and Guattari, A Thousand ..., p. 162.
26 Ibid., p. 263. The concept o f haecceity, derived from the Latin haec, was introduced
to the history o f philosophy by Duns Scotus, which D eleuze and Guattari admit, yet they
find Scotus’ elaboration on the relation between haecceity and haec inadequate: “it is a fruitful
error because it suggests a m ode o f individuation that is distinct from that o f a thing or
a subject.” See D eleuze and Guattari, A Thousand ..., p. 540, n. 33.
There is a mode o f individuation very different from that o f a person, subject,
thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it. A season, a winter,
a summer, an hour, a date [...] are haecceities in the sense that they consist en
tirely o f relations o f movement and rest between molecules or particles.27
A degree o f heat is a perfectly individuated warmth distinct from the sub
stance or the subject that receives it. A degree o f heat can enter into compo
sition with a degree o f whiteness, or with another degree o f heat, to form
a third unique individuality distinct from that o f the subject [...] A degree,
an intensity, is an individual, a H aecceity that enters into composition with
other degrees, other intensities, to form another individual.28
[...] between substantial forms and determined subjects, between the two, there
is not only a whole operation o f demonic local transports, but a natural play
o f haecceities, degrees, intensities, events and accidents that com pose
individuations totally different from those of the well-formed subjects that
receive them.29
Individuations (haecceities) envelop the stratum of finite beings to form their
luminous halo, an insubstantial margin. Haecceities (as modes of individua
tion) form at the boundaries of the determined subject (as a modality of an
individual), a no man’s land, a frontier-zone open to all kinds of illegal vis
itations. (Zygmunt Bauman presents a parallel image of the porous and contradiction-ridden boundaries of the postmodern body, the body of the “pleasure-collector”; the image which is useful as far as it enhances the impervious
nature of the body, yet incomplete in its view of merely sensual surface ac
cidents, and not distinct enough in the differentiation which should be main
tained between the two planes.30)
One may ask why and how to distinguish between haecceities and becom
ings; they both operate on the plane of immanence and both are events of the
middle (” [a] haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination;
it is always in the middle”31). Haecceities are only the material of becomings;
2' Ibid., p. 261.
28 Ibid., p. 253.
29 Ibid.
,u “M ost sensations that the pleasure-collector’s body may experience need stimuli com
ing from the outside world; the consumerist condition makes it imperative that the body opens
up as w idely as possible to the potential o f rich and ever richer experiences contained in
such stimuli [...] Yet the same exchange with the outside world com prises the individual’s
control over bodily fitness [...] which in turn is the condition o f the body’s capacity for gath
ering sensations. That capacity may be dim inished if immigration control is not vigilant
enough; admission must be selective at all times - but would not all selectivity impoverish
the pool o f potential sensations?” Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments. Essays in Postmodern
Morality (Oxford: B lackw ell, 1995), p. 120.
11 D eleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
p. 263.
haecceities are natural; becomings are a sudden event, an accident. Haecceities (complex individuations) come about due to a natural play of degrees and
intensities (simple individuations) while the driving force of becomings is desire.
(A trivial analogy: flirting and having sex, foreplay and its culmination.)
What is the desire which is the substance and motivation of becomings?
“[Understanding the BwO requires a willingness to understand desire independ
ently of human, instrumental agency,”32 John S. Howard comments on the desire
inherent in becomings, and thus points to the plane of immanence as its
a-personal origin. Following Deleuze and Guattari, one should see the driving
force of becomings as the desire for m olecular proxim ity : the desire to become
the closest in terms of a molecular organisation to what one is becoming. An
individual, a molar man or woman, enter into a relation with another individ
ual, or with a certain individuation, to bring about a certain molecular compo
sition: a molecular woman, plant, animal, mineral, etc:
Starting from the forms one has, the subject one is, the organs one has, or
the functions one fulfills, becoming is to extract particles between which one
establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are
closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes. This is
the sense in which becoming is the process of desire.33
Do not imitate the dog, but make your organism enter into composition with
something else in such a way that the particles emitted from the aggregate
thus composed will be canine as a function o f the relations o f movement and
rest.34
Albertine can always imitate a flower, but it is when she is sleeping and en
ters into composition with the particles o f sleep that her beauty spot and the
texture o f her skin enter a relation o f rest and movement that place her in
the zone o f a molecular vegetable: the becoming-plant o f Albertine.35
Descriptions proliferate, but the key term of becomings - the “molecular
composition,” remains a cryptic phrase - which does not facilitate the under
standing of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory. Even when the two types of the
subject are brought together only to clarify their individual features, the
molecular one, as a rule, remains hidden behind notions equally vague and
indeterminate:
molar entity is, for example, the woman as defined by her form, endowed
with organs and functions and assigned as a subject. Becoming-woman is not
32 John S. Howard, “Subjectivity and Space. D eleuze and Guattari’s BwO in the N ew
World Order,” in Deleuze and G uattari . . , p. 121.
33 D eleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
p. 272.
34 Ibid., p. 274.
33 Ibid., p. 275.
imitating this entity or even transforming oneself into it [...] not imitating or
assuming the female form, but emitting particles that enter the relation o f
movement and rest, or the zone o f proximity, o f a microfemininity, in other
words, that produce in us a molecular woman.36
[...] all becomings are molecular; the animal, flower, or stone one becomes
are molecular collectivities [...] not molar subjects, objects, or form that we
know from the outside and recognize from experience, through science, or
by habit.37
How to recognise a molecular plant, child, woman, animal, how to know one
becomes specifically towards, say, a molecular crab or vegetable? One never
will, because what is real is becoming, while what one becomes may not be
real at all: “[bjecoming produces nothing other than itself [...] What is real is
the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms
through which that which becomes passes [...] The becoming-animal of the
human being is real, even if the animal the human being becomes is not.”38
The reason for some of the blank spaces in the theory of becomings may be
the unmediated nature of becomings. (” [B]ecomings represent the discovery,
through action, of ideas of composition of relations.”39 Armstrong suggests that
only the practice of becomings will create the theory of becomings.) Becom
ings are an event of the middle, which is the space of immediacy. The begin
ning and end (origin and destination, past and future) anticipate mediation:
create a certain space for progression, or a certain story to narrate. Only the
middle is. Because of their unmediated “essence,” which is the middle, becom
ings have to be, to some extent, intuitive.
What is clear is that the becoming subject is in the difference between the
familiar and unfamiliar. At the same time, it puts to doubt the idea of being
familiar with oneself, since in becoming, the subject recklessly and restlessly
abandons its borders, and gets exposed to the alien. The becoming subject is
infinite, yet not deprived of its middle. Yet, the middle (the former centre, or
the focal point) is dislocated onto the “fringes.” In other words, the becoming
subject is not in the centre o/both its inside and outside (which would encom
pass it like two concentric envelopes) but in the difference between the inside:
the inward, conservative, centralising orientation, and the outside: the outward,
relational, expansive, de-centralising orientation).
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., p. 238.
39 Armstrong, “Som e R eflections ...” p. 56. [Emphasis mine.]
The "Feminine" of Becomings
On reading Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that “writing is traversed by strange
becomings,”40 one confronts the problem whether the writing they mention
includes I’ecriture fem in in e, whether the feminine subject, the subject of
I’ecriture fem inine, can be read as the becoming subject. “[M]y self is only
one of the elements of the immense mass of material [...] we are dust [...] we
are atoms,”41 Cixous confesses. To prepare the ground for the view of the fem
inine subject as becoming requires a presentation of its borders as oriented
towards the middle: the pivot of becomings.
The state of the borders of the feminine subject is qualified through the
peculiar condition of “a nonclosure that is not submission,”42 which suggests
rather an ambiguous disposition to encounter, but not to let in, the state of
balancing between trust and caution. (Needless to say, it is the in-between where
the two are compromised.) The non-submission of the feminine subject has no
militant undertones: “she comes out of herself [...] not to do away with the space
between, but to see it, to experience what she is not, what she is, what she can
be.”43 Yet the nonclosure of the feminine borders (’’never settling down, pouring
out, going everywhere”44) does not spell her fall into formlessness, either. What
protects woman equally from destructive aggression and submission is the
genuine passion she develops for her Other: “she comes out of herself to go
to the other”45 ; “[subjectivity vacillates, between no one and all of its pos
sible individualities”46; “[wjriting is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the
dwelling place of the other in me”47; “her writing [...] can only go on and on
[...] daring these dizzying passages in other, fleeting and passionate dwellings
within him, within the hims and hers whom she inhabits just long enough to
watch them [...] to love them”48; “a wonderful ‘sun of energy’ - love, - that
bombards and disintegrates [...] ephemereal, amorous anomalies so that they
41 H elene C ixous, “Extreme Fidelity,” excerpted from “Extreme Fidelity,” trans. Ann
Liddle and Susan Sellers, in Writing Differences: Readings from the Seminar o f Helene Cixous
(Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1988), rpt. in The Helene Cixous Reader, ed. Susan
Sellers (London, N ew York: Routledge, 1994), p. 136.
42 C ixous, “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/W ays Out/Forays,” trans. Betsy Wing, in The
Newly Born Woman (London and N ew York: I. B. Tauris, 1996), p. 86.
4i Ibid., p. 86.
44 Ibid., p. 87.
45 Ibid., p. 86.
46 C ixous, “First Nam es o f No One,” trans. Deborah C ow ell, excerpted from Prenoms
de personne (Paris: Seuil, 1974), in The Helene Cixous Reader, p. 28.
47 C ixous, “Sorties,” pp. 8 5 -8 6 .
48 Ibid., p. 88.
can be recomposed in other bodies for new passions.”49 It is commonly agreed
that the model of subjectivity Cixous advances is “based on openness to the
Other.”50 But when one inspects the way the encounters between the feminine
subject and the Other are presented, this claim can be pushed further: the
feminine subject is the becoming subject.
Woman’s Other, her exotic intimate, spans the human and non-human
realms. Woman meets, and strikes up intimacy with “males, gentlemen, monarchs, princes, orphans, flowers, mothers, breasts,”51 or “women [...] monsters
[...] jackals [...] Arabs [...] aliases,”52 or “animals of joy [...] artists [...] rea
soning beings [...] animals of prey [...] aggressive souls,”53 which echoes the
Deleuzian “unnatural participations.” What is more, woman’s Other, when
specified, often comes in numbers. Deleuze and Guattari profess, “[w]e do not
become animal without a fascination for the pack, for multiplicity.”54 It is
a ’’fascination for multiplicity” which shows through in the clusters, packs,
hordes and bouquets of woman’s exotic lovers. The proliferation of the exotic
lovers the feminine subject splits into is like the proliferation of the molecular
compositions towards which becomings lead.
An illustration of the becoming of the feminine subject is the peculiar
relation developed between woman and the orange - as critics admit, a powerful
symbol in Cixous’ writings.55 It would be hard to speculate why. The flaming
colour and the juicy pulp form a distinct aura of the orange fruit. Is the orange
a symbol of life impetus and energy that lights up the gloom the Apple brought?
Likely, but one has to remember that becomings are not a metaphor; the plane
of immediacy upon which becomings thrive is “[a] fixed plane of life.”56 (’’The
plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor - all that consists is real.”57)
Becoming-orange should not be taken as a metaphor, either; becoming-orange
is an event, not a metaphor. “Cixous wants to explore the inside, the under
neath, the taste and the texture,”58 Shiach remarks. The significance of the
49 Ibid., p. 84.
50 Morag Shiach, Helene Cixous. A Politics o f Writing (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 23.
51 C ixous, “Sorties,” p. 84.
52 Ibid., p. 84.
53 C ixous, “La - The (Fem inine),” trans. Susan Sellers, excerpted from La (Paris: des
fem m es, 1979), in The Helene Cixous Reader , p. 60.
54 D eleuze and Guattari, A T h o u s a n d pp. 2 3 9 -2 4 0 .
55 C f “[A]n exam ple o f object that in its materiality and its seem ing triviality is often left
out o f novelistic representations; the unconscious, the East; the Jewish people, or women
[...] the focus for a com plex set o f imagery involving blood, light, and m oistness.” Shiach,
Helene Cixous . . , p. 63.
56 D eleuze and Guattari, A Thousand .... p. 255.
57 Ib id , p. 69. Quoted after Robin Mackay, “Capitalism and Schizophrenia. W ildstyle in
Full E ffect,” in Deleuze and Philosophy . . , p. 253.
58 Shiach, Helene Cixous . . , p. 36.
orange’s presence for this enterprise becomes clear in a scene from “(With) Or
the Art of Innocence,” one which evolves around the intimacy between wom
an (her skin and eye) and “orange flower water.”
To enhance the intensity of life, woman sprinkles herself with orange flower
water; at the same time, Arabic hieroglyphs, in which the name of the perfumes
is written on the phial, capture her attention:
I need writing; I need to surprise m yself living: I need to feel m yself quiver
with living: I need to call m yself into living [...] I need to accompany living
with music: I need writing to celebrate living: this morning I perfumed my
self with essence o f orange flower water: on the phial o f essential oil there
is the original label covered with Arabic signs that spirit me away on their
sweeping curls to an unknown but imaginable neighborhood in Baghdad.59
To “celebrate living” woman responds to a variety of immediate impressions:
a mist of sprayed orange flower water and the extravagant, eye-catching letterimages. The mist of orange flower water, the invisible particles of the perfume,
linger on and penetrate her skin, circulate gently across its surface. Letters of
an unknown language form a cryptic code. The eye, suspended in their pres
ence, can neither possess nor destroy the enigmatic script; their communica
tion is never consummated. One may leave the secret word or keep gazing at
its forever immaculate shape. The orange’s essence creates a feast of imme
diacy. The orange’s essence (’’essence of orange flower water”) recovers the
essence of life.
The presence of the orange permeates the whole of the feminine reality. The
orange appears to be its d islocated centre: the orange displays all the features
of the divine centre, but at the same time it animates the fringes, enlivens the
middle. The orange has to be essential: it is the crisis of writing that follows
woman’s separation from the orange: “[m]ute I fled the orange.”60 And it is
only the orange re-gained that resuscitates writing: “[s]he put the orange back
into the deserted hands of my writing.”61 The orange is everywhere, floods
bodies and words. “[I]t was nearly the nymph of the orange that awakened in
my breast and surged forth streaming from the heart’s basin”62; “[t]he influx
of orange propagated itself to the ends of my bodies”63; “I was alive in the
59 Cixous, “(With) Or The Art o f Innocence,” trans. Stephanie Flood, excerpted from (With)
Ou I ’art de I'innocence (Paris: des femmes, 1981), in The Helene Cixous Reader, p. 95.
60 Cixous, “To Live the Orange,” excerpted from Vivre I’orange/To Live the Orange, trans.
Sarah Cornell and Ann Lindle (Paris: des fem m es, 1979), rpt. in The Helene Cixous Reader,
p. 86.
61 Ibid., p. 86.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid., p. 87.
moment, I had orange all over [...] I was humid, my skin young, sweet.”64
Woman rejoices in the juices streaming all over her body. But the intimacy with
the orange enlivens the mind as well, and produces “the juice-filled fruits of
meditation.”65 The orange inspires the mind and penetrates the body, spans and
fulfills all needs and desires.
No wonder the orange is proclaimed woman’s god and paradise and a stamp
of goodness: “[t]he orange is a beginning. Starting out from the orange all
voyages are possible. All voices that go their way via her are good”66; “[i]t
was an orange regained.”67 However, one can notice a certain dissonance here:
the orange is only the beginning. It does not establish the complete route, and
thus flees the organisation of the plane of transcendence. The orange is the
divinity of the plane of immanence, where all journeys are suspended in in
determination, and find their culmination in the middle. After all, the orange
is the quintessence of immediacy and an emblem of relatedness, both of which
are attributes of the plane of composition rather than organisation. (”[0]range’s
existence [...] all that is kin of the air and the earth, including all of the sense
relations that every orange keeps alive and circulates, with life, death, women,
forms, volumes, movement, matter [...] the invisible links between fruits and
bodies, the destiny of perfumes.”68)
It is difficult to be decisive about the idea of becomings, which, really, is
less a theory than an art of persuasion. But the persistence with which the orange
permeates woman’s reality loses its purely poetic air when related to the the
ory of becomings. The woman is driven to molecular proximity with the orange.
Even though the orange hardly materialises in the feminine reality (its pres
ence manifests in “the invisible links between fruits and bodies”), it floats as
a sign of relatedness: the orange induces the desire for a union, creates dreams
of mutual inter-penetration. One can be persuaded about the view of woman
as the becoming subject, and femininity as becoming in yet another manner:
when “voice,” an attribute of the feminine subject, is also inscribed into the
mechanism of becomings.
Deleuze and Guattari insist upon “musical expression” as a component of
becomings.69 It is possible to develop the understanding of “becoming-music”
with the references Deleuze and Guattari themselves make to lullabies, sym
phonies, operas and songs, or their allusions to music transposed from the molar
level onto the molecular one.70 But the “music of becomings” may also be
64 Ibid., p.
65 Ibid., p.
66 Ibid., p.
67 Ibid., p.
68 Ibid.
69 D eleuze
70 Ibid., p.
88.
87.
88.
87.
and Guattari, A Thousand ..., pp. 2 9 9 -3 0 9 .
309.
construed as the reso n a n ce which accompanies the encounter of the heteroge
neous series, a phenomenon Deleuze discusses in The L o g ic o f Sense.
Resonance is the sign of the complication of disparate notions: “[b]etween
these basic [heterogeneous - M.Z.] series, a sort of in tern a l reso n a n ce is pro
duced [...] it is necessary for the heterogeneous series to be really internalised
in the system, comprised or complicated ... [t]heir differences must be in clu
sive." 11 Becomings, the “unnatural participations,” also involve a complication
of heterogeneous series, and thus form a ’’resonating” event. Resonance is the
sign of the sudden communication of entities whose proximity cannot be taken
for granted. In this sense, resonance is also a sound of the flickering triumphs
of the plane of immanence. Resonance is the “voice” of the Body without
Organs, the only way the Body without Organs can be heard. The Body without
Organs, accompanied by the sound of resonating disparates, is for ever the
“sonorous” body.
Like the Deleuzian plane of immanence, the animate matter of the feminine
reality resounds with inner vibrations: “[t]here is a time for listening to the vibra
tions that things produce in detaching themselves from the nothing-being.”72 The
inner vibrations of things deliver them from nothingness. The respectful listen
ing to things as they are bom is contrasted with “murderous speech.” Murderous
words fix the identity of things, “fall upon things and fix their quaverings and
make them discordant and deafen them.”73 The quaverings of things are their
fragile but potent songs, vibrations resonating like hymns counteracting death.
Cixous’ poetic interludes contain non-poetic, literal, warning: you listen to and
respect the song of life (the inner vibrations of matter), or suppress it.
Cixous reflects on the practice of I ’e critu re fe m in in e, “I write a more sub
tle body than my busy body, the tympon body, I write - I think - ears that
are more refined than my ears, that only hear what makes noise, but do not
hear what moves, works, speaks, exists incessantly without being noticed.”74
What transpires is that the feminine subject contributes to the production of
a new body, apparently inconspicuous, invisible, yet desired as the only tool
for the tasks for which the body as organism proves inadequate. The other body
woman shapes is left unnamed, and specified only by its difference from the
body as an organism.
The Body without Organs is the sonorous, resonating, body. For Cixous,
voice is the essence of femininity, femininity is the essence of voice : “I can
71 D eleuze, The Logic o f Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin
V. Boundas (London: The Athlone Press, 1990), p. 261.
72 C ixous, “To Live the Orange,” p. 89. This idea often is interpreted as C ixou s’ debt
to Heidegger. See Shiach, Helene Cixous ..., p. 60, and Sellers, The Helene Cixous Reader,
p. 83.
73 C ixous, “To L ive the Orange,” p. 89.
74 C ixous, “(With) Or The Art o f Innocence,” p. 98.
adore a voice: I am a woman: the love of the voice.”75 It is not accidental.
Woman cannot be separated from voice; voice is her flesh and soul. The
“feminine” body, the body woman writes, is the body she gives voice to. “Write
yourself: your body must make itself heard”76; “[s]ings the most carnal of my
flesh [...] we hear ourselves internally to our nerves’ end.”77; “I am spacious
singing Flesh”78 - this is repeated in Cixous’ texts like an incantation. Also,
music is an indispensable component of Vecriture fem inine: “[f]irst I sense
femininity in writing by: a privilege of voice: w riting an d voice are entwined
and interwoven [...] In feminine speech, as in writing, there never stops rever
berating [...] song, the first music of the voice of love, which every woman
keeps alive.”79 Music, writing and body are the inviolable composition of fem
inine experience. The proposed idea of the feminine subject as the becoming
subject can be completed with the view of the feminine “voice” being parallel
to the “resonance” of the Deleuzian plane of immanence. The feminine writ
ing resounds with the sudden complications of the plane of immanence: with
the connections which compose the Body without Organs.
This intuition about the feminine subject as the resonating Body without
Organs is enhanced with the climactic, in a sense, experience outlined in a scene
from “To Live the Orange.” It is the climax of one’s experience on the plane
of immanence - when structures burst open, when surfaces are not the guard
ians of the inside but unfold to strike a harmony and resound with the trium
phant songs of life at its unmediated purest. It is the triumph of the feminine,
which flees the masculine law and organisation of the plane of transcendence,
and traverses the plane whose components constantly converse and commu
nicate, where concepts cannot be immobilised and opposed:
down in the depths o f the self, the confinement o f the being ceases [...] things
remain free, all are equal in vitality [...] each being evolves according to its
own necessity, following the order o f its intimate elements [...] they bathe,
in the middle o f the world [...] Senses flow, circulate, messages as divinely
complicated as the strange microphonetic signals, conveyed to the ears from
the blood, tumults, calls, inaudible answers vibrate, mysterious connections
are established. It is not impossible in the unrestrained conversing that among
75 Cixous, “To Live the Orange,” p. 84. Sellers writes that for Cixous, “voice” is linked
to the pre-symbolic stage, to the union between mother and child [Sellers, The Helene Cixous
Reader, p. 49], Shiach, similarly, points to the proximity o f voice to the unconscious, and to
the way the feminine “song” transgresses the law o f separation [Shiach, Helene Cixous..., p. 22].
77 C ixous, “Breaths,” trans. Susan Sellers, excerpted from Souffles (Paris: des fem mes,
1975), in The Helene Cixous Reader, p. 50.
79 Ibid., pp. 9 2 -9 3 .
disjunct, remote, disproportionate ensembles, at moments, harmonies o f in
calculable resonance occur.80
This argument pronounces that the feminine voice is the resonating sign
of becomings, the concomitant of the compositions struck on the plane of
immanence. The body woman writes is the Body without Organs: vibrations
which animate the inanimate, and shake the ground of fixed identities.
Jfc
5{C
Neither Deleuze and Guattari nor Cixous devote much attention to the
clarity of the ideas they propose. They produce hermetic, even hallucinatory
discourse, where thought may wonder (and wander) not to find any anchor
ing point. But one can see a few surprisingly clear points Deleuze and Guattari
make with which they affect our comprehension of subjectivity. First, as was
said, they dispense with all the pillars of discourse on subjectivity, yet keep
the body. Still the concept of the body is maintained in a queer, self-contra
dictory notion of the Body without Organs. It is yet another strategy of
Deleuze (and Guattari) to “unground the ground.” The body is vital, and thus
the ground of our existence. With the concept of the Body without Organs,
the ground - the body of flows, intensities, desires, but above all, the body
of pure difference, the body of the communicating middle - is maintained
but ungrounded. Deleuze and Guattari produce a positive view of disintegra
tion. They dismember the body, and remove its organs to celebrate differ
ence; to point out that difference, and only difference, is vital; to abandon
the petty fear of a sick organ. The middle, the communicating inside of the
philosophy of difference, becomes central; the former centre, the plane of
transcendence, is drawn to the margins.
Mullarkey argues for the partnership of the two planes: “[a]nother misun
derstanding [...] tempts many to interpret Deleuze’s analyses as reductionist,
to wit, that there is an on tological hierarchy between molarity and molecularity, with the molar thereby unreal and everything genuinely molecular.”81 But
is the perfect balance possible? What becomes relevant again is the image of
the horizon-line, and the relation between the inside and the outside it estab
lishes. The horizon-line, while it cannot be erased, safeguards organisation, and
thus marks, in a fragile but distinct manner, the presence of the plane of tran
scendence. But it is the plane of immanence that gains prominence as the more
intimate, home-like dimension. We live in the permanent inside of the plane
of immanence with nothing but the horizon-line to shape our experience of
transcendence. The plane of transcendence is the moving end of our pespec80 C ixous, “To Live the Orange,” pp. 9 1 -9 2 .
81 Mullarkey, “D eleuze and M aterialism ...,” p. 444.
tive, the horizon of man’s immediate experience of life, and the only barrier
against a fall into nothingness, the void of dissolution. (As Deleuze and Guat
tari insist, the Body without Organs, “full of gaiety, ecstasy, and dance,” when
the impetus for destruction is stronger than the desire for composition, easily
turns into the “emptied body,” the body of death.82)
Yet the plane of immanence, our Body without Organs is not given, and
it cannot be taken for granted. “Find your body without organs. Find out how
to make it. It’s a question of life and death [...] sadness and joy. It is where
everything is played out.”83 With Deleuze and Guattari’s monotonous incite
ments, the Body without Organs grows in significance. This is the revolution
of Deleuze and Guattari’s model of subjectivity. The standard call is to o ve r
com e the state of flux rather than to arrive at it. (The very idea of arriving at
a state of flux sounds paradoxical.) The point of caution and worry is the sun
rising rather than the waters into which it sinks. (’’Save the sun, everybody,
from the watery deeps, the dark underneath it must go.”) But the Body with
out Organs has nothing to do with “mere subsistence,” or “pure immanence,”
with what is given, and thus held in contempt. It is a task, a challenge. And
the guidelines are not given.
The Politics of Becomings
“Becomings [...] involve us in the political task of becoming other,”84 says
Armstrong, creating the political context for becomings. Following the objec
tives of this argument, the question about the political significance of becom
ings will be related directly to the feminist debate. However, Mullarkey right
ly observes that “the misimpression that Deleuze would dissolve molar beings
into anonymous molecular flows has brought him much criticism from at least
one quarter, namely, feminist philosophy.”85 It is sheer hysteria that sounds, for
instance, in Alice Jardine’s commentary upon the concept of “becomingwoman”:
to the extent that woman must “become woman” first [...] might that not mean
that she must also be the first to disappear? Is it not possible that the process
o f “becoming woman” is but a new variation o f an old allegory for the proc
ess o f women becoming obsolete? There would remain only her simulacrum:
83 Ibid., p. 151.
84 Armstrong, “Som e R eflections ...,” p. 56.
85 Mullarkey, “D eleuze and M aterialism ...,” p. 445.
a female figure caught in a whirling sea o f male configurations. A silent, mu
table, head-less, desireless spatial surface necessary only for his metamor
phosis?86
Jardine, like other feminist critics overwhelmed by the catastrophic implica
tions of the BwO, refuses to consider the whole of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory.
The theory of becomings is one of the most frequently referred to and the least
understood parts of their philosophy. More objections are raised and more fears
voiced; none of them, however, seem to be grounded in more than a mere
haunting outline of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory.
Admittedly, Deleuze and Guattari make it plain that “there are many be
comings of man, but no becoming-man,”87 and insist that “the woman as a molar
entity has to becom e-wom an in order that the man also becomes- or can becomewoman.”88 It is also true that “all becomings begin with and pass through
becoming-woman.”89 In the system of becomings woman seems to occupy
a position both peculiar and disadvantegous. Woman’s privileged status in the
order of becomings enhances only the idea of her subjection to man, who needs
the mechanism of becomings for his own fulfillment. Still, Deleuze and Guattari
explain that the lack of balance between man’s and woman’s position in be
comings reflects the existent social order; “man is majoritarian p a r excellence,
whereas becomings are minoritarian [...] It is perhaps the special situation of
women in relation to the man-standard that accounts for the fact that becom
ings, being minoritarian, always pass through a becoming-woman.”90 The ex
clusion of man from the order of becomings is a consequence of his privileged,
centred, domineering social and cultural status - of which Deleuze and Guat
tari do not approve but at the same time cannot play unaware. Deleuze and
Guattari’s theory, uniquely abstract, and apparently ignorant of practical issues,
recognises, addresses, and develops as a reaction to, the same social context
that has provoked the rise of feminism.
Deleuze and Guattari insist upon the molar and molecular dimension of
subjectivity, but claim the strength of the latter and the urgent need to transform
the former. The emphasis they put upon the molecular mode of subjectivity
follows their strong conviction that the molar organisation can be unhinged (and
improved) only on condition that the molecular dimension is activated (”The BwO
defies the either-or logic that always leads to win-or-lose mentality,”91 Howard
86 A lice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations o f Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell
U niversity Press, 1985), p. 217. Quoted after Grosz, Volatile ..., p. 161.
88 Ibid., pp. 2 7 5 -2 7 6 .
89 Ibid., p. 277.
90 Ibid., p. 291.
91 Howard, “Subjectivity...,” p. 121.
says, pointing to the potential the Body without Organs carries for political
change.) And, as they warn against the neglect of the matter, it is the ampu
tation of the molecular that will spell the molar immobilised:
It is, o f course, indispensable for women to conduct a molar politics, with
a view o f winning back their own organism, their own history, their own sub
jectivity: “we as women ...” makes its appearance as a subject o f enuncia
tion. But it is dangerous to confine oneself to such a subject, which does not
function without drying up a spring or stopping a flow. The song o f life is
often intoned by the driest o f women, moved by ressentiment, the will to
power and cold mothering [...] It is necessary to conceive o f a molecular wom
en’s politics that slips into molar confrontations and passes under or through
them [...] The question is not, or not only, that o f the organism, history and
subject o f enunciation that oppose masculine to feminine in the great dual
ism machines. The question is fundamentally that o f the body - the body
they steal fr om us in order to fabricate opposable organisms.92
One reason to quote this passage at length is that it recalls a number of Cix
ous’ most renowned claims. Some of the expressions sound like allusions to,
if not direct quotations of Cixous’ widely spread ideas of “women winning back
their bodies,”93 or of the necessity to give woman back her “goods, her pleas
ures, her organs, her vast bodily territories kept under seal.”94 The other, less
disputable, reason is the clarity with which Deleuze and Guattari point to the
significance of the “molecular politics.” And the two reasons combine, in fact,
in the body Cixous writes on, the body stolen, both from men and women, and
the Deleuzian Body without Organs, the becoming fem inine subject, what/who
we are on the plane of immanence.
’’Man” and “woman” are, in a sense, excluded from the plane of immanence.
Man and woman, the male and female subject, have sexed bodies and gendered
minds. They wholeheartedly support the molar organisation, and try desper
ately to immobilise the horizon-line, or to raise its artificial substitutes at which
they could clutch in a gesture of defence against the fluctuating ground of their
home, the plane of immanence, the molecular organisation of being. Even
though Deleuze and Guattari are not directly committed to feminism, their
theory, founded upon a similar understanding of the cultural and social scene,
is a way out of more than one cultural trap and blind alley feminists resist and
fight.
In N egotiations , Deleuze asks, “[s]o how can we manage to speak without
giving orders, without claiming to represent something or someone, how can
94 Ibid., p. 97.
we get people without the right to speak, to speak?”95 And as Buchanan ac
curately paraphrases Deleuze’s words, “[t]he real philosophical problem [...]
is not the determination of who can or should speak (a matter best left to the
police) [...] but rather the fabrication of a set of conditions that would enable
everyone to speak.”96 Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theories appear as a p ossibility
o f voice: to liberate the voice of many, and silence none.
95 D eleuze, Negotiations , p. 41. Quoted after Buchanan, “Introduction,” The South At
lantic Quarterly, p. 385.
96 Ibid., p. 24. Quoted after Buchanan, “Introduction,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, p.
Say What I Am: Aldhelmian Riddle
as the Language of Transformation
Nu snottre men swijjast lufiajD
m idwist mine; ic m onigum sceal
w isdom cyjjan; no J>£er word sprecafl
aenig ofer eoróan. t>eah nu aelda beam
londbuendra lastas mine
sw i|)e secafl, ic swafie hwilum
mine bemijje monna gehw ylcum .
[N ow w ise men love very much
my presence; To many shall I
announce my wisdom; nor w ill there be spoken any word
over earth. Although now the sons o f men,
the earth-dwellers, fiercely seek
my tracks, I som etim es
conceal m y path from all men.]
Riddle 94, The Exeter Book, 10*711th c.
The role of riddles in the development of literary forms cannot be under
estimated, although nowadays their generic identity is mostly limited to the
sphere of childish word games. Riddles, having evolved from oral origins and
giving rise to various literary forms, are inextricably connected with the no
tion of metamorphosis to the extent possibly even greater than any other lit
erary genre. A riddle acquires its intrinsic character verbally veiling the object
it shrewdly attempts to describe. In order to do so, it resorts to the change within
the frame of reference conventionally applied to the object in question. How
ever, not only are the riddles created by transforming the referential system for
their actual objects but it is also the very formula of the riddlic element in them
which often undergoes transformation. The intention of my essay is to illus-
tratę the possibility of such processes by discussing a particular collection of
eighth-century Anglo-Latin riddles composed by Aldhelm bishop of Sherboume.
That the riddlic forms were vital for culture creating processes in almost
any society is now beyond doubt. It is attested geographically and historically
by a variety of sources, ranging from the earliest cuneiform texts of Sumer,
the Sanskrit V edas, Old Icelandic sagas or remote contemporary oral cultures
from South-East Asia. The primeval potency of the form and its mutable nature
are conspicuous if we take into account the etymologies of the words denoting
riddles in various languages. Even a sketchy analysis of the Indo-European
languages reveals that the primordial functions attributed to what we now call
riddles used to be connected with the domain of the serious, only later giving
rise to the playful elements which are now riddles’ main focus. Riddling and
riddles were regarded as belonging to the sacred rather than the profane; they
performed the roles ascribed to divination (cf. French d e v in e tte or Italian
in d o vin elli, derived from Latin divin u s, “divine” but also “prophetic”; Russian
and Polish za g a d k a or Czech h adan ka related to Old Church Slavonic gadanye, “divination, guessing, riddle”) as well as with wisdom in general (cf. Old
English rcedelle, rcedelse, or Old High German ra d isle with Old English reed,
“counsel, opinion” or Old High German ra t, “counsel”). Curiously, while
Germanic languages seem to focus more on the common-sensical, pragmatic
sides of riddles, Romance and Slavonic etymologies appear to identify the
concept with more esoteric spheres of religion and soothsaying.
Thus etymology proves that the notion of riddle has undergone several
semantic shifts. What appears to be even more conspicuous is that riddles have
always been preoccupied with the forms of identity transformation. The main
distinctive feature of the genre lies in describing something anew, by estrang
ing the description from its customary linguistic environment. At the same time
certain hidden textual ties between the subject and its riddlic representation must
be preserved or facilitated, so as to engender the provocative game of wits
between the text and its recipient. Posing a successful riddle, one may be
tempted to say, is then comparable to walking a tightrope stretched between
incomprehensibility and transparency of the text. Simultaneously, however, as
the active participation of the reader/listener is the sin e qua non of the riddlic
discourse, riddles are involved in the process of transformation taking place
within his or her frame of mind. They offer the possibility of sudden, epiphanic understanding, when the initially estranged subject, so to speak, “returns”
to the reader/listener. This “return,” which can be understood in terms of
Aristotelian a n a g n o risis, materialises through the process of reverse transfor
mation, that is through the recipient’s reconstruction of the estranged identity.
Thus the riddlic discourse may be seen as presenting an interesting model of
communication in literature as a whole. And indeed, literary potency of rid
dles has been widely acknowledged, ranging from Aristotle’s R h eto ric, where
they were recognised as sources of ingenious metaphors whose initial obscu
rity only strengthened the impact of the text,1 to Northrop Frye’s study, where
riddles are referred to as “the generic seeds or kernels, possibilities of expres
sion sprouting and exfoliating into new literary phenomena.”2
Interestingly, the enigmas of Aldhelm (ca. 640-709) appeared for the first
time in order to illustrate literary matters as he included them to provide
examples for D e m etris, his treatise on Latin meter sent to King Aldfrith of
Northumbria (685-705). Aldhelm, abbot of Malmesbury and bishop of Sherbourne, was arguably one of the most eminent men of letters to have emerged
from the recently Christianized kingdom of Wessex, the man whose influence
outreached both his native land and his era. The A enigm ata attached to his
scholarly study most probably instigated a prolific tradition of Anglo-Latin and
Anglo-Saxon literary riddles of which the most famous instances are the Old
English riddles enclosed in the E xeter Book. Aldhelm’s enigmas are so diverse
in themes that the collection appears to be short of any internal logic at first
glance. Furthermore, it displays a feature which the E xeter B ook riddles lack;
each of Aldhelm’s enigmas is preceded by a title, simultaneously acting as its
solution. Although such practice was not uncommon and was employed by some
late Roman enigmatographers, the fundamental principle of riddling appears
to have been jeopardised there. The obvious doubt emerging at this point would
be that since the solutions are known from the very beginning, the enigmatic
is non-existent. I believe and aim to demonstrate, however, that this apparent
contradiction is precisely where Aldhelm’s formula of riddle becomes trans
formed from the seemingly playful form into a manifestation of a complex
world-view. In order to disentangle this paradox we must begin with consid
ering the question what constitutes the enigmatic element in Aldhelm’s col
lection.
The Biblical omnipresence of God and the omnipresence of his wisdom,
identified with the Holy Spirit, was a dogma which was particularly empha
sised by the early Christian scholars. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, an
anonymous Christian philosopher who probably lived in Syria around the 6th
century, explains it thus in chapter seven of The D ivine N am es :
God is praised as “Logos” [word] by the sacred scriptures not only as the
leader o f word, mind, and wisdom, but because he also initially carries within
his own unity the causes o f all things and because he penetrates all things,
reaching, as scripture says, to the very end o f all things. But the title is used
especially because the divine Logos is simpler than any simplicity and, in
' Aristotle, The Art o f Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese (London: W illiam Heinemann
Ltd, 1967), B ook III, Ch. II, p. 357 and B ook III, Ch. XI, p. 409.
2
Northrop Frye, “Charms and R iddles,” in Spiritus Mundi. Essays on Literature, Myth,
and Society (Bloom ington and London: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 123.
its utter transcendence, is independent o f everything. This Word is simple
total truth. [...] The man in union with truth knows clearly that all is well
with him, even if everyone thinks that he has gone out o f his mind.3
Pseudo-Dionysius appears to be postulating that in order to attain spiritual
balance in this world man must become aware of the truth which is within the
Word, and which, in turn, is God. The search for the truth is consequently the
path towards God. Enlightenment is only possible through answering an allencompassing riddle, whose answer is the omnipresent wisdom of God. An even
more famous contemporary of Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory the Great, follows
the same line of reasoning, employing a more straightforward style: “When we
look closely at the outer form of a thing we are referred to its inner meaning,
for the wonderful works of the visible world possess the marks of the creator;
and though we are still not able to see him, we incline towards him if in those
things which he has made we admire him.”4 Christian confidence in God’s
personal participation in the process of creation and the necessity to discern
and understand His ubiquitousness in every being, might have been, and in
deed was, interpreted as resembling a riddle posed by Him to mankind.
With this perspective in mind, Christian attractiveness of the riddle form
becomes obvious. Firstly, they were composed on the basis of a design which
was not self-evident but the discovery of which was a prerequisite to the
discovery of the riddle’s meaning. According to Christian ideology this pro
cess imitated the divine plans behind each of God’s creations. Secondly, since
the variety of topics within the riddle collections was great, riddles reflected
the variety of God’s works. Aldhelm’s Aenigm ata, beside their didactic func
tion of exemplifying the complexity of Latin meter and beside their entertain
ing qualities, evidently share the Christian point of view on the form in par
ticular and on the world in general. The speaking personae of Aldhelm’s rid
dles are not only their actual subjects, but also tokens of the divine wisdom.
It is the holy Logos, the vox D e i , which continuously speaks through those
objects. Aldhelm’s invocation to the Eternal Judge constituting the Praefatio
to his enigmas, presents his riddles as involved in disclosing the secret schemes
of divine creation:
Limpida dictatnti metrorum carmina praesul
Munera nunc largire, rudis quo pandere rerum
Versibus enigmata queam clandistina fatu:
Sic, Deus, indignis tua gratis dona rependis.
3 Basic Issues in Medieval Philosophy, eds. Richard N . B osley and Martin Tweedale
(Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1997), p. 597.
4 Cited in F. H. Whitman, Old English Riddles (Ottawa: Canadian Federation for the
Humanities. Monograph Series N o. Ill, 1982), p. 62.
Patron o f him who songs in flowing verse
Composes, now bestow thy gifts on me,
That I with my rude lines may bare in speech
The secret riddles o f created things To the unworthy thus thou giv’st thy gifts.5
Metaphorically speaking, Aldhelm sees his role as a messenger of the divine
Logos, unveiling “the secret riddles of created things,” for the only true riddler is God. Aldhelm’s view in a more contemporary version seems to be
repeated in the words of Jorge Luis Borges who, in one of his allegorical stories,
observed that puzzles do involve godlike privileges: “it is the prerogative of
God, not man, to strike confusion and inspire wonder.”6 It is only natural, then,
to comprehend what Aldhelm might have considered as the true enigma of his
A enigm ata as the sinuous path leading from their subjects to the elements of
divinity enclosed in them. The presence of titles in the collection does not
diminish the sense of mystery but rather intensifies it. The title is merely the
initial form which the eye meets, much in the manner of perceiving the object
in the physical world. The way in which the object is portrayed is dramatically
different from the initial association and it is there where the new, richer sig
nification can be found. The reader/listener is to carefully follow that way,
savouring the intricacies of particular riddles and comparing them with the title
so as to unite his preconceptions on the subject with its estranged identity in
the act of epiphanic revelation. It is a powerful lesson, both in terms of an
exercise in imagination and in terms of religious teaching, the lesson about
which Aristotle’s R h etoric spoke: “Most smart sayings are derived from
metaphor, and also from misleading the hearer beforehand. For it becomes more
evident to him that he has learnt something, when the conclusion turns out
contrary to his expectations, and the mind seems to say, ‘How true it is! But
I missed it.’ [...] And clever riddles are agreeable for the same reason; for some
thing is learnt, and the expressions is also metaphorical.”7
Therefore, we arrive at the first transformation of the riddle concept in
Aldhelm. It occurs on the level of individual riddles, where it is no longer the
subject which is unknown and disguised but the clues to its understanding; it
is there where the solving takes place. The true challenge lies in being able
to imagine the subject as described by the poet, to see the connections between
the metaphors and metonymies used by the riddler and the object. This mech
anism was intensified by Aldhelm’s sophisticated etymologising, a practice
5 The Riddles o f Aldhelm, ed. and trans. James Hall Pitman (N ew Haven: Archon Books,
1970), pp. 2 -3 ,1 1 .6 - 9 .
6 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Two Kings and Two Labyrinths,” in Collected Fictions, trans.
Andrew Hurley (London: A llen Lane, 1999), p. 263.
7 Aristotle, p. 409.
common for early medieval learning and the one which frequently formed the
foundation of medieval knowledge. The most well-known example of it are
7th-century encyclopedic E ty m o lo g ia e by Isidore of Seville. The etymologi
sing employed in Aldhelm’s enigmas is based on Isidore and adds to their
linguistic potential, sometimes verging on the wordplay between the enigma
and its title. Nicholas Howe regards it as one of the formative ideas behind
Aldhelmian riddles: “Aldhelm delights in the articulation of the linguistic riddle
stated by the title, while Isidore delights in solving the linguistic riddle of the
word’s etymology. The underlying relation between the two - riddle as word,
word as riddle - becomes evident as one traces Aldhelm’s frequent technique
of reframing Isidore’s etymological matter to form a riddle.”8 Both Aldhelm
and Isidore engage in the fabric of meaning symbolised and contained in names.
Isidore’s etymological study centres on the name itself as the element compris
ing the potential for understanding a given thing. Aldhelm seems to reverse this
process, since for him it is the understanding of a given thing, enabled by his
clues, which directs the audience to its name, positioned, n ota b en e, a b o v e the
riddle. Whatever the approach, the metaphysical element of the meaning and
the name as coming from “above,” from God, is affirmed in both authors.
Aldhelm and Isidore undertake the fascinating task of attempting to detect the
true enigmas set and concealed by the supreme agent, both meeting at the point
where the riddle-like encounters the learning. Subsequently, both the etymo
logical and theological approaches to the enigmas prove the fact that the riddlic character of Aldhelm’s work is located not where one would traditionally
seek it, that is n o t in the straightforward search for the riddles’ camouflaged
identities.
A corresponding mechanism yet on a larger scale can be observed in
Aldhelm’s anthology as a whole. Initially it appears as a heterogeneous, not to
say chaotic, arrangement of topics which seemingly are unconnected with one
another; for example the “Bellows” riddle is preceded by the “Dog” riddle and
the “Serpent” is followed by the “Bookcase.” Such an attitude, however, would
necessarily be of simplistic and shallow nature. The logical result of the riddlic transformation discussed above is that nothing is insignificant. In the words
of a 12th-century theologian and philosopher, Alain de Lille: om nis m undi creatu ra q u a si lib e r e t p ic tu r a n o b is e s t e t sp ecu lu m , “every creature in the world
is, for us, like a book and a picture and a mirror as well.”9 Consequently, the
symbolic in Aldhelm is enclosed not only in particular elements within indi
8 N icholas H ow e, “A ldhelm ’s Enigmata and Isidorian Etym ology,” in Anglo-Saxon Eng
land, eds. Peter C lem oes, Simon K eynes and Michael Lapidge, Vol. 14 (Cambridge: Cam
bridge U niversity Press, 1985), p. 39.
9 Alain de L ille, Rhythmus alter, quoted in Dale Coulter, “ P seu d o-D ion ysiu s in the
Twelfth-Century Latin West”, The ORB Online Encyclopedia (http://orb.rhodes.edu/encyclop/
culture/Philos/coulter.html).
vidual enigmas but also in the entire collection composed of particular riddles.
The “Creation” enigma closing the collection is a clear allusion to the diver
sity of themes employed by the enigmatographer, for it is an all-encompassing
force, the divine Logos. Its final lines, posing the question as to the identity
concealed in the riddle, can be also read as challenging the reader/listener as
to the meaning of the whole collection: “S c isc ito r inflatos, fu n g a r quo nom ine,
sofas. [Now I ask/Puffed up philosophers what name I bear.]”10 The “say what
I am” challenge is posed not only by the “who” or “what” questions, but also
by the question “why.” In other words, the mystery of the collection is also
formed by the other type of transformation of the riddlic formula. The enigma
is enclosed in the shrouded reasons why these and not other riddles constitute
the anthology, and what the significance of their spatial arrangement is.
A closer reading of Aldhelm’s enigmas confirms the assumptions I have
demonstrated so far. Aldhelm creates a grand construction spanning his riddles,
immediately transporting the audience from the playful form into the questions
of power, creation and fate. The A en ig m a ta open with five natural riddles,
“Terra” (“Earth”), “Ventus” (“Wind”), “Nubes” (“Cloud”), “Natura” (“Natural
Force”), “Iris” (“Rainbow”) followed by “Luna” (“Moon”), “Fatum” (“Fate”)
and “Pliades” (“Pleiades”). The elements, intertwined with nature and fate
commanding over them, are placed underneath the firmament, establishing the
ingredients of and the theatre for the enigmas of the collection. The whole work
is completed by the above-mentioned supreme enigma, the remarkably long
and complex riddle C “Creatura” (“Creation”). Aldhelm himself, although in
a veiled way, mentions the dome-like, all-enclosing structure he designed, in
an enigma, appearing to be jutting out from the others, no. LV “Crismal” (“Ciborium”). It is there that I see Aldhelm revealing his structure in a metaphorical
understanding of the vessel containing the Hosts. As each Host accommodates
Christ so does each thing, described by Aldhelm, involve Christ’s presence,
communicating its own and His splendour. The vessel is likened to a temple
of God just as the world itself can be compared to one and both, the vessel
and the A e n ig m a ta , f lo r e t g lo ria rerum , “bloom[s] with the glory of things”:
C andida sanctarum sic floret g loria rerum,
N e c trabis in tem p lo, surgunt n ec tecta co lu m n is.
[...] thus h o ly things
R ev ea l their glory. H ere no tim bers are;
N o co lu m n s rise to bear this te m p le ’s d o m e .11
10 Pitman, pp. 6 6 -6 7 , 1. 83.
11 Ibid., pp. 3 0 -3 1 , 11. 8 -9 .
Nonetheless, the hundredth riddle of Aldhelm is a giant, clear and definite
conclusion to the A enigm ata, at the same time including all of their possible
aspects, simultaneously being one thing and its exact opposite:
Grossas et graciles rerum comprenso figuras.
Altior, en, cselo rimor secreta Tonantis
Et tamen inferior terris tetra Tartara cemo;
All shapes, both gross and graceful, I comprise.
Lo, higher than heaven, the secrets I explore
Of thundering God, yet, lower than the earth,
[I] Gaze on foul hell;12
Employing the rhetoric used by the Creation, the enigma seems to present
Aldhelm’s ultimate solution and ultimate riddle, ending with the challenge to
the inflatos sofos, “puffed-up philosophers,” not so much to discover its name
but rather to discover the holy Creation as permeating all the preceding rid
dles. This challenge is anteceded by a warning, which I understand as refer
ring to the riddles as well, to [a]uscultate m ei credentes fam in a verbi (1. 80), •
“hear and believe the words of my utterance,” which in fact are the very riddles,
because [e]t tamen infitians non retu rfrivola lector (1. 82), “the doubting reader
should not think of them as worthless.” The Creation, understood by Aldhelm
as subject only to rerum gen itor (1. 64), “the creator of all things,” whose
mundum serm one coercen s (1. 64), “word commands the world,” is really
arching over the entire collection, infiltrating all of its items with the divine
Logos.
In general, Aldhelm seems to be fascinated with the way in which the
particular components of reality infiltrate one another. This infiltration takes
place on various levels, beginning with the foremost level of the divine par
ticipation in everything by means of the Creatura, an agent analogous to the
Logos which is permeating the elements. The elements, in turn, permeate the
actual riddle items, which eventually penetrate one another. Everything, Ald
helm appears to be claiming, is interconnected and forms an ever-changing
entity, revolving around God. Such is the mixture of the elements in one riddle
which appears in the middle of the collection and which, one would say, stands
not only for Lebes, “Cauldron,” but also for the vessel in which things are
conceived and from which they are born, a metaphor for the universe as it is.
Placed in the middle of the collection, focused on transmutability and being
concerned with the opposites, enigma XLIX is thus the support of the arch
extending from the opening to the close of the A en igm ata :
Horrida, curva, capax, patulis fabricata metallis
Pendeo nec caelum tangens terramve profundam,
Ignibus ardescens necnon et gurgite fervens;
Sic geminas vario patior discrimine pugnas,
Dum latices limphse tolero flammasque feroces.
Ugly, capacious, round, of flattened bronze,
I hang suspended, touching neither heaven
Nor lowly earth. I glow with fires, and seethe
With eddying billows; thus a twofold war
Of varying risks I bear, as I endure
The limpid waters and ferocious flames.13
A powerful mixture of the principles, the amalgam of the beautiful with the
ugly, the celestial with the infernal, brings to mind the oxymoronic statements
of the final enigma. Similarly, the presence of the four elements generates
a conspicuous connection with the enigmas situated in the opening folios of
the Aenigm ata. Bearing a close resemblance to the cauldron riddle is another
enigma located in almost immediate proximity to it. Riddle LIV “Cocuma
Duplex,” (“Double Cooking-vessel”), seems, at first, to be reasserting the thesis
of the paradoxical presence of antagonistic elements, but it is also expanding
it by pointing to their productive power. Through their coalescence, brimming
with militant images, the peace and benefit of food is achieved. In addition to
this, the enigma is topped with questions involving the paradox of contradic
tory elements functioning as one, again, much in the fashion of the final rid
dle, whose title is also the answer to them:
Credere quis poterit tantis spectacul;a causis
Temperet et fatis rerum contraria fata?
Ecce larem, laticem quoque gesto in viscere ventris,
Nec tamen undantes vincunt incendia limpha:
Ignibus aut atris siccantur flumina fontis,
Foedera sed pacis sunt flammas inter et undas;
Malleus in primo memet formabat et incus.
Who could believe such causes wrought this sight,
Who reconcile such contradictory lots
With common laws of Nature? Lo, I bear
Within my hollow belly fire and flood;
Yet billowing water may not quench the flames,
Nor may dire heat dry up the welling streams,
For wave and flame have made a pact of peace.
Hammer and anvil long since shaped me thus.14
13 Ibid., pp. 2 6 -2 7 .
14Ibid., pp. 3 0 -3 1 .
Thus individual riddles go beyond their separate identities and generate one
organism. The e pluribus unum rhetoric of the work is echoed in its structure,
varied as the universe it is attempting to portray but focused on the common
scheme of mutual interdependency and interconnectedness between the com
ponents of that universe. All that created an elaborate and interlocking web of
connections which could be compared to Anglo-Saxon visual arts where illu
minations form intricate knotwork designs. Both there and in Aldhelm’s A en
igm ata the main motifs emerge from underneath the net of tangled elements
weaving, intertwining and blending one into another.
The A enigm ata are abundant in the elements which serve to bridge the
discussed above contextual groups within the collection. Detecting such ties,
created on metonymic and metaphorical levels, itself adds to the riddlic char
acter of the anthology. The spatial limitations of this essay do not allow for
an exhaustive analysis of the intricate web of meanings woven by Aldhelm,
I shall, therefore attempt to present only some of the most prominent exam
ples of such interdependencies. The connections between Aldhelmian enigmas
appear, as I have noted above, both between those positioned in close prox
imity to one another as well as between those divided by considerable distanc
es. Some of them are strikingly explicit, as obvious as they could only be, yet
some of the connections are truly labyrinthine and their discovery indeed
appears as a revelation, as a moment of epiphany comparable to that following
a successful resolving of a riddle. Therefore the question “why” concerning not
only the choice of topics but also their spatial arrangement in the whole text
seems only natural and the discovery of connections, “bridges,” spanning the
enigmas’ topics is the outcome of such communication with the reader/listen
er. Aldhelm’s riddles follow the paradigm pertaining not only to other literary
riddles but also to other texts: that in which meaning becomes the outcome of
the relationship between the text and the erudition of the reader. The message
is then formed, so to speak, in between, a process which is congruous with
Wolfgang Iser’s view of the textual meaning described by him as:
[A] mutually restrictive and magnifying interaction between the explicit and
the implicit, between revelation and concealment. What is concealed spurs
the reader into action, but this action is also controlled by what is revealed;
the explicit in its turn is transformed when the implicit has been brought to
light. Whenever the reader bridges the gaps, communication begins. The gaps
function as a kind o f pivot on which the whole text-reader relationship re
volves. Hence, the structured blanks of the text stimulate the process of idea
tion to be performed by the reader on terms set by the text.15
1S
W olfgang Iser, “Interaction Betw een Text and Reader,” quoted in Critical Theory and
Practice: A Coursebook, eds. Keith Green and Jill LeBihan (London and N ew York:
Routledge, 1996), p. 209.
The reader’s “process of ideation” of the entirety of Aldhelm’s collection can
be perceived as animated first by the bridging of the gaps within individual
riddles and then as the ideation of the associations between them as entities.
Therefore the study of such associations seems to me as significant for
the understanding of the collection’s potential as the study of the individual
enigmas.
The relations observable within the enigmas of the collection operate on
two levels, structural and semantic. Following Jakobson’s division of linguis
tic structure, the structural level of the connections appears to function on the
basis of the similarity (metaphors) and the contiguity (metonymies) of seman
tic elements displayed by the enigmas. On the level of semantic analysis the
associations are constructed by riddles belonging to common categories, such
as animals, plants, natural phenomena; by the use of common motifs in rid
dles, such as the usage of cosmology or the elements; and by riddles resorting
to the sphere of Christian symbolism. The connections based on the collection’s
typology or motifs shared by particular riddles are evidently contiguous and
thus are built as metonymies or synecdoches, whereas the connections created
by Christian symbolism are evidently metaphoric. It is not always possible to
demarcate the connections as clear-cut examples of one particular class. On
the contrary, the boundaries of their classes are frequently crossed causing them
to merge with one another, eventually creating an even tighter net of depend
encies. Similarly, the forms by means of which the connections are introduced
also seem to reflect the idea of the text as mirroring the world’s mutually
dependent and entwined structure, where the tangible combines with the sym
bolic and where the traces of the divine demiurge are ubiquitously diffused.
Moreover, not only are the connections built on various levels of affinities
shared by the enigmas, but they also are composed as reciprocal antitheses. At
this point let me introduce the category of grafting which, in the context of
Aldhelmian riddles, I intend to present as twofold. By grafting I mean the
examples of such connections where an idea or an element employed in one
riddle appears to give rise to another enigma. This process can be seen as being
of positive or negative nature: riddles can either stem out of one another by
means of direct affinities (positive grafting) or they can be derived from one
another by means of direct opposites (negative grafting). The instances of
positive grafting bring to mind the idea of divine order and are opposed by
the disorder generated by those stimulated by negative grafting. At the very
same time it must be made clear that neither of the two types of grafting should
be understood as superior or inferior to one another. Both forms merely com
plement each other and resemble the symbolic image of the opposed, yet
complementary elements of the cooking pot from riddle LIV.
As the connections based on cosmology and the elements have already been
mentioned in the discussion of the overall structure of the Aenigm ata, and as
the associations constructed on categorial contiguity are frequently self evident,
let us concentrate on the method of grafting. Aldhelm’s grafting as a technique
of linking his enigmas is visible particularly well in those of their groups which
were constructed on the grounds of most immediate similarities between their
attributes. Without doubt, close affinities are primarily the trait of those rid
dles which are consolidated by their common category. Nonetheless, Aldhelm,
as I have already attempted to prove, was capable of much more intricate and
less straightforward associations. An example of his true riddlic skill can be
noted in three, bearing no apparent semblance, riddles, LIX “Penna,” (“Pen”),
LX “Monocerus,” (“Unicorn”) and LXI “Pugio,” (“Dagger”). The key to the
riddle of the enigmas’ proximity appears to me as hidden on two levels, external
and deeply internal or, I should rather say, symbolic. Externally it is the shape
of the three objects which positively grafts the riddles in one another: the
elongated silhouette of the pen is mirrored in the most prominent feature making
a unicorn a unicorn, its long spiralled horn. Finally, the outline of the dagger
completes the threefold pattern. And, in reverse, it is precisely the dagger’s
shape which encapsulates the solution to the second interpretation, for daggers,
just like swords, are in the form of crosses. Naturally and congruously with
Christian rhetoric then, there arise the associations with Christ, whose suffer
ing is symbolised by the dagger,16 and whose very person is represented by
the unicorn17 and the pelican, the original owner of the pen. Thus the connec
tion functions here as a system of metaphors.
An allied, although maybe even more elusive, correspondence weaves it
self through four other enigmas, nos. XXX-XXXIII. The “Elementum” (“Al
phabet”), “Ciconia” (“Stork”), “Pugillares” (“Writing-tablets”) and “Lorica”
(“Cuirass/Breast-plate”) can be associated also on grounds of the similarities
of their appearances as well as certain attributes, analogous to them. The
connections are interlaced and are not fully common to the whole group as one
unifying idea. Instead, they again employ positive grafting and emanate from
their antecedents. The alphabet of riddle XXX cunningly and incredibly ap
pears in the stork riddle (XXXI), which, according to the Christian symbol
ism, is associated with the holy letter X .18 The writing-tablets are associated
with writing p e r se , employing a Christian hyperbole in [s]e d sem en se g iti de
ccelo d u c itu r alm u m , “from heaven unto that field [i.e. the tablets themselves]
is borne the seed.”19 Yet the enigma of the writing tablets engages also a military
allegory: [h]eu! tarn sa n c ta se g e s d ir is extin gu itu r a rm is (1. 8), “alas, this holy
16 W ładysław Kopaliński, Słownik symboli [“A Dictionary o f Sym bols”], (Warszawa:
Wiedza Powszechna, 1990), pp. 223, 258.
17 Ibid., p. 124.
18 The letter is formed by its open beak and crossed legs. Cf. Kopaliński, p. 29.
19 Pitman, pp. 1 8 -1 9 ,1 . 6.
harvest is destroyed by fierce weapons,” which creates an immediate link with
the subsequent breast-plate riddle. Not only does it physically resemble the
writing-tablets, but it finishes with the statement metaphorically answering the
lament of the preceding enigma: [sjp ic u la non v ere o r lo n gis ex em p ta fa r e tr is ,
“no arrow in the quiver frightens me.”20 Thus, an elaborate allegory may be
tentatively observed as arising from the group: Christian writing which will
withstand the attacks of its enemies.
The connections basing on the analogous features of the described objects
can be formulated not only on affinities but also on contrarieties between them,
thus employing the paradigm previously marked as negative grafting.
A conspicuous illustration is provided by two riddles whose objects share only
one property, both have feathers. Apart from it, riddles XLI “Pulvillus” (“Pil
low”) and XLII “Strutio” (“Ostrich”) are completely dissimilar and the differ
ence lies in the celestial dimension. The pillow says that [c ]e lsio r a d su p era s
p o ss u m tu rg e sc e re n u b es, “high, towards the clouds of heaven, at times I
swell,”21 whereas the ostrich laments its plight: [s]ed p o tiu s p ed ib u s sp a tio r p e r
sq u a lid a ru ra , “rather, I must pace/on foot through dirty fields.”22 Here, then,
the tie is negatively grafted in the succeeding enigma. It is not made by the
things converging to a common point, denoted here by the possession of feath
ers, but rather by diverging from it, moving in totally contrastive directions.
As the technique of grafting is widely used to compose the particular struc
tures within the A en ig m a ta , so is the idea of binary oppositions, related to the
concept of negative grafting. The binary oppositions are constructed on a larger
scale than the ties employing the negative grafting, usually encompassing whole
entities of the riddles in question. Such contrastive comparisons can be noted
in the interrelations woven by the most substantial and elevated concepts, that
is those stemming from the Scriptures. Possibly the most obvious of them is
positioning riddle LXIII “Corbus” (“Raven”), immediately before riddle LXIV
“Columba” (“Dove”). The riddle of their mutual location is self-evident, for
both enigmas are not only juxtaposed in terms of the symbolism of their colours
but also as the birds released by Noah during the Flood, the fact to which both
of the enigmas refer in their texts. They are set in opposition as the raven is
an example of disobeying Noah, whereas the dove returned to him bringing
the symbol of good hope. A more intricate exemplar is to be found between
riddle LXXI “Piscis” (“Fish”), and riddle LXXII “Colosus” (“Colossus”). This
time the connection is not directly based on the Bible but rather on the jux
taposition of the might of the divine Creator with that of man. The colossal
difference in size and importance does not diminish the miracle of creation in
20 Ibid., pp. 18-1 9 ,1 . 7.
21 Ibid., pp. 2 2 -2 3 ,1 . 3.
22 Ibid., Riddle XLII, I. 4.
the fish. Although [m \e pedibu s m anisbusque sim ul fra u d a vera t alm us / A r
biter..., “[t]he Lord Creator both of feet and hands/[d]efrauded me...”23 the fish
is still incomparably more intricate than the Colossus, which, opening with
a clear reference to limbs as well, witnesses the futility of human attempts to
emulate God:
Omnia membera mihi plasmavit corporis auctor,
Nec tamen ex isdem membrorum munia sumpsi, [...]
Heu! Frustra factor confixit corpus inorme,
Totis membrorum dum frauder sensibus intus.
My body’s maker moulded all my parts,
Yet I no service from my members get [...]
Alas! In vain my maker fashioned me
A form enormous, since within that form
I lack all feeling in my various parts.24
Finally, let us consider what I believe to be the most supreme of all the
interdependencies carefully constructed by Aldhelm. The phenomenon takes
place between riddles LXVI and LXX and, like the two connections described
immediately above, resorts to Christian rhetoric. The group is composed of three
items, LXVI “Mola” (“Millstone”), LXVII “Cribellus” (“Flour-sieve”) and LXX
“Tortella” (“Loaf of Bread”). The logical order of milling grain, producing flour,
which is then sieved and eventually baked into bread is self evident. The unclear
element, however, is Aldhelm’s decision to postpone the appearance of the bread
until riddle 70, placing it only after two, absolutely unconnected with it, enigmas
nos. 68 “Trumpet,” and 69 “Yew-tree.” I am inclined to believe, however, that
the puzzle is resolved when the opening and the final lines of the bread riddle
are scrutinized:
De terns orior candenti corpore pelta [...]
Vix artus animseque carerent tramie mortis,
Ni forsan validis refrager viribus Oreo.
From earth I rise, a shield o f shining white [...]
Scarce would a soul escape the Stygian way,
If I with sturdy strength opposed not death.25
The image of “rising from the earth” and “opposing death” united with the
manifestly Christian symbolism of bread make this enigma an allegory of Christ,
which is reinforced by the metaphorical connection offered by the piece di
23 Ibid., pp. 40—41,11. 1-2.
24 Ibid., pp. 42^13,11. 1 -2 , 7 -8 .
25 Ibid., pp. 40-41,11. 1 ,6 - 7 .
rectly following it and describing a fish, enigma LXXI, one more symbol of
Christ. The allegory would not come as unusual had it not been for the fact
that the bread riddle is the third enigma after the flour-sieve enigma, which
finishes with the very telling lines: [l\iq u itu r in p ru n is num quam to rren tib u s
hcec nix,Ą s]ed, m irum dictu, m a g is in d u rescit a d ignem , “in glowing coals this
snow will never melt;/nay, fire miraculously hardens it,”26 a clear reference to
Christ’s brief sojourn in hell after his death. Everything becomes clear and the
group is revealed not only as an allegory of Christ, but as an allegory of his
life, death, the harrowing of hell and, finally, resurrection. It is even more
interesting as Aldhelm resorts to the subtle numerical stratagem of postponing
the advent of Christ by two riddles, as if representing the two days dividing
Christ’s death and triumph, and thus symbolically repeating the message of the
Gospel.
The brief inquiry into Aldhelm’s A en ig m ata that I have attempted to present
was focused on demonstrating the processes by means of which the riddle form,
although outwardly associated with the playful side of human existence, ac
quired multifaceted significance. The transformations of the riddle formula in
Aldhelm’s work which I have outlined, transfigure his collection into a total
enigma, where every element contributes to the sense of mystery infiltrating
the work on every possible level, from individual riddles to their clusters,
eventually leading to its general solution as the praise of divine creation. The
metamorphosis of the common sense of the concept functions on the level of
individual riddles, where the enigmatic shifts from the mere search for the
estranged identity to the search for a new, Christian insight into the subject.
At the same time this shift works in the collection treated as an entity, which,
due to the fact that the enigmatic is involved in joining the riddles, is to be
understood as a model of a Christian view of the universe.
26 Ibid., pp. 38-39,11. 8 -9 .
Improperty
In the long-winded and often tiresome discussions devoted to the problem
of possible meanings of the word “postmodern” the notion of identity is un
doubtedly one of the key terms around which the vying sides construct their
basic arguments whether they be “conservative” or “progressive.” The most
familiar issue is, of course, whether the postulated postmodern identity (if it
exists) is in fact just a developed form of the modern identity, or whether it
is a new phenomenon that radically breaks with the modem as an authoritar
ian paradigm. Such discussions, although they have been pursued for at least
the last three decades, have not led to any satisfying conclusions. One of the
points of this essay will be that the reason for this might be at least partially
due to the overhasty neglect in the analyses of the construction of an identity,
and especially in its postmodern mutation, of the second term under our sur
veillance, that is to say, the nature of property and its effects.
It is said that in traditional (“primitive”) societies identity was not prob
lematic. One grew to become a functional member of one’s tribe or clan and
his/her identity was a product of a mythical structure which prepared one’s route
in life in advance and absolutely. Such a structure was free from internal rupture
because an identity crisis was within its bounds unthinkable. Whether such
a society was really the case or whether it constitutes just a belated dream of
the lost immanence of modernity is not the issue here, yet one has to remark
that what we have just described as the “traditional identity” is not identity in
the full sense of this word which implies agency that is the outcome of
a separation: I am the place of my free activity that constitutes me as myself
for myself as well as within the public sphere. The “invention” of this type
of identity belongs to the Greeks and is connected to two related developments
which were not the case in “primitive” societies. The traditional society knows
only functional property, i.e. the property of the tools necessary to survival in
the world and the property which is in its entirety the product of one’s work.
Such property is not private because it does not serve an individual as differ
ent and opposed to the member of the tribe. Which brings us to the related
separation of the public and private spheres that is already in place in the world
of the Greeks and it is only here that we can speak about property and identity
in their proper sense.
Yet, the Greek form of property is not property in the modern, abstracted
sense of this word. First of all, property constitutes one’s place in the world
and as such it has no exchange value (no value in the modem sense): losing
property means being excluded from the public sphere of the society of free
men and entering a lower order of the slave, whether formally enslaved or
slaving to the necessity of selling one’s talents and abilities in order to sur
vive. The Greek identity is based on property yet in the mode of negating it:
I, as a free individual, am everything that in me overreaches the pedestrian
necessity of the maintenance of my individual physical life. For the Greeks
property does not mean the riches or it means this only secondarily, since a rich
slave remains a slave and a poor citizen is still a citizen. The difference between
them is crucial: a man without his own place is no longer a man, and therefore
has no identity. This is because man is constituted (e.g. for Aristotle) not by
work, i.e., his necessary interactive encounter with the materiality of the world,
but by praxis, i.e. the activity which is the expression of my freedom and, among
other things, my freedom from necessity. Being rich is important only as far
as the problem of necessity is concerned: poverty forces a free man to act as
a slave; a man that is relatively rich is the master of his necessities of life and
therefore free to overreach his private and particular life and enter the com
mon, public world where (and this is the only place) he can express himself
as a free man. The private sphere is always perceived as a bit indecent realm
of necessity and mysterious (brute?) things that should remain hidden as birth
and death. In this sense property remains the foundation of identity, yet this
foundation is perceived as indecent (although necessary). This explains the
relative lack of development of ancient economies where the wealth is not an
end in itself, and therefore it is enough for the system to reproduce itself without
the infinite accumulative necessity. Identity of the Greeks is always the public
identity that implies the continuity in discontinuity, i.e., on the one hand, dif
ferent people see a thing from different perspectives, yet there is no question
of the possibility (a typical modern threat) of each of them seeing something
else: they know that they see different aspects of the same thing.1
1
The above paragraph is based on: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. Ch. II and
Ch. Ill (Chicago: The U niversity o f Chicago Press, 1958).
As far as the question of identity is concerned, the modern paradigm in
troduces certain new developments of which probably the most important are
its mutability and enhanced self-reflexivity. First of all, the range of available
patterns of identity rapidly widens and, apart from that, the available social roles
become increasingly the subject of one’s conscious choice as one is freer to
make and remake his identity according to his own will. To summarise very
briefly, this concept of modern identity has two different incarnations: identity
as a substantial self and identity as an existential project.2 The first, being to
a large extent the descendant of the absolutely unique essential and self-iden
tical substance which was the immortal soul itself,3 was the pervasive motif
of the western philosophy from Descartes’ res cogitans to Husserl’s transcen
dental ego and is presented as the already given, innate, unique and stable nature
of the thinking subject whose task is to shed the illusions of the tradition and
return to its truthful essence in the process of thinking itself. The second, which
in different guises one can encounter in the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger or
Sartre, renounces the pre-given substance of the self in favour of the creation
of the authentic individual as a task to be accomplished by him/her. Both of
these attitudes however lead to what by some people is considered to be an
exclusively modern malady, i.e., the state of anxiety, which is the effect of free
dom of choice. When the aim is either a return to or an arrival at an authentic
identity and the accomplishment of this task is left entirely in our hands, the
possible choice implies that one is always in danger of making a wrong choice
and therefore wasting one’s life living in the mode of self-delusion. Hence the
ongoing identity-crisis which is modernity itself. Moreover, the wished-for
stable and authentic identity (a normative goal), even if it be realised, has to
be recognised as such also by the others who ultimately constitute it in its
identity but to whom the being-authentic of somebody else’s identity is not
available as such.4 This way the process of authentication can never be accom
plished and the modern subject is constantly in the state of crisis.
The repeatedly employed solutions to such a crisis are two well-known
projections compensating for a lack one is: either collapsing back into
a transcendence or leaping forward into an immanence. The first solution is
to deny entirely the possibilities of modernity and keep presupposing “the
missing part” outside the world: there is the origin and the principle of the world
that is other than the world and into which the world will ultimately vanish
(the God of monotheist religions). Such a principle has been revealed and, in
order to fill up the lack in oneself, one cannot help but fashion one’s identity
2 D ouglas Kellner, “Popular Culture and the Construction o f Postmodern Identities,”
in Modernity and Identity, eds. S. Lash and J. Friedman (Oxford: B lackw ell, 1992), p. 142.
3 Plato, Phaedrus, 245 C.
4 Kellner, p. 142.
according to the provided pattern (considering all other patterns as existentially and socially dangerous nonsense because the pattern is the guarantor of both
a “healthy” identity and a “healthy” community). The second solution is prop
erly modern: seemingly denying a transcendental prosthesis it finds the “fill
er” of the lack within the world. Being conscious that the unfulfilled state is
the identity’s absolute condition it creates a myth of the figure of the absolute
subjectivity: the Fiihrer. Since, in modernity, the identity anxiety is a mass
phenomenon, some ideologues worked on the knowledge that “inasmuch as
the masses have no proper identity, only a myth can provide them with one
by posing a fiction in which their unity is embodied, depicted - in short: in
which they auto-envisage or auto-represent themselves as Subject.”5 In the
figure of the Fiihrer a group (an organisation, a society, a nation, etc.) projects
its essence as that which is most proper and common to all of them (precisely
what they actually lack) and what constitutes the (mythical) reality of the organic
community as the communion between its members, i.e. as “ein totale Staat
knowing no division, unless it be minimal and intended solely to relate the social
body to itself between the beloved Chief and his loving subjects.”6 An iden
tity thus emptied and at the same time fulfilled recognises no exteriority or oth
erness, no division as such.
The problematics of identity in postmodern theory might be taken as
a development of the Nietzschean motif but without its “authenticating” co
ordinates. In the postmodern world identity becomes increasingly fragmented
and incoherent. It is claimed that since the subject is free to choose his identity
at will, and since this process is open-ended, in the sense that it has no other
goal than the immediate satisfaction of certain desires, then there is not such
thing as authenticity and the identity disintegrates “into a flux of euphoric
intensities”7 that do not offer any coherence other than accidental. The series
of fragmentary and short-lived identities refuse to crystallise into anything
stable.
Such an image of identity that at least allows a certain kind of will or agency
is sometimes pushed even further. Perhaps the best and most famous example
of it is a “television identity” as described by Jean Baudrillard. For him tel
evision is pure noise, a whirlpool of images whose number and speed of cir
culation reach the verge of perceptual overload. Such a turnover results in the
implosion of identity where the images no longer have any discernible effects
and thus they lose their signifying function and turn into pure ecstasy of
a meaningless spectacle which makes any kind of hermeneutic activity futile.
5 Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, “The Freudian Subject,” in Who Comes after the Subject?,
eds. E. Cadava et al. (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 70.
6 Ibid., p. 69.
7 Kellner, p. 144.
Such spectacle is by its very definition one-dimensional, depthless: whatever
it presents has to be there on the surface for a very simple reason that an
imploded identity is the apathy itself, drained of any constitutive energies and
closed within its own prefabricated house of mirrors.8
Those open-ended or imploded identities are presented as a new phenom
enon that constitutes postmodemity’s break with the modem paradigm in which
the surface phenomena had their actual (hidden) meaning, so therefore also with
the problems of ideology as well as political economy (the new identity is not
primarily the product of the relations of production and it is not immediately
connected to the hard facts of economic reality). Leaving alone for now the
obvious empirical arguments to the contrary (the media propose a very limited
number of identity patterns for emulation) and remaining on a somewhat more
abstract level we can ask whether the above are not somewhat premature
conclusions grounded in a restricted concept of the subject.
The postmodern structure of the (lack of) identity takes the subject to consist
of no stable features or ground, yet what makes the same subject a stable place
of the turnover of pleasures or ecstasy is the desire that ultimately constitutes
the being-identical of the subject: whatever identity the subject momentarily
takes on goes through the stable point of pleasurable digestion. The effect of
such a situation is that the turnover of intensities cannot cease because its whole
identity exists as the point of absorption of pleasure without which this inte
grative force would stop operating and the identity would disperse into ver
itable non-existence.
Such a structure, however seems to remind us of another that has been
analysed over and over again: also the capital is this force whose sole purpose
is its ever increasing speed of accumulation which is its only way of survival
because otherwise it would disperse being used up in the process of ever
increasing consumption.9 Another pertinent feature of the capital here is
a certain way in which it takes the world away: it transforms the world into
nothing other than the capital’s reflection. Because human beings become
themselves only as far as they interact with the world as their place or space,
everything in the world has a use value and this term designates precisely the
place of meeting where the object and the subject cease to represent each other,
where the world defers its separate existence as the object of knowledge and
where the subjective and the objective lose their meaning becoming alterities
in communication, i.e. praxis itself. Such place of community is within the logic
8 See especially: “The Order o f Simulacra,” in Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. I.
H. Grant (London: Sage, 1993), pp. 5 0 -8 6 ; and “The Precession o f Simulacra,” in Simulacra
and Simulation, trans. S. F. Glaser (Ann Arbor: The U niversity o f M ichigan Press, 1994),
pp. 1-42.
9 Such is the capital’s law: increased production always goes hand in hand with increased
consum ption since the resources o f the latter are practically infinite.
of the capital abstracted into the exchange value, which is nothing other than
a mirror image of the capital as it takes the world as world away. The exchange
value is a universal measure with which everything can be measured, yet an
image-representation which the measuring provides is not the image of the world
as world (this is given only in praxis !use value) but of the capital. In such
a world also initiative is lost: in spite of the superficial fervour of economic
activity both the worker and the capitalist are essentially apathetic because they
are deprived of their own will and are sentenced to reiterate the capital’s logic
infinitely - in the process of production neither the capitalist nor the worker
appear as living human beings (alienation).10
Such a self-mirroring structure has been many times described as the m odem
self-reflexive constitution of the subject. Within this logic nothing else than the
subject can appear as the world because every object of consciousness inev
itable turns into the object of self-consciousness and is therefore an object
suppressed as object: the world that is given in its use value as a co-ordina
tion, co-appearance of an object and consciousness, becomes the object of the
subject - “this other [in our case: the world] is no longer an other but an object
of a subject’s representation.” 11 Such an alterity can only have an instrumental
(sublatable) and not an ontological role because within this structure all that
is extraneous turns out to possess a negative but specular identity with the
representing subject who therefore only mirrors itself in the supposedly extra
neous other.12 There are, generally speaking, two mutations of such a mirroring
structure that resist true alterity.
In the first scenario, the subjective situates itself against the world. The
consciousness is isolated from the objective since both of them, as constituted
and finished, resist each other. That which enables the presentation of the object
to consciousness is what we can call, after Kant, the forming force of reason
or transcendental imagination,13 which are categories empty of any content,
categories as that which allow us to perceive an entity as a separate entity and
not as just an aggregate of its sensible qualities (what Heidegger would call
the “thingness of the thing”). Yet such a presentation called “presence” is al
ready a figu re p rodu ced by the subjective because these categories, i.e., what
allows the subject to perceive something as present, the means by which
subjectivity installs its object as present to subjectivity, are necessarily the
10 Leszek K ołakowski, Główne nurty marksizmu (Warszawa: K rąg-Pokolenie, 1989),
p. 239.
11 Jean-Luc N ancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. P. Connor, trans. P. Connor et al.
(M inneapolis: U niversity o f M innesota Press, 1991), p. 24. The remaining part o f the essay
is heavily indebted to this book.
12 Ibid., pp. 2 3 -2 4 .
13 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. C. Fynsk
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U niversity Press, 1989), p. 70.
product of the subjective. The present object of consciousness is necessarily ideal,
since, in order to appear in consciousness (in order to present itself), it has to
be rid of all empirical diversity. In such away, the subjective installs itself and
becomes its own producer: there is a double mirror within the subject in which
the subject reflects itself as reflection. Ultimately, and paradoxically, it is the mirror
that produces everything including the mirror itself and what is presented as the
world is nothing other than the specular image of the subjective.
For Hegel, subjectivity and objectivity are both moments of the same totality
that develops itself as the process of its own understanding. Before the sub
jective and the objective get separated in the movement of dialectics they already
belong to each other; they are the same “before" they are different. This in
tricacy has its source in the nature of the real where what is objective (e.g. being)
has its subjective moment and what is subjective (e.g. thought) lays claims to
objectivity.
The existing thing is bound to possess qualities. It has to be determinate
if it is qualitatively distinct from another being. A quality, as excluding other
qualities is a limitation and therefore a negation. But since every quality is what
it is only in relation to other qualities, the thing exists in the wholeness of
relations with other things. Such an existence, the existence in the sphere of
“otherness,” is called by Hegel “being-for-other” (Anderssein). But the thing
is not only formed from the outside, it is not only the aggregation of relations
and qualities; it also exists as this something that makes it this very thing,
“being-in-itself ’ (A nsichsein ). These two moments cannot be separated for the
obvious reason that one enables another.14
What makes being-in-itself possible is that the thing permanently relates
to itself.15 Being-in-itself is an intro-flected being, a being that has returned to
itself from being-for-other.16 Intro-flection, however, has always been perceived
as a subjective quality.17 Yet, the dialectic of the thing has also a third “side.”
Determinate being is more than the flux o f changing qualities. Something
preserves itself throughout this flux, something that passes into other things,
but also stands against them as a being for itself. This something can exist
only as the product o f a process through which it integrates its otherness with
its own proper being. Hegel says that its existence comes about through “the
negation o f the negation.” The first negation is the otherness in which it turns,
and the second is the incorporation o f this other into its own self.18
14 H egel’s Science o f Logic, trans. A. V. M iller (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969),
p. 120.
15 Ibid., p. 119.
16 Ibid., pp. 119-120.
17 Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), p. 133.
18 Ibid., pp. 132-133.
Such a process, which Hegel calls “mediation,” creates another subjective
moment, since it presents things as, to a certain extent, controlling their devel
opment. But, there is a reason that explains why the objective possesses some
qualities of the subjective. The reason is simple: in the Hegelian system, re
ality is the notion.
For Hegel, the opposition of Being and Nothingness is a metaphysical
fallacy. Since everything in the world is created and then destroyed, the only
truth that resides in the real is the truth of becoming.19 Because being and
nothingness are one, everything in the world carries in itself their togetherness.
That means that every being exists only insofar as it is its own contradiction;
being contradictory, it is inclusive of its own negation. To maintain its truth,
the thing has to become what it is not and, in order to do that, it has to leave
its particularity behind. Thus the truth of something particular exceeds its
particularity and, by relation with other things, becomes “a totality of conflict
ing relations.”20 Therefore the truth of the real can only be universal. This truth
is expressed in the notion (Begriff).
To common sense, what exists is particular (this was the earliest pre-Socratic intuition) and what is universal is “just” thought. As such it has the status
of only the “second-rate” existence or the semblance of existence proper. This
way thought becomes only an indifferent fo rm that lacks substantial links with
its particular content. Hegel opposes this view,21 for him, the universal - and
the universal can only be present to thought - not only exists but is also more
real than the particular:
The indispensable foundation, the notion, the universal which is the thought
itself [...] cannot be regarded as only an independent form attached to
a content. But these thoughts o f everything natural and spiritual, even the sub
stantial content, still contain a variety o f determinatenesses and are still
charged with the difference o f a soul and a body, o f the notion and a relative
reality; the profounder basis is the soul itself, the pure Notion which is the
very heart o f things, their simple life-pulse, even o f the subjective thinking
o f them.22
Since the notion exists only for thought23 and, at the same time, is also the
“pulse” of reality, the objective world is the “result” of some absolute thought
that thinks itself. (Hegel calls this thought the Absolute Idea.) This way sub
jectivity finds itself as being realised in objectivity. It also means that the object
19 Hegel's Science o f Logic, pp. 8 2 -8 3 .
20 Marcuse, p. 124.
21 H egel’s Science o f Logic, pp. 3 5 -3 6 .
22 Ibid., p. 37.
23 Ibid., p. 35.
is never exterior to thought; they are always already in some kind of concord
because the dialectics is not only a method in the sense of an instrument that
is applied from the outside, “a means standing on the subjective side by which
this side relates itself to the object,”24 but is also, and at the same time the
“su b sta n tia lity of th in g s ,”25 i.e. the very way the thing exists, develops itself,
and is its aforementioned truth.
But in such a system the other gets lost again. Hegelian reality is a to ta lity
which is a system of relations in which the interval between the same and the
other has only a temporary (although necessary) existence before the two terms
get adequated within a larger totalisation. Because the same depends on the other
to seize itself, such an other becomes only a moment of the same. This pro
cess poses the other as the guarantee of the totality: negation is always p u re,
which means that there is no a b so lu te Other within the system, there is only
noth in g which is a pure abstraction and this purity is precisely what enables
it to disappear only to come back on a higher level of totality. Negativity is
only “that same” whose sole purpose is the return to “this same” vanishing
completely on the way.26
Both of the above ways in which subjectivity relates to the objective end
in the final analysis with the subject that projects its own image on the world
and taking its projection as the world itself. As we have already noticed, in
similar ways the capital turns everything (including identity/subjects) into its
exchange value which in fact is no feature of the object but the capital’s specular
reflection in everything it encounters and the reason it cannot encounter any
thing else than itself. What is more, within such an understanding, both the
subject and the capital are infinite. This does not mean that the subject or the
capital are immortal but that they cannot be outside themselves: their limit does
not concern them, it simply surrounds them.27
In all the above senses the capital and the (post?)modem identity constitute
parallel if not identical structures as it had been the case throughout the modern
era, and so it is quite difficult to understand the repeatedly proclaimed diag
noses of the death of ideology. When it is claimed that the postmodern subject
is a radically desubstantialised formation, a purely functional space of the
turnover of intensities which displays no stability, no substance, and which is
pure jo u is s a n c e (that such a structure is neither a substantial phenomenon nor
a project in which the identity is understood as a task in the process of being
accomplished), such jo u is s a n c e is in no position to escape the logic we have
24 Ibid., p. 827.
25 Ibid., p. 826.
26 Joseph Libertson, Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication (The
Hague: Martinus N ijh o ff Publishers, 1982), p. 30.
27 N ancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 27.
pursued so far, since that instantaneous jo u issa n ce or a series of unrelated
intensities is precisely the place/moment where the subject’s self-presence of
itself is constituted.28 The subject of jouissance, although it is neither a Cartesian
substantial subject nor an existential project in accomplishment, is neverthe
less the subject of desire which, although it will never fill up the lack it is (it
is “sentenced” to desire), represents itself as essentially consisting of such a lack.
(This is the postmodern theory itself: the new identity is essentially the lack
of identity.) Such a subject has to be understood as a work. Although this work
is not worked up along a pre-established teleological trajectory (substance),
although it is not even the work in the process of working up its trajectory and
goal (project), it is nevertheless a work whose essence is the very working up
of itself and which identifies/represents itself as such. This returns us to the
logic of the capital again: it has no other aim than working up of itself (ac
cumulation); the riches are, in a sense, only a by-product of capital’s work; the
capital goes nowhere and when its work ceases it wastes away immediately.
And it is not true that jou issan ce is modelled on the notion of abandon and
expenditure while the capital is a product of the sparing economy - as we have
already noticed, the quicker and bigger accumulation, the quicker and bigger
spending (hence the infinite necessity of ever increasing accumulation).
From the above one thing is clear: identity is inextricably connected with
the classical notion of the subject in all its incarnations because what is called
identity is, as its very name says, the way the subject identifies itself, i.e.
represents itself for itself. Such a representation cannot avoid a very simple
logic: because the subject as subject is the master of its projections, the iden
tity will always be something over which a subject exercises complete control
but which is at the same time in complete control of the subject since it is its
own mirror image. In this sense identity always is property (something that the
subject has) but at the same time the subject itself is the property, its own
property, since it can only be itself by possessing itself in its self-representation. Therefore, in the final analysis, the subject/identity is always a thing:
something that is possessed and possessable. Identity equals property.
Is there then any escape from that logic which always turns out to be
representing the being that is dead and by that means an immortal monad?
Maybe the first move should be the clearing of the field and getting rid of the
dead matter that has been persistently superimposed on the singular being as
its very ownmost advantage, what is added to this being as a certain quality
or the surplus which is produced by self-representation, i.e., the identity itself.
What will be able to take the place of identity, what will not be the identity
of a thing, and therefore a non-identity, cannot start with the individual as
defined by its self-knowledge, and therefore property. The non-identity, or what
one would rather call im property (not propriu s , not one’s own, but also not
suitable because not following suit, and therefore unbecoming, even indecent)
can only begin with relation, which is prior to knowledge, also self-knowledge,
since no knowledge exists in a pure state, but it is always articulated in a certain
language and is therefore a communicative or communal phenomenon.29 Thus,
otherwise than identity-property which starts with a certain addition, improp
erty starts with a subtraction: the subtraction of identity-property. But what is
such a subtracted being if it is anything? Yes, properly speaking it is nothing
(it is not something) but it is a nothing that is shared, by which the singular
beings are related: it is the sharing of the lack of identity.30 Yet this lack of
identity is not a higher form of “substance” in which the beings can recognise
themselves and with this their essence (something we have already encoun
tered in the notion of jouissan ce). Although lack of identity is not necessarily
something that implies relation, rather the opposite as it is clear from the
examples of mental disturbances (a person whose identity collapsed tends to
become a monad), there is a lack of identity that we can recognise as being
shared by all of us: this is our condition of being mortal beings. Our finitude
is something that we share, death is common to us all. But w hat brings us
togeth er also keeps us a p a rt : I cannot recognise my death in the death of the
other, since my death is my “ownmost possibility” that cannot be reappropri
ated through the other.
No one can take the Other’s dying away from him. O f course someone can
“go to his death for another.” But that always means to sacrifice oneself for
the Other “in some definite affair.” Such “dying for” can never signify that
the Other has thus had his death taken away in even the slightest degree. Dy
ing is something that every Dasein itself must take upon itself at the time.
By its very essence, death is in every case mine, insofar as it “is” at all. And
indeed death signifies a peculiar possibility-of-Being in which the very B e
ing o f one’s own Dasein is at issue. In dying, it is shown that mineness and
existence are ontologically constitutive for death.31
According to Heidegger, the only utterance in which D asein finds authentic
expression is: I am bound to die. Yet in this way my death becomes a work
(in the sense of jo u issa n ce ): although it is properly speaking nothing (it has
no substantial identity), it semi-represents itself in the way I work myself
towards my authentic existence. But death is precisely that which cannot be
turned into a work as the identity to come - the work of death is what destroys
29 K ołakowski, p. 132.
30 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. xxxvii.
31 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. MacQuairre and E. Robinson (Oxford:
Blackw ell, 1962), p. 284.
all identity.32 Moreover, for Heidegger, the consciousness of my finitude tears
me away from being with others and throws me back at my selfhood: face to
face with its own death D asein ' s being-with (M itsein ) - supposedly constitu
tive of its mineness - becomes irrelevant.
Death is a possibility-of-Being which Dasein itself has to take over in every
case. With death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-forBeing. [...] If Dasein stands before itself as this possibility, it has been fully
assigned to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. When it stands before itself
in this way, all its relations to any other Dasein have been undone. This
ownmost non-relational possibility is at the same time the uttermost one.33
Such an existential solipsism34 misses one important point however. Although
it is true that I cannot recognise myself in the death of others and that their
deaths do not create a homogenous we as: “we the mortal beings,” because death
is not common to us all (your death is not mine, I can’t even imagine it along
the same lines), and although my finitude is nothing (I cannot make
a representation of it), yet it appears, but its appearance (which is not
a representation) demands relation as its possibility: I experience my finitude
in the finitude of the other which is not my finitude (I can represent the death
of the other). So, to be more precise, one should say that finitude co-appears,
since the appearan ce o f death is im possible without the other.35
In the light of the above we can return to some terms that are deemed to
be new in the constitution of the postmodern identity. We have seen that
understanding a new subjectivity as consisting of a series of temporary inten
sities which leads to the collapse of the hermeneutic depth, which in turn results
in the superficiality and exhaustion of the postmodern culture, brings us back
to the same problems we had encountered in the modern identity, so, in fact,
there in no radical difference here. But maybe the terms that are used while
describing a postmodern identity, can have a different meaning that would fit
our improper terms?
Improperty is definitely not static: what we encounter here is not a question
of a link or bond between the formerly constituted identities - communication
or relation does not mean intersubjectivity.36 Since relation is always anterior,
the relationship between “you” and “I” is not a juxtaposition but exposition or,
in other words, e c s ta s y 31 where ecstasy does not mean the idiotic fascination
32 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 15.
33 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 294.
34 Jean-Franęois Courtine, “V oice o f C onscience and Call o f B ein g,” in Who Comes
after the Subject?, p. 86.
35 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 28.
36 Ibid., p. 29.
37 Ibid.
of a monad with itself as spread out in an excessive number of images that
approach the point of perceptive overload. Such a “postmodern” understand
ing of ecstasy always has to lead to the identity of the opposites that sooner
or later will become one through sublation, and it does not really matter whether
it is the consciousness that absorbs the outside images (the classical concept
of the subject) or the outside images that absorb the consciousness (the post
modern concept of the subject). We have seen that in the final analysis, the
difference is only superficial.
There is also another term, apart from ecstasy, that we can utilise as far as
the discourse of improperty is concerned. The postmodern subject is said to
be d ep th less which, ultimately, is to lead to the abandonment of thinking,
philosophy, etc. since if everything that there is to it is displayed on the sur
face of what is seen, the uncovering process, that is usually conceived as being
identical to philosophy-hermeneutics, is spurious, because there is no hidden
meaning beyond the surface nature of the image. Here again we are led into
a kind of idiotic narcissism, which a postmodern identity is said to constitute.
But, again, the idiocy is there only as long as we stick to a monadic notion
of the subject. In that case, as we have seen, since all the objects are always
the objects of the subject, the object is ultimately only an image in which
a subject represents itself to itself. Such an image has no depth because in it
the reason can see only what it has already invested there - this is the ultimate
case of narcissism. Yet in the discourse of improperty what is there in the first
place is not an object, not a representation: first comes the sharing38 (both
dividing and having in common) of our finitude, our mortal bodies. As we have
seen, the finitude is not an object (not an object of knowledge) because it cannot
be reappropriated as a representation or a work. Where there is no object, also
the subject is impossible (as a transcendental ground) and what is left is the
im ageless body, the body - my body - but, as in the case of my death, the body
as given to me without becoming a thing I own, without being reaproppriated
through the representation that other bodies are for me.39 Improperty is also
(if not first of all) my body but my body as a undifferianted weight, mass; the
body with no representation superimposed on it, the body without organs, if
organs are functional parts of the whole.40 One does not have a body, one is
a body in the fullest possible sense of this word. Obviously such a body has
no depth, because it does not provide any representation below which one can
dive. What happens is actually the opposite: a naked body is precisely what
38 N an cy’s term: partage.
39 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Corpus,” in The Birth to Presence, trans. B. H olm es et al. (Stanford:
Stanford U niversity Press, 1993), p. 199.
40 Ibid., 203. “B ody without organs” is o f course Antonin Artaud’s image (cf. 84, N o
vember 1947, p. 102).
appears (co-appears: without other bodies, which I can turn into representa
tions, I would not be conscious of my own body) to reveal that “there is nothing
to reveal, everything is there exposed.”41 The body does not hide anything; here
“endlessly, the mass rises to the surface and peels off as surface”42 Improperty
is precisely the place-moment where this peeling off, this exposure takes place.
Therefore improperty is depthless, it is all surface, yet it does not mean that
it is superficial. Moreover, improperty does not think, if thinking is conceived
as the representing activity of reason. But doesn’t the improper way in which
the body shares itself without becoming itself in representation (then there would
be nothing to share) deserve to be called thought - not philosophy but fecund
thought of the world in p ra x is ? One may wonder if there is anything postmod
ern about it.
41 Ibid., p. 205.
42 Ibid., p. 199.
(Trans)-formacje I
Tożsamość i własność
Streszczenie
Tożsamość i w łasność są sobie bliskie. Tożsamość rozumiana jako pewna ja
kość bycia sobą, bycia jednością czy jednostką, kryje w sobie w ieloznaczność w ła
sności - posiadania na własność oraz posiadania pewnych cech określanych także
mianem w łaściw ości. Ekonomia własności jest nacechowana pozytywnie jako eko
nomia „w łaściw a”, sytuując w szelkie zakłócenia własności w sferze niew łaściw o
ści jako nieobecność w łaściw ych w łaściw ości, która stanowi pewien brak, nienor
malność czy ułom ność. Coś, co nie ma własności to „ni to ni sio”, pewne „ni to ni
tamto”, które stanowi przedmiot refleksji niniejszego tomu.
Choć tożsam ość należy raczej do sfery życia niż do śmierci, to autorka otw ie
rającego tom artykułu (Katarzyna Ancuta: Niewiarygodnie dziwaczne stwory, które
przestały żyć i przeistoczyły się w żywe trupy!,,The Incredible Strange Creatures Who
Stopped Living and Becam e M ixed-Up Zombies or How to be the Living Dead in
Technicolor”) zastanawia się nad zadurzeniem współczesnej kultury w postaciach
żyw ych trupów, w stworach nawiedzających tożsam ość i przypominających o jej
końcu w śmierci. Rozpoznając żyw e trupy jako „nie nas”, zabezpieczam y swe w ła
sności i w łaściw ości jednocześnie, nieco m asochistycznie pożądając tego, by móc
postrzegać samych siebie jako żyw e trupy, którymi niejako jesteśm y, lecz nie m o
żem y przyznać się do tego ze strachu przed nimi.
O
ile żyw e trupy przywodzą na m yśl w ieloznaczność podmiotu poprzez w ielo
znaczność życia, o tyle filozofia Emmanuela Levinasa dokonuje tego samego z per
spektywy pojęcia m iłości. Postrzegając m iłość jako coś „par excelence sprzeczne
go”, dokonuje on „esencjalizacji Erosa”, równocześnie traktując go jako coś niedefm iow alnego i niewypowiadalnego (Ewa Rychter: Czy mam swego ukochanego?
Tożsamość i posiadanie w „Fenomenologii Erosa” Emmanuela Levinasa! „Am I My
Lover’s Keeper? Identity and Possesion in Emmanuel Levinas’s »Phenomenology
o f Eros«”). Ego nie m oże zawładnąć m iłością, gdyż nie ma w niej miejsca na wła
sność/w łaściw ość, na pełnię jej wypowiedzenia. N iem ożliw ość wypowiedzenia sta
nowi także głów ny wątek artykułu Katarzyny Borkowskiej ( Własność i tożsamość:
Heaney jako przykład!,, Property and Identity. Heaney as an Example”), który po
dejmuje ona w kontekście kształtowania się poetyckiej i narodowej tożsamości Seamusa Heaneya. Aneta Zacharz (W drodze donikąd. Refleksje nad tym, co niem ożli
we w tożsam ości! „On the Way to Nowhere - Reflection Upon the Impossible of
Identity”) porusza kilka zagadnień z filozofii Szestowa, Blanchota, Levinasa i Brach-Czainy, wskazując na kilka dróg wyjścia z ekonomii własności ku obszarom gra
nicznym, stanowiącym istotną przestrzeń kształtowania tożsamości.
Piotr Dziedzic (Słowo, j a i podziem na p o siadłość P ierce 'a Inverarity w „ The
Crying o f L ot 49" Thomasa Pynchona/„The Word, the Self, and the Underground
Estate of Pierce Inverarity in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying o f L ot 49”) zastana
wia się nad możliwością utraty tożsamości wskutek braku porozumienia z innymi,
co sytuuje jednostkę w przenośnym podziemiu, w oddaleniu od oglądu świata, to
też na zewnątrz także notorycznie odmawia poddania się poznaniu. Poddawanie się
czy też oddawanie stanowią ważki element retoryki erotyzmu, którą Jacek Mydlą
(,Ż ą d za w akcji". Posiadanie, transform acja i egzorcyzm owanie Erosa! „»Lust in
Action«. Possession, Transformation, and the Exorcising of Eros”) analizuje w świe
tle różnicy między pożądaniem a miłością.
Transformacje wymykające się kontroli, jak twierdzi Rafał Dubaniowski (P rze
obrażanie Europy. K rajobraz i dom ostwo w literaturze angielskiej łat trzydziestych
X X w./„Transforming Europe: Landscape and Domesticity in English Literature of
the 1930s”), stanowią ważny moment w kształtowaniu się nowoczesnej tożsamo
ści europejskiej w latach trzydziestych - tożsamości, która, rozczarowana sama sobą,
traci nadzieję na wybawienie świata przez sztukę. Modernizm znajduje więc sens
w przedmiotach, które zastępują idee i doznania. Postmodernizm z kolei, jak twierdzi
Charles Vander Zwaag (P ostm odernistyczne sam onaw rócenia! „Postmodern Auto
Conversions”), eliminuje takie przedmioty, czyniąc niemożliwym określenie, kto
doświadcza tych idei i doznań, czyniąc podmiot ledwo rozpoznawalną miksturą zin
terpretowanych interpretatorów świata. Wraz z późnym postmodernizmem nadcho
dzi niewidzialność przedmiotów pozbawionych wszelkich cech identyczności.
Zagadnieniem prywatności w świecie ponowoczesnej technologii, umożliwiającej
zaistnienie anonimowej tożsamości, zajmuje się w swym artykule Marcin Samek
(Sieciow atele, ułom ysły i sprofiłowani. N owe tożsam ości doby rew olucji komuni
kacyjnej /„Netizens, Hive-minds, the Profiled. New Wired Identities of the Com
munication Revolution Era”), a Tomasz Kalaga (P lagiat we w spółczesnej akade
mii. Tożsamość a er_yW„Plagiarism in the Contemporary Academia: Identity and
Ethics”) zastanawia się nad skutkami rozpadu tożsamości i prywatności dla statusu
plagiatu we współczesnym dyskursie akademickim i nad różnicą pomiędzy „wy
twarzaniem” a „twórczością”.
Małgorzata Medyńska (Dana, Eire, Cesair: płynna tożsam ość irlandzkich bo
giń chtonicznych ! „Dana, Eire, Cesair: The Fluctuating Identity of the Irish Chtho
nic Goddesses”) przenosi fluktuacje tożsamości do sfery sacrum, proponując mito
logiczną analizę trzech chtonicznych bogiń irlandzkich, a Marek Kulisz (Tożsamość
wodza - organizacja nom adyczna w obec p a ń stw a /,, The Identity of the Comman
der - Nomad Organization Against the State”) zastanawia się nad rolą perspekty
wy historycznej w kształtowaniu pojęć odnoszących się do kultur nomadycznych.
Marta Zając (P odm iot w różnicy, czyli o stawaniach się; p o jęc ie tożsam ości u D e
leuze ’a i G uattariego !„Subject in Difference, or on (Feminine) Becomings: Deleuze
and Guattari’s and Cixous’ Concept of Subjectivity”) poszerza kwestię historyczną
0 kwestię tezy jednostkowego „stawania się” podmiotu, którego pojedynczość da
się przemienić w pewną mnogość „stawań się”, proponowanych przez Deleuze’a
1 Guattariego. Cofając się do czasów bardziej odległych, Rafał Borysławski (P o
wiedz, czym je ste m : Zagadki Aldhełm a ja k o ję z y k transform acji/,, Say What I Am:
Aldhelmian Riddle as the Language of Transformation”) wprowadza zagadkowość
zagadek jako zagadnienie otwierające dyskursy pozornie afirmatywne na możliwość
niedopowiedzeń i niejasności. Zamykający tom artykuł Sławomira Masłonia (Niew łasn ość! „Improperty”) proponuje spojrzenie na brak własności/właściwości jako
na przestrzeń obnażania tożsamości.
(Trans)-formations I
L’identite et la propriete
R e s u me
L’identite et la propriete sont proches l’une de l’autre. L’identite en tant qu’une
certaine qualite d’etre soi-meme, d’etre unite ou individu, devoile la polyvalence
de la propriete - comme etat de possession et comme possession de certains traits
caracteristiques compris comme les qualites. L’economie de la propriete est mar
quee d’un signe positif en tant que l’economie „proprement dite” en situant ainsi
toutes les perturbations de la propriete dans le domaine du manque des qualites pro
prement dites, ce qui constitue une certaine lacune, une anomalie ou une infirmite.
Ce qui ne possede pas de propriete, c’est ,,ni chair, ni poisson”, ou „entre le zist et
le zest”, et devient l’objet de l’analyse des auteurs du present volume.
Quoique l’identite appartienne plutót au domaine de la vie qu’a celui de la mort,
l’auteur de l’article qui ouvre le volume (Katarzyna Ancuta: Les etres incroyablement bizarres qui ont cesse de vivre et se sont transform es en cadavres vivan ts/
„The Incredible Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up
Zombies or How to be the Living Dead in Technicolor”) reflechit sur le fait que la
culture contemporaine s’est amourachee des personnages des cadavres vivants, des
etres qui hantent l’identite et rappellent sa fin dans la mort. En reconnaissant des
cadavres vivants comme les personnages qui ne sont pas nous-memes, nous protegeons nos propres proprietes et qualites, et en meme temps nous desirons ardemment, d’une maniere quelque peu masochistę, percevoir nous-memes comme des
cadavres vivants que nous sommes mais ce que nous ne pouvons pas admettre de
peur devant ces cadavres.
Si les cadavres vivants font penser a la polyvalence du sujet grace a la polyva
lence de la vie, la philosophic d‘Emmanuel Levinas le fait par le biais de la notion
de 1’amour. Ce philosophe peręoit 1’amour comme „par excellence contradictoire”
et effectue ainsi ,,1’essencialisation” d’Eros qui est traite comme impossible a definir et exprimer (Ewa Rychter: Est-ce que je possede mon bien aime ? L ’identite et
la propriete dans la «Fenom enologie d ’Eros» d ’Emanuel L evinas!A m I My Lover’s
Keeper? Identity and Possesion in Emmanuel Levinas’s »Phenomenology of Eros«”).
Ego n’est pas capable de s’emparer de l’amour etant donne qu’il n’y a pas de place
dans celui-la pour la propriete / la qualite, pour la possibilite de l’exprimer d’une
maniere ample. L’impossibilite de l’exprimer constitue egalement la notion-cle
de l’article de Katarzyna Borkowska {La p ro p riete et I’identite: L'exem ple de
H eaney/,, Property and Identity. Heaney as an Example”). Elle l’analyse dans le contexte de la formation de l’identite poetique et nationale de Seamus Heaney. Aneta
Zacharz (Vers nulle part. Les reflexions sur Vim possible dans I ’identite! „On the Way
to Nowhere - Reflection Upon the Impossible of Identity”) aborde les problemes
choisis de la philosophic de Chestov, Blanchot, Levinas et Brach-Czaina, et demontre quelques possiblites de quitter l’economie de la propriete vers les espaces
frontaliers qui consituent un espace important dans la formation de 1’identite.
Piotr Dziedzic (La parole, moi et la propriete souterraine de Pierce Inverarity
dans „ The Crying o f Lot 49" de Thomas Pynchon! „The Word, the Self, and the
Underground Estate of Pierce Inverarity in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying o f Lot
4 9 ”) reflechit sur la possibilite de la perte d’identite par le manque de la communi
cation avec les autres, ce qui situe l’individu dans le souterrain metaphorique, dans
l’eloignement de la perception du monde qui, vu de 1’exterieur, refuse toujours de
se soumettre a l’analyse. La soumission ou bien la sujetion constitue un element
important dans la rhetorique de l’erotique que Jacek Mydla (Le d esir en action. La
propriete, la transform ation e t la pratiqu e de Vexorcisme sur E rosl„» Lust in Ac
tions Possesion, Transformation, and the Exorcising of Eros”) analyse en s’appuyant
sur la difference entre le desir et 1’amour. Les transformations qui evitent tout contróle, comme le pretend Rafał Dubaniowski (Les transform ations de VEurope - le
paysage et le dom icile dans la litterature anglaise des annees 30 du XXe siec lel
„Transforming Europe: Landscape and Domesticity in English Literature of the
1930s”), constituent un moment important dans la creation d’une identite europeenne
moderne dans les annees 30 - une identite deęue par elle-meme qui perd l’espoir
de la liberation du monde par l’art. Par contre, le modemisme selon 1’avis de Charles
Vander Zwaag (Les autoconversions postm odernistes/„Postm odern Auto Conver
sions”) elimine de tels objets et rend impossible la determination des personnes qui
eprouveraient ces idees et ces impressions. Ainsi il transforme le sujet en une mix
ture a peine reconnaissable des interpretes interpretes du monde. Avec le postmodernisme tardif, l’invisibilite des objets depourvus de tous les traits d’identite
apparaTt. Marcin Sarnek reflechit dans son article (Les identites nouvelles de I ’ere
de la revolution de communication /„Netizens, Hive-minds, the Profiled. New Wired
Identities of the Communication Revolution Era”) sur les problemes de l’intimite
dans le monde de la technologie postmoderniste qui facilite l’apparition d’une iden
tite anonyme. Tomasz Kalaga (Le p la g ia t dans I’academ ie contemporaine. U id e n
tite et l ’ethique!„ Plagiarism in the Contemporary Academia: Identity and Ethics”)
presente les influences de la destruction de l’identite et de l’intimite sur le statut
du plagiat dans le discours accademique et la difference entre „la production” et
„la creation”.
Małgorzata Medyńska (Dana, Eire, C e s a ir ; I’identite instable des deesses
chtoniennes irlandaises/,, Dana, Eire, Cesair: The Fluctuating Identity of the Irish
Chthonic Goddesses”) transmet les variations de 1’identite dans le sacrum en proposant ainsi une analyse mythologique de trois deesses chtoniennes irlandaises. Par
contre, Marek Kulisz (L ’identite du c h e f : I ’organisation nom ade et I'Etat/,,The
Identity of the Commander - Nomad Organization Against the State”) reflechit sur
le role de la perspective historique dans la formation des notions portant sur les
cultures nomades. Marta Zając (Le sujet dans la difference ou les «apparitions» :
la notion de V identite chez D eleuze, G uattari et Cxous /„Subject in Difference,
or on (Feminine) Becomings: Deleuze and Guattari’s and Cixous’ Concept of
Subjectivity”) elargit la perspective historique par une these de «l’apparition» individuelle du sujet dont la singularity peut etre changee en une certaine multitude
des « apparitions » proposees par Deleuze et Guattari. En remontant dans le passe
eloigne, Rafał Borysławski (D is-m oi qui j e suis : les enigmes d ’Aldhelm en tant que
langage de transform ation/ „Say What I Am: Aldhelmian Riddle as the Language
of Transformation”) introduit le caractere enigmatique des enigmes et il le traite
comme le probleme qui ouvre les discours en apparence favorables envers la pos
sibility des sous-entendus et des imprecisions. Sławomir Masłoń, dans son article
qui clot le volume (La non -propriete/„ Improperty”), propose le regard sur le
manque de propriete / de qualite en tant que l’espace du devoilement de l’identite.
Wydawca
W ydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
ul. Bankowa 12B, 40-007 Katowice
www .wydaw nictw o.us.edu.pl
e-mail: w ydawus@ us.edu.pl
F irs t im p r e s s io n . E d itio n : 2 0 0 + 5 0 c o p ie s . P rin te d
s h e e ts 1 3 .5 . P u b lis h in g s h e e ts 18.0. P a s s e d to th e
P r in tin g H o u s e in O c to b e r 2 0 0 2 . S ig n e d fo r p rin tin g
in D e c e m b e r 2 0 0 2 .
P r ic e z ł 2 5 , -
P rin tin g a n d b in d in g : " P R O D R U K " s.c.
ul. G liw ic k a 2 0 4 , 4 0 -8 6 2 K a to w ic e
BG 315796
IS S N 0208-6336
IS B N 83-226-1207-9

(Trans)-formations I : identity and property : essays in cultural practice

Transcription

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