Public (E-Journal, York University)

Blum, Alan

English

Scenes

Carver, Lisa

[Star]

Porter, James N.

Intentional Disturbances: Making the Toronto Movement Scene

Gainer, Jonathan

Window Lights

Kennedy, Jennifer

Annie Tikivik, Mary Korgak, and
Surusimituq Michael
Interview by Jennifer Kennedy
Kimmirut is a small Inuit hamlet of just over four hundred people,
located on the south shore of Baffin Island. The hamlet is named after the
large limestone formation that directly faces the settlement. In Inuktitut,
the language of the Eastern Arctic Inuit, the word ,,kimmirut" means
"looks like a human heel." Indeed, the slope of the limestone formation
does have the look of a giant's heel. Kimmirut has been a traditional camp-
ing site for thousands of years and has had various features of a settled
community for about one-hundred years. There has been a Hudson's Bay
post here since the turn of the twentieth century, as well as an RCMp
detachment and an established Anglican church. However, it has only
been in the past forty or fifty years that various Inuit families have given
up their nomadism and come to live full time in the community. In fact,
even in the last twenty years, families have "moved in off the land." Hunt-
ing, camping, and fishing remain preferred activities for most residents. In
town, there is a church, a health station with two nurses, a power plant,
a gas station, a municipal garage, a daycare, a small playground, a school,
a community gym, two grocerylrctarl stores, one eight room hotel, a Com_
munity Learning cenrre (satellite campus of Nunavut Arctic college),
and a visitor's centre for summer traffic from cruise ships and campers
travelling through Katannalik Park. Kimmirur is reachable by boat in the
summer and by snowmobile for certain parts of the winter, but it truly
depends on the thrice weekly air-service of rwin otter bush planes. Linked
to the global economy by satellite TV, cybershopping, mail order, and
Napster, it remains one of Nunavut's more traditional communities.
[Note: it does have its own webpage; a search engine will turn it up]
I interviewed three school girls on the afternoon of october 24.2000.
Annie Tikivik is nine-years-old and in grade five, Mary Korgak is ten and
in grade six, and surusimituq (everyone calls her Ala) Michael is eleven
and in grade six.
I began asking the girls what activities there are to do as kids in Kim-
mirut. They listed gymnastics club, volleyball, and Chinese jump rope. In
fact, they kept watching the clock so not to be late for Chinese jump rope.
"Gymnastics is for fun," said Mary. In gymnastics, taught by the grade
five/six teacher Jessica Arthur, they have learned to execute front flips,
cartwheels, rolls, backrolls. since starting the club last winter, the girls
z-1

have performed for the community at the Spring Fling celebration held at
the school in April.
other activities for kids in Kimmirut are to play outside, visit each other,s
homes, and watch TV. Ala said her favorite show is The simpsons, Mary
mentioned channel twenty-five cartoons (maybe the cartoon specialty
channel or YTV? I don't know) and The powerpuff Girls. r urk.d th.-
what they liked about The Powerpuff Girts. "Because they are heroes,,,
said Ala, and, "they are strong," added the other girls.
\fhen asked about their favorite music, they listed Macy Gray, christina
Aguilera, and Britney Spears. Mary added the New Spice Girls.
'il/hen asked what their favourire food is, all three chimed in without
hesitation, "PlzzA." Ala enjoys homemade pizza every Friday night at
her best friend, Brianna Jaffray's house. Her father Robert Jaffuay,-Coor-dinator of Park operations Nunavut, is known locally for his great. pizza(at least I can vouch for it). The other two girrs buy their pizza frozen at
either the Northern Store or the Kimik Coop.
Halloween is a very big event here. It is celebrated during the day at
the school with various activities including costume contests, scavenger
hunts' and games. But all the kids can hardly wait until the evening,s trick
or treating. Last year, we had about one-hundred and fifty kids come ro
our door, which is almost the total school-age population of the commu-
nity. Many of them arcived by snowmobile, bundled up from the cold
with only their masks or face-paint showing. I asked thelirls what char-
acters they would dress up as this Halloween. Annie is going to be a bat,
Mary was planning on being Spiderwoman, and Ala is going to be a \7eb\fitch. I asked her to describe a veb witch and she said, ,,a girl with
white webs, most of it is black, some purple."
I asked them what activities they did with their families and they said
fishing, especially with all their cousins. They also attend Summer science
camp, an annual event for community children run by Katannalik park
staff. summer science camp mixes modern science with traditional knowl-
edge. This past camp the participants went hunting, berry picking, fishing
and even swam in soper Lake. I was surprised by this as the harbor ice
only begins to melt in June, although smaller lakes, waterfalls, and rivers
around Kimmirut begin melting in May. Ala said that soper Lake is not
deep' She said parts of it are "cold, hot, cold, hot. \7e were only there
three ("ten," interjected Annie) minutes and our teacher, she told us not
to go swim because she thought it was too cold and too windy."
I then asked them about their families . Mary lives with her mother and
stepfather. She is the youngest with two sisters and two brothers. Annie
lives with her mother and father and is the second oldest. She has a sisrer
and two brothers, one of whom is adopted, a very common practrce in
25

Inuit culture. AIa lives with her morher and father. She is the second
youngest. Her oldest sister lives in another laryer Baffin community, I,ang-
nirtung. Still at home are her older sister and younger brother.
I asked the girls how they thought adults were different than kids. They
said, "they're old, they smoke." They also said that adults hunt and ride
Hondas, skidoos, trucks, and motorcycles.
I asked them if they wanted to be a kid or an adult. They alr liked being
kids better than being adults. \7hen asked why, they said they got to ,,do
more stuff than adults, like math and computers." Mary said that with
her oldest sister, "my mom tells her to do the dishes, she is always telling
her to do something," and while sometimes Mary has to do the dishes as
well, it is not as often. The girls are usually paid to help around the house
through an allowance
It was nearing the time for jump rope and the girls were getting restless,
so I finished with the question, "r7hat will it be like for kids in Kim-ir,rt
in fifty years?" They had to think about that. Finally they said it wourd
be "different." \7hen I asked how so, Ala said, "we would be old and the
kids will be young." when I asked them what activities kids would have
available, they said that they would still pray, stay our, ride on skido.s.
and slide in the snow.
Not too different from now.


Annie Tikivik, Mary Korgak, and Surusimitug Michael

War Game | Lynne CohenWeb-Cam | Earl MillerWord | Barbara HammerWork Room | Lynne Cohen

Davis, Christine

VR-WEB 
media coverage), a realm of the mind-seemingly abstract, cool, clean 
and bloodless, idealistic, pure, perhaps part of the spirit, that can leave 
behind the messy, troublesome body and the ruined material world. Far 
from being left behind, however, the flesh forms the essential site of VR. 
It is the site of fictions made material, fictions which are the images of 
our subjectivity-how we know what we are. 
- Catherine Richards 
Excerpted from "Virtual Bodies," Public 11:  Tbrozigbput, 1995. 
War Game 
-Lynne Cohen 
Web-Cam 
Web-Cam, or live video feed to the Internet, is an ideal symbol of the ero- 
sion of privacy, the eradication of individual control over private space 
that marks our electronic information society at the end of the millenium. 
The type of Web-cam postings doing so, which are real-life precursers to 
two predictable Hollywood narratives telling of media-controlled lives, 
The Truman Show and Ed TV, are best represented by the Jenni-cam 
site. Having received mass media attention over three years ago, this site is 
the first to be well-known, and, therefore, has many imitators. Jenni puts 
non-censored cameras in the bedroom and living room of her Manhattan 
apartment. Guests and members of her Web site can look in and "inter- 
act" in her private life, especially upon reading such insightful notes to her 
fans as, "Yikes! Allergy season." 
Her efforts could suggest that individuals are able to regulate privacy, 
take it into their hands and re-define private space past bourgeois notions 
of autonomy and propriety. This is commendable. In fact, it recalls how 
much art of the seventies, performance, film and video art of a conceptual 
and often feminist bent, has taken cues from Marxist thought and broke 
down privatelpublic boundaries. 
However, the missing part of the equation that problematizes Jenni- 
cam and similar efforts (incidentally, most of these pioneering Web-Cam 
sites have been made by women, possibly because the potential audience, 

WEB-WOR 
curious voyeurs, is mostly male) is that the so-called public electronic 
space, which private space is opening into, is far from democratic and is, 
therefore, not truly public. For this reason, making the private become 
public on-line does not involve the progressive "politicizing of the per- 
sonal," as went the popular feminist rallying cry of past generations, but 
the regressive politicizing of it by surrounding "public" space. 
But, is not cyberspace a free, unregulated frontier? 
Uhhh-no. On-line "public" space is ruled by the private space of 
masculine, corporate, and mass media interests. Due to pretences of free- 
dom and lawlessness, the Internet's filtering of public space is simply 
more invisible than more carefully monitored forms of communication. 
Predominantly developed by men of questionable social skills slaving away 
in Silicon Valley dungeons for corporate dragons, the Web is still most 
commonly used to peddle the masculine-dominated world of porno, ever- 
so-fashionable now due to a seemingly endless retro-seventies trend. How- 
ever, an encompassing and certainly sanitizing corporate takeover of the 
Web is imminent, due to the onslaught of e-commerce. This is, of course, 
equally unsettling. 
This kind of control is the reason why Web-cam, despite offering icon- 
oclastic possibilities of publictprivate breakdown, has to date failed to do 
so. What is needed to reverse on-line bias is at minimum an acknowledge- - 
ment that electronic space does not equate democracy. Then, by making 
Internet inequity known, private inequities may be addressed on it that are 
not tainted by their framework. Then, the personal can indeed become 
politicized, as opposed to acting as an agent for the status quo. 
Web-cam, for calling for a publictprivate breakdown, has inadvertantly 
become a natural symbol of the demise of privacy upon the dawning of the 
new millenium. Indeed, it will remain so as long as those contributing to 
it continue to open up the private to the public without politicizing the act 
of doing so. 
-Earl Miller 
Word 
How many, how often, how asked. Can you think without a word? I know 
it sounds incredible today, but in 1970 when I was thirty years-old I had 
not heard nor read the word "lesbian." During an early women's group I 
heard the word and as I heard it and found its meaning I acknowledged an 
inner sensibility I had not known before. I came out. To have a word is to 
have a freedom. 
- Barbara Hammer 
Work Room 
- L y ~ e  Cohen 
Youth 
WOR-ZER 
Know-it-alls. A great commodity. (see Intelligence, New Technology) 
- Janine Marchessault 
Zero 
Zero is really nothing else but zero. But it would not be wrong to say that 
the zero was invented so as to signify empty space. That great confusion 
arose in the early mathematical systems as far as nothing was concerned. 
The Babylonians, for example, wrote "106" as "1. .6", a subtlety that 
could easily be missed by a tired or drunken scribe. Without zero, an empty 
space next to an empty space (as in 1006) could easily be read as a single 
empty space. 
"Zero" is said to derive from the Sanskrit "shiinya." Indian civilization 
distinguished over twenty-five nuances of "shiinya" (the non-existent, the 
non-present, the unthought, the unborn, the immaterial,. . .) and India can 
be rightly designated as the Great Breeding Ground of Zero. It was in 
ancient India that was born "shiinyata," a Buddhist concept that relates to 
vacuity and does not distinguish between reality and non-reality, thus 
reducing things to complete insubstantiality. 
Zero is at the origin but it seems it may also be at end of a certain line, 
as in the ground zero of the bomb, the zero degree of writing and the zero 
of entropy. Whether cyphers belongs to generals, writers or scientists, 
everyone seems to agree that the universe is ineluctably heading towards a 
state of evenly distributed homogeneous cold dust. 
While we are set on this ineluctable crash course with nothing, our world 
is for now one of weak truths, weak events and weak forms-a lukewarm 
buffet of near-zeroes where everything tastes the same and where architec- 
ture and cities are more about holes, voids and interstitial spaces than 
about actual forms. The zeroes of the cities are those empty spaces between 
form apexes. Not form that bites back like a hungry hyena when given 
mental space to do so. Sometimes they are voids but then sometimes voids 
are as form-full as solid sheer-angled blocks. The zero is often mediocre. As 


MAR-MEN 
Martyrdom and Aromatherapy 
The increasing number of stores selling small labeled vials of essential oils 
with specific directions and cautions for usage indicates a recognition- 
albeit in a packaged sort of way-of the power of scent. In examining 
stories of martyrs from around the world, I have found that this power has 
long been known to martyrologists. 
Martyrdom imbues a conflict with sacred meaning. In conquering the 
fear of death, the martyr becomes a symbol for a society's conquest over the 
enemy. This symbol binds together, strengthens and importantly for a small 
community, helps to recruit more martyrs. Martyrologists from many reli- 
gious traditions have told inspiring tales to attract more martyrs, of how 
they travel directly to heaven, of the powers they have there to intercede on 
the behalf of their family and friends, of the crowns they wear. 
There is another detail commonly included in martyrs' tales which seems at 
first superfluous to religious or political ends and directed rather at sensual 
whimsy. In many traditions it is said that martyrs do not decay but rather 
their bodies give off pleasant aromas. An article from 1998 in the Daily News 
of Colombo, Sri Lanka, for example, said that the blood of a recent Buddhist 
martyr had the sweet smell of breast milk. The Christian martyrs of Lyons 
who died in 177 CE were said to exhale the "sweet odor of Christ," a "fra- 
grance which comes from knowing Him." The scent of a martyr can exist out- 
side of time and permeate more than the air. The sweet-smelling manure of 
the gazelles who ate the grasses around the tomb of Husayn was appreciated 
both centuries before and after the Shi'ite martyr's death in 680 CE. 
The aroma of apples is common to both Christian, Muslim and Hindu 
martyrs and can be detected by believers at  Husayn's tomb if it is visited 
before dawn. Hindus and Shi'ite Muslims of Agra, India tell of the odor of 
the martyr Qazi Nurullah's body which was found three days after he died 
by searchers who noticed the smell of apples coming from his grave. It was 
his aroma spreading throughout the land which first drew people's atten- 
tion. They followed their noses and gave birth to what a martyrologist 
would call a pilgrimage. 
-Suzanne Evans 
Men's Club 
-Lynne Cohen 

Michigan Central Station 
1997198, chromogenic print, 18 X 22 inches 
-Stan Douglas 
Michigan Theatre 
1997198, chromogenic print, 18 X 22 inches 
-Stan Douglas 
Migration 
No prior century has witnessed a greater displacement of people from 
their original homes as the twentieth century. Twenty-first-century migra- 
tion will outpace its predecessor. A recently published report by the United 
Nations High Commissioner states that forty-five million migrants, refu- 
gees, and expellees-victims of poverty, famine, epidemics, natural cata- 
strophes, unemployment, civil wars, and persecutions-are in the midst 
of flight to new homes. This number will increase sharply in the immedi- 
ate future, and the destination of such migration will continue to be the 
metropolis.' Let us examine how the transitory nature of migration-a 
condition that is often forced upon an individual-affects the psychologi- 
cal but also the physical creation of domestic space, and in this way better 
consider without generalization and naivetC the possibilities for providing 
the individual's most essential need within the urban realm. 
The condition of the migrant is characterized by an inability to move 
fluidly in his or her new context and one where the capacity for adapta- 
tion is arrested by unfamiliar social, political, and cultural conditions that 
provide limited choices. To this end the author Franz Fanon wrote of the 
displaced subject, "I am for somewhere and for something else.. .in the 
world in which I travel, I am endlessly creating my~elf."~ Domestic space 
for most of the world's migrants is completely provisional-it is either the 


first transition point in a long period of assimilation or a place where life 
is suspended preceding a return to their original home. In both cases these 
homes constitute way-stations between the previous home and an imag- 
ined home to which they aspire. 
In twentieth-century modern architecture's polemical utopian projects, the 
immense and complex scale of the urban plan often subsumed the smaller 
scale of the domicile. Architects conceptualized the construction of the places 
of everyday life either as cells within a monolithic housing block or as units 
within a vast carpet of low-rise dwellings. In the visionary urban schemes, 
(such as Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse or Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre 
City, to cite two prominent examples), life within the well-equipped house 
was organically linked to the functioning of the entire stable, urban milieu. 
These urban proposals emphasized movement systems that incorporated 
the latest technology in rapid transportation-automobiles and airplanes- 
but such obsessions regarding movement systems were always the means for 
increasing circulation within already homogeneous social groups. 
What can be made of the continuing modern obsession for travel in 
light of the reality that the de facto modern subject was and is, not the self- 
directed, mobile cultural agent, but a migrant who is often compelled by 
unpredictable economic, political, and social upheavals, to move to a new 
home? The migrant, instead of arriving at  a gleaming vast urban utopia 
that offers shelter, arrives a t  a contingent and intimate domestic space. 
Here, in ad-hoc sites of domesticity, the migrant assembles a new home 
out of material possessions-transported objects of sentimental value and 
newly acquired objects of consumer culture-imbued with both memories 
of the place of origin and aspirations of imagined spaces-despite the 
absence of a reasonable architecture into which he or she can decant his or 
her life. Is it possible to imagine that a market economy might still be able 
to provide even minimum dwellings to which people will aspire? Can this 
fissure be ameliorated or will housing for those within migration's under- 
tow remain a myth within the twenty-first century as it has within this 
century? 
Notes 
1 Gert Mattenklott, "Ed~tor~al," Daedalos, (1994), 22-23. 
2 Franz Fanon, Black Skzn Whzte Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 229. 
-Paul Kariouk and Mabel 0. Wilson 
Military Installation 
-Lynne Cohen 
Modernism 
Manic monadism. 
-Ken Allan 
Montage 
"Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and our furnished 
rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked 
up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by 
the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far- 
flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling." 
{Walter Benjamin] 
-Susan Lord 
Excerpted from "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations 
(New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 242. 
Morphos 
#l #2 
-Christine Davis 
Museum of Accidents 
When it comes to information distrust the probable. Always begin by 
believing what seems incredible. 
-Emile Gaboriau 

To innovate the vessel was already to innovate the shipwreck, to  invent 
the steam engine, the locomotive, was again to invent the derailment, the 
rail catastrophe. So it goes for the birth of aviation, airplanes innovating 
air-crashes, the air catastrophe. Not to mention the automobile and car 
pile-ups, electricity and electrocutions, nor especially those major techno- 
logical hazards produced by the development of chemical and nuclear 
industry.. .each period of technological development, with its instruments 
and machines, brings its share of specialized accidents, thus revealing en 
nkgatif the scope of scientific thought. 
The military object, armaments or diverse devices, invert the tendency 
to privilege SUBSTANCE; on the contrary, the logic of war requires the 
ACCmENT, disasters as a principle: canons, shells, tanks or missiles are 
then nothing but cumbersome war artifacts to be lightened and miniatur- 
ized as quickly as possible while their destructive effects (range, impact.. .) 
are constantly improved and made more spectacular in a bid to obtain the 
absolute weapon (atomic or otherwise), the absolute expression of major 
technological risk, the absolute form of fear, and thereby, one would hope, 
the beginning of wisdom. 
Indeed, the beginning of wisdom would be, above all, an awareness of the 
symmetry between substance and accident, instead of constantly dissimulat- 
ing them. To acquire a tool, a new piece of industrial equipment or whatever, 
is also to acquire a danger, a particular risk; it is to open one's door, to 
expose one's intimacy to hazards, slight or major. To censor evidence, as is so 
often the case, is to practice dissimulation, ensure disinformation, and so 
contribute to a loss of confidence in the effects of science, analogous today 
only to what happens in politics. Hence the disinterestedness, the decline of 
curiosity in the most varied fields, reckoned to the unprecedented develop- 
ment of electronic or other images, though the simulation industry marks the 
rise of contradiction and even a certain compensation. 
Exposing the accident in order not to be exposed to it is, at present, the 
main function of simulators used to measure the performance of techno- 
logical objects. It seems to me, the same should hold for the new museog- 
raphy, especially that which claims to  deal with science and industrial 
products.. . . As we saw on the TV news (18.2.86), the live demolition of a 
large building in a Paris suburb, the transmutation in 8 seconds of a 180m 
high-rise building into 70,000 tons of rubble: the "museum of accidents" 
already exists, I've seen it: it is the TV. 
-Paul Virilio 
Excerpted from "The Museum of Accidents," trans. Yvonne Lawrence. Public 2: The 
Lunatic of One Idea, 1989. 
MUZ-NON 
Muzak 
The corporation that pioneered what is generically known as muzak 
(much to  their chagrin), elevator music, or dentist music. First established 
as Wired Radio, Inc., in 1922 to serve small public businesses, the com- 
pany was founded by General George Owen Squier and was based on 
communication technologies he had developed for the Army. Over the 
next several decades, an arranging vocabulary, based predominantly on 
string textures and gestures, developed into what we now think of as ele- 
vator music. This music stopped dominating the programmed music mar- 
ket in the 1980's, however, replaced by what the industry calls foreground 
music, i.e. songs played by original artists. This development coincides 
with the invention of niche marketing, the widespread availability of home 
video and cable television to compete with network programming, and in 
general the shift to narrowcast over broadcast approaches. The three com- 
panies that dominate this industry today are Muzak, Audio Environments 
Inc., and 3M. 
The few existing studies of ubiquitous musics all point to their embed- 
dedness in contemporary capitalism. For example, Joseph Lanza argues in 
Elevator Music that it is the quintessential twentieth-century music, because 
it seeks to control the environment, as have other defining technologies of 
the century. Jonathan Sterne suggests, in Sounds Like the Mall of America, 
that programmed music is a significant factor in defining the relationships 
of spaces and flows in malls. And in a culture of music discourses that made 
it easy to dismiss elevator music as inauthentic, commercial pap, the shift to 
foreground music programming raises new problematics-particularly ques- 
tions of value and ideologies-in the study of ubiquitous musics. 
-Anahid Kassabian 
New Technology 
A catch-all expression that sells cars and universities. 
-Janine Marchessault 
Nonsense 
For some time after its emergence as a literary genre in Victorian literature, 
nonsense maintained a strong dependence on its perceived opposite, sense. 
Without sense as a backdrop, nonsense was incapable of existing for Vic- 
torians, or at least of coming into view as a recognizable, modern form. 
Whenever nonsense fell outside the penumbra of sense, it regressed to 
gibberish, the lowest form of nonsense, and disappeared from view as a 
pleasurable or tastefully subversive literary form. The success of Alice in 


Ultrasound | Janine MarchessaultUtopia | Dot Tue

TRA-UTO 
debate and consensus and constituted by individuals agreeing to submit to 
the implicit contract of its laws. 
Translation poetics, approaching languages(s) from the perspective of a 
relation with an outside, poses the question of (in)finitude, of limits, those 
of the self, the other, the collectivity, of the medium, the tecknk, the nation, 
of modernity even, and of knowledge. What remains a matter of ongoing 
debate is whether translation is a process of enfolding an outside, or of 
unfolding to an outside in a movement of expansion with the potential for 
enhancement or dispersal. 
Notes 
1 Karen Littau, "Refractions of the Feminine: The Monstrous Transformations of Lulu," 
Modem Language, Notes 110,4 (1995): 888-912. 
2 Michel Serres, La Traduction (Paris: kditions de Minuit, 1974). 
3 John Glassco, "Introduction," Poetry of French Canada in Translation (Toronto: Oxford, 
1970), xxii. 
4 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist 
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 293. 
5 Brian Singer, "Cultural versus Contractual Nations: Rethinking their Opposition: His- 
tor)' and Theory 35,3 (1996): 309-337. 
-Barbara Godard 
Ultrasound 
"[Iln the nineteenth century, [there was] a long period when a woman was 
not sure if she was pregnant. At a certain point, there was quickening 
and she gained certainty and then became a pregnant woman socially. If a 
woman did not want to be pregnant, she did not have to deal with the 
destruction of life in the uterus because that life stayed within the central 
experience of her own body. This is very different from women who are 
pregnant today, and who as many doctors report, do not feel "certain" 
that everything is alright until they have seen an image of their uterus 
through the ultrasound scan." {Barbara Duden] 
- Janine Marchessault 
Excerpted from "History Beneath the Skin" (transcript from Ideas), CBC Radio (Oct. 7-8, 
1991). 
Utopia 
Last night a thick mist shrouded the city of Corrientes in a mysterious 
cloak, a physical manifestation of the intrigue that swirls through narrow 
colonial streets and spills into the plaza where the utopians wait, hopeful, 
dreaming, for a social revolution that has already been defeated. In their 
tent city, built upon colonial histories and contemporary abuses of power, 
they organize fish and loaf communal meals and spontaneous assemblies 
where each speaks to a system in ruins. Behind the thick whitewashed 
walls of the government buildings, meetings take place in secret rooms 
hidden down dark labyrinthine hallways. A paranoia inherited from the 
ruling classes seeps through the city like damp rot through an old crum- 
bling house. The new leaders and their advisors know that although the 
system is in ruins, it is still powerful. The people who have brought them 
to power have handed them a terrible paradox. To feed the people, outside 
of miracles wrought from a biblical epoch, they must accept the crumbs of 
globalization. They speak of social justice to the multitude in the square 
and meet with international bankers behind closed doors. They barter 
away a state infrastructure in response to International Monetary Fund 
demands for privatization and austerity. In the plaza the utopians begin to 
fight among themselves and they don't even know why. 
In a house just off the main square, dust settles on pictures of Ernesto 
Cardenal and framed slogans from the sixties; dust cloaks pamphlets and 
books, muralist ink drawings and indigenous wood carvings, a thick suffo- 
cating dust that muffles the future. A sadness permeates the space, a retreat 
from what is left of dreams and utopias. The couple inside hide behind their 
books and their writings. Their bodies turn inwards, defensive, nervous, 
drooping in defeat, refusing to  walk in the plaza, to breath the air of the 
people's desire for change, to witness euphoria turning to bittersweet resig- 
nation to anger at the immobility of the world in an era after the end of 
the revolutions. The past encircles them, clasping them with long thin out- 
stretched arms, dragging them down into a cloudy pool of memories. 
The night that the dictator was overthrown in this sleepy backwater city 
where the confluence of the Parana and Paraguay rivers form eddies and 
whirlpools and battling currents, the church called upon a deeply religious 
and traditional people, who live amongst their saints and folklore, to exor- 
cise the devil. Rumours had swept through the city that the dictator was 
involved in black magic, that near his vast opulent estate built in the mid- 
dle of the jungle in the style of the rubber barons of the Amazon, little boys 
had disappeared into the chasm of satanic ritual. From these rumours grew 
an outrage, swelling in concert with the demonstrations against corrup- 
tion, the marches demanding unpaid salaries, and the hunger that began to 
gnaw at people's stomachs. With the call of the church to defeat the forces 
of evil, they began to march silently, with candles in hand, from the four 
corners of the city, like ants that devour all vegetation in their path, to form 
a cross at  midnight in the plaza. An auto-da-fe' is held only months before 
a new millennium promises a world of clinical surfaces and technological 
miracles that will brush away the superstitions of a spiritual dimension. 
In the pedestrian shopping promenade, lined with endless shoe stores, 
two boys play accordians-trade name Child Prodigy-two blocks apart. 
Each has his lunch beside him, a Coca-Cola and a sandwich, carefully 
packaged, Each has a sign telling passers-by that they are refugees-from 
where they do not say-and that their father and little brothers need 
money to survive. One is named Florian and the other Christian. When 
the Correntinos stop to ask them questions, fascinated by the appearance 
of exotic beggars from elsewhere peddling music in their shopping con- 
course, the two boys smile angelic smiles and lift their fingers to their 
mouths as if to signal they are dumb-without language-but not without 
guile. Gypsies or Kosovo Albanians fleeing a war, they cannot or will not 
say. A few stores down sit the regular beggars. A woman with her two 
babies is empty handed. An old blind man clutches a clear plastic pop bot- 
tle that has nothing in it. Meanwhile, the two accordion players beat out 
music to the sound of constant change clattering through the slot of their 
tin cans, carefully closed so that no one can know how much money they 
are collecting each hour. 
At the Casino Hotel bar overlooking the river, where Graham Greene 
once sat scribbling notes for The Honourary Consul, a couple sit eating 
white bread sandwiches and drinking beer from tall frosty glasses. Sinister 
is a word that keeps entering their conversation. Perhaps, she tells him, the 
struggle for power is so sinister because it is an empty abstraction, a cob- 
web of illusions, a force that slips away into the everyday world of petty 
manipulations. They pause and stare out at  the lapacho trees in full 
bloom, blossoms falling softly to earth forming vast petal carpets of soft 
mauve and vibrant rose. The setting sun, an iridescent ball of red, falls into 
a thick mist rising from the river. As dusk envelops the city, old friends are 
torn apart by the political upheaval. Loyalties dissolve into the murky 
waters of power struggles and brute survival. Hope is cast up against the 
cruel ironies of a global defeat. What to do with this encounter of dreams 
and materiality? Where to take the contradictory emotions that rise like 
bile from the heart? How to believe that utopia can still exist, if even for a 
moment, in a sleepy Argentinean town that unexpectedly awoke one day 
to marches in the plaza and impossible demands for social justice? 
-Dot Tuer 
Vacation 
And what is a paradox, most often, if not the account of a phenome- 
non identical to one declared to be true, but whose point of view, 
alone, was changed? 
-Victor Sigalen, "Pensers pai'ensnl 


JAZ-LAB 
The vision of jazz is of black guys in nice sharkskin suits faithfully living a 
tradition through performance. Sweaty, stoned, drunk, they reach into 
their souls to reveal the pain of existence through a spirituality that their 
musical practice allows them to reach. The god in the pit of their stomach 
pushes their lungs and limbs to produce sounds we can hardly manage, 
new sounds. Today contrivance is taken for granted and Hip Hop appears 
as the commodified representation black musical culture. Its promoters 
know they've got a hot product, a new gospel to sell. 
There is a new musiclnew jazz of today, a scene dominated, oddly enough, 
by classically-trained musicians such as John Zorn, Mishe Mengleberg and 
Dave Douglas, who are tired of the strictures of the classical tradition. 
New jazz is a hybrid of written music and improvisation, and it grew out 
of the revival of free jazz. Free jazz was itself a response by largely black 
players to the white talte-over of bebop, and is often dated to October 1, 
1964, the "October Revolution" performance by flugelhornistlpainter Bill 
Dixon. No writing, just playing. Freedom for the soul, a study in listening, 
mind meets gut. 
-Mike Hansen 
Laboratory 
Il- 
I (  ii 
-Lynne Cohen 
Labour 
No one wants to hear about it. Too time-consuming. (see "Process") 
-Janine Marchessault 






LAN-LAW 
Landscape 
Reducing the landscape to an idealised modality of nature or built heritage 
is to forget that its history is inherently linked to the progressive taming of 
the most inhospitable confines: forest, mountains, seas and deserts haven't 
always been considered as landscapes. Are not the real territories to ex- 
plore today notably the ones that we don't see simply because of our 
immersion in them: these impure and extensive lands of the urban? 
At a time when we don't exactly know how to deal with the speed 
and the power of the various phenomena transforming the planet, the 
concept of landscape can be a strategic tool to colonize the mutations that 
are taking place. In-between mental and material constructs, the landscape 
idiom liberates a zone of indecisiveness that allows us to think about 
the potentials of a multi-layered reality. Beyond the green and decorative 
picturesque to which it is too often confined, the landscape is above all 
a vehicle for the apprehension and the transformation of the territory. 
If the mediation of the landscape can be transfixed by reductive values 
which are legitimised by tautologies of harmony and control, its under- 
lying mechanisms, however, remain entirely plastic. Everything can be 
a landscape. More than ever, the stake is to hold together differences. The 
landscape, as a shared and open project, may be the vehicle for these 
hybrid consistencies. 
Law 
In breaking a statue one risks becoming a statue.. . 
-Jean Cocteau 
How can a prohibition against images be enunciated? Is there not some- 
thing profoundly contradictory about the very representation of the law 
forbidding representations of the absolute? Would not the law inevitably 
transgress itself in its own pronouncement? Would it not, indeed, stimu- 
late the very iconophilia that it prohibits-this according to the irreducible 
imbrication of law with desire, proscription with enjoyment-and thus 
undermine itself in its very enunciation? 
The issue here involves somewhat more than the double bind attendant 
on every law in its self-universalizing force and promise. Hegel had al- 
ready identified that initial problem, a logical one, in his chapter on 
"Force and the Understanding": this is the paradox of a law rendered vac- 
uous by its formal repeatability and hence binding p0wers.l It involves 
more, too, than the performative self-contradiction of a pronouncement 
delegitimating itself precisely by virtue of its own legality. To pronounce 
the Bilderverbot is itself to assume legislative authority-thus to identify 
LAW-LED 
with the origin of the law, even if only in order to speak of it and on its 
behalf-in this sense committing self-idolatry precisely in order to restrict 
or limit it, contaminating transcendence in the very effort to protect its 
purity, assuming the essential guilt it would deter. Follow me1 do not fol- 
low me.. . . Is not the Bilderverbot in this respect the most self-transgressive 
of all laws? Invoked in order to be violated-does it not indeed exemplify 
the ultimate impossibility of the law as such? There is, however, more than 
one way of responding to such an impossibility. 
At issue here is not only the familiar psychoanalytic point (regarding the 
return of the repressed as neurotic symptom), nor only the Foucaultian one 
(concerning the positive productivity of the law in its very negativity). One 
might remark with equal cogency-this will be my essential argument-that 
if every prohibition both incites and requires a corresponding transgression, 
it is also conversely the case that through its apparent selfinfraction the law 
only binds us closer (although to what remains undetermined). In this case 
the law's very inability to authorize itself may testify equally to an even 
deeper, if perhaps ultimately inscrutable, prohibition-but perhaps equally 
to the claim of an unspeakable desire. 
Perhaps something more than dialectical reciprocity is at work in such 
a chiasmus of law-and-transgression. Perhaps in this doubly contaminat- 
ing movement of self-deregulating regulation and self-regulating deregula- 
tion, another relationship both to the law and to the image may begin to 
announce itself. 
Note 
1 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University 
Press, 1977), 79-103. 
-Rebecca Comay 
Excerpted from "Materialist Mutations of the Bilderverbot," Public 15: Icons &Idols, 1997. 
Ledger 
Joe was eaten by a tuna. 
Marietta was convinced by a spermatozoa. 
Clarence was indoctrinated by a curtain. 
Sally was bitten by a jack-in-the-box. 
Mory was trounced by a gram of saliva. 
Tina was capsized by a porcupine. 
Salvador was perforated by a weather balloon. 
Ursula was basted by a porthole. 
Nikolai was reconstituted by a bat. 
Grace was hurtled by a steam engine. 
- 
LED 
Clint was laminated by a milkjug. 
Teresa was suctioned by a wheatfield. 
Uri was impressed by a squid. 
RenCe was misplaced by a cloudburst. 
Gudbrandur was ploughed by a recipe for marzipan. 
Wendy was castrated by a daydream. 
Vincent was summoned by a wolf. 
Maureen was purged by a type of ship called an ocean liner. 
Kamahl was infiltrated by a vestibule. 
Lena was deleted by a meadow. 
Mark was marked by a mark. 
Astrud was catapulted by a fragrance. 
Boris was yanked by a glyptodon. 
Doreen was pilfered by a sundial. 
Jim was reimbursed by a falling ocelot. 
Nutricia was cross-checked by a carpet sample. 
Clive was reconfigured by a trampoline. 
Indira was courted by a sundial. 
Lance was lanced by a lance. 
Veronica was crimped by a taxidermed stork. 
Jeremy was exorcised by a gearbox. 
Serena was orchestrated by a continental shelf. 
Guido was pummelled by a kaleidoscope. 
Fatima was pursued by a confessional. 
Theodore was detonated by a vaccination. 
Deborah was lubricated by a chihuahua. 
Patrick was inculcated by a rickshaw. 
Aurelia was magnified by a rip. 
Steven was agitated by a spiral. 
Kimberly was ratified by a celery stalk. 
Kurt was harpooned by a fire alarm. 
Mauve was pigeonholed by a cathedral. 
Derek was improved by a moustache. 
Sabina was martyred by a snowflake. 
Avery was lectured by a goalpost. 
Temperance was expunged by a century. 
Sebastian was imagined by a girdle. 
Jill was stampeded by a sprocket. 
Vladimir was mummified by a cricket match. 
Tammy was approved by a centipede. 
-Steve Venright 
LIK-LOV 
Like 
If each word gained weight through use, "like" would be the heaviest word 
in the English language. Earlier definitions suggested both affection and 
equivalence. As a linguistic stepping stone to a post-literate, digital culture, 
the crucial ascendency of this word signals an end of monogamy (replaced by 
interchangeable partners) and an end of language's ability to distinguish and 
differentiate. Like is a word that has taken the place of countless other words 
in the language, it is a bridge, a pronounced moment of grammatical intru- 
sion (saying like is like saying the word "comma"). Finally, it is a linguistic 
parasite so strong that future dictionaries will contain just one word. Like. 
-Mike Hoolboom 
Lobby 
-Lynne Cohen 
Love 
Unlike sex, love is impossible. Lacan tells us sex-the sexual relation- 
is impossible: "What one calls sexual bliss is marked, dominated, by the 
impossibility of establishing, as such anywhere in the enunciable, the 
unique One which is important for us, the One of the relationship 'sexual 
relations."' But Lacan, as everyone knows, was no feminist. What, in part, 
he was getting at  is in the heart of what he understands of the maculate 
processes of being masculine: "Phallic jouissance is the obstacle which 
stops man arriving at  jouissance in the body of the woman, precisely 
because what he gets his bliss from is the jouissance of his own organ."' It 
is Zeno's paradox: Achilles's arrow never arrives at the spot that Briseis has 
just vacated. But, of course, Briseis has never completed her second step 
either, and the One which is pursued in the sexual act, the One of sexual 
union, is the One of the Real numbers, and it is itself infinite, because, like 
the step away from the speeding arrow, the price of its completion is death. 
This, oh best beloved, is the sole point from which love is comprehensi- 
ble: the realm of paradox, the necessity and impossibility, the union and 
the infinite incompletion, the generosity and the fatality of love. Unlike 
sex, love is not eternal. Sex is just an instinct. Let us also say: It is an 
instinct that is incapable of finding satisfaction under any but the most 

LOV 
fantastical conditions, conditions that, at any one time, can exist only for 
the tiniest proportion of the population, and then only for split seconds of 
historical time. The flamboyance with which he pursued sexual gratifica- 
tion would seem to suggest that the Emperor Tiberius never achieved it. 
Confronted with the man who boasts constantly of his conquests, or worse, 
whose lackeys boast of them for him, one doubts the veracity of the tales 
of the harem of Haroun al-Raschid, and believes instead in the endlessly 
deferred delights of Scheherazade. This is where love emerges, through the 
truly secular delights that, unlike the divine, can never be attained. 
Love, after all, is pure and holy only if it is love, that is to say, if it is unre- 
quited. Divine love can always be fulfilled, in the mystics' aching visions, in 
the deaths of virgins and martyrs. But human love can find no peace in 
death with which it waltzes endlessly. The humble, sublunary love is always 
fouled in the mires of the bodies here below; it is always a pale shadow of 
itself, its own retreating echo, fading even as it speaks. The narcissist is unin- 
teresting: the narcissist's lover, the nymph Echo, disappearing, swallowed in 
the marshes of her own unanswerable love-that is a creature as worthy of 
respect and devotion as the will-o'-the-wisp desire she follows in her inter- 
nal exile. This is love, and there is more of it about today than ever before. 
It has ceased even to be desirable. Perversely, that can mean a return to the 
body, a reconstruction of jouissance, apart from the tedious tyranny of the 
prick. A tyranny whose reign is, in any case, credited with far more power 
than it really has; whose ominous grip on the conduct of human affairs is 
profoundly overrated, and whose ability to provide a lasting sense of good 
cheer is clearly inadequate to the planetary gloom it is charged with dis- 
pelling. The good news is that love has a history: it is only sex that endures. 
Love has a strange history; the story of frustrated communication. I 
take it that the most fundamental quality of human beings is that we are 
social, cultural creatures, and that our common destiny is to share, to 
communicate, not for any particular purpose other than to speak to one 
another, to strike sparks, to be and to become cultured creatures. Every- 
thing else-politics, economics, sex-is subordinate. The reproduction of 
the species is incidental to the communicative business of love. But as it 
has emerged in the twentieth-century West, love is a bogus communica- 
tion, premised on the hidden, shameful, puritanical account for sexual 
action. That shame, as Lacan imagined, laid the foundations for a genital 
sexuality that lies incommunicado. For once (and only once) McLuhan 
was right: in sex, and sex alone, the medium became the message. 
But now, thank God, we can at least begin to see the far side of this enor- 
mous dead weight of hypocrisy and its necessary other, sexology. A terrible 
virus has not only caused deaths, but has made lives take on a particular 
shape. If ever it was envisaged as an Old Testament plague driven by a venge- 
ful and malicious god, then the virus, as viruses will, has had its own revenge. 
LOV 
In the wake of HIV and AIDS, there is more perversion, not less-a further 
reduction in the "natural" and "reproductive" functions of sexuality. 
In the absence of a governing image of sexuality, of love, of everything 
that is central to the secular worlds of Anglo-Saxony (whose commonest 
curse and blessing is "fuck," the mana of the West), there emerges a mode 
of sexuality that has even less to do with reproduction, less to do with sat- 
isfaction, less to do with orgasm, less to do with penetration, less to do 
with the medium, and more, much much more, to do with the message. 
Sex becomes love at the moment it no longer is an end in and of itself. 
Even self-love needs, demands, an other to complete the vicious circle of 
Narcissus, the slippery Echo in which vanishes the otherness of the self, to 
itself in the narcissism-the newest pitfall in the romantic history of love. 
Note 
1 Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire livre XX:  Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 15. 
-Sean Cubitt 
Excerpted from "The Love That Can't Remember Its Name," Public 10: Love, 1994. 


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