Public (E-Journal, York University)

Of | Michael TurnerOptimism and Pessimism | Lang Bake

Davis, Christine

NUM-OPT 
Credit card numbers 
S.I.N. 
M.C.P. Numbers 
What's your number? 
000011100010100000111010001010 
Serial numbers 
Number 1 
New Year. Old Year. Another Year. 
Zero. Nothing. Everything. 
-Dion Tubrett 
To be of something, to belong, to be thought of. But to be robbed of some- 
thing! Or gotten rid of! To be made an enemy of, and thus be left alone. 
How sad, to die of a disease. Or worse-to be of what's coming. All 
that anticipation, all that weight. So: to work only with what's present, 
what's passed? A rearrangement? To never write another statement of 
intent again; to prefer that nobody know? To be unable to think of any- 
thing to say that would change all that. 
-Michael Turner 
Optimism and Pessimism 
At a certain point in the 1990s it became clear to me that ethics was to be 
substituted for politics in the discourses of my contemporaries both in and 
outside of the academy. Where politics remained it was in the sense of 
office or career politics. It is true that for the professionalised worker, 
whose conditions of existence are represented by the modern university, 
the time that can be allotted to politics in the old sense-work for social or 
communal causes, goals and interests-is seriously limited by the demands 
of work. This dilemma is real and shared. These areas of the practise of 
life take on the status of charity, and, at least in principle, charity work is 
a viable political practice. However, such activities remain on the margins 
of the real workings and mechanisms of the accumulation of power, as the 
agenda of many fiscally conservative regimes testify. 
In any case, there is a slippery slope that leads from the projection of a 
life in comparative poverty, perceived mediocrity or insignificance, to that 
sacrifice of time required to "build a life." Some like their work, most 
don't. Some accumulate capital far beyond their needs, most don't accu- 
mulate enough. Through this sacrifice the gatherers gamble on a delay of 
their lives (work) in the name of a later delay of work: a dream holiday, a 
house, a car, retirement, medical care, perhaps a child, a "cause," or sim- 
ply food and shelter for themselves or others. If we sift through this list or 
examine other such lists, what we find is a profile of the political disap- 
pearance of the worker, for it is like the infinitely expanding list of things 
that must get done but never will. 
Nevertheless, any strong separation of ethics and politics risks missing 
the truly difficult thing about ethics which is not only the impossibility of 
knowing and the need for healthy scepticism when it comes to applying 
moral claims in the world. That view quickly turns into an academic 
conceit. The really difficult thing about ethics is the politics of one's own 
actions. It is the field and implication of our errors, our conceits, but also 
and even primarily, of our lucid decisions. It is the latter especially that 
make ethics difficult-the effects we foresee or justify and pretend not to, 
all our active minimizations, maximizations, rationalizations of conse- 
quences and intentions. So, yes the blind spots are bad. Inexperience and 
ignorance produce mistakes, and these are elements of the accident that is 
a life. Then there is the negotiation of said accident. 
In this light all talk of the "end of history" and related talk of the "end 
of politics" reveals a shortness of historical perspective that is that is both 
bemusing and horrifying. Good politics always has and always will require 
a vigilance which demands time and interest, and even something like 
belief. No good ethics without good politics. It seems they are always 
conjoined, ethics and politics, as if ethics is the obligation this vigilance 
answers to. 
The tendency and dynamic represented by the ideology of professional- 
isation, of eclipsing the possibility of good in the world, is not new. How- 
ever, it demands that the possibility of politics be sought out and that it 
take on new forms. 
Politics is in many ways about predicting the future because it is ulti- 
mately concerned with assessing and mediating powers and potential pow- 
ers. Optimism and pessimism effect action itself, in advance as it were. 
Optimists will attempt more, perhaps fail more often, but will succeed on 
occasion: "nothing ventured, nothing gained." Pessimists sabotage actions 
by questioning the realization of necessary conditions. They thereby impov- 
erish existence, as Nietzsche would have said (though Nietzsche sometimes 
called himself a pessimist, it was certainly not in this sense). Pessimism 
makes the world appear unworthy of us (an underhanded way of making 
"us" look better). Optimists set themselves up for a fall, so it is safer to be 
a pessimist. In this sense pessimism is a kind of social-psychological safety 
feature of modern ideology. 
Critical pessimism, grounded in epistemological pessimism, can be very 
dangerous here since it undermines the notion that things can be done in 
advance, a priori. Yet this is why such pessimism is rampant in a profes- 
sionalised society and its philosophies: there is no time for anything but 
pessimism, and pessimism justifies this lack of time. Of course the attempt 
to realize good in the world can lead to oppression or be claimed by those 
seeking to justify oppression, but what is a t  issue is not movement or 
change as such, but rather the form these changes take. This means we 
must distinguish between the movement of time, or change in general, and 
the forms of movement or change that continue to destroy us, other beings, 
and the world. 
After all, it is the violence, indifference and cruelty of our societies that 
we resist, as much as the narrowness of the goals that are imposed by cul- 
tural and material inertia. Progress as "more progress" or more of the 
same, gives us an oblivious illusion of movement as if nothing else could 
ever be imagined. It does not create goods or a good, it circulates cultural 
capital and capital itself. 
There are forms of inertia that are positive and which sustain creative 
movement. These must be distinguished from the destructive forms. Change 
can be good, but so can endurance and repetition. 
Consider the "subject," that human individual and institution that is so 
close to us all. Sometimes having or being a subject helps us (we may have 
certain rights that protect us) even as it destroys us (we are liable to the 
forces of capital, seized "as" subjects, addressed by advertising "as" sub- 
jects of desire, and so forth). So to some degree this "subject" works as a 
kind of lifejacket for existence which provides a way to pass through time, 
clumsy device though it be. Some will go even further: it is the institutions 
themselves that preserve the conditions of the Good. Rule of law, edu- 
cational institutions, quality control, security, confidence, the list goes 
on. Note that many of these institutions involve anticipation of risk. One 
would have to break down the good and bad of this list and retrieve the 
being or beings that were meant to be sustained, allowed to be and to  
become, if they could be found among this institutional dispersion. Per- 
haps we would be left with only education and hospitals and lives lived in 
spite of all that, passing on ways, truths, compassion and so on. If the 
buffer of life doesn't allow passage then a neutral circulation, indifference 
and intolerance will prevail because the problem will be reduced to one of 
personal survival. A kind of animal limit appears with two fronts: one the 
death of the subject, the other the spirits that meet us in the world. 
At least we have come to learn that this subject is collective and that the 
self is constituted by and through collectivities. The self is not such a pri- 
vate property after all! Deleuze helped us conceive this membrane of the 
self, ephemeral, vibrating at the point of becoming collective, pointing the 
way beyond the tautological human hoards to the earth, to the animals 
who are after all more subtle, less befuddled by epistemology, more worldly, 
more optimistic. 
I think of the Parisian composer Messiaen's musical transcriptions of 
bird calls of the 1950s and 1960s. "No one gets to hear them in the city," 
he explained in an interview. I imagine him throwing them pieces of bread. 
"There is some for you too. What do you have to tell us?" The world be- 
comes good just hearing such a story. I hesitate to add that Messiaen ear- 
lier wrote his Quartet for the End of Time (Quatuor pour la fin du temps) 
while interned in a Nazi camp, a piece which is today much more famous 
than the bird transcriptions. I imagine him listening to the birds in the 
camp; I imagine them helping him to compose-singing, coming and going, 
keeping the way open. 
-Lang Baker 
Patagonia 
Name of uncertain origin. Pata = foot (?), Gonia (? ) .  The "ultimate ulti- 
mate" according to Bruce Chatwin who literally wrote the book In Patag- 
onia about the vast, featureless lands of southern Argentina. 
Early explorers called Patagonia a land of fierce giants and monsters. 
Later Charles Darwin called the inhabitants-the all-too human Fuegian 
Indians- "wretched" creatures. Paleontologists noted that the monsters 
were merely oversized sloths. 
Legends of rivers of diamonds and rubies lured opportunistic Spanish 
and English privateers to a land that instead yielded wind and dust. Stories 
of a lost City of Caesars (inhabited by a race of robust Aryans and burst- 
ing with gold) nestled deep in the heart of the Patagonian Andes kept fleets 
of intrepid Jesuit missionaries busy as they plunged deeper and deeper into 
the heart of the Patagonian wilderness in search of Christian souls in need 
of salvation. 
Later, homesick Welsh settlers (marooned in Patagonia after buying 
one-way tickets to what they thought was a New World paradise) estab- 
lished tidy farmsteads and proper tea rooms overlooking the barren pam- 
pas. The American cowboy Butch Cassidy was rumored to  have made 
Patagonia his hideout (the Hollywood movie version of his life and death 
later changed the location to Bolivia). 
Patagonia's modern day cachet is exemplified by the eponymous, multi- 
million dollar company whose expensive outdoor clothing and designer 
catalogues are found in shopping malls around the globe. Armies of eco- 
tourists (socially responsible masses clad in neon-colored Patagonia brand 
parkas) descend upon Patagonia (the land) to shoot (with cameras, of 


English

ART-BEA 
Art Hysterical Discourse 
Revisioning the rapture. 
-Ken Allan 
Avant-Garde 
A new perfume by Calvin Klein. 
-Janine Marchessault 
Beaver 
Beaver hats, beaver tails, beaver droppings, beaver club, beaver colony, 
beaver hunt, busy beaver, sheared beaver, beaver-beaver (censored) citizen 
beaver? 
Canadian history is informed by the culture of the beaver on so many 
levels that any debate about the nation becomes a truly sexual experience. 
Anyone interested in the history of this country has crossed paths with 
extremely rich narratives of the nation, in which the quintessential Cana- 
dian experience is often documented as a matter of beaver [snaplshots. 
Those narratives written by early French explorers, British diarists as 
well as very serious Canadianists-mostly male, and sometimes female- 
describe the she-nation through graphic imagining of beaver fur, detailing 
the luxury of colours, shades, softness and darkness of the fur patches, 
nicely distributed according to the specifics of North American geography. 
Some accounts go so far as to claim that the best furs are to be found 
around Lake Ontario and in Qutbec, and that this rich brown glamourous 
fur is a matter of the northern exposure of the pretty beaver. In a very 
telling and significant way, these natural scientific descriptions of the 
beauty of the nation propose a constant crossing between beaver the beast, 
beaver as the route to penetration of the land, and the beaver-beaver as 
a sexual embodiment, a space conveniently framed as female, as female 
sex, as the she-nation. (For the record, the Jesuit periodical Relations 
and Canadian historian Harold Innis's famous book on The Fur Trade 
in Canada, offer the most exciting erotic taxonomies of fur geographies 
hands down). Looking at these epic journeys into beaver land, one cannot 
help but notice how the little beast is treated as a first-class citizen. 
This historical queer fascination for the beaver found a strange echo 
in the governmental dams of Ottawa and Quebec during the summer of 
1999. Suddenly, the cute, funny, puffy little beaver was the "sex" object 
of a national scream from coast to coast. The beaver, the first-class citi- 
zen of this country, was outed as sexually confused. The unique Castor 
Canadensis, the industrious beefcakelstud par excellence, rather than its 
fussy evil renowned queer European cousin, turned out to be a hermaphrodite. 
In its July 10, 1999 edition, the Ottawa Citizen brought out "scientific" 
evidence that the Canadian beaver, for centuries marketed as a monogen- 
dered mammal, was a pseudo-hermaphrodite. In fact, the news was not 
such a scoop. Already, an obscure nineteenth-century study had suggested 
that the anatomy of the most precious resource of the country was, well.. . 
anatomically gifted. The study was quickly dismissed as tabloid material, 
and did not stop the Canadian government from proudly standing by the 
assumed one-gender-one-nation heterosexual beaver, choosing the little 
muncher as the symbol of the sovereignty of Canada in 1975. Hence the 
shock, the shame, the national scream: how can a nation become so con- 
fused as to make its representatives a queen and a beaver? While for years, 
the government had no problem in flagging and greeting the nation and 
the world with a fur patch, suddenly the dubious gender of the beaver was 
an issue. As the Ottawa Citizen article laconically comments: "The sym- 
bolism is inescapable. Just south of the nation's capital, in South Nation 
River, Canada's national animal-the beaver-lives in profusion. And 
sexual confusion. Two professors were looking for something specific 
and they found it in 100 per cent of the males-a uterus. The finding may 
someday officially tag the North American beaver, Castor canadensis, as 
a pseudo-hermaphrodite-an animal that has sex organs from both gen- 
ders." (Ottawa Citizen, p. A-l). This latest ho-hum episode in the secret 
life of the busy Castor Canadensis aroused dismay and silence among fed- 
eral and provincial bodies, literally leaving the country to the beaver. Even 
the vociferous pro-fur agency, the Fur Council of Canada, usually so keen 
to hunt the beaver, didn't trail on the tale this time, silenced by the mystery 
of the male womb. While the gem of the nation was getting a close shave, 
or should I say a sheared beaver, a different sort of national identity debate 
was in full swing, and as the Ottawa Citizen article bravely pursues: "the 
truth-whether the beaver represents a sexual oddity or an environmental 
casualty-points to yet another Canadian identity crisis" (A-2). For future 
generations and to celebrate the new millenium, in addition to avoiding any 
further sexual confusion and postcolonial beaver fever, let's make a plea to 
have Canadian citizenship reverted and perverted to that of the Citizen 
Beaver. Welcome to Beaver Land! 
-Chantal Nadeau 
Semiotic or psychological disorder. 
-Janine Marchessault 
BIT-BLU 
Bit 
"Bit" designates the minimally meaningful units of both early twentieth- 
century live performance and late-century informatics. In vaudeville, radio 
comedy and post-war stand-up, a "bit" was a well-honed piece of comic 
business, a unit of gesture (such as the "double-take," the comically delayed 
response to word or action) or of linguistic play (as in the double-talk of 
Abbot and Costello skits). Bits were part of the rich tapestry of narrative 
films or combined within the larger syntax of the live routine. By the end of 
the twentieth century, a "bit" was no longer the richly condensed legacy of 
performance traditions. Rather, it named one of the building blocks of 
computer-mediated information, utterly meaningless on its own. 
-Will Straw 
Blue 
You say to the boy open your eyes 
When he opens his eyes and sees the light 
You make him cry out. Saying 
0 Blue come forth 
0 Blue arise 
0 Blue ascend 
0 Blue come in 
I am sitting with some friends in this cafe drinking coffee served by young 
refugees from Bosnia. The war rages across the newspapers and through 
the ruined streets of Sarajevo. 
Tania said "Your clothes are on back to front and inside out." Since there 
were only two of us here I took them off and put them right then and 
there. I am always here before the doors open. 
What need of so much news from abroad while all that concerns either life 
or death is all transacting and at work within me. 
I step off the kerb and a cyclist nearly knocks me down. Flying in from the 
dark he nearly parted my hair. 
I step into a blue funk. 
The doctor in St. Bartholomew's Hospital thought he could detect lesions 
in my retina-the pupils dilated with belladonna-the torch shone into 
them with a terrible blinding light. 
Look left 
Look down 
Look up 
BLU 
Look right 
Blue flashes in my eyes. 
Blue Bottle buzzing 
Lazy days 
The sky blue butterfly 
Sways on a cornflower 
Lost in the warmth 
Of the blue heat haze 
Singing the blues 
Quiet and s l o ~ l y  
Blue of my heart 
Blue of my dreams 
Slow blue love 
Of delphinium days 
Blue is the universal love in which man bathes-it is the terrestrial paradise. 
I'm walking along the beach in a howling gale - 
Another year is passing 
In the roaring waters 
I hear the voices of dead friends 
Love is life that lasts forever. 
My heart's memory turns to you 
David. Howard. Graham. Terry. Paul. 
But what if this present 
Were the world's last night 
In the setting sun your love fades 
Dies in the moonlight 
Fails to rise 
Thrice denied by cock crow 
In the dawn's first light 
I caught myself looking at shoes in a shop window. I thought of going in 
and buying a pair, but stopped myself. The shoes I am wearing at  the 
moment should be sufficient to walk me out of life. 
Pearl fishers 
In azure seas 
Deep waters 
Washing the isle of the dead 
In coral harbours 
BLU 
Amphora 
Spill 
Gold 
Across the still seabed 
We lie there 
Fanned by the billowing 
Sails of forgotten ships 
Tossed by the mournful winds 
Of the deep 
Lost Boys 
Sleep forever 
In a dear embrace 
Salt lips touching 
In submarine gardens 
Cool marble fingers 
Touch an antique smile 
Shell sounds 
Whisper 
Deep love drifting on the tide forever 
The smell of him 
Dead good looking 
In beauty's summer 
His blue jeans 
Around his ankles 
Bliss in my ghostly eye 
Kiss me 
On the lips 
On the eyes 
Our name will be forgotten 
In time 
No one will remember our work 
Our life will pass lilze the traces of a cloud 
And be scattered like 
Mist that is chased by the 
Rays of the sun 
For our time is the passing of a shadow 
And our lives will run like 
Sparks through the stubble 
I place a delphinium, Blue, upon your grave. 
-Derek Jarman 
Excerpted from Blue (1993), a film by Derek Jarman. Text Q Basilisk Productions, 1993. 
Public 10: Love. 1994. 
BOR 
Borders 
Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen. The 
eye of the other combines with our own eye to make it fully credible 
that we are part of the visible world. 
-John Berger, Ways of Seeing1 
Borders are as much virtual as material. To create a border, one needs 
not merely a concrete geographical space, but an imaginary one as well. 
In the absence of both these conditions being met, the symbolic efficacy 
of the border dissolves. One would be hard pressed to find a more telling 
manifestation of this fact than the current situation in Quebec. The Parti 
QuCbtcois claims Quebec's borders are inviolate. The federal government, 
on the other hand, maintains that if Canada is divisible, then so is Quebec. 
Aboriginal groups, for instance, demarcate their own ancestral borders 
and may opt to be part of Canada or indeed to create their own sovereign 
states in the event of Quebec secession. Add to this possibility the prospect 
of Quebec anglophones in west-end Montreal and other federalist regions 
insisting on their right to stay in Canada, and the fragility of the political 
demarcation of places becomes painfully clear. 
Indeed, in Quebec, the proliferation of imaginary border spaces seems 
to become all the more frenetic as the "differences" those borders would 
vouchsafe lose their grounding in everyday experience. In the 1995 refer- 
endum on sovereignty, leaders of the secessionist movement claimed that 
after separation nothing would change in Quebec, yet everything would. 
In the rest of Canada, the state of things is hardly clearer: in Parliament, 
Reform Party representatives from the prairies argue that decentralization 
is the only way to strengthen the Federation. In these times of increasingly 
ambiguous nationalist definitions, the desire for notions of nationhood at 
once more concrete and more historically resilient becomes palpable. For 
both Canadian and QutbCcois nationalists, the notion of the land as geo- 
graphical site of nationhood has gained much credence of late. Not infre- 
quently, this appeal to the land disregards the complex legal, historical, 
and cultural practices that have defined the lives of that land's inhabitants. 
Its limitations notwithstanding, this notion of the nation as land is a nec- 
essary prerequisite for the development of what Benedict Anderson has 
called the "imagined community." In the context of Quebec, this rhetoric 
of "the land" has increasingly become a key factor.* When land becomes 
the defining element of nationhood, borders-signs of a break, a gap, a 
demarcation of difference- become of paramount importance, and the 
"site" of the border often takes the form of images. 
While image-making is often used in order to demarcate cultural and 
national difference, it is frequently the case that this serves to exacerbate 
rather than resolve uncertainties concerning what kinds of difference really 
BOR 
exist. This is especially true of the Canadian Federation. This is not to  
claim that difference does not exist; instead, it is to posit that the bound- 
aries that define such difference are far more blurred than nationalists of any 
stripe wish to believe. Indeed, it is at  these points of uncertainty concern- 
ing identity that the various collective identities populating Canada find 
their deepest affinity. Regardless of one's national status within Canada, 
the one notion that unites Canadians and QuCbCcois alike is the fear that 
they are no different from those who surround them. So as nationalists 
continue to produce countless images in an effort to clarify their difference, 
those images belie the very anxiety they were intended to assuage. 
Notes 
1 John Berger, Ways of Seetng (London: BBClPengu~n Books, 1972), 9. 
2 Bened~ct Anderson, Imagtned Communtttes: Reflecttons on the Ortgtn and Spread of 
Nattonaltsm, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), passzm. 
-Scott MacKenzie 
Excerpted from "A Line in the Snow: Visualizing Borders Imaginary and Real," Public 14: 
Que'bec, 1996. 
Boredom 
Bore was first used in English in the eighteenth century, and boredom itself 
in 1862. Boredom is a luxury product. Though originally the province 
of courtiers, once given a name, boredom became democratic: anyone 
may be bored. Boredom is to be distinguished from the more contempla- 
tive French ennui, and from melancholy: it is available to those who are 
not of introspective disposition, who don't care what boredom is. Bore- 
dom has become an academic growth industry, the object of a number of 
theoretical studies of its social and intellectual history. 
Boredom may be considered as a n  absence of entertainment, or  as 
an  unfulfilled desire simply to  feel desire. As an injured sense of one's 
own centrality (we demand to be distracted, desired, desiring) it is a form 
of self-recognition and self-assertion as powerful as the fundamental 
twentieth-century theoretical desire to be desired by another's desire. It 
functions as a kind of Polyfilla for the decentred self. There is an aura 
of boredom. Akin to migraine aura, it gives acuity, and elevates the most 
interminable fluorescent-lit daily transactions in which everyone else's 
skin looks terrible. 
Being boring is equally a function of self-assertion. The most boring 
people are those who are most fully absorbed in their own interests and 
not in your own: the bores who tell you what their pet did or thought 
(boring even if the cat is a bomber pilot), bores who tell you their dreams 
(I kept putting on socks and they were all too big and they kept falling off 
BOR 
and I couldn't go to work), bores who tell you the plots of movies (Tom 
Cruise plays this guy), bores who make lists. 
Note 
On the broad explanatory power of boredom, see Patricia Meyer Spack, Boredom 
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 
-Elizabeth Legge 
Boredom 
Boredom is at once an empty and an overflowing conceptual category- 
empty, because it has no ultimate, transcendent meaning; overflowing, 
because it has been the source of a relatively exhaustive study, especially in 
the West. 
In eighteenth-century theories of the sublime, for example, boredom 
was assumed to mask uneasiness, anxiety, or terror; as such, it was theo- 
rized as a reaction to privation or absence, a refusal to engage the unat- 
tainable or unrepresentable (the realm of the sublime itself) by remaining 
resolutely within the domain of the common, the ordinary, or the every- 
day. In nineteenth-century Romanticism, boredom assumed the quality of 
negative passion, associated both with the nothingness and nonbeing of 
the sublime as well as the unbearable experience of being in the everyday 
(in other words, a negative passion was transformed into passion for nega- 
tivity and negation). In the twentieth century, particularly in the discourses 
of psychoanalysis and clinical practice, boredom became inextricably 
linked to depression, and to anger, grief, or loss as the source of a nega- 
tivity which must be experienced, overcome, or worked through. (In this 
respect, the psychoanalytic cure of boredom was similar to that evoked by 
the Romantics.) In German critical theory of the 1920s and 1930s, bore- 
dom was once again transformed as a concept, understood in relation to 
leisure, and also to waiting, to an expectation or future orientation of sub- 
jectivity devoid of anxiety or alienation. Finally, in contemporary theories 
of postmodernism, boredom has been associated with both frustration and 
relief; in other words, with the frustration of the everyday and with the 
relief from this frustration in the gesture of aesthetic refusal (in the work 
of Jameson, Baudrillard, and Lyotard, among others). 
The very instability of the concept suggests, among other things, that 
boredom has a history, which is as much a history of subjectivity as it is of 
cultural change. As French theorist Michele Huguet explains, "There is 
not one psychology of boredom but many, the common feature of which 
betrays the way in which, when confronted with a void which is painfully 
experienced, the subject can elaborate its defenses according to an ideal 
that is perceived as absent, unsatisfying, or impossible.. . The subject expe- 
BOR-CLA 
riencing boredom is not suffering from an absence of desire, but from its 
indetermination, which in turn forces the subject to wander, in search of a 
point of fixation."' 
This notion of indetermination (of desire, an ideal, the void) helps to 
explain how boredom came to confound the oppositions so central to eigh- 
teenth and nineteenth-century thinking about work and leisure, nobility 
and commonality, excess and lack, fullness and emptiness, and-by impli- 
cation-masculinity and femininity, that earlier had defined philosophical, 
literary, and psychoanalytic approaches to this conceptual category. Indeed, 
with the rise of visual culture, mass society, mass production, and con- 
sumerism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, boredom came to 
epitomize the modern experience of time as both empty and full, concen- 
trated and distracted. This is perhaps why boredom continues to offer such 
a useful conceptual language for contemporary theorists, who struggle to 
come to terms with the status of experience and history in postmodern rep- 
resentational forms. 
Note 
1 Michele Huguet, L'Ennui et ses discours (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984), 
215. 
-Patrice S. Petro 
Breast 
Cancer. 
-Janine Marchessault 
Chemical 
Replaced chemistry in the 1970s, was superseded by "nuclear" only to 
resurface at  the end of the century as "organic." 
-Janine Marchessault 
Classroom 
-Lynne Cohen 


Jazz 
People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent 
poetry and mystery of the image. No doubt they sense this mystery, 
but they wish to get rid of it. They are afraid. By asking "What does 
this mean?" they express a wish that everything be understandable. 
But if one does not reject the mystery one has quite a different 
response. One asks other things. 
-Renk Magritte 
"Turn it off." 
This is a common response to contemporary jazz music. Is it because 
this "sophisticated" popular form, that has been slowly allowed a "high 
culture" status, is musically too sophisticated for most listeners with its 
strange time signatures and chords? Are listeners intimidated by the end- 
less names of players appearing in different combinations and dates of 
sessions, the minutiae of which are the truck and trade of many jazz en- 
thusiasts: who played what, when, with whom, what was the venue, how 
did they sound in this circumstance? The history of jazz shows a fast- 
changing and rapidly-evolving form. The sidemen one night are the lead- 
ers the next, so the recipe never remains the same. 
Certainly some forms of pop music have elicited violent revulsion, even 
shock and horror. Rock and roll was the devil's music exposing youth 
to impure experiences and thoughts. However, rock music overcame its 
roots (we now have "easy rock") and has gained a certain cultural legiti- 
macy and domesticity. The same can be said of many classical works that 
at  first shocked audiences but are now part of the standard repertoire. 
It is, I think, the "hook" that eventually seduces the audience to accept 
these domesticated forms. A little surprise change that repeats, a gimmick 
guitar lick or vocal phrase. The composer/band/vocalist casts it out to you, 
the listening audience. It takes only a few beats, a gentle tug, and WHAM. 
The hummable chorus, the whistled overture become all too familiar. The 
voice broadcasts, the commercial plays, the product sells, the world goes 
round. Radio is full of white voices and smooth music addressed to a malte- 
believe audience that are presumed to aspire to a watered-down version of 
European cultural ideals (the familiar overture, the recognized hook). 
To me, the very idea of jazz evokes something undomesticated: from its 
name to its instrumentation it wreaks havoc. Its boorish name-jazz, jissm, 
eroticism, the body, the music of bordellos filled with strippers, prostitutes, 
sex.. . A ratchet is thrown into the machinery, the gears are gummed up, the 
sprockets cease, ears open, it puzzles, fascinates. It makes you think, it hurts 
-all things offensive to mainstream radio and apparently most listeners. 
Jazz radio shows are not money makers even with an audience. 
Perhaps jazz in this "offensive" form cannot exist on commercial radio. 
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 


Rattles | Gregory WhiteheadReading | Pam BrownRefry | John GreysonRights | Thomas Keenan

Quebec state. We would argue that the key cultural significance of the 
social changes inaugurated by the Quiet Revolution has been nothing less 
than the production of the "Cultural" field itself as both the central legit- 
imating agency of government and as an emergent regime of social power.2 
This production of the "cultural" involves the elaboration of new forms 
of knowledge about le peuple qutbe'cois and hence new articulations of 
social difference within the population. L'identitaire que'be'cois is thus 
articulated across a dispositif which links temporal (language and ethnic- 
ity as the historical grounds of the people), spatial (the regions as the fig- 
uration of cultural difference within l'identitaire) and administrative (the 
structuring perspective of cultural development) logics in the formation of 
emergent state practices. At the same time, it involves the production of 
the field of la citoyennete' culturelle; a field of distinction of the citizen as 
both social subject, sovereign subject of a nation, and as object of new 
forms of political power linking the distinctive traits of the citizen with 
those of the cultural producer and consumer. 
Notes 
1 J. Letourneau, "Le 'QuCbec moderne': un chapitre du grand ricit collectif des quCbtcoisn 
Discours social, v. 4, nos. 1-2, (1992), 63-87. 
2 J. Donzelot, L'invention du social (Paris: Fayard, 1984). 
-Martin Allor and Michelle Gagnon 
Excerpted from "Singular Universalities: Qukbkcois Articulations of le culturel," Public 14: 
Que'bec, 1996. 
1998, oil and wax on canvas, 60 X 60 inches 
-Sean Scherer 
Rattles 
Every now and again, the quaint idea of radio as a kind of Talking Drum 
for the Global Village comes around for one more spin. In this romantic 
scenario, radio art is cast as an electronic echo of oral culture, harking 
back to ancient storytellers spinning yarns in front of village fires. The 
idea has a seductive ring to it, and can be embellished in all kinds of ways, 
making room for everything from Finnegan's Wake to Street Rap: radio as 
Universal language, Electronic Community, Planetary Boombox. 
Radio Talking Drum-a utopian transposition that loves to forget. 
Most forgotten are the lethal wires that still heat up from inside out, wires 
that connect radio with warfare, brain damage, rattles from necropolises. 
When I turn my radio on, I hear a whole chorus of death rattles: from 
stone cold, hard fact larynxes frozen in every stage of physical decomposi- 
tion; from talk show golden throats cut with a scalpel, transected, then 
taped back together and beamed across the airwaves; from voices that 
have been severed from the body for so long that none can remember 
who they belong to, or whether they belong to anybody at all; from pop 
minster gigglebodies guaranteed to shake yo'booty; from artificial folds 
sneak-stitched into still living throats through computer synthesis and digi- 
tal processing; from mechanical chatter boxes dead to begin with; from 
cyberphonic antibodies taking flight and crashing to pieces on air. 
In November 1988, I had the good fortune to experience one of those 
infrequent opportunities to become abruptly and eternally united with 
one's own metaphors. While en route to Australia, my flight, a Boeing 747 
stuffed with tour groups, came very close to crashing on take-off from 
Honolulu. With stabilizing flaps damaged by metal bars that had broken 
away from the landing gear, the plane barely lifted off the ground before it 
began to rattle violently. 
In the wake of each fresh plane crash, I confess to reading survivor 
accounts with intense curiosity, and keep voluminous files. Such accounts 
almost invariably refer to violent rattles moments before disaster, so as the 
luggage compartments sprang open above our heads, I felt certain that we 
were seconds away from rattling right into a burn unit. But the Qantas 
pilot immediately lightened our load by dumping thousands of litres of 
fuel into the Pacific Ocean, and we lumbered back to Honolulu airport for 
a surprisingly uneventful emergency landing. 
Several hours later, in a typically incongruous late-twentieth century change 
of scene, I sat watching the surfers ride the waves at Waikiki, a Qantas com- 
plimentary cocktail in hand. I thought about other waves, airwaves, the risks 
of mechanical vibration. I thought about all the radio art transmissions that 
dump their fuel and make premature landings, about the countless audio 
aircraft that never arrive at their true destination, or that shake, rattle n' 
roll violently without coming to the climax. And after three or four more 
complimentary cocktails, I thought about the crashlrattled post-Rodez 
body of Antonin Artaud, thereafter resurrected as Artaud, Le MBmo. 
When Artaud was finally released from his psychiatric internment at  
Rodez, his body had been thoroughly wasted by the nervous explosions of 
his mental illness, externally administered electroshock treatment, frequent 
insulin injections and a terminal case of (undiagnosed) rectal cancer. Con- 
vulsed by electricity, and with disease spreading inward from the anus, 
Artaud returned to Paris in 1946. From this time on, his vision of a body 
without organs, with its promise of pure redemption, takes centre stage. 
Artaud's desired new body, stripped bare, scraped clean and turned in- 
side out, quickly assumes a pseudonym. Le MGmo: the pure energy of 
direct brain wave transmission, born from an occult synthesis of needles, 
electricity and a cacophony of irrefutable inner voices. Le MGmo: giving 
voice to the prosthetic language of the disembody, the antibody, the radio- 
body. Le MGmo: full of vocal flatulence, noisy jolts, black magic and 
bloody nothings. 
In 1947, Artaud Le M6mo gave voice to his final public pronounce- 
ment, To Have Done with the Judgement of God, a lacerating cacophonic 
performance scheduled for national broadcast on February 2, 1948, but 
cancelled at  the last minute by the Director of French Radio, Wladimir 
Porche. The official explanation rounded up all the usual suspects-ob- 
scenity, sacrilege, anti-Americanism. But after listening to a tape of the 
broadcast, one suspects the presence of a deeper fear, the fear that Artaud 
Le MGmo might yet reverse the voltage and wire countless brains to the 
shock treatment of his unearthly howls, jolting a million cars into the next 
world. As Le MGmo himself writes: The magic of electric shock sucks out 
a death rattle, it plunges the shocked person into that death rattle through 
which one leaves life. 
-Gregory Whitehead 
Excerpted from "Radio Art le MBmo: Gas Leaks, Shock Needles and Death Rattles," 
Public 4/5: Sound, 1990191. 
Reading 
What do you take aboard when you read? It seems like 
aqueous penetration. Through the eyes, through the 
mouth in vestigial salivation, flowing its slinky ink, 
writing its unwritable memoir. Mouth, mouth how slyly 
you are in league with the ear, in bonefolds subtler 
than the morel's gills. And eye, turning in its pool 
like an eel, breathing in and out, that body that 
becomes your body, that body of water clear deep and 
light going grey at the bottom, invisible. The words 
stay on the paper, like those leaves at  the edge of 
the pool, not trembling, distinct. Then as if the 
water rose up to  engulf the trees, indeed the world up 
to the withers, the clear water overwhelms the buoyant 
leaves and takes away their pattern, then subsides, 
while the image invisible begins to fall gently down 
to the darkest grey. Some fragments raft together, 
calling up vaster shapes from lower down that rise as 
they fall, rise as they fall. A sinuous confluence 
occasionally tense is begotten, and like a spawning 
the reading. Shadows of their veins decay as debris 
falls down to dark, and any matter insinuates itself 
into form, though these are very few, and utterly 
transformed, not so much verbal as electrical, a 
charge of pure meaning to be recalled in other times, 
dry and wet, with the components indistinct or 
recombined, yet at times as human and whole as the 
peat bog men preserved in the wet moss of Ireland. 
-Pam Brown 
Re fry 
"Lexicon has been described aptly as 'The Game for the Million,' and 
its increasing popularity gives evidence of its widespread appeal." 
Stay at Eco San, an' sit on da car wi' Dr. Ali. He's at par wi' Lili, eh? I'm 
sur' tis toi, so put out da rap til Jim is lit up an' hets ar' bi. Put gun to sow 
an' refry (sic). 
"The entertainment value is almost inexhaustible, owing chiefly to 
the fact that Lexicon caters to all types of players whose tastes differ 
widely." 
In December, my brother and I were packing up the family storage locker, 
when we found a yellowed deck of cards, buried in straw in a crate of old 
china. The spine of the card case was curved wood, mimicking the red 
leather cover of a dictionary. A tiny instruction manual, dated 1935, listed 
24 different games you could play, including "Lexicon Bridge," "Lexicon 
Stud Poker," "Lexicon Don't Forget" and "Lexicon Donkey." It was prob- 
ably our grandmother's, but we'd never seen her play. 


"Owing to the increasing popularity of Lexicon Drives, the following 
suggestions may prove of assistance to hostesses in their organization." 
We tried most of the games. Maybe it was us. Maybe our tastes differed 
too widely, maybe we were simply exhausted by the entertainment value, 
maybe we needed a Lexicon hostess. However, we did not despair. 
"A family game, an instructive game, a gamble wild and fierce, a 
solus game, a round game-in fact, every type of game can be played 
with Lexicon." 
Lay out all 50 cards in a grid, ten across by five deep. Record all words 
which occur in any direction: vertically, horizontally or diagonally. Abbre- 
viations, acronymns, slang and proper names are allowed. Construct a 
story of out of these words, and present it to your fellow players. 
"Remember, the lowest score is the winner." 
-John Greyson 
Rights 
What does it mean to claim a right, or what is it to do such a thing, since 
to assume that it is meaningful in advance is to presume too much? Who 
claims, and on what (if any) basis? The most obvious answer is simply: I 
claim. I claim something that belongs to me as my property, as what is 
proper and essential to me in virtue of what I am or what I have or what I 
do (and I am, for starters, human, but I am all sorts of other things too, 
various identities, understood here as given, or better, as taken, taken for 
granted). Right is my (own) right, not even right of or on behalf of others; 
no representation is possible here. Right is what is owed to me as me and 
no one else. The claim to a right is justified here precisely on the grounds 
that the site of the claim and of the right are identical. In short, I am right, 
and claiming rights is really nothing other than reclaiming or rescuing 
them, since they are essentially mine and their loss can be only accidental 
or contingent. 
But what of this claim? Why claim what is one's own? Why even open up 
the relation to the other that the linguistic act of claiming implies when my 
relation to my rights is essentially a relation to myself without mediation 
through, or openness to, an other? This claim could only be a statement, the 
constative declaration of a fact that had fallen into temporary oblivion. Is 
this act of claiming necessary? For if rights must be claimed, then: 
1. the relation to the other, and the supposed "loss" of rights in the 
other, cannot be merely contingent, and 
2. the rights claimed cannot simply pre-exist the claim that is made for 
them. 
In other words, if there is an irreducibility to the act of claiming rights, 
then they cannot simply be given, and the "I" that claims them for itself 
cannot be given either but must occur only in relation with an other, an 
other that always implies the possibility of the dispropriation of oneself 
and one's "rights" and "property," an other whose inevitability is this 
experience of disproportion, i.e. of language as something other than a 
system of signs or representations. 
-Thornas Keenan 
Excerpted from "Deconstruction and the Impossibility of Justice," Public 6: Violence, 1992. 
Scale 
A defining quality of the turn of this century is a new or at least hitherto 
unknown sense of scale. The verb "to scale" means to "represent in pro- 
portional dimensions," to find "commensurable" representations of real- 
ity. Whether in the context of technology (how high can a building be built 
before the proportions of gravity and steel collapse?) or of judgement and 
ethics (what does it mean to have a sense of proportion?), the human sense 
of scale has dynamically transformed: coordinates of time and space, coef- 
ficients of rate of change, social parameters of normativity. Technologi- 
cally, the world is faster than perhaps ever before: SPEED is the maxim of 
the twentieth century. But SIZE in relation to scale has moved in two 
opposite directions, both "bigger and better," and, especially in the realm 
of the virtual, "better, faster, smaller." The question is: how does the 
human body, and its proportions and scale, respond? Where do humans fit 
themselves, limited by a mere three dimensions of space and the obstinate 
shadow of death, in a social spaceltime in which metaphors of velocity, 
amplitude, and compactness dominate? The "perfect" proportions of Da 
Vinci's Vetruvian Man, arrayed around his centre of gravity, no longer hold. 
What is needed, ironically, is a new perspective on scale. 
The human's sense of scale is, on one hand, as limitless as her vertigi- 
nous imagination. In The Matrix (1999) Neo is asked the question, "What 
do you need?" He responds, "Guns. Lots of Guns." The rush of gun racks 
and ammunition that are conjured in the white limbo of the film's virtual 
reality trail into infinite perspectival space: more guns than he and Trinity 
could ever "realistically" use, but at their disposal nonetheless. This CGI 
visual effect is conceptually no more complicated than the copy-and-paste 
command of any word-processing program. Its limit is the physical capac- 
ity of computer memory and optical resolution, each of which grows 
exponentially larger and more refined by the day. The scale of human 
inquiry, observation, and power is larger than had ever been conceived in 
earlier centuries whether the field is computer imagery, infinitesimal sub- 


HAM-HIN 
Hamtramck Colonial Housing 
1997198, chromogenic print, 18 X 22 inches 
-Stan Douglas 
Hindism 
A coinage for the hyper-saturated colours and constructed compositions 
universally employed in tourist imagery, especially landscape imagery, 
which act as agents in producing iconographies of nationhood. The most 
influential postcard manufacturer of the postwar era was John Hinde 
Limited, which began operations in 1956 on the outskirts of Dublin, and 
which continues in business today. John Hinde perfected the "modern" 
postcard, as it is called, by carefully choreographing his production oper- 
ation. In the process, Hinde also perfected the idealizing imagery that 
lubricates global tourism at the millennia1 turn. In the 1950s, Hinde pre- 
dicted the future look of tourism in Ireland-and unwittingly the look 
of tourism everywhere. Hindism colonized tourist iconography, so that 
now the beaches of Ireland are indistingishable from the beaches of Ber- 
muda, both of which are indistinguishable from the beaches of Vietnam. If 
Hindism is the look of the future, as I imagine, we should know the look 
of its past. 
In the trade, "modern" postcards are also known as "chromes." Chromes 
are not much prized by the marketplace of mass-cultural ephemera- 
$5.00 will buy you a bundle of them from most dealers-because of their 
availability and their relatively recent vintage. The cards are as ubiquitous 
as the multi-coloured packaging of consumer goods, first introduced in the 
1950s, such as the infamous Brillo Box, or as newspaper colour supple- 
ments, first introduced in 1962. The exploitation of colour for consumer 
display, in postcards and glossy magazines, as much as in consumer pack- 
aging and advertising, dates from mid-century. As widely distributed prod- 
ucts manufactured by the thousand for the tourist market, chrome cards of 
the kind invented by Hinde utilized the new technologies of colour to par- 
ticipate in the construction of national ideologies. Postcards do an unusual 
amount of narrative work in the proclamation of national identity, partic- 
ularly through representations of landscape. They conscript landscape and 
help to produce an iconography of nationhood. 
In his invention of modern tourist imagery, John Hinde was exacting 

HIN 
about the purposes of manipulation. He regularly rearranged his subject 
matter, for example, by wiring foreground floral arrangements into place 
or by eliminating figures that disrupted the flow of his composition, and in 
the darkroom he intensified his colour juxtapositions to heighten their 
visual impact. "The lily has to be gilded," he once asserted, insisting that 
his company photographers become metaphorical gardeners and gilders. 
The compositional formulae Hinde imposed upon his photographers- 
strong vertical accents on the sides of the picture and winding diagonals 
through the centre-were conventions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen- 
tury European landscape painting. "They were quite strict about the kind 
of images they wanted," observed David Noble, one of the most accom- 
plished staff photographers. "They wanted them constructed. You knew 
that you had to garden, as it were. You knew that you had to make the 
picture a bit more than it was." 
In theorizing the postcard and tourist imagery, two of its categories 
might be called the picture postcard pastoral and the picture postcard sub- 
lime. These are terms for the millennium. Irish cards are exemplary of the 
postcard pastoral. There is a profound disjunction between the postcarded 
Ireland of John Hinde Limited that one buys as a tourist to send home to 
friends and the mediatized Ireland one buys to keep abreast of the Trou- 
bles. Were there not differences between the two, we should wonder why 
(except in the case of totalitarian regimes, of course, where the dissemina- 
tion of information is centrally controlled and newspaper and tourist 
images generally emanate from the same propagandizing source). 
I think there is something astonishing and instructive about the degree 
of the disjunction one observes in Ireland, the extent to which one set of 
representations negates-even obliterates-the other. The postcards depict 
an island where no distinction is made between the north and the south, 
where political boundaries, like civil strife, are non-existant. This is one 
iconography of nationhood. Here Ireland is rural (which is to say, time- 
less), green (which is to say, satiated in colour), pre-modern (which is to 
say, without advanced technologies, save the automobile), and idyllic 
(which is to say, peaceable). In the newspapers, by contrast, boundaries are 
the defining element in the built environment, and urban tension over- 
whelms rural harmony. This is a second iconography of nationhood. Here 
Ireland is territorial (which is say, obsessed with borders), urban (which is 
to say, cast in surveillance shades of gun-metal grey), religious (which is 
say, obdurate unto the grave), and tribal (which is to say, vengeful and 
murderous). 
The first Ireland represents a holiday fantasy, the second a fantasy night- 
mare. At the root of the disjunction is Hindism. For better or worse, Hind- 
ism has given us images for the millennium. 
HIS-HOL 
Hissar 
1999, oil and wax on canvas, 17 X 14 inches 
-Sean Scherer 
Hoi Polloi 
-Stephen Andrews 
Hologram 
We approach a point of no return. No  up. No  hope of ever coming down 
Icons of Lenin and Mao drift along a ghost-index of numbers. A ren- 
dezvous with an ex-spouse in a power-vacuum. Every radar swivels posi- 
tion, standing by for the birth of a new child 
We approach a point of no return. We approach a return with no points 
of intersection. No  solar system whirling from the double shot of tequila. 
No  Spanish galleon navigating black holes in search of genetic hair loss. 
No Bigfoot lonely for rainforests wandering the escalators of Japan 
Everyone speaks perfect English. Everyone scrutinizes their private con- 
tours in a private Plexiglas dome. In funhouse chambers, clouded and mir- 
rored. Waters so pure it would turn your hair white 
The last fertile man to be preserved on violet emulsion. Eternal daylight 
savings for those who auto-ovulate at poolside 
All this to catch on in a very big way 
Whatever will be will exceed the balance. Whoever balances can keep 
their chequebook. A little spittle at  the corners of his or her mouth. Excel- 
lent monthly flow and opportunities for advancement. Pleasures commin- 
gled with species with complex nubile joints 

HOL-HOR 
And the monkey shall lie down with the stealth plane 
The dying shall speak through the living 
All of your radical friends will prove interchangeable 
-Ryan Kamstra 
Home 
"Woman-headed households, serial monogamy, flight of men, old woman 
alone, technology of domestic work, paid homework, re-emergence of 
home sweat shops, home-based business and telecommuting, electronic 
cottage, urban homelessness, migration, module architecture, reinforced 
(simulated) nuclear family, intense domestic violence." {Donna Haraway} 
-Janine Marchessault 
Excerpted from "Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science Technology, and the Socialist Feminism 
in the 1980s:' Public 6: Violence, (1992), 119. 
Home 
... let me just say that these words-dom, Master, bottom, whore-fem, 
butch, Daddy-boy, cruising, play, play-mate, and so on-have their place. 
Rather, they make a place. They describe, circumscribe, inscribe a spec- 
tacular space, a made-up, unreal, larger-than-life and certainly more inter- 
esting space that people like myself sniff out and crave and live in and 
want to call home.. . 
-Sue Golding 
Excerpted from "Sexual Manners," Public 8: The Ethics Of Enactment (1993), 161. 
Horizon (Utopian) 
The concept and image of horizon comes from phenomenology (Husserl, 
Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur) and it was refunctioned by Ernst Bloch into a 
consciously sociopolitical tool within his "warm stream" Marxism. It is a 
spatial metaphor necessarily associated with the cognate spatial concepts 
and images of locus and orientation; these are "the Ur-form[s] of theoret- 
ical work," with etymological roots in astronomy1 and geography. Beyond 
that, the roots reach into the desire for understanding and the ancient 
metaphoric cluster in which seeing stands for cognition. "Locus" is the 
place of the agent who is moving; "horizon" that toward which the 
agent is moving; and "orientation" a vector that conjoins locus and hori- 
zon. The horizon changes with the location of the moving agent, as was 
exhaustively argued by Giordano Bruno. But orientation can, through 
HOR 
all the changes of locus, remain a constant vector of desire and cognition. 
The use of these terms is predicated on an analogy with the empirical 
world. The claim of the "Possible Worlds" approach to fiction, as well as to 
all other forms of social imagination, is that the social types' imaginative 
structures are necessarily taken from "natural worlds" (i.e. dominant con- 
ceptions thereof). For "the term of 'world' is not a manner of speaking: it 
means that the 'mental' or cultural life borrows its structures from natural 
life."2 Our here-and-now has a preferential status. "The natural world, as an 
organized and perceptually structured spatiotemporal ensemble, constitutes 
the original text.. . of all possible discourse, its 'origin' and its constitutive 
environment.. . . All possible discourse is enunciated only against the ground 
of the perceived world's significant space, by which it is surrounded."3 The 
fact that we can meaningfully effect this metaphoric analogy from practice to 
signic constructs constitutes itself a highly significant meta-meaning. 
The freedom of the users (originators and addressee-modifiers) of Pos- 
sible Worlds consists in the fundamental fact that these can be and are 
expressly modified in the newly articulated signic constellations. I shall 
discuss this further on the example (valid with suitable modifications for 
other uses too) of utopian fiction and imagination. 
The goal of utopia is in principle not a defined, localized or fixed 
humaneness but a not-yet-manifest type of human relationship, a hominiz- 
ation in Engels's or Teilhard's sense. This is "a depth dimension of the 
Onwards,"4 from which it follows that there can be no final, "classical" or 
canonic locus of utopianism. This can be systematized as the domznance of 
Horizon over Locus. Locus does not coincide with but interacts with Hori- 
zon: this makes for a dynamic, open utopia (e.g. Platonov's Cheuengur, Le 
Guin's The Dispossessed). Action and agents embody here the orientation 
toward a moving (in these cases, an anarcho-communist) utopian horizon. 
The second possibility is that Locus coznczdes with or swallows Horz- 
zon: this makes for a dogmatic, static, closed utopia (e.g. Campanella's 
Ciuitas Solis, Cabet's Voyage en Icarie): Such a doctrinaire or dogmatzc 
text "asserts the utopian focus as 'ultimate' and drastically limits the pos- 
sibilities of the utopian horizon; an open-ended text, on the other hand, 
portrays a utopian locus as a mere phase in the infinite unfolding of the 
utopian horizon, thereby abolishing the limits imposed on it by classical 
utopian f i c t i ~ n . " ~  
The third possibility is Locus alone, i.e. without a utopian Horizon 
(which makes it a pseudo-utopian locus): this makes for heterotopia. The 
best theoretical example is of course Foucault, and the best fictional one 
his disciple Samuel Delany's Triton, also a direct polemic with The Dis- 
possessed's "ambiguous utopia." While both these novels "refuse the doc- 
trinaire identification of the utopian locus with the utopian horizon [,l 
Delany.. . also does away with the utopian horizon itself.. . . [The utopian] 
horizon and the urge are [in Delany] absent, and that absence leaves his 
characters purposeless and confused."6 
The final logico-combinatorial possibility is to have in a text Horizon 
alone, without a utopian Locus. This is where non-localized "utopian 
thought" belongs, such as all the abstract blueprints, utopian programs, 
etc. I have difficulty in seeing how a horizon without concrete locus- 
without Bakhtin's chronotope-can be a fictional narration in any strict 
(not ironic or loosely metaphoric) sense. 
To resume the above locus/horizon combinatorics: 
11 H > L: open-ended or dynamic utopia; 
21 L = H or L > H: closed or static utopia; 
31 L (H = 0): heterotopia; 
41 H (L = 0): abstract or non-narrative utopia(nism). 
These terms (as well as a further set of agential terms) might be applied as 
analytic tools to the whole range of utopian studies-fictions, projects, 
and colonies. 
Finally, the interaction of locus and horizon in the dynamic utopia con- 
stitutes it as not too dissimilar from-possibly as a special case of-Eco's 
definition of a semiotic encyclopedia: 
It appears not as a finished object but rather as an open project: not 
a utopia as terminus ad quem, i.e. a state of perfection to be reached, 
but a utopia as a regulating idea, as a project ante quem, whose force 
stems precisely from the fact that it cannot and should not be real- 
ized in any definitive form.' 
Eco himself identifies such an open utopia with a rhizomatic encyclopedia 
only, which I would rather liken to my possibility #3. I would not share 
the Post-Modernist taboo on global organization of knowledge as in my 
utopia #l above: on condition that this globality is conscious of itself as a 
synchronic cross-cut for well-defined interests and with a limited perti- 
nence. There is no reason that would necessarily prevent such a dynamic 
utopia from defining strategically central cognitive trees available for 
action aimed at radical change at any given point. 
Thus I would conclude, with Bloch, that we should hold a steadfast ori- 
entation toward the open ocean of possibility that surrounds the actual 
and that is so immeasurably larger than the actuality. True, terrors lurk in 
that ocean: but those terrors are primarily and centrally not the terrors of 
the not-yet-existing, but on the contrary simple extrapolations of the exist- 
ing actuality of war, hunger, degradation, and exploitation of people and 
planets. In order to understand how to approach such open adventist pos- 
sibilities, we may have first to learn the lesson of the dynamic utopias, 
where locus constantly tends toward and yet never fuses with horizon. 
HOR-HUM 
Notes 
1 Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Geschichte rind Eigensinn (Frankfurt: 
Zweitausendeins, 1981), 1002. 
2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris: nrf, 1945), 225. 
3 Louis Marin, "Pour une thCorie du texte parabolique," in Claude Chabrol et al., eds., Le 
Rki t  tvange'lique (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1974), 167 and 175. 
4 Ernst Bloch, Tubinger Einleitung in die l'hilosophie (Frankfurt: Suhr-kamp, 1970), 147. 
5 Bulent Somay, "Towards an Open-Ended Utopia," Science-Fiction Studies 11.1 (1984), 26. 
6 ibid, 33. 
7 Umberto Eco, "Quattro forme di enciclopedia.. .," Quaderni d'italianistica 2.2 (1981), 108. 
-Dark0 Suvin 
J. L. Hudson Company Building 
1997198, chromogenic print, 18 X 22 inches 
-Stan Douglas 
Human (The H in HIV) 
Two points o n  a long trajectory of philosophical reflection o n  mortality 
may  serve t o  suggest t h a t  t h e  culminat ing event of h u m a n  existence is 
always and  by definition a death t h a t  is premature. Seneca begins his essay 
"On the  Brevity of Life" thus: 
Most human beings, Paulinus, complain about the meanness of 
nature, because we are born for a brief span of life, and because this 
spell of time that has been given to us rushes by so swiftly and 
rapidly that with very few exceptions life ceases for the rest of us 
just when we are getting ready for it.. . . Hence the dictum of the 
greatest of doctors: "Life is short, art is long." Hence too the griev- 
ance, most improper to a wise man, which Aristotle expressed when 
he was taking nature to task for indulging animals with such long 
existences that they can live through five or ten human lifetimes, 
while a far shorter limit is set for men who are born to a great and 
extensive destiny.. . . . . . . You are living as if destined to live forever; 
your own frailty never occurs to  you; you don't notice how much 
time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and 

HUM 
overflowing supply-though all the while that very day which you 
are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You 
act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that 
you desire.' 
Reading and writing in our own time, Derrida takes up Seneca's argument: 
But after having wondered, in sum, why man-and not the animal- 
always dies before his time, while also understanding that he dies 
immaturus, immaturely and prematurely, Seneca describes the 
absolute imminence, the imminence of death at every instant. This 
imminence of a disappearance that is by essence premature seals 
the union of the possible and the impossible, of fear and desire, and 
of mortality and immortality, in being-t~-death.~ 
If man always dies "prematurelyy'-if untimely death is a defining condi- 
tion of humanity itself-in what terms are we to  parse the diversity of the 
forms death takes: for example, in the case of HIVtAIDS? Is the "pan- 
demic" (itself a term contemporaneous with the advent of AIDS) in the last 
analysis merely an  instance of what is always the case? 
A noted clinical researcher concluded in a recently published study that 
"At its core, anxiety about AIDS consists of nothing but anxiety about dying 
before one's time."3 While his "nothing but" might be understood to  mini- 
mize the consequences of immune deficiency, it might also be read as a sim- 
ple logical exclusion meant t o  elucidate. In either case, if it is true that 
"anxiety about AIDS" is tracable to  a loss not only of time but of the oppor- 
tunity t o  constitute a lifetime-if such a loss must be counted among the 
effects of the pandemic-then, as Alexander Garcia Duttmann notes in A t  
Odds with AIDS, "one is obliged to take into account the possibility of such 
a threat whether or not one successfully brings t o  bear a vaccine against 
AIDS."4 In this way, AIDS marks "the imminence of a disappearance that is 
by essence premature" and hence "seals the union of the possible and the 
impossible," as Derrida observes. But more than this: in the case of AIDS, 
premature death-dying "before one's times'-becomes the very paradigm 
of the impossible and untimely experience that is human lifetime. 
Notes 
1 Seneca, "On the Shortness of Life," Dialogues and Letters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 
1997), 59, 62. 
2 Jacques Derrida, Aporias (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 4. 
3 Martin Dannecker, Der homosexuelle Mann im Zeichen von Aids (Hamburg: Ingrid 
Klein, 1991), 31. 
4 Alexander Garcia Duttmann, At Odds with AIDS: Thinking and Talking About a Virus 
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 5. 
-Deborah Esch 


Quiet Revolution | Martin Allor and Michelle GagnonQum | Sean Schere

Notes 
1 But in the best technical formulations, the aesthetic phenomena which presumably corre- 
spond in some way to the concepts of pleasure, experience, and drive remain latent and 
thus become accessible to reflective observation. 
2 Allon White, "Hysteria and the end of carnival: Festivity and bourgeois neurosis," Semi- 
otica 54, 1-2 (1985), 109. 
3 ibid, 85-86. 
4 Charles Levin, "Art and the Sociological Ego: Value from a Psychoanalytic Point of 
View," Life After Postmodernism: Essays on Value and Culture, ed. John Fekete (New 
York: St. Martin's, 1987), 22-63. 
5 Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization (New Brunswick, 
N. J: Transaction Books, 1974). 
-Charles Levin 
Excerpted from "Metapsychology of the Infant Body: Psycho-analytic Aesthetics Recons~d- 
ered," Publzc 3: Carnal Knowledge, 1990. 
Quiet Revolution 
It is within the common sense of public life in Quebec to frame the Quiet 
Revolution as a cultural revolution leading to the interlaced development 
of new formations of sociality: secularization and educational reform; 
democratization and reconstruction of the state apparatus; the formation 
of a "national" business class. In other words, both erudite knowledges 
and popular memory frame the Quiet Revolution as both a process of 
modernization and the emergence of Quebec into m0dernity.l The cultural 
character of this interlaced development is most often viewed as a struc- 
turing shift in and between institutions, practices and mentalitbs. Thanks 
to this shift, the ratio between private and public action as well as between 
the "people" and the public institutions of state and economy are under- 
stood as having been transformed. 
At the same time, less attention has been paid to the concomitant elab- 
oration of a complex field of governmental action centred on the domains 
of culture: "elite" culture and the arts, popular culture and the cultural 
- - 
industries, heritage and museums, the cultural geography of the regions, 
language policy, immigration and the "cultural" communities. In addition, 
while the successive ministries of culture have acted as a central agency in 
this action, its interventions have extended into the actions of the majority 
of ministries. The most recent Cultural Policy, for example, lists fourteen 
ministries directly involved in intervention in the cultural field. Just as 
important are the relations between these domains of state action and the 
elaboration, inside and outside of the state, of a public discourse of QuCbC- 
cois identity subtending the more general claims to sovereign action of the 
Quebec state. We would argue that the key cultural significance of the 
social changes inaugurated by the Quiet Revolution has been nothing less 
than the production of the "Cultural" field itself as both the central legit- 
imating agency of government and as an emergent regime of social power.2 
This production of the "cultural" involves the elaboration of new forms 
of knowledge about le peuple qutbe'cois and hence new articulations of 
social difference within the population. L'identitaire que'be'cois is thus 
articulated across a dispositif which links temporal (language and ethnic- 
ity as the historical grounds of the people), spatial (the regions as the fig- 
uration of cultural difference within l'identitaire) and administrative (the 
structuring perspective of cultural development) logics in the formation of 
emergent state practices. At the same time, it involves the production of 
the field of la citoyennete' culturelle; a field of distinction of the citizen as 
both social subject, sovereign subject of a nation, and as object of new 
forms of political power linking the distinctive traits of the citizen with 
those of the cultural producer and consumer. 
Notes 
1 J. Letourneau, "Le 'QuCbec moderne': un chapitre du grand ricit collectif des quCbtcoisn 
Discours social, v. 4, nos. 1-2, (1992), 63-87. 
2 J. Donzelot, L'invention du social (Paris: Fayard, 1984). 
-Martin Allor and Michelle Gagnon 
Excerpted from "Singular Universalities: Qukbkcois Articulations of le culturel," Public 14: 
Que'bec, 1996. 
1998, oil and wax on canvas, 60 X 60 inches 
-Sean Scherer 
Rattles 
Every now and again, the quaint idea of radio as a kind of Talking Drum 
for the Global Village comes around for one more spin. In this romantic 
scenario, radio art is cast as an electronic echo of oral culture, harking 


Garbo  | Susan LordGenetics | Janine MarchessaultGluttony | Emily Rabotea

offered to one's gaze a sort of Platonic Idea of the human creature, which 
explains why her face is almost sexually undefined, without however leav- 
ing one in doubt. It is true that this film (in which Queen Christina is by 
turns a woman and a young cavalier) lends itself to this lack of differenti- 
ation; but Garbo does not perform in it any feat of transvestism; she is 
always herself, and carries without pretence, under her crown or her wide- 
brimmed hats, the same snowy solitary face. The name given to her, the 
Divine, probably aimed to convey less a superlative state of beauty than 
the essence of her corporeal person, descended from a heaven where all 
things are formed and perfected in the clearest light. She herself knew this: 
how many actresses have consented to let the crowds see the ominous 
maturing of their beauty. Not she, however; the essence was not to be 
degraded, her face was not to have any reality except that of its perfection, 
which was intellectual more than formal. The Essence became gradually 
obscured, progressively veiled with dark glasses, broad hats and exiles: but 
it never deteriorated. 
And yet, in this deified face, something sharper than a mask is looming: a 
kind of voluntary and therefore human relation between the curve of the 
nostrils and the arch of the eyebrows; a rare, individual function relating 
two regions of the face. A mask is but a sum of lines; a face, on the contrary, 
is above all their thematic harmony. Garbo's face represents this fragile 
moment when the cinema is about to draw an existential from an essential 
beauty, when the archetype leans towards the fascination of mortal faces, 
when the clarity of the flesh as essence yield its place to a lyricism of Woman. 
Viewed as a transition, the face of Garbo reconciles two iconographic 
ages, it assures the passage from awe to charm. As is well known, we are 
today at the other pole of this evolution: the face of Audrey Hepburn, for 
instance, is individualized, not only because of its particular thematic 
(woman as child, woman as kitten) but also because of her person, of an 
almost unique specification of the face, which has nothing of the essence 
left in it, but is constituted by an infinite complexity of morphological 
functions. As a language, Garbo's singularity was of the order of the con- 
cept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance. The face of 
Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event." {Roland Barthesj 
-Susan Lord 
Excerpted from "The Face of Garbo," Mythologies, 1957. trans. Annette Lavers (London: 
Granada, 1982), 56-57. 
Genetics 
All that is solid melts into numbers. 
-Janine Marchessault 
GLU 
Gluttony 
The Life of an Insatiable Glutton 
When I was six, I built me a house out of chocolate sticks. And when I was 
eight, I ate it. 
It felt good to be homeless and headstrong. But when I was ten, I got 
hungry again, so I ate my dog's howl and my little brother's smile-but 
that was not enough. 
I learned to like the taste of wood and wax and words. I ate the altar, 
the alphabet and the library. I drank my mother's tears. She cried because 
she thought she had a termite for a daughter. 
When I was eleven, I swallowed stop-signs like lollipops. I licked along 
the highways but without acquired taste for asphalt, I preferred to suck 
instead the sky, to gulp the grandiose. 
I ate the butcher's scale, the beef, the cooking teaspoons and the mea- 
suring cup. When I was twelve, I chewed the classroom clock having stom- 
ached already the rulers, the rule-books, the teacher's desk and the teacher. 
Now no one could measure how small I was, or guess I was getting too 
big. My father shook his head and sighed and said, "The word for this is 
gluttony and that's a sin.'' I looked at him and laughed before I ate him. 
"I'll ride piggyback to hell on Satan's shoulders! I can drink dreams and 
I can nibble nightmares! I was a fire-eater when I was five, now don't you 
think I could eat those damned demons from their horns down to their 
hooves?" 
I nibbled at the leftovers of my neighbors' wasted weekends, and because 
I never learned to swallow seasons, I nightly slurped on sleep so I could 
always stay awake. To watch. To wait. At fourteen, bleeding in the nec- 
tarine tree, I panged, I shrieked at the frowning moon. 
When I was sixteen, I burped. I binged, I purged, I ate again. And when 
I was gourmet-grown and fallen deep in love with a man who said he 
loved my lips, I sucked, I sopped so hard, before I knew, the passion plate 
was clean. Yes, I ate my lover raw. 
I found myself alone, rolling on the floor of the pantry with a terrible 
stomach ache. I chewed my right hand past the nails and knuckles. I wept 
with thoughts of bittersweet chocolate childhood. No, I could not eat loss. 
So I gnawed at my wrist and the bone of my arm. 
I cringed at the nerve-ends of ligaments. When I got to my elbow, I kept 
on going, knowing as I did what I did, that when I had consumed me 
whole, after my ears, my eyes-my mouth would remain, more or less 
the same; craving continents, gobbling at galaxies, swallowing starshine, 
blackness and all. 
-Emily Raboteau 


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