Public (E-Journal, York University)

Davis, Christine

English

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 

in "you're just a zero." But this zero mediocrity is a fruitful mediocrity that 
can give birth to the beautiful and the unexpected. And beyond the Zero 
there is some fleeting thing, like ripples expanding around an empty center. 
While Holderlin wrote in German: "But where danger is, grows the saving 
power also," we could say that: "But where absolute smoothness is, grow 
the ripples of the Zeroes (also)." 
-Michel Moussette 


Contributors 
Giorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at the Uni- 
versity of Verona. He is the author of numerous 
books including The Man Without Content 
(Stanford, 1999). 
Ken Allan is a doctoral candidate in the History 
of Art department a t  the University of Toronto. 
Martin Allor is Professor and Chair of Communi- 
cations Studies at Concordia University in Mon- 
treal. His areas of study include social discourse 
analysis, media theory and cultural studies. 
Stephen Andrews is an artist who lives and works 
in Toronto. 
Roy Ascott is director of the Centre for Advanced 
Inquiry in the Interactive Arts of the University of 
Wales College, Newport, UK, and is on the edito- 
rial board of Leonardo. 
Olivier Asselin is Associate Professor of Art His- 
tory a t  Concordia University in Montreal. He has 
published on Canadian contemporary art as well 
as eighteenth-century aesthetics and art theory. 
Lang Baker has taught Philosophy and Political 
Science in Canada and Europe. He has published 
numerous articles and translations, is a violinist, 
and has recently completed a manuscript on the 
Philosophy of Music. 
Andrew Biro is completing a Ph.D. in the depart- 
ment of Political Science at York University, 
Toronto. His dissertation is entitled Denaturaliz- 
ing Ecological Politics: "Alienation from Nature" 
from Roussearr to Marcuse. 
Dale Bradley recently completed his Ph.D. in 
Social and Political Thought at York University. 
His dissertation titled Unfolding a Strategic 
Space: A Discursive Analysis of Cyberspace's 
Power Relations is available online at http:// 
wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ33524. 
Nicnle Brossard, twice the recipient of the Gover- 
nor General's Award, winner of the Prix 
Athanase David, and member of I'AcadCmie des 
Lettres du QuCbec, is the author of more than 
thirty books, including Mauve Desert and 
Baroque a t  Dawn. She lives in Montreal. 
Pam Brown, a Brooklynite, is working on a 
book of poems, The Niche Arouse. She teaches 
Renaissance drama and poetry at the University 
of Connecticut. 
Simone Cage a.k.a. Tagny Duff is a Vancouver- 
based interdisciplinary artist. 
Laura Calvi is an artist living and working in 
Halifax, Nova Scotia. 
E. M. Cioran, the reclusive Romanian philoso- 
pher published over fifteen books, often being 
compared to such writers as Beckett and Borges. 
He died in 1995 at the age of 84. 
Lynne Cohen is an artist represented by P.P.O.W. 
Gallery in New York. A major exhibition of her 
work is being organized by the National Gallery 
of Canada and the Musee de L'ElysCe de Lau- 
sanne for 2001. It will be accompanied by a book 
entitled No Man's Land. 
Rebecca Comay teaches philosophy and literary 
studies at the University of Toronto. She has pub- 
lished numerous articles on speculative philosophy 
and contempory theory. 
Gerald Creede is a writer living in Vancouver. He 
has published in the journals Writing, West Coast 
Line and, recently, W. His books include 
Verbose, Like Flies and Ambit. 
Sean Cubitt has recently written Digital Aesthet- 
ics (1998) and Videography: Video Media as Art 
and Cultfire (1993). He has completed a manu- 
script on simulation theory and is currently a 
research fellow at the Duncan of Jordanstone 
College in Dundee, UK. 
Dorit Cypis is a Los Angeles artist. Her recent 
installation projects include: Out of Time at the 
Walker Art Center, Framing Memories I Never 
Had at Galerie de I'UQAM, Montreal, and 
Kulture Klub Collaborative, city-wide through 
MinneapolisISt. Paul. 
Christine Davis is an artist living and working in 
Toronto. She is represented by the Olga Korper 
Gallery in Toronto. 
Stan Douglas is an artist living in Vancouver. He 
is represented by the David Zwirner Gallery in 
New York. 


Contributors

Film | Janine MarchessaultFilth | Maria TroyFlight | Ken AllanFuck | Mike Hoolboo

EXI-FIL 
Yet one of the processes of colonization is to teach the colonized that they 
do not belong. The colonized deals with a perpetual embarrassment that 
she does not know what her nationality is.. . If the process of colonization 
constructs me, it also constructs 'me' as an exile whose subjectivity com- 
pulsively tricks me into believing that home is elsewhere, while simultane- 
ously being traumatized by the awareness that home is but an illusion." 
{You Ching] 
-Janine Marchessault 
Excerpted from "The Sublime Object of Home" in Felix: AJournal of Media Arts and 
Communication vol. 2 no. 1, 1995,56. 
Film 
A sheet of dirt covering a surface; twentieth-century art and entertainment. 
-Janine Marchessault 
Filth 
"One man found, aged 63,  living in his own filth.. ." 
"He peed in mason jars that he stored in the basement. Other times he 
used a litter box.. ." 
"The walls were literally crawling. The whole place was rat-, roach-, 
mice-, flea-infested. You name it.. ." 
It is with us from birth to death, regardless of age, race or class. Dirt, 
decay, trash, garbage, excrement-we are constantly generating it, remov- 
ing it, generating it, removing it. Filth is instrinsic to life itself. 
Freud theorized that the repulsion from feces is learned. At first "his 
majesty" the baby glories in shit, it is his special gift to his mother. Only 
later is shit detestable, only later does shitting become an activity to keep 
hidden. Even dogs seem to absorb our aversion-looking shyly over their 
shoulder as they poop on the public sidewalk. It is an awkward position, 
yet absolutely vital to maintaining the body's, and by extension, society's, 
integrity: the elimination of waste. 
The phenomenon is familiar to all modern urban societies: the trash 
house, the cat lady. And it is all too understandable, for the tide of trash is 
so enormous, the impulse to dissolve your aversion and sink into abjection 
seems so temptingly near. The amount of energy spent in constant vigi- 
lance is considerable. No wonder the sick, the old, the lazy, and those of us 
who just don't care, so quickly subcumb and begin to slowly accumlumate 
detritus. We cease to place distance between ourselves and filth, and in- 
stead come to live amongst it. We throw the trash in the basement instead 
of out in the alley and save our urine instead of flushing it away. 
FIL-GAR 
Filth is the sediment of our bodies and our culture, the inevitable result 
of decay. 
-Maria Troy 
Flight 
Hover in aquatic life. 
-Ken Allan 
Fuck 
Once a legal term for rape (For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge) this term's 
use has expanded to  include the middle name of the Christian saviour 
(Jesus fucking Christ), a mystical wonder (Fuck!) and the pepper spray of 
language (Fuck off). In order to preserve the word's integrity, and to keep 
its meanings from over-proliferation, a number of administrators around 
the world, a kind of word police, are presently employed to delete this 
word, most often when it is uttered by actors. 
-Mike Hoolboom 
Garbo 
"Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human 
face still plunged the audiences into ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself 
in an image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind 
of absolute state of the flesh, which could neither be reached nor re- 
nounced. A few years earlier the face of Valentine was causing suicides; 
that of Garbo still partakes of the same rule of Courtly Love, where the 
flesh gives rise to mystical feelings of perdition. 
It is indeed an admirable face-object. In Queen Christina, a film which 
has again been shown in Paris in the last few years, the make-up has the 
snowy thickness of a mask: it is not a painted face, but one set in plaster, 
protected by the surface of the colour, not by its lineaments. Amid all this 
snow, at  once fragile and compact, the eyes alone, black like strange soft 
flesh, but not in the least expressive, are two faintly tremulous wounds. In 
spite of its extreme beauty, this face, not drawn but sculpted in something 
smooth and friable, that is, at once perfect and ephemeral, comes to re- 
semble the flour-white complexion of Charlie Chaplin, the dark vegetation 
of his eyes, his totem like countenance. 
Now the temptation of the absolute mask (the mask of antiquity, for 
instance) perhaps implies less the theme of the secret, (as is the case with 
Italian half mask), than that of an archetype of the human face. Garbo 


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 
Wonderland rests in part on the presence of Alice as the voice of reason, 
protesting each breach of social and linguistic rules that she confronts. Non- 
sense later came to follow a course familiar to modernity, that of increasing 
autonomy. For nonsense, autonomy means autonomy from sense, freedom 
from the constant duty to challenge the sanctity of sense. The transforma- 
tion appeared first with the Western European avant-gardes. While their 
stated goals were frequently the denigration of prevailing "bourgeois" val- 
ues and institutions, the artworks themselves often exhibited independent 
aesthetic and critical value. For instance, in addition to insulting prevailing 
values of order and meaning, Hugo Ball's "abstract poetry" helped develop 
new syntactic possibilities in the language-based arts. Magritte's paradoxi- 
cal painting of a pipe, bearing the inscription "This is not a Pipe," typically 
provokes agreement, with the accompanying recognition that a new, legiti- 
mate avenue of thought is being artfully presented. Nonsense forms became 
slowly de-linked from sense, or at least were no longer defined negatively in 
a necessary-and necessarily subordinate-relation to sense. In recent years, 
this path to autonomy has been greatly abetted by the concomitant decline 
of an agreed upon idea of what "good sense" is. This problem did not exist 
in Victorian England, where good sense could be confidently presumed, and 
nonsense therefore instantly recognized and domesticated. Several decades 
of epistemological skepticism, cultural relativisation and experimentation, 
along with the absence of even the pretence of social consensus, have 
expunged the fixity of sense. Nonsense forms, released from the obligation 
to be "the other" to sense, are increasingly free to form their own, sover- 
eign, contexts of use. New directions emerged from the nonsense skits of 
Monty Python, for example, which were not particularly intended as satires 
of order and meaning. Unlike the otherwise comparable work of the Marx 
Brothers, who directed their nonsense at sociopolitical institutions and 
at  language itself, Monty Python skits, like the "Ministry of Silly Walks" 
which humorously expands the vocabulary of walking, and "The Cheese 
Shop" that of disappointed expectations, experimentally explore a world 
from which the constraints of sense aren't so much transgressed as ignored. 
Contemporary nonsense, being newly autonomous and self-justifying, has 
a correspondingly reduced ability to be "subversive" of sense. In some 
respects, however, it can be more disturbing than earlier forms of nonsense, 
for nonsense and sense forms can now jostle against each other in an 
increasingly inchoate cultural arena. It is, ironically, sense which is the more 
embattled of the two, while nonsense has entered a period of open-ended 
expression and experimentation. The threat to nonsense is no longer sense, 
but decadence. 
-Gary Kibbins 
NUC-NUM 
Nuclear 
An outmoded term (i.e., family, energy); unpopular even with the physi- 
cists who invented it. Replaced by organic. 
-Janine Marchessault 
Nuevocations 
Narchitects design houses in their sleep. 
Farmermaids plough underwater fields with their tails. 
Surgeontologists use scalpels to examine the nature of Being. 
Repopes repossess souls and bless automobiles. 
Sculptorpors create three-dimensional works of art while nearly comatose. 
Stratagemologists affect the outcome of wars by the cutting of stones. 
Prostitutors give private lessons to students aspiring to a degree in copu- 
lation. 
Derangers are paid to go berserk in national parks. 
Pachydermatologists examine hides and offer cosmetic tips to elephants, 
rhinos, and the like. 
Robotanists are automated machines that study plants. 
Footballerinas bash heads and tackle one another in exquisitely choreo- 
graphed, fiercely competitive dances on stadium astroturf. 
Accidentists remove your teeth by mistake. 
Lexiconjurors tap their wands and pull the words right out of my mouth. 
-Steve Venright 
Number / Numbers 
1 + 1 = 2  
E = mc2 
Paint by numbers 
Camps 
Student numbers 
How much is it? 
Phone numbers 
12 step 
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 


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 


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 




Client 
poor, ill, maimed, crazy or otherwise disenfranchised- Get that client out 
of my office, the host in the social welfare hostlparasite symbiosis-Get 
that client out of my occupational therapist office, my vehabilitational 
psychologist office, etc., etc. Related terminology: For-professional 
detachment, read: thinly veiled disgust. When they say: We at  the Ministry 
do not make value judgements-you've been cut off. 
-Gerald Creede 
Clock 
It never all started once upon a time since inevitably there was a ticking 
nearby, in the blood or the wood, some coagulate of gears a batch of springs 
a face with moments quite divisible in anumerical way, a rock casting its 
shadow through the day, or the world was passing through its darkness 
when a doubt arose, alightning lack of faith that fell into the daily thoughts 
of one restless individual and quietly spread through the soul, cracking 
through others too, from town to town and ship to ship, across valley and 
farm and hermitage, great cracking and wracking, this fissure of faith root- 
ing into the souls of a nation indivisible nor stop at mere borders of nations, 
leaping through the whole known world, languages wither to dust in such 
doubt, incantations lose their meaning, prayers drop off the tongue like a 
botched job, a feast of brambles, the darkness thick and people jostle shove 
kick splinters out of each other and never know, their words have holes they 
have no idea what is missing, faith but a stone in their shoe, they scream and 
wail not hearing a single note of their noise, like the businessman alone on 
his balcony of the castle he has taken great pains to restore, groping his way 
along the walls stumbles out onto the cold stones, insists he sees the stars 
and balancing on his ledge he picks up a lute, for the instrument is celestial 
to him and he strums and pulls and scratches the strings thinking it lovely, 
tears hopping down his fat cheeks because of the music that isn't there, ten- 
der and full of dumb grace, while in some hovel far away unaware of itself 
a sound echoes softly through the room, a breathing almost whispers, a hum 
and the quick trickle of a laugh, till a hand reaches out to the little box on a 
table nearby, turns it round while a voice says Darling what time is it, Six- 
fifteen, the sunwill be rising, let's go up the hill and watch, but the first 
pleading No I don't care stay here with me, and they sink back onto their 
pallet, pressing close as slowly the sun fills the dusty curtain with light, and 
everywhere a great cheering rises up, a wild delirious cheer, and people do 
not know the reason for their rejoicing. 
-Jason Weiss 
CLO-COM 
Clouds 
-Mina Totina 
Collapsed House 
1997198, chromogenic print, 18 X 36 inches 
-Stan Douglas 
Communication 
My Mailbox Is Empty Again Today. 
1 try to shove this into words 
The longevity of us 
The complicated science of us 
Which is at once both 
Delicate as an origami bird 
And leaden as an antique cannon. 
I try to act like the sort of woman 
Men offer to buy drinks 
So that you can finish acting like a cowboy 
But really I just want a good nights sleep. 
It's hot as tarpits and the truth is, love, 
I hate you for painting the windows shut. 
-Emily Raboteau 

COM-CON 
Community 
Communication, communion, church. Say "the" and add "outreach" in 
all grant applications to  governments and corporations. 
-Janine Marchessault 
Confession 
It is well known that the main objective of the Greek schools of philosophy 
did not consist of the elaboration, the teaching, of theory. The goal of the 
Greek schools of philosophy was the transformation of the individual. The 
goal of the Greek schools of philosophy was to give to the individual the 
quality which would permit him to live differently, better, more happily, than 
other people. What place did self-examination and confession have in this? 
At first glance, in all the ancient philosophical practices, the obligation to 
tell the truth about oneself occupies a rather restrained place. This is so for 
two reasons, both of which remain valid throughout the whole of Greek and 
Hellenistic Antiquity. The first of those reasons is that the objective of philo- 
sophical training was to arm the individual with a certain number of precepts 
which would permit him to conduct himself in all circumstances of life with- 
out his losing mastery of himself or without losing tranquility of spirit, purity 
of body and soul. From this principle stems the importance of the master's 
discourse. The master has to talk, to explain, to persuade; he has to give the 
disciple a universal code of conduct for all his life, so that the verbalization 
takes place on the side of the master and not on the side of the disciple. 
There is also another reason why the obligation to confess does not have a 
lot of importance in the direction of the antique conscience. The tie with the 
master was then circumstantial or, in any case, provisional. It was a relation- 
ship between two wills, which does not imply a complete or a definitive obe- 
dience. One solicits or one accepts the advice of a master or of a friend in 
order to endure an ordeal, a bereavement, an exile, or a reversal of fortune, 
and so on. Or again, one places oneself under the direction of a master for a 
certain time of one's life so as one day to be able to behave autonomously and 
no longer have need of advice. Ancient direction tends towards the autonomy 
of the directed. In these conditions, one can understand that the necessity for 
exploring oneself in exhaustive depth does not present itself. It is not indis- 
pensable to say everything about oneself, to reveal one's least secrets, so that 
the master may exert complete power over one. The exhaustive and continual 
presentation of oneself under the eyes of an all-powerful director is not an 
essential feature in this technique of direction. 
-Michel Foucault 
Excerpted from "Subjectivity and Truth," Public 7: Sacred Technologies, 1993. 
CON 
Consumer 
At the intersection between private and public space they want me to 
throw my skin back on. The security guard takes my clothes and shoes, 
then throws them at me. Afterwards, he gently covers me with a medical 
blanket, turning me into Sleeping Beauty. The whole time I know that they 
are frightened while I really do feel peaceful resting my back against the 
cool tiled floor. I'm surprised at how easy this is. I'm in a space between 
vulnerability and having enough power to explode the invisible pylons 
that regulate our movement in this shopping mall. 
I lie here looking at the video camera and I see the imaginary audience 
witnessing the security guards surrounding my body. I stare up at you, the 
audience, and my extended self watching the scene unfold. I am a combi- 
nation of a starving saint and a starvation artist performing for multiple 
audiences. In this busy urban mall the incidental audience thinks I'm 
either a psychotic or a junky, and it makes them uncomfortable. Anorec- 
tics like me are dangerous. We impose our bodies onto your gaze. We 
physically manifest our desires. It's become a type of sport: who can show 
their discomfort the most without speaking about it? Who can come up 
with a diagnosis to contain the discomfort? 
And now, the medics come planning to take me away to the psychiatric 
ward for the diagnosis. Then, the police arrive and they think I have a 
bomb rigged to my body. In that moment, I think how ironic it is: the way 
passive bodies act like conduits for explosive situations. At this point my 
speaking self steps in because she knows that my body is about to be con- 
sumed by another violent gaze regulated by forces that can impose physi- 
cal restraints. So, the voice and mouth speak the language of reason to the 
police officer kneeling beside me, and she says, "I'm finished now. I'm out 
of character. This is just a performance." 
He laughs. 
She articulates an understanding of the rules and displays rational cogni- 
tive skills. The voice that speaks as "artist" contains the behaviour. She is 
lying on my behalf because she knows the violence of the terms "anorectic, 
hysteric, and psychotic." The voice also knows that the policeman has taken 
a fatherly role as he proceeds to talk to her in a kind and gentle manner. The 
policeman tells her that if he were her father, he would take her home for a 
spanking. The voice laughs because hls jokes speak volumes and she knows 
this is a warning. 
The whole time I am aware of the camera that records this self-designated 
history. In fact, everything has gone as expected and the performance is suc- 
cessful. The gaze that imposes upon my body sifts through multiple screens 
as I match your look. I perform too well by my own design. I don't ask for 
permission to self-diagnose. I co-opt your regulated gaze and spit it out of 
my ears because I have redesigned my body. Advertising icons get absorbed 
CON-COR 
and thrown up. I drink up medical journals and psychoanalytic poetry and 
cough them out. I taste pornography and happily urinate its residue. I lie in 
the middle of this mall and drink the spectacle that you, the audience, assist 
in constructing. And I know that you will define a history based on a design 
that is not yours even though I have done my best to mediate it. 
-Sirnone Cage a.k.a. Tagny Duff 
Contact Lens 
"The encyclopedia of the world and the pedagogy of perception collapse 
to make way for a professional training of the eye, a world of controllers 
and controlled communing in their admiration for technology, mere tech- 
nology.. . . The question is no longer what there is to see behind the image, 
nor how we can see the image itself-it is how we can find a way into it, 
how we can slip in, because each image now slips across other images, 'the 
background in any image is always another image,' and the vacant gaze is 
a contact lens." {Gilles Deleuze) 
-Paul Kelley 
Excerpted from "Letter to Serge Daney: Optim~sm, Pess~m~sm and Travel," [Preface to 
Serge Daney's Clne-lournal, 19861, Negotzattons: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughln (New 
York: Columb~a University Press, 1995), 72. 
Continental Motors Plant 
1997198, chromogenic print, 18 X 22 inches 
-Stan Douglas 
Corporate Office 
-Lynne Cohen 


COR-CYB 
Corridor 
-Lynne Cohen 
Culture, High and Low 
a.k.a. Highbrow and Lowbrow 
Terms on death row. Incarcerated within the vertical axis of value desper- 
ately seeking petitions of clemency from the horizontal axis of belonging. 
-Clive Robertson 
Curator 
In contemporary parlance, refers to a person who organizes art objects 
and interprets them in a meaningful way. The term Curator has histori- 
cally meant guardian and manager but it has increasingly lost that gener- 
al meaning. Curate is etymologically linked to religion (a curate is an 
assistant to a parish priest). The English definition is related to its French 
counterpoint which is, however, more specific-a conservateur preserves 
and maintains a collection of valuable objects and is conversant with 
them. In contemporary culture, anyone can throw together some loosely 
related objects within the context of an indeterminate space (see 
"Institution") and call themselves a curator. 
-Tom Folland 
Cyberspace 
"Cyberspace" has become a rather familiar term in a relatively short 
period of time, a term referring to a technologically-generated environ- 
ment within which various communicative activities occur. The technolo- 
gies involved in the production of cyberspace work toward the creation of 
a seemingly self-contained and separate world. This "separateness" is 
often taken as fact, foreclosing any discussion of cyberspace as an instru- 
mental space produced by the wider social space of late capitalism. It is a 
space which functions; it automates and operationalizes the specific net- 
works of information, space, and power that are involved in the produc- 
tion and reproduction of political, economic, and social relations. 

CYB-DAY 
Cyberspace, as it currently exists, is not just a space, but a discourse 
about a space-a name given to a certain desire for a social space whose 
contours are emerging from within late capitalism. This discourse is defined 
by the proposal that a new and electronically-constituted space must be cre- 
ated in order to manage the increasingly large field of information that has 
come into being through the activities of globalized late capital and the 
social welfare state. The strategic goal of the proposal is this: rather than 
controlling the informational topographies that exist in any given geo- 
graphical place, these places are interlinked and combined into a networked 
electronic topography. The ability to actually create and define an appar- 
ently independent, electronic geography allows control to be "built in" to 
the space in advance via the use of standardized data formats and protocols 
for use. Cyberspace must be addressed, therefore, in terms of how it partic- 
ipates in established power relations and in terms of the degree to which 
these relations are altered, amplified or transformed by their extension into 
a new space of social activity. 
If cyberspace is continuous with the networks and institutions that 
comprise late capitalism, it is not unreasonable to  suspect that power 
relations in cyberspace will be similarly continuous.. . . Surveillance in 
cyberspace is detached from a fixed andlor central position and is dis- 
persed over the entire network and automatized in the standards and 
protocols that define cyberspace's practical functioning. Everything in 
cyberspace is only ever data and, as such, standardized formats and pro- 
tocols are employed which ensure that all data-objects and subjects find 
their place within a recognizable and reproducible structure. In order to 
make cyberspace a stable and secure space, controlling mechanisms are 
required which record and monitor the activity within it. Surveillance in 
cyberspace is thus an architectural and geographic principle which ren- 
ders the "space" of late capital's informational networks visible in order 
to control it. It makes the space intelligible to  its (virtual) inhabitants 
while, at  the same time, making those inhabitants visible to whatever 
mechanisms are necessary for controlling and policing the space. 
-Dale Bradley 
Excerpted from "Situating Cyberspace," Pztblic 11: Throughput, 1995. 
"If Fascism promises beginnings of the day, representation exposes the 
interests of the middle of the day; then the owl of Minerva, flying at dusk, 
may reflect on the remains of the day-the ruins of the morning's hope, 
the actuality of the broken middles." (Gillian Rose} 
-Paul Kelley 


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 
VAC 
During a recent voyage through France's Massif Central, the road was 
blocked at  Saint-Flour by a sign: DEVIATION : AU BOUT DU MONDE 
[Deviation: To the End of the World]. Vacation, vacatio, vacatus, freedom, 
exemption, immunity, vacant-for a writer, an ideal (linked to the anxiety 
of the void): blank, desert, tabula rasa, zero degree.. . 
Imagine my joy to have found, in a restaurant in the Cantal, a wine from 
the CGtes d'Auvergne, Les Demoiselles Oublie'es du Donazat [The For- 
gotten Maidens of Donazat]; and later, more profound, more troubling, 
somehow sadder, a wine of Gaillac, Domaine d'Escausses, Cuve'e de la 
Vigne de l'Oubli [Growth of the Vine of Forgetfulness]. Baudelaire ex- 
pressed it well, in the name of all great drinkers, past and future, from 
Dionysus through Rabelais, Verlaine, Rimbaud: "It is time to get drunk! 
In order not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get ceaselessly drunk!"2 
Wine is an epistemological drug, for drunkenness leads to the negation of 
time and the transformation of space, t o  true vacation. 
There are forgotten tales and tales of forgetting. In contrast with an 
ars rnemoriae, Umberto Eco asks whether it is possible to create an  ars 
oblivionalis, an art of forgetting. The response is negative: insofar as all 
mnemotechnics constitutes a semiotics, such is a means of creating pres- 
ence, where each signifying gesture produces a mental effect. "If the arts 
of memory are semiotics, it is not ~oss ib le  to construct arts of forgetting 
on their model, because a semiotics is by definition a mechanism that pre- 
sents something to  the mind and therefore a mechanism for producing 
intentional acts."3 He  concludes that one cannot forget by lack, through 
annulling, but only by excess; one cannot forget through the multiplica- 
tion of absences, but by the proliferation of presences. 
Jean Boudou, in Le livre de Catoi'e (written in the nearly forgotten langue 
d'oc, Old Proven~al,  thus particularly inscribed in his region of the Lot 
valley), ends chapter 17: "Towards noon we arrived near Jonquevieil." He  
then begins chapter 18: "We did not go to Jonquevieil. In fact, there is no 
Jonquevieil. We went to La Combe. La Combe de Jonquevieil. Like ~ n e r -  
gues d'Andouque or Bourgnounac de Mirandol. For the Albigensians, the 
souls of the dead follow the living. The ghosts move from the old house to 
the new one. Similarly, every new village is accompanied by its fantom-vil- 
lage, as by a ~ h a d o w . " ~  
Les Angles, les Baraques, la Baume, la Belle, la Bouteille, le Bouquet,  le 
Buisson, Lacalm, la Caprice, Chantegrenouille, Cocural, la Combe, Cul- 
tures, Hontes-Bas, Hontes-Haut, la Joyeuse, les Maisons, les Places, les 4 
Chemins, les 4 Routes, Sage, la Salesse, Sauvages, la Serre, la Tricherie. [The 
VAC-VER 
Angles, The Shanties, The Balm, The Beauty, The Bottle, The Thicket, The 
Bush, The Calm, The Caprice, Frogsong, Cuckolder, The Dale, Cultures, 
Lower-Shames, Upper-Shames, The Joyful, The Houses, The Places, The 4 
Paths, The 4 Roads, Wise, The Dirtied, Savages, The Hothouse, The Trick- 
ery.] These village and place names-generic, deficient in information, min- 
imally inspired (however charming) -were destined to fall into oblivion. 
One should not forget that a place name [lieu dit] consists of a place and a 
name, as Proust revealed in the sections of his Recherche entitled, "Noms 
de pays : le nom" [Names of the Country: The Name] and "Noms de pays 
: le pays" [Names of the Country: The Country]. The study of toponomy 
suggests that the source of place names usually indicates either historic or 
topographic values: most often, the topography remains while the history 
is erased. It is precisely within this interstice-through deformed, trans- 
formed, forgotten histories, contrasted with the weighty presences of 
things, people and places-that the Proustian narrative is constructed.. . 
and that the essence of vacations arises. Every presumed equivalence 
between onomastics and ontology is deceptive. 
.c 
That wooden roadsign-SAINT-URCIZE-written in who's hand?, 
weather worn and fallen into the grass: I seek that former village, and not 
the one several kilometers before me. 
Jean Boudou wrote: "In our house, time does not change. Here, the clock 
always chimes the ancient hour."s There is no new hour; the soul of the 
house cannot travel towards a new house; every change will be the end of 
an epoch, an apocalypse; every voyage, an uprooting; every future, death. 
Rootedness provokes forgetting, the forgetting of history. 
In the Aubrac, where the major "industry" is hiking (an activity often 
threatened by the presence of particularly vicious dogs), I asked an artisan 
who creates fine handmade staffs what to do if one is fearful of being bit- 
ten by a dog. He queried: "Before or after?" 
2 
In an article entitled, "How to Live With Stones," John Berger explains (in 
the context of the dry, rocky, megalithic landscape of Antonio Gramsci's 
childhood, which contains innumerable piles of stones fashioned from 
those gathered to clear the fields, as well as thousands of neolithic stone 
towers): "To place a stone upright so that it stands vertical is an act of 
symbolic recognition: the stone becomes a presence: a dialogue  begin^."^ 
The landscape of the Aubrac is equally stone-strewn, and also contains 
many mounds of gathered stones, tumuli, and vertical "statues," stone set 
upon stone. Symbolic, indeed; but silent, empty symbols, irretrievable 
from the depths of oblivion. 
VAC-VER 
Yes, there is an art of forgetting, as there is an art of memory: they are 
both called history. 
* 
Notes 
1 Victor SCgalen, "Pensers pa'iens" (1906), Voyages au pays du rdkl: Oeuures littdraires 
(Paris, cditions Complexe, 1995), 132. 
2 Charles Baudelaire, "Petits pobmes en prose," Paradis artificiels (Paris, Flammarion, 
1966), 188. 
3 Umberto Eco, "Ars Oblivionalis?, Forget It", PMLA, Vol. 102, No. 3 (1988), 259. 
4 Jean Boudou, Le livre de Catoi'e (1966; Rodez, fiditions du Rouergue, 1993), 83-84. 
5 ibid, 44. 
6 John Berger, "How to Live With Stones," HEAT No. 8 (Artarmon, Australia, 1998), 9. 
-Allen S. Weiss 
Versions 
I used to think disco sucked and now I can listen to KC and the Sunshine 
Band. I don't think any alien being of any kind has visited the earth. I 
think Lee Harvey Oswald was exactly the patsy he claimed to be. I think 
Christianity ought to be big enough to withstand a little blasphemy, a little 
cowdung on the Virgin Mary. I think car alarms should only ring on the 
owner's keychain, like a beeper. But then again, who's to say. 
"Fellah, you don't know what this story means." 
These are the words newspaper editor Hume Cronyn speaks to reporter 
Warren Beatty in Alan J. Pakula's 1974 film The Parallax View. Beatty is 
trying to convince Cronyn that a group called The Parallax Corporation is 
in the business of recruiting disenfranchised loners to train as political 
assassins. The editor trusts his reporter's instincts but is confounded at the 
wholesale ambiguity of the proposition. 
His retort above becomes the truest line in the film and a perfect slogan 
for the twentieth century. 
"Parallax" is a scientific term which refers to the relative apparent posi- 
tions of objects, like stars, produced by a shift in the position of the 
observer. It is a term used in different scientific techniques to measure dis- 
tance. Trigonometric parallax, for example, refers to the apparent dis- 
placement of a nearby star against the background of more distant bodies, 
resulting from the motion of the earth around the sun. So, "parallax" is a 
term used to refer to the apparent position of things. 
In photographic terms, a "parallax view" is the difference between the 
area taken in by a camera lens and the area taken in by the camera's 
viewfinder. This becomes a most alluring definition because it implies that 
there is an everpresent viewpoint that is not seen, a perspective that is 
directly before us, and is real, but remains hidden in plain sight. It also 
implies that those versions and perspectives that are not hidden from view 
are, ultimately, only descriptions of apparent positions. 
Everything about the past century-its historical events, its burgeoning 
media and technology -has provided fertile ground to feed the battlefield 
of apparent positions. 
Pakula's film appeared a decade after the assassination of JFK (an event 
with its own endless layers of parallax views, a moment in history which 
can find no point of rest. It is the story that keeps on giving, which would 
infer that perhaps a more appropriate slogan for the century be "That's 
entertainment!") and it played as adroitly into the burgeoning sense of 
public cynicism as it did with issues of both the revision and redemption 
of history. The film's final shot inclines toward this impulse for the truth 
as Beatty's reporter runs through a dark hall toward the blinding light of 
a slowly closing door. He makes it to the door before it closes. A gunshot. 
The end. If he learns the truth, we never hear of it. Fellahs, we still don't 
know what this story means. 
In an essay called "Versions," which recounts the varied descriptions of 
the shooting of Andy Warhol and curator Mario Amaya, Ihor Holubizky 
begins by quoting from a George Kubler book called The Shape of Time. 
In referring to the narrative historian, Kubler points out that "history cuts 
anywhere with equal ease, and a good story can begin anywhere the teller 
chooses." History, then, is all versions and everything about this past cen- 
tury bears that out. With an explosion of media and technology, we write 
the various versions of history as quickly as we live them. It is a scenario 
that can confuse and confound, leaving us with little more than a riddle 
inside an enigma inside something else. But the clash of versions, of appar- 
ent positions, has also brought to the surface histories previously sub- 
merged, such as those of women and indigenous cultures worldwide, a 
partial redemption of history from its own apparent positions. We have 
begun the process of saving history from itself. 
And still these various routes often bring us no closer to the truth which, 
according to popular culture, remains "out there" somewhere. In 1962, 
Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which described 
how science in no way pursued a linear path to the truth. Instead, each sub- 
stantive discovery-say, gravity-effected a paradigm shift whose effects and 
influence were total. Our journey forward is far more an erratic avenue 
winding through continually-reconfigured versions of the world. 
Versions are not just history, but everything in history. Versions are all 
art, a weekend painter or Andy Kaufman. Advertisers have their versions. 
Even atrocious poets have their versions. I was originally going to suggest 
that versions are all we have. 
VER-VR 
But maybe all we really have is the parallax view, the space between ver- 
sions. Where it all happens. 
-John Massier 
Vision 
"Splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass." {Theodor Adorno] 
-Paul Kelley 
Excerpted from "Reflections from a Damaged Life," Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. 
Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974), 50. 
Vocation 
Training valued by Conservative governments. Opposite of vacation. 
- Janine Marchessault 
I see nothing. A voice asks me to  hold up my gloved hand. Wavering 
before me is a free-floating drawing of a hand. "Make a fist." I do. The 
drawing waits, makes a fist. "Now extend the first finger,. . . now the 
next,. . . the next.. . and next.. .finally the thumb." I perform, the draw- 
ing performs. "Calibration seems okay." My virtual hand is ready. 
Virtual reality (VR) seems highly charged. It represents a technological 
constellation of ideas-full of many contradictions and dilemmas. One 
of the most provocative issues manifested by VR is the contradictory 
treatment of the body. On the one hand, it offers an implicit promise of 
omnipotence as an idealized, bodiless "experience." On the other hand, 
the actual body itself is almost sensory-deprived, as if submitting to some 
kind of medical testing. I virtually fly like superwoman, zoom through 
walls unscathed, scale myself down to play with molecular structure, grab 
worlds and change them to my point of view, yet my flesh is in bondage 
and my senses are blinded. This reconstruction of the mindlbody split is 
puzzling to say the least, since it is an outdated paradigm in science and 
unfashionable in conventional medical circles. 
As number of proponents would say, VR promises a freedom that is 
limited only by our imaginations and, furthermore, that the artificial 
sensorium we can create for ourselves will be more satisfying than our 
relationships with the real world. A spectator (participant) is promised 
mastery of a realm of creation (or destruction, as seen in the Gulf War 
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, 


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