Public (E-Journal, York University)

West, Cornel

English

Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism

Thomas, Chantal

Casanova and the Revolution

Baird, George

Being Out in Public 
Questions of Praxis and Representation 
George Baird 
P 
It is some time now since the so-called public realm began to  be viewed askance by 
thoughtful social critics and cultural theorists. In two famous texts, Jiirgen Habermas in 
1962 and Richard Sennett in 1974 already saw the public sphere as being in a state of 
decline, and younger generations of commentators in the field have tended to  be even 
more pessimistic - not a few of them even chastising these two predecessors for what 
later came to be seen, in some cultural/theoretical circles at least, as their naive hopes for 
the possibility of a new public life in the future. It is probably indicative of the bleak cur- 
rent mood in these matters that a topical American anthology of texts by social critics and 
architectural historians has been subtitled "The New American City and the End of Public 
Space." Still, this pervasive pessimism has not - except among the most unyielding follow- 
ers of Adorno and Lukacs - entirely obliterated nostalgic yearnings and hopeful specula- 
tions in respect to  what might still be able, publically, to come into being. Indeed it is 
sometimes the case that the most thought-provoking visions of future possibility can be 
discerned in the arguments and commentaries of some of the most probing critics of 
Habermas and Sennett. 
A s  an architect, I have been interested for some time in the question of whether it 
would be possible to  construct a new model of a public realm - a field for praxis, as it 
were - which arises less from exalted memories of the Athenian "polis" than it does from 
attentive observation of the unconscious behaviours of strangers who, at the least, co- 
inhabit shared space, however contingently, and from consideration of the "agnostic" 
model of conscious political praxis which is now being framed by young reinterpreters of 
the work of Hannah Arendt. 
A convenient vehicle for the exploration of these issues in architectural design is pro- 
vided by a programme which was developed a few years ago for a "redesign" of Toronto's 
Nathan Phillips Square - a major public space in that city which was originally designed in 
1958, and completed in 1964. The real-world circumstances of the new programme I had 
been asked to develop were primarily pragmatic ones, having to do with improvements to 
performance facilities, public services, etc. Still, they nevertheless opened the door at the 
same time to a design consideration of some of the challenging issues cited above, partic- 
ularly as they arise nowadays in respect to  race, class, and gender. I decided to use the 


programme to conduct Visiting Design Studios at Harvard and Yale last year. In an intro- 
ductory statement, I challenged the students: 
The square was originally designed on the basis of a set of urban assumptions about the forms of 
public assembly and display which were operative circa 1958. Many of these assumptions, including 
those affecting our view of pedestrian and vehicular movement in the core of the city, by now have 
changed profoundly.. . . Then too, in recent years, Toronto has begun to sustain a significant social 
transformation such as to bring into play large questions as to what the status of the "public" can 
be in a space such as this one. It is not insignificant that the recent so-called "riot" in Toronto 
began in it. 
Two design responses are illustrated here, the first by Guido Hartray at Harvard Uni- 
versity, and the second by Marcelo Franganillo at Yale. Hartray chose to  focus his atten- 
t ion on the very surface of the paving of the square itself, particularly in relation to  the 
adjacent surfaces of the pavements of the surrounding streets and sidewalks. In an 
aggressive gesture, he proposed to  eliminate the perimeter colonnade which now rings the 
square, preferring instead to pose an explicit confrontation of a radically opened-up sur- 
face of the square with a decisive, bounding wall along its western edge. This opposition 
is mediated only by a high, open loggia in the square's southeasterly corner, hovering over 
the intersection of Queen and Bay streets. 
Franganillo, on the other hand, chose to open up the surface of the square, and by the 
creation of a series of sloping incisions into it, to disclose the curious interrelationship of 
distinct pedestrian worlds above and below it - the one currently constituting the honorific 
space of the forecourt of the City Hall, and the other a netherworld of parking and of 
pedestrian passages. Franganillo also proposed to replace the existing perimeter colon- 
nade with a device which is, so far as I know, a new urban invention: a continuous, 
weather-protected overhead canopy and a set of publically accessible bleachers, both com- 
bined into one. 
Neither scheme focused centrally on the improved accommodations for public assem- 
bly, or attempted to  strengthen the already vestigial axiality of the City Hall itself, but both 
sought to build on the strong identification which so many Torontonians now have with 
the space as a primary icon of their citizenship. Both sought also to  offer the means of a 
wide range of modes of unself-conscious bodily praxis - procedures of self-disclosure and 
identification of both individuals and groups in three-dimensional space. By the sheer 
heightening of the consciousness of surface, and by the establishment of a revelatory visi- 
bility which is the result of new means of bodily ascension and descent in public, both 
schemes seek to  establish conditions propitious to "action." 



Being Out in Public: Questions of Praxis and Representation

Weiss, Allen S.

Ophelia's Lament 
Allen S .  Weiss 
The yielding ripeness of Shakespeare invites license. 
- Vjadimir Holan, A Night With Shakespeare 
"A woman who exists for but one night, no, for but a single dream, leaves us with the 
most tender regrets. She leaves us, trembling like a tree that passed the night inundated 
with moonlight, with a light gratitude." 
Freud mused over these words of Jules Renard, as he began writing his New Introduc- 
tory Lectures to Psychoanalysis, on this calm, moonless evening of May 1932. Freud winced 
at the thought of the recent publication of Les vases communicants, by that impertinent 
impostor Andre Breton, who berated him for having shied away from the erotic nature of 
his own dreams. As if Surrealism were nothing other than an erroneous footnote to psy- 
choanalytic metapsychology! 
In the light of this project, Freud reread his The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 
the first year of the millennium of dreams, 1900, the year where Nietzsche's death liber- 
ated Freud from his only equal, the same Nietzsche who wrote: "Nothing belongs to you 
in its own right more than your dreams. Subject, form, duration, actor, spectator - in 
these comedies, you are entirely yourself!" He thought again of those all-too-few pages he 
had devoted to the greatness that is Hamlet. These ideas were summed up in a phrase that 
he wrote in a letter to Fleiss, as early as 15 October 1897: "Every listener was once, in 
embryo and in fantasy, such an Oedipus." Had he really meant to say "such a Hamlet"? 
In any case, he was aware that his initial intuitions continued to be true, given the subtle 
interplay of recognition and repression in Hamlet - especially considering Hamlet's pro- 
nounced distaste for the erotic. Yet Freud wondered whether he might also need to con- 
sider the intellectual blockage of the libido as a separate process, a sort of "Hamlet 
Complex", now that he realized the independence of the death instinct, now that Heinz 
Hartman had convinced him of the existence of an autonomous ego function, and now 
that pest Karen Horney was hounding him to death about the existence of an essential 
femininity, apart from the exigencies of masculine sexual development. Would all of this 
make any difference to the metapsychology of dreams anyway? 
He mistrusted his body these days, and feared that his physical deterioration was 
contagious, and would ultimately effect his mind. He often confused the lacerations 
caused by the dissenters in the psychoanalytic movement with his own physical malaise. 
His sleep, indeed his dreams, now always suffered an undercurrent of pain, a pain which 
nearly ruled his entire existence -with the major exception of his intellect. He also 
feared insomnia. The pain in his jaw increased at night, as if the lunar apparition aug- 
mented not only the level of the oceanic tide, but also that of his own torment - as if the 
light of the moonbeams falling on his disfigured face somehow mystically revived the 
terrible surgery, in a premature payment for his sins. Perhaps on this night, graced by a 
new moon, the pain would lessen. 
He would have loved to find an exemplary dream, one which met the condition of 
instantiating all the great discoveries of the period of The Interpretation of Dreams: uncon- 
scious feelings of guilt, family romance, stages of sexual development, the power of 
repressed aggression, and the causal link between endopsychic mechanisms and mytho- 
logical belief. But this was not to be. For the difficulty in describing dreams is linked to 
the vigilance of secondary revision, to the repressive and obfuscating powers of the intel- 
lect, which dissimulates the mysterious displacements of affect in the dreamwork. Rare, 
therefore, is the uncanny. Ever rarer, indeed, after the year 1900! 
Sleep, nevertheless, arrived.. . 
Ophelia floats, dead, in a pond still as the cosmic void and illuminated like a stage set 
designed by Bocklin. She is surrounded by wreathes of flowers, and bathed in the late 
summer music of insects, with perhaps the seductive tones of Pan's pipes trilling in the 
distance. Sirius dominates. She dreams.. . . Whilst rank corruption, mining all within, infects 
.unseen, from my fair and unpollutedflesh may violets spring! So shall you hear of carnal, bloody, 
and unnatural acts, as hell itself breathes out contagion t o  this world, a foul and pestilent congrega- 
tion of vapors, like life in excrements. Though I have no tongue, I will speak with a most miraczl- 
lous organ, US I must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words, a rhapsody of words, though these 
words are not mine! The rest is but silence. Doomed for a certain term t o  walk the night, there with 
fantastic garlands did I come, a breeder of sinners, my clothes spread wide, t o  squeak and gibber in 
the Roman streets, awaiting, as patient as the female dove, thepe+ume and suppliance of a moment. 
In the dead vast and middle of the night occurred such encounters, wondering always who's there, 
wondering always whether this thing appeared again tonight, wishing for the uncertain unction of 
a mountebank. If thou hast any sound, or use of voice, speak t o  me, when in your motion you ure hot 
and dry. Burn out the sense and virtue of mine eye, US you wouldpluck the heart of my mystery! 
This is the very ecstasy of love, a savageness ofunreclaimed love, which could tear upassion t o  tat- 
ters. So lust, though t o  a radiunt angel linked, is most foul, strange and unnatural, a fault against 
the dead, a fault to nature. But our cold maids, blasted with ecstasy, do dead men's fingers favor. 
But in a fiction, one that would circumvent God, in a dream ofpussion, every god did seem t o  set his 
seal, as stars with trains offire, and dews of blood. Now, being a god kissing carrion, could I drink 
hot blood from gods wounds. So how is it that the clouds still hang on you, sick almost t o  doomsday 
with eclipse? What is this quintessence of dust? Wormwood, wormwood! Help, angles! 
Freud awoke, nauseated by a slight feeling of anguish, mixed with disappointment, 
regret, and the distant, cold memory of sexual stirrings. He could already hardly remem- 
ber the jumble of words that had coursed through his head, yet his first concrete thought 
was one of strong empathy with Hamlet, who certainly instantiated the most prevalent 
form of degradation in erotic life. The Prince's refusal of Ophelia somehow explained to 
Freud why he could never have even considered the existence of an "Ophelia Complex" 
- even though some had suggested this as a solution to the etiological mysteries of certain 
types of female neurosis. Woman, not un homme manque'? Ophelia, Thanatos, incarnate? 
Dreams, the symbolic body politic? 
"Ophelia complex indeed," he snarled in a silent voicing of his disgust, "she was noth- 
ing but God's whore, even more so than that poor devil of a psychotic Schreber!" No, he 
wouldn't change anything in his new presentation of the mechanism of dreams. 
In his journal for the year 1901, Jules Renard wrote, "The dream neither creates anything 
nor even warms us. It  is a dead thing which, like the moon, arrives in space without the 
slightest freedom." 


Ophelia's Lament

Setzer, Katherine Adrienne

Butch/Femme and Drag: Queerness in Forbidden Love and Lip Gloss

Yogasundrum, Dilip

Writing Cultural Differences into the Law 
Dilip Yogasundrum 
The assertion of minority rights here in Canada tends nowadays to find its justification in 
a language of "cultural difference." That language involves more than merely calling for 
the recognition of values that lie outside of, and present a challenge to, a dominant norm; 
it also involves reevaluating and displacing the terms of prospective inclusion given under 
the principle of "diversity." When social justice is prosecuted through the law in affirma- 
tive action programmes ("employment and pay equity" in Ontario), and in the judicial 
review of discriminatory legislation (spousal benefits for same-sex couples, for example), 
the state is involved in a pragmatic administration of consensus, conducted in the name of 
diversity. The suspicion we might direct towards "diversity" concerns a double standard 
which works to contain the disruptive value of cultural differences - by their recognition 
as heterogeneous social facts which do not themselves set the universal terms of recogni- 
tion, and by the effacement of the state's normative position from which such a universal 
recognition of nominally equal facts is constructed. 
The question of cultural difference gets its broadest articulation in the debate within 
the humanities over the worth of vernacular traditions long considered to be minor or irrel- 
evant within a certain canonical understanding of Western culture. Let me use the essay by 
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., that introduces the collection "Race," Writing, and Difference to draw 
out the implications of writing minority values into the law. The virtue of Gates's introduc- 
tion is that he very quickly describes the dilemma of black writing, and in so doing 
sketches the form taken by the double standard implicit within the principle of diversity. 
Gates records some consequences of the Enlightenment's privileging of a reflective rea- 
son, where writing became the material sign of reason's presence. Peoples ostensibly with- 
out writing were said to be without reason, and, without those repeatable and visible signs 
of reason, to have no collective memory or history of their own, no self-consciousness. 
For black slaves in the United States to be ascribed no cultural history served to jus- 
tify their continued exclusion from becoming juridical subjects. Slaves were prevented 
from writing - by law in some states - and those who wrote in spite of such adversity 
became the subject of arguments over the humanity of black people in general. Slave writ- 
ing was a commodity exchanged from the margins of an economy of historical self-con- 
sciousness, a means of contradicting the purported absence of such a consciousness. 
"Writing, for these slaves, was not an activity of mind; rather, it was a commodity which 
they were forced to trade for their humanity."' But if slave writing was not a detached 
"activity of mind," this act of contradiction was also a writing into self-consciousness, a 
production of subjectivity which negotiated those commodified margins by undertaking 
the inscription of the material signs of reason. 
Gates phrases the conditions of black writing in the form of an ironic dilemma: "How 
can the black subject posit a full and sufficient self in a language in which blackness is a 
sign of ab~ence?"~  Africans and Africa stood for what the project of human reason had left 
behind. For black writing, if the presence of subjectivity is not to be qualified by blackness, 
by race - if subjectivity is something that black people share in the same measure as whites, 
but whose expression has been denied, if it is something distinct or detachable from the 
signification of blackness as absence - then that subjectivity is presupposed as a universal 
possibility. But insofar as subjectivity is also something which institutes itself differentially 
in language, through invested signs of its presence and absence, such a universal subjectiv- 
ity must efface in itself the traces of the differential signs which constituted its presence. 
Writing, for African Americans, therefore "stood as a complex 'certificate of human- 
 it^."'^ Their writing would always have to address and overcome the signs that differ- 
entiated them as an absence. To a degree, black writing beholden to a universal standard 
subjects itself further to the effects of that racism by having to demonstrate the "same" 
humanity, the "same" historical capacity, as whites. Aesthetic considerations would 
become secondary to a moral question. Such writing would always have to show that it 
could be as good as or the same as European writing, would always stand before an exter- 
nal judge whose normative view does not acknowledge any debt to black writing. 
If, on the other hand, black writing displays another subjectivity, if there is something 
like a b1uck subjectivity, then this exists, from the standpoint of the dominant culture, as 
fragmentary and heterogeneous in the diaspora of the New World. How would one bear 
witness, from an Afrocentric standpoint, to the subjugation of African cultures, to the 
adaptation and reincorporation of their legal codes, to the destruction of their conditions 
of existence, all carried out in the name of the the civilizing values of the West? 
A reconstructive writing that would recapture a singularly Afrocentric subjectivity 
or seek to establish blackness as a positive aesthetic would have to distinguish itself deci- 
sively from those Western values. But what is specific to that black aesthetic does not 
present itself as empirically given in what persists of a culture experiencing the disloca- 
tion of slavery. Which idioms are to be recognized and valued as distinctively Afrocen- 
tric? What has been lost in translation? Who is invested with authority to speak? These 
are all questions for a judgement that is as much juridical as aesthetic. To base the speci- 
ficity of a black subjectivity on the extant aesthetic signs of blackness - signs which are 
already invested by their relationship to an economy of self-consciousness constituting 
blackness as other - feeds into an exoticism which does not displace the limit that places 
blackness outside. 
Black writing is caught between these two poles: of anticipating a subjectivity which 
it has been denied, but which, through its inscription, will demonstrate that that subjec- 
tivity was there all along; and recovering a subjectivity which will have funded a future 
horizon distinct from the particular subjectivity of the West. 
Paradoxically, the aftermath of the Enlightenment also brought with it the thinking of 
just these questions within the West, in discourses which saw European freedom at home 
as compatible with colonialism and slavery. The emergence of the romantic discourse of 
nationalism in the nineteenth century marks an attempt to embody the space and time of 
signs taken to reflect reason, to plot the political and cultural unity of self-consciousness 
and self-determination while differentiating itself from others. 
As Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha point out, the post-Enlightenment nation 
describes an ambivalent entity.4 The dispersion of arbitrary and contingent signs - culture 
- is understood, within nationalist discourse, to reflect an internal necessity marking the 
integrity of a people with a historical self-consciousness. On the other hand, the principle 
of this self-recognition and necessity is itself constituted in the project of a nation to realize 
itself in a state, and this is performed in those cultural signs of its will. Anderson's oft-cited 
comment on the double-sidedness of the nation-state is apt: "If nation-states are widely 
conceded to be 'new' and 'historical,' the nations to which they give political expression 
always loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more important, glide into a limitless 
future."> The nation-state describes an entity pulled in two directions at the same time: 
the particular cultural gestures of the nation signify a communal past which, as a constitu- 
tive origin, enables the future universality of a self-determining will and self-conscious 
reason; while simultaneously the inscription of those gestures anticipates the universality 
which would retrospectively authorize their rootedness in a misty past. The discourse 
of nationalism, then, produces itself through an ambivalence which it seeks to rule out: 
its constitutive origins are both presupposed and must be realized in a universal self- 
consciousness. 
Gates locates the solution to this ambivalence of romantic nationalist discourse, at 
least in literary study, in the moment of formalism, and this moment is instructive pre- 
cisely because it takes on a legal form, which will allow us to return to the issue of diversity. 
Gates cites T.S. Eliot's ordering of the Western literary canon to include those texts 
said to embody the elevation of culture. In principle, that elevation is impartial, belong- 
ing to no one culture exclusively: transcending the intentional and parochial conditions 
that occasioned them, these texts speak out of, and to, the element of their universality 
(as expressed in such values as the "human condition," and so on). Considerations such as 
race, history, or other embodied differences now describe mere particularities and there- 
fore fall away in significance faced with a reason common to all humanity. Nevertheless, 
the particular expression of such transcendent values of a universal human reason could 
be identified, their milieu interpreted and their history located, only through a philologi- 
cal and etymological analysis of their appearance. 
In Gates's gloss on literary formalism, the language of the canon, then, is both the 
medium of universality, bringing its values into play, as well as the repository of an inher- 
itance through which that universality can be recognized. The revelation that values 
can be free from particularity is enabled by a turn towards the formal patterns through 
which the expression of those values is achieved. 
The implications of this gloss are that the canon reveals its literary objects as instances 
of constitutive values which are themselves given in signification; and it is because signi- 
fication and constitution are presumed to share the same universal form and reflect each 
other in language that this is possible. 
In one sense then, the form of reflection implicit in the canon is not beholden to a 
particular tradition; it claims to achieve a transparent identification of constitution with 
signification, presenting that achievement as a universal tradition, the common inheri- 
tance "of us all." 
But in another sense, the act of reflection roots itself in a particular tradition insofar 
as the fomz of that reflection has been elaborated by those discourses - legal, literary, 
philosophical, theological, and others - which describe the complex project of the West 
emanating out of both the Judaeo-Christian and the Graeco-Roman traditions. The dis- 
course of nationalism forms part of this history. 
In yet another sense, reflection is not traditional at all, insofar as the relationship 
between constitutive values and signification is not given, but rather is itself the subject 
of reflection and the object of a discovery. The (self-)understanding of the West and its 
limits opens itself up to critical inquiry: such an openness, at least, is a hope which legiti- 
mates its cultural practice and claim to universality. In interrogating its limits for the 
signs of its constitution, reflection orients itself to an outside and to a future, so that its 
form is always in the process of being completed. 
If reflection is not beholden to given traditions, to its Western past, this past is never- 
theless positioned at its centre as a virtuality - about to be actualized, and yet, having to 
be actualized, not yet centred. From this standpoint, the form of reflection which emerges 
through the discourses of the West can be said to consist in the (re)discovery of (its own) 
universality in a chain of signifying and constitutive values. 
The ethnocentrism of the West would operate, then, by effacing the constitution of 
the universal subject of reflection, a constitution which nevertheless remains active, pro- 
ducing itself in relation to an outside which it institutes as the site for the discovery of 
new signifying values. Universality is indicated as the impossibility of presenting a com- 
prehensive solution to the claims of particular signs, so that there is nothing preventing 
the establishment of regional or national canons insofar as they participate in, and become 
watchwords for, the rule of a universal law. 
In terms of cultural difference, the principle of diversity emerges in the recognition 
of the gap between constitutive values and their signification as providing the basis for 
openness and tolerance. The consensus of the liberal state is based on a reason whose con- 
stitution cannot be fathomed as such. Communities and traditions give rise to the pre- 
sumed consensus of the state, but this consensus has no particular cultural representation 
until retroactively identified in the form of individual rights. 
The management of consensus then involves a veering between the assertion that indi- 
vidual rights exist politically and are sufficiently protected by the state, and the discovery 
of social differentials, whose correction will restore the rationality of consensus. 
Issues of social justice dealt with by the liberal state have this appearance of being 
outside its proper concern and at the same time of being the means by which consensus is 
preserved. To have different cultural values outside the protection of the state is to subject 
them to an unfettered economic rationalization, but to protect cultural differences as 
minority rights, codified in a form available for their monitoring by the state, has the fol- 
lowing consequence: the real social gains achieved by the critical pursuit of minority 
tights come at the price of the further commodification and individualization of particular 
cultural differences. 
We can note this briefly with affirmative action and antidiscrimination laws. Often, 
the legitimacy of affirmative action is attacked on the grounds that it restricts the 
possibility of exercising judgement according to evaluative standards dearly held to be 
neutral, efficient, and fair. But even where such judgement can be exposed to have 
been ethnocentric and discriminatory in practice, the necessity of affirmative action is 
defended as a regrettable stopgap measure needed to redress past irrationalities and to 
restore a level playing field. This is because the level playing field can only ever be a 
regulative ideal for the state: the state is not in the business of giving a stereotyped sub- 
stantive representation of that ideal society, which would abrogate the state's formal uni- 
versality and reveal itself as once more ethnocentric. 
Similarly, when antidiscrimination protections ate instituted, they usually come under 
attack either for restricting free judgement and expression or for undermining tradi- 
tional cultural norms and values. When such protections are defended, it is in the name 
of tolerating conduct which, beyond the particular form the conduct takes, evinces a 
rational character. This rational character is governed, in the dogma of the liberal state, 
by two sometimes contradictory impulses: individuals should be free to choose their mode 
of personal fulfilment; and the connections into which they enter to that end should be 
protected if those connections, associations, communities, and so on, are not inimical to 
social utility. But, again, social utility and individual fulfilment can be given no fixed 
cultural form. 
Hence, it is only through a case-by-case demonstration of the rational basis of partic- 
ular cultural differences that recognition of those differences is awarded and the principle 
of diversity maintained. Of course, the state figures crucially in this process, assuming 
the task of scrutinizing and upholding the fairness and representativeness of the political 
process itself. But since that rationality, whose guardian the state takes itself to be, only 
has a representation in the protection of minority values, the process of adjudicating dif- 
ferences works metonymically to provide a visible guarantee of the state's rational character. 
In this scrutiny of the state, there are two operations to note. The legal recognition of 
differences leaves out something communal about their value in making them equally 
as valid as more dominant values: such a recognition moves towards an abstract general- 
ity. And, insofar as the state becomes involved in making cultural differences the object of 
knowledges identifying the irrational inequality of social position, those differences are 
progressively inscribed into the web of remedial state practices. But these two movements 
operate disjunctively - one towards a formal equivalence of values, the other towards a 
differentiation of social facts - and are attended by continual crises of governability. 
The more the law applies itself to social life as a way of managing it, the more it pro- 
duces a seriality of positive social facts dislodging the cultural difference from its commu- 
nal conditions of existence. The legal codification of social life, undertaken in the attempt 
to recover an equilibrium, the level playing field, produces further discrepancies in the 
social body relative to an original consensus which can never be given a substantial repre- 
sentation. In this respect the law is complicit in the rationalizing of cultural differences 
and the production of surplus social repressions, even as it moves to protect them. But in 
this empowerment of minorities through rights secured, there are relationships of belong- 
ing, of community, produced in the interstices of the double operation of the law. Cultural 
difference affirms names which have not yet been heard, and this means not only what is 
left out in the identification of differences under the principle of diversity, but also an 
affirmation of what is produced as unidentifiable by the state's management of consensus. 
NOTES 
1. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Writing 'Race' and the Difference It Makes," "Race," Writing, and Difference 
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 9. 
2. Ibid., 12. 
3. Ibid. 
4. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Refections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Lon- 
don: Verso, 1983), and Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). 
S .  Anderson, 19. 


Writing Cultural Difference into the Law

Kelley, Paul

Love Potions, Truth Serums

Contributors

Marchessault, Janine

Davis, Christine

Preface to  Love 
. . . the lover's discourse is today of an extreme solitude. This discourse is spoken, perhaps, by 
thousands of subjects (who knows?), but warranted by no one; it is completely forsaken by the 
surrounding languages: ignored, disparaged, or derided by them, severed not only from authority 
but also from the mechanisms of authority (sciences, techniques, arts). Once a discourse is thus 
driven by its own momentum into the backwater of the 'unreal: exiled from all gregarity, it has 
no recourse but to become the site, however exiguous, of an affirmation. 
- Roland Barthes, 1978 
This issue of Public is devoted to love's discourses, its images, its contradictions and its 
Nature. In the spirit of Roland Barthes' "fragments of a lover's discourse," we have gath- 
ered together a number of works that explore figures of love in different cultural and his- 
torical settings. 
Love has consistently been positioned in the private and feminine realm of emotion, 
pdetry, imagination and dream - as Barthes puts it: "the backwater of 'the unreal:" I t  has 
consistently been given a place of non-authority, situated in opposition to concrete reason, 
necessity and rational action. The principle aim behind this issue of Public is to explore 
and disturb the place of love. The works included here share a concern with love as histor- 
ical creation, with love as inextricably tied up in revolution, anarchy, technology, the nat- 
ural world and language - and with language as shaped by love. 
We should confess that this issue was, initially, conceptualized with a certain postmod- 
ern cynicism. We did not want to rescue love, to imbue it with a new authority that would 
level its anarchistic edge (legitimizing those fools who would do anything for love). Nor did 
we want to appear to be sanctioning some kind of 'new age' transcendentalism. Perhaps 
most of all we did not want to be sentimental. And yet as Barthes understood so well, the 
only way to be truly transgressive (which means to create a new understanding) is to 
transgress the intellectual orthodoxies that define transgression. 
Thus, the love between these sheets is not completely accounted for as discourse. And 
though it is difficult to resist the seductive teleology of the 'love story' with its promise of 
unilateral progress and resolution, we have attempted not to narrativize love. Neverthe- 
less, here is perhaps where Publiczo parts company with the "absolutely insignz;ficant order" of 
A Lover's Discourse. Two interrelated tropes inform the structuring of this issue: romantic love and 
revolutionary passion. The "amourous relation," described so eloquently by Barthes as a relation 
of Otherness, is extended to include various modalities of social existence; juxtaposing theological 
and political, universal and particular, global and narcissistic interests. We have attempted to sug- 
gest not only the profound heterogeneity of love across these different bodies but also, its function 
within the modern social imaginary. Both romantic and revolutionary passion are directed by 
'forces' (physical/political) outside and beyond the subject's control. Forces that have the power to 
dissolve boundaries and identities, to level property, to dispossess and overwhelm the self in 
"unforseeable rhythms". . .and sometimes, to transfigure the world. 
Janine Marchessault and Christine Davis 


Preface to Love

Straw, Will

The Booth, The Floor and The Wall: Dance Music and the Fear of Falling

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