In the beginning of the nineties Jacques Derrida addressed, in a colloquium on “European Cultural Identity”, certain possibilities about the different paths the new Europe could take. The address, entitled “The Other Heading”, departed with some initial concerns about what constitutes European identity and its relations towards others. What is the basis for such an identity of Europe? Could Europe transform itself, depart from the old Europe towards a community open both within itself as towards its frontiers? This article will examine some of Derrida’s hopes for this new Europe, and the path Europe has gone since his stipulation. The short answer is quite disquieting. Since his address the EU has built higher and more impenetrable borders against its African neighbours and at the same time established itself as a technocratic institution distanced from its people. We have also witnessed a rise of right-wing extremism, which may very well be connected to this particular construction of European identity. Terms like “social tourism” and the “polish plumber” flourished in various national electoral debates, and even in the academia. No more than 1 ½ year ago the French immigrants had enough of it, but the resulting riots were for the most part labelled as non-political and fragmented – former French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, now President, labelled them as “racaille” – a rabble of youths. The response was even more segregation. The relationship towards the so called Other couldn’t have been more patronizing.

In his address Derrida identifies certain characteristics in the European identity, most notably its strive to be what he calls a “heading”, an advanced point, which both declares the telos of human civilization and Europe as the captain steering the world towards this final destination. Those are the key aspects of European identity as it has been, according to Derrida, however the picture soon becomes blurred as he examines the inherent contradictions within that claim. For the heading, far from being a well-defined objective, is actually empty, there is no final resting place for Europe or for any other cultural identity for that matter. For the (political) definition of Europe as a Heading always take place in an undecidable terrain and thereby forecloses other alternatives and other objectives. Thus there is always a possibility for an other heading, a change of destination or a change of captain; “the heading of the Other”, a possibility that finally could open up to an understanding of the “other of the heading”, i.e. a relationship that doesn’t take on the hierarchical form of a Heading. Derrida’s hopes for Europe consist in the heading’s double role, as he proclaims:

“And what if Europe were this: the opening onto a history for which the changing of the heading, the relation to the other heading or to the other of the heading, is experienced as always possible? An opening and a non-exclusion for which Europe would in some way be responsible?”
Jacques Derrida, 1992: 17

For to be a cultural community one must also be a heading, one must present oneself as a heading in order to define oneself. As post-structuralism has thought us, identity is never essential – it is never given naturally – but this lack of identity only makes us aspire towards it. This aspired telos/heading is what constitutes us Europeans as a partial cultural community. But for Derrida that positioning needn’t correspond to a distancing from the Other, but could very well be an understanding of them. Derrida reminds us that we cannot simply avoid aspire to be a heading, i.e. open ourselves up to the coming of anything, which could make the return of “the phantom of the worst” (Derrida, 1992: 18) possible, but at the same time not let that memory – that identity as a Heading – keep us from opening ourselves up towards a future that we have not yet identified, to the “other of the heading”. A future that is always “to-come” so to speak. That is the path Derrida identifies for Europe, though it has not yet been one that Europe has taken.

Despite the rather gloomy picture of Europe already presented in this article, there does however seem that some of Derrida’s hopes have come true. The constant enlargement of EU is an example of that, as the EU-commissioner for enlargement, Olli Rehn, recently reminded us at the World Economic Forum in Davos: Europe has no borders to its east, and is therefore not a geographical concept but a philosophical. As such, Rehn asserted, the EU has essentially open borders. This is of course in essence a valid proclamation, since every border originally is a social construction, but that needn’t entail that the philosophical EU has no borders. In fact those borders seem rather strict. The enlargement of the EU has unfortunately not been about an opening towards the Other, which is what Derrida wanted of us, but about the alteration of the Other into oneself, illustrated by the strict demands of assimilation put on its applicants, most notably in the case of Turkey’s inclusion. The European identity is very much marked by the old idea of Europe as an advanced point, steering the world into civilization while simultaneously distancing itself towards the Other.

That identity expresses itself in many different contexts, among others the EU’s increasing technocratic character, a problem not only because of the democratic deficiency entailed with it – through a separation with the people and a lack of transparency and accountability. It is also a problem connected to the relationship towards the Other. Chantal Mouffe calls this increasing technocracy a depoliticization of politics, which aspire to foreclose every internal and external difference in the name of consensus and rationality by “putting the stress on ‘neutral politics without adversaries’” (Stavrakakis, 2005: 79). This effort, which we today find especially in the “Third Way” politics of the political centre, is not only misleading – since it fails to deal with the limits through which identity is constructed – but it also makes, argues Stavrakakis, the construction of European identity frail and weak. Thereby it leads people to other political arenas without these tendencies, which could explain the proliferation of right-wing extremist discourses in Europe today, discourses that accentuate the relation towards the Other as a harsh separation. These discourses are in that sense easier to identify with than the dry Europe constructed by the EU. In continuation this is what makes the EU’s construction of Europe – characterized by consensus and neutrality – seen as a top-down political project producing not identification but alienation. The 1991 headline of the British tabloid The Sun echoed that alienation by simply reading: “Up yours Delors!” (editorial note: Jaques Delors, former president of the European Commission)

“Third Way” politics?

But while Mouffe and Stavrakakis expresses the borderless character of this consensual politics – portraying it as only producing identification with other more conflictual discourses, such as right-wing extremism – Derrida makes an understanding of the link between it and an even greater antagonism possible, seeing them as strictly interrelated. By constructing a cultural identity around the homogeneity of consensus and deliberative rationality –to define oneself as a complete Heading in itself, and thereby closing off oneself against the always present other Heading – is only to make that demarcation stricter and more impenetrable. It does not however make that border disappear in an (imagined) universality. Consensual democracy in that view leads to a more radical difference, not only to the people habituating Europe, but also to the people outside that territory and the states aspiring to get in. Either they integrate their Heading with that of Europe or they will be kept at a distance. Those left outside the limits of consensus are thus seen as a radical Other, a completely different Heading which needs to be either decapitated or kept at an extreme distance. Today, we can, unfortunately, witness both replies in Europe’s migration politics. First of all the Schengen Agreement has now produced what is popularly called “Fortress Europe” building walls around its geographical borders keeping immigrants at a safe distance. While it is easier than ever to travel within the confinements of Europe it is harder than ever to get in. According to a recent press review over 6000 people have died trying to cross the border into Europe since 1988, most of them in boats on the Mediterranean Sea. Nowhere can the relation between politics of homogeneity and an antagonistic outside be made more visible. But it is a relationship that the EU has tried to keep hidden, illustrated by the outsourcing of its borders to Africa. The frontiers separating us are now located not in Europe, but in various African states. The EU as a political entity is a stark contrast to the vision of Derrida, which portrayed a responsible heading as one that knows its borers, its limits and is self-reflexive in its relationship towards them. Instead this outsourcing well portrays Derrida’s argument that accentuating inner homogeneity coupled with the illusion of non-borders only constructs higher borders – even though they might be more invisible.

This radical demarcation between Europe and its frontiers is directly associated with the construction of Europe as an anamnesiac Heading, as a Heading that forecloses its own future in the remembrance of its imagined past, which invariably leads to an introvert looking cultural entity and a strict separation towards the Other. Depressingly, this is the path Europe has taken. But that does not entail that this path is unchangeable, quite the contrary I would say. There is always a possibility of changing Headings, for every cultural identity is in essence contingent in character, and therefore the opening up of European identity to the other of the heading always remains a possibility. It remains a promise stemming from the future. A promise about not only knowing the Other but of opening oneself up towards them. One could “therefore invent gestures, discourses, politico-institutional practices that inscribe the alliance of these two promises or contracts: the capital and the a-capital, the other of the capital” (Derrida, 1990: 44), that defines Europe as an entity but an entity whose definition is left unstipulated. That is why Derrida’s hopes for Europe, although more than 15 years old, are still valid, and his proclamations in need of constant repetition:

”Not only to look – in the way of research, analysis, knowledge, and philosophy – for what is already found outside Europe, but not to close off in advance a border, to the future, to the to-come [à venir] of the event to that which comes, which comes perhaps and perhaps comes from a different shore”
Jaques Derrida, 1992: 69

Claes Wrangel

References:

• Derrida, Jacques, 1992, “The Other Heading” in The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, Bloomington, Indiana University Press
• Mouffe, Chantal, 2000, The Democratic Paradox, London, Verso
• Stavrakakis, Yannis, 2005, “Passions of Identification: Discourse, Enjoyment and European Identity” in Howarth & Torfing, Discourse Theory in European Politics, London, Palgrave Macmillan

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Introduction:

Sovereignty of the nomos [is defined] by means of […] a scandalous unification of two essentially antithetical principles that the Greeks called Bia and Dikē, violence and justice. Nomos is the power that, ‘with the strongest hand’, achieves the paradoxical union of these opposites.
–Giorgio Agamben, 1998: 31

How do we understand the apparent tension that exists between the U.S.’ dominant power and violence on the world stage and the U.S.’ much-voiced concerns of universal freedom and human dignity – indeed of promotion of the very international laws that the U.S. itself has been so keen to violate? How has, following Agamben’s epigraph above, the U.S. become the nomos of the international society – a sovereign power having achieved the ‘paradoxical union’ of violence and justice – normally considered as opposite logics of politics.

What this thesis analyzes is how U.S. dominant power during the George W. Bush presidency have been made possible through idealistic notions of universality. What borders are drawn towards its Other(s) and what function(s) do these borders fill in relation to the much-desired universality? But more importantly, what are the conditions of possibility of this ‘politics of deliverance’?

In my view, this simultaneous (and contradictory) presence of idealism and ‘hard’ power within U.S. foreign policy has to be analyzed and theorized in its entirety. Additionally, the effect that idealistic universalism brings about might be even more powerful and violent than what would have been the case with an explicit real-politik. If indeed the U.S. was only in hunt of national interest, then the end-point of its project would be clear in sight (relative gains, as the realist school informs us) – and resistance towards it would be easily articulated. However, the universalistic/idealistic connotations render the security narrative open-ended – not resting until ‘eternal’ security/freedom is upon us. Furthermore, such a security context may marginalize efforts of resistance or alternatively turn such efforts equally universalistic, as in the case of Al-Qaeda (Behnke, 2004). Therefore, attention to this universalistic idealism is pressing.

Furthermore, this thesis aims to contribute to an already vibrant discussion within the post-structural body of theory regarding the possibility of normative critique. Much have been said already about this War on Terror. For instance, Drucilla Cornell (2005) fears that it has foreclosed the future. And Judith Butler (2004), echoing Cornell’s concerns, have argued vividly for opening up universalist discourses.

In contrast, I would argue that such critique falls short of its goal, since, arguably, all discourses are essentially open in character – even those articulating the War on Terror, which the empirical analysis of this thesis shows. Hence, lack of openness cannot be a criteria for post-structural critique. In my view, the way forward could lie with surrendering the strategy of opening up, and instead put focus on which logics of articulation are used to deal with the inevitable ambiguity created by the non-fixity of universalism, i.e. by the term’s essential emptiness. Questions that would need further contemplation would then include how identification, desire and lack can be theoretically and strategically articulated without creating antagonisms and violent borders?

Claes Wrangel

For clarifiaction on references, see reference list in paper.

Claes Wrangel

The following is its (rather long) abstract:

Denna uppsats undersöker beteende som avviker från internationella normer och internationell lag (IL) genom en fallstudie av Marockos ockupation av Västsahara. Syftet är att förstå vad som har möjliggjort Marocko att undvika implementationen av IL och att fortsatt agera i strid med internationella normer. Konflikten i/om Västsahara har varit aktiv sedan 1975, då Marocko övertog Spaniens koloniala roll. Sedan 1990 har ett enigt FN arbetat för att få tillstånd en folkomröstning om landets självständighet. Trots konfliktens mångåriga karaktär avgränsar sig studien till att analysera konfliktens fortlevnad sedan 2001, en tidsram vald dels p.g.a. att det då skedde en förändring i IL angående konfliktens lösning samt p.g.a. de nya former av mellanstatliga relationer Marocko ingått i under efterspelet till terrorattackerna mot USA den 11/9-2001. Uppsatsen menar att dessa faktorer utgör en ny social kontext i vilken Marockos fortsatta icke-implementering av FN:s säkerhetsråds resolutioner möjliggörs på nya vis.

Genom en kritik till Alexander Wendts konstruktivism (1999) argumenterar uppsatsen för ett teoretiskt skift inom studiet av internationella relationer (IR) från konstruktivismens fokus på identitet till poststrukturalismens betoning på identifikation. Ett skifte som möjliggör en definition av sociala strukturer, inkluderat IL, som essentiellt öppna enheter, vilket i sin tur tillåter uppsatsen att förstå både strukturell förändring och avvikande beteende från internationella normer utan att hänvisa till exogena variabler – såsom Wendts rationella aktör. Vidare så strävar uppsatsen, via en diskussion mellan Derridas begrepp ”to-come” (1992) och Laclaus begrepp ”empty signifier” (1996), efter att bryta det teoretiska företräde som diskursteorin, genom Laclau & Mouffe (2001), gett den antagonistiska relationen. Diskussionen skapar dels en förståelse för hur social identifikation kan konstrueras utan en strikt uppdelning mellan vän/fiende, dels tillåter den analysen att identifiera två stycken aporior – inom-diskursiva paradoxer. Aporior som har skapat ett utrymme inom IL och inom internationella normer för Marocko att fortsätta ockupera Västsahara utan att tillskansas en position stående utanför det internationella samhället. Aporiorna har vidare lett till ett utelsutande av internationella påtryckningar som ett reellt alternativ för det internationella samfundet, ett studieresultat som inte skulle ha varit möjligt utifrån ett traditionellt Laclau & Mouffe (2001) inspirerat ramverk. Studieresultatet visar således på behovet av en mer nyanserad konceptualisering inom IR av sociala strukturer – inklusive IL och internationella normer, för att förstå dessas roll och betydelse för statliga subjekt.

Mer specifikt så använder sig uppsatsen av en diskursanalytisk metod, av uppsatsen benämnd diskursiva kedjor – en neologism skapad för att undvika Laclau & Mouffes fokus på antagonistiska relationer – för att analysera de internationella normerna angående konflikten samt vilken roll Marocko har tillskansats inom det internationella samhället – representerat i denna studie av USA. Materialet analyserat sträcker sig från officiella uttalanden och tal, kongressförhör, mänskliga rättigheter rapporter till policy dokument.

This trilogy is a small summary of a brief discussion I’ve been having with Lasse Thomassen – researcher, writer and lecturer of all things connected with Derridean theory. The discussion started off with a general question being raised in a seminar concerning whether Derrida’s concept of “to-come” (1992, multimedia) was active in all discourses or only in a few (most notably the discourses discussed by Derrida himself, which articulated democracy, justice, and hospitality, to name a few). One answer to that question – that it is indeed active in all discourses – made me feel like there could be some tight connections between the concept and Laclau’s concept of the “empty signifer” (1996), connections that might help us to bridge Laclau’s strict focus on antagonistic relationships as the moment of individuation, which would allow us to fully theorize about other kinds of social relations and their role/s in processes of identification.

But like every story this too has it’s beginning, middle and end. In this first part I will discuss the “empty signifier” and the theoretical problematics that is entailed to that concept. Problems that concern the antagonistic focus inherent in Laclau’s body of theory. In the 2nd part of this trilogy I will introduce Derrida’s “to-come” – and address some different interpretations that could be derived from it. In the final chapter I will link the two concepts together, by showing both similarities and differences, and thereafter argue that this connection could make both concepts better suited for a political non-essentialist analysis. Hence the title: Towards a Modified Discourse Theory.

Discourses as non-complete entities
But let’s start off with Laclau. First of all we need a sense of his (and of course Mouffe’s too) definition of discourse. For him, the intrinsic emptiness in all discourses is what constitutes them as unstable, inessential and contingent formations. No discourse can be a complete entity – i.e. a social construction that would be independent from all other constructions – because that would mean that the construction would be essentially given and resistant to change. It would be a meta-physical entity that we couldn’t even begin to understand. This is exactly the problem with the structural linguistic theory of Saussure – from who Laclau and Mouffe starts off. In his well known Course in General Linguistics (1974) Saussure portrayed a linguistic structure as a system of difference where every sign gets its meaning from its relational position vis-à-vis other signs. In such a system meaning is only constituted through difference and every sign becomes non-essential in character, but on the other hand, the meaning of the system itself becomes essential – something in itself as it is not standing in relation to anything at all. The relational positions of the included signs thus become fixed – which means that meaning itself is fixed. Meaning is still arbitrary – yes, and still relational – yes, but yet it remains fixed. Even Saussure recognized this problem and because of that he included the time-factor in his theoretical body. Linguistic change, he postulated, can only come from something as undefined and un-theorized as time itself (1974: 73-74).

Because of this theoretical problem Laclau and Mouffe introduced several notions, among them their concept of the “field of discursivity” (1985/2001: 111) – a field in which every discursive formation partakes in and which they cannot fully master. The field of discursivity is characterized by infinitude, i.e. by the multitude of meaning that every object/sign/element can take. This field conditions every object as discursively constituted, while at the same time it prevents every attempt to fix their meaning, since they can always be put in new relational constellations, which would assign them new meanings. Every discourse thus becomes a semi-stable fixation of the field of discursivity and there is always something outside every discursive formation – structure in Saussure’s terminlogy. This ‘outside’ makes every discourse into a non-complete entity, which allows us to theorize about structural change. But it also allows us to theorize about power – and it is for that latter analysis that the concept of empty signifier is of the utmost importance.

Emptiness at the discursive centre
The field of discusivity allows us to understand the non-complete character of meaning, but it doesn’t allow us to understand how a semi-stable meaning actually is constructed. As Laclau and Mouffe says: “Even in order to differ, to subvert meaning, there has to be a meaning.” (1985/2001: 112), and how is this meaning constructed? How is it that certain elements in the field of discursivity actually become connected to one another and thus turn themselves into a chain of relational positions (which is Laclau and Mouffe’s definition of discourse)? This is where the empty signifier comes into play. The empty signifier is the discursive centre, what Laclau & Mouffe calls a nodal point, i.e. a privileged element that gathers up a range of differential elements, and binds them together into a discursive formation. But it is only by emptying a certain signifier of its content that this process can be achieved. Its emptiness makes it possible for it to signify the discourse as a whole. The power of a certain signifier is therefore coterminous with its emptiness. It is only through this emptiness that it can articulate different elements around it, and thus produce a discursive formation. (As David wrote in his Notebook entry on Rauschenberg’s “Mother of God” (notebook): The centre is at the same time both brilliant and actually pretty much nothing at all). With this emptiness the nodal point becomes universal in its scope, but it cannot be completely universal, since it is only given meaning by the particular elements, which it stands in relation to. Rather it is becomes a signifier of an absent universality – of a lack within the discourse’s core. It becomes:

”… present as that which is absent; it becomes an empty signifier, as the signifier of this absence” (Laclau, 1996: 44)

The centre’s emptiness is what makes discourses possible, but at the same time they condition every discourse as empty – as a non-complete formation. The discursive centre, far from being an identifiable centre with a given – positive – content thus becomes a function of negativity, i.e. a function of something that the discourse lacks, to use Lacanian terms.

We can now begin to understand how this emptiness is related to power, not only the power to be able to construct a discursive formation, but also as a power-struggle between formations. For Laclau, the empty, incomplete character of every discourse is the driving factor behind politics as such. Politics, looked at from this perspective, then becomes a struggle to fill the emptiness with a given content – to suture the rift of the discursive centre and to create a universal hegemony. The political struggle is therefore a struggle of identification, of obtaining a full/complete/positive/essential identity. An impossible project, but nevertheless a project that political discourses undertake. It would be a project aiming at the end of meaning and at the end contingency; towards “… the realization of a society fully reconciled with itself” (Laclau, 1996, 69). Given the impossibility of this project, antagonisms are introduced as the ”… symbol of my non-being” (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985/2001: 125), of what keeps the political project from realizing itself, i.e. from obtaining a positive identity and thus establish hegemony. So the antagonistic relationship – what keeps us from Ourselves (with a capital O) – is the only type of identity we can obtain. Partial, yes, but at least semi-stable.This is exactly what privileges the antagonistic relationship in Laclau’s body of theory, because it constructs the antagonistic relationship as the moment of individuation, as constitutive of the discursive formation, using Torfings wording:

”… the outside is not merely posing a threat to the inside, but is actually required for the definition of the inside. The inside is marked by a constitutive lack that the outside helps to fill.” (2004: 11)

So the discursive centre is empty and needs to be filled, this is the very notion of politics that Laclau has brought us. A notion that always produces antagonisms, since Laclau’s notion of politics determines that the emptiness within needs to be filled with a given content. What keeps us from performing that operation (which is actually the field of discursivity) is symbolically articulated as an antagonism. So the only identity that we can obtain, according to Laclau, is this antagonistic version of being kept from Oneself.

But what if we could portray that inherent emptiness in other terms, terms that would still address discourses as lacking identity, but not necessarily illustrate their centres as something that needs to be filled/mastered by political projects – or even identified as possible to be filled for that matter – which would inevitably produce a symbol for that project’s failure (the antagonistic other)? What kind of effects would that reformulation have for the analyses of social relations and of processes of identification? Instead of focussing à priori on one type of relationships, we would have an abundance of relationships – all part in processes of identification and the moment of individuation. Such a reformulation would widen social space – such as it is portrayed by traditional anglo-saxan discourse theorists, and open up for a more nuanced and valid discourse analysis – more in tune with the social. Or at least, that’s what I feel.

But could we theorize such a leap without turning the discourses into positive entities? Without marking social relations as essential/stable relationships? And could we still withhold the emptiness within the discursive centre? It is my understanding that Derrida’s “to-come” gives us that possibility. And so we turn to part 2.

Claes Wrangel

References:

• Saussure, Ferdinand de, 1974, Course in General Linguistics, Fontana, London
• Derrida, Jacques, 1992, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David G. Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, Routledge, London
• Laclau, Ernesto, 1996, ”Why do empty signifiers matter to politics?” i E Laclau, Emancipation(s), Verso, London: 36-46
• Ibid, 1996, ”’The Time is Out of Joint’” i E Laclau, Emancipation(s), Verso, London: 66-83
• Laclau, E & Chantal Mouffe, 1985/2001, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Verso, London
• Torfing, J, 2004, ”Discourse Theory: Achievements, Arguments and Challenges” i Howarth, D. & J. Torfing, Discourse Theory in European Politics: Identity, Policy and Governance, Palgrave, Basingstoke

Well, these … this particular group of works were somehow sort of icons of eccentricities and … and exceptional in the sense that they didn’t fit into the art world at that time. I did them to see how far, you know, you could push an object and yet, it’d still mean something. And … I just knew that they were unique and … they were dear to me. Most of these, these works were on view in my various studios all the time. I had my sort of “Muse Wall” and they were personal, to me, and celebrated but not available. Most of the work in this collection scared the shit out of me, too. And they didn’t stop frightening me. And so, there was … there was a kind of courage that was that was built into them in their uniqueness and that, that … in their individuality that … I didn’t want to forget about either.

David Feil

To begin, there are two possible readings of the title: as the Virgin Mary, or as the expletive provoked by a witnessing of the sublime. Both aspects of the dual-reading are supported by the work, and Rauschenberg creates an interesting dialectic through the painting’s emphasis on what is absent, missing, lacking, destroyed, or forgotten.

Before I continue, I should include the caveat that I cannot remember whether the circle is entirely painted over the maps or if it is created by the maps’ border. Most articles I have come across say the former, but my instinct is to say that the maps themselves were gone. As the image remains the same regardless, I do not know why this should be such an important point, but to me the nature of the white circle, whether it is superficial or intrinsic, determines its potency.

The most immediate response to the piece, given its date of creation, would be its resemblance to the destruction of an atomic bomb. The radius of a blast drawn out on a city map would not be an unfamiliar image of the Cold War and the sublime of such mass destruction would surely warrant the exclamation, “Mother of God.” I believe that this interpretation is the one most directly visible in the piece, but at the same time, I believe that Rauschenberg, in giving the piece a title with such multiplicities of meaning, did not intend that interpretation to constrain the others, of which, we will see, there are many.

The white void is, for all intents and purposes, the subject of the work. The art’s meaningfulness is gained by Rauschenberg’s reversal of positive and negative space, and so the negative space becomes the central content. A very simple way of connecting the Virgin Mary with the piece would be to say that the void is a womb, which would also signify the unknown, unknowable origin of God. This in turn also plays on the paradox of Mary’s position as “Mother of God:” that she is the human mother of God’s son, his incarnation on Earth, who is also one with God Himself, yet she has no supremacy over the divinity of God, nor therefore of God Himself. Exactly what she can be praised for — for Christians wish to praise her as something more than a mere vessel — is often contradictory to this notion. This paradox contributes greatly to power of Rauschenberg’s image.

“He whom the entire universe could not contain was contained within your womb, O Theotokos.”

This line from an ancient Christian hymn implicates Rauschenberg’s painting in the question of what can contain what the entire universe cannot contain. Can a void contain what a map of the world cannot contain, can a painting contain it? I don’t think that this is a religious artwork in the sense of being devotional, but I do think that that Rauschenberg is accessing the idea of God as an unknowable supremity and I also believe that the realm of this work is the realm of awe. Theotokos is a Greek word which literally translates as “god-bearer,” but which is, by convention, translated into English as “Mother of God.” During the middle-ages, Theotokus icons (paintings or murals depicting the Virgin Mary with an infant Jesus) were an artform widely dispersed among Christian Europe. These icons share a common compositional style, as evidenced in these examples.

Obviously, there are no figures of the mother and child in Rauschenberg’s Mother of God (nor do I think Rauschenberg ever expected anybody, like me, to add them), but perhaps that is what the picture is truly lacking. Gold leaf was often used in the background of medieval religious art as a way of signifying a heavenly setting. Here we have lusterless city maps, which signify a purely earthly setting. The oddest compositional aspect of Rauschenberg’s work is that the circle and the maps which inscribe it are elevated on the campus, above an empty space. This raising of the main elements of the painting puts the circle at the same level as the halo in the Theotokos icons. It is not hard to imagine one of the Theotokos virgins superpositioned over this modern-day setting. Our void now becomes a halo, but what is a halo if it crowns no one?

The little snip of paper at the bottom right of the piece contains an excerpt of text that reads:

“An invaluable spiritual road map. As simple and fundamental as life itself — Catholic Review.”

Rauschenberg often includes snippets of text, comic-strip panels, of advertisements like this as a way to play off the meaning provided by other parts of the work as well as the larger image itself. Here, the quote almost even seems like a punchline to a joke. The maps are not connected except by force and none leads anywhere. They are noise surrounding a peaceful source. The dialectic created between the void and this quote reminds me very much of a line from Stevens’s essay “Concerning a Chair of Poetry” (library) where he states “the Chair would be either a brilliant center or pretty much nothing at all.” Mother of God is, in fact, both.

David Feil

Online Resources:
• Introduction to Rebels With A Cause Exhibit, Timothy Anglin Burgard
• ‘Theotokos’, wikipedia
• ‘Robert Rauschenberg’, wikipedia
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, sfmoma.org

In anticipation of an upcoming article on the deconstruction of song and rhetoric in the 1967 album Corrected Slogans, I have prepared a smaller introductory article from the fair amount of background information that came out of my research. The album is obscure and information about it is scattered in many different sources, so I hope this compilation of facts will find itself useful outside of being a brief introduction to That’s Not It readers unfamiliar with the album itself.

In addition to this introduction, I have also put audio files of a few of the songs in the Multimedia section and placed the lyrics to the album under a new page in the Library.

The Birth of Corrected Slogans

In the late 1960′s in Houston, Mayo Thompson and his group the Red Krayola were at the forefront of the American experimental music scene, transcending the formulaic limitations of the psychadelic genre and the aesthetic boundaries of noise. Their first record, The Parable of Arable Land, released in 1968 is half composed of sound collages recorded with the help of an almost 100-person collective known as The Familiar Ugly. These six tracks make the Velvet Underground’s contemporaneously ‘experimental’ “Velvet Underground & Nico” look like the pop album it truly is. The original formation of the Red Krayola recorded two more albums in the following two years (although one, Coconut Hotel, which the label considered too much a departure from traditional music, remained unreleased until Drag City put it out on cd in 1995). Thompson’ solo album Corky’s Debt to his Father, a collection of cleverly worded and intricately arranged country and blues songs, was recorded in 1969 and showcased his ability to work creatively within more conventional song structures.

In the early 1970′s, the original line-up of the Red Krayola had dispersed and Thompson himself had moved to New York where he became involved in the visual art scene and worked as a studio assistant for Robert Rauschenberg (wikipedia). At the same time, London-based collective Art & Language was setting up a New York branch which attracted artists, historians, and theorists such as Joseph Kosuth (wikipedia), Terry Smith, Charles Harrison, and Michael Corris, and which was later joined by Thompson himself, who contributed to and assisted with the publication of the group’s periodical The Fox. As the New York and London branches became more divided, Thompson, who was disillusioned with the American scene, continued to work closely with the English members and eventually relocated to London.

The history of Corrected Slogans goes back to at least 1973, when the idea was originally proposed. The story of the proposition itself (which I imagine has been somewhat fictionalized in the intervening decades, but will repeat here despite this) goes as such: Thompson played Corky’s Debt to his Father for the members of the group who agreed that the songwriting was impressive, though questioned whether or not the songs were too ‘personal’. This comment intrigued Thompson who either then dared the group or accepted the groups’ dare that they would create an album together, where Thompson would set to music whatever words the members chose as lyrics. The contest-like aspect of this story does not seem an unlikely source of Corrected Slogans, as the lyrics seem almost purposely written to be the most un-singable material that could be given a songwriter. And so the story of this strange album’s birth is told

David Feil

Music Resources
• “Corrected Slogans” was reissued on cd in 1997 by Chicago-based Drag City Records and can be purchased from their online catalog (as can all other Krayola releases) at dragcity.com.
• The album is also available in mp3 form through iTunes.

Print Resources
• The August, 2005 issue (258) of music journal The Wire, features a cover-story on Thompson. The back-issue can be purchased through their website, thewire.co.uk.

Online Resources:
• 
  ‘Art & Language’, wikipedia
• ‘Mayo Thompson’, wikipedia
• Comprehensive Mayo Thompson / Red Krayola Discography, white-rose.net/redcrayola/
• Harrison, Charles. ‘Essays on Art & Language’ books.google.com

The swinging bouquet of flowers is an image repeated (in various settings) throughout the film and, in its being both one of the first and last images presented, comes to have a certain metonymic representation of the prisoners’ relationship. The guard, patrolling the outside of the prison, sees this attempt at union and is inspired by the act to tour the inner cells and spy on the inmates. At the end of the film, after the guard has forced himself upon the older prisoner, the bouquet of flowers is shown again, and this time finally the grasping hand succeeds. It is a substantial act in that the other intermediaries between the prisoners (smoke, sound, fantasy, and the guard himself) are transitory and ungraspable, though perhaps in the world of the prison where possessions are not likely to survive, this could be a negative quality — in fact, we only ever see the flowers outside of the cells themselves. Perhaps the flowers only exist when they are in the act of being tossed, and not when they are held in either one hand or the other. The act of tossing itself is the only thing the prisoners share — the flowers are merely a place-holder, a replacement for physical union, transferred from one hand to the other. Is this a critique of the idea of a gift, especially, in the case of flowers, a romantic gift, that Genet is putting forth. Do gifts function outside of other communication? Do they carry a different significance because of this? The cell window is literally an access to an external world.

The second main act of communication in the film is that of the straw carrying smoke through the cell wall. The straw has an interesting role in the prisoners’ world because while its function is primarily one of communication, its imagery is that of penetration and ejaculation, and its content is simply reflection. The old prisoner, the one instigating the rite, gets no joy from merely releasing his breath into the other chamber; a response is required, a confirmation, which in this case is nothing more meaningful than to have smoke blown back into his own cell. On one hand, this is dialog at its most basic level. It is also an act of reflection, turning the wall, as far as communication is concerned, into a functional mirror. With this analogy, the other prisoner becomes merely Reflection made human, the personified act of casting something back. Because the other figure is entirely absent outside of this reflective act, the older prisoner’s act also appears in a way to be masturbatory. The accessing of the other cell is merely the accessing of the imaginative world of fantasy that is always so closely tied to Genet’s masturbatory acts. What could be more dreamlike than feeling the unbodied breath of your beloved?

The third main image of communication between the prisoners is, in an odd twist, the guard himself. It is also the main act through which the young inmate effects the older. The younger inmate, noticing the guard’s eye peering in on him, provokes him by putting on a performance of love with the older inmate next door. The ultimate motives of this act are unclear, but the intention is: the boy is ridding himself of both admirers by setting them against each other. In one sense, this act creates the only physical union present in the film. It is the only true act of intercourse. The second consequence is contrary to physicality: in a second sense, the boy’s act is the most masturbatory and fantastic of them all. The two men involved in the union, the guard and the older prisoner, are both fantasizing of the young man — the guard with a passionate image of two bodies, the prisoner with a dream of freedom and of partnership. The young man, alone in his cell knows that he is also occupying two dreams at once. This is his act of power. In manipulating the guard as his messenger and vessel, does the boy then, even if momentarily, have some sort of dominion over the prison itself. During this scene, his cell becomes an elevated seat and perhaps this, more than anything else, was the motive that drove his betrayal of the older prisoner. Though he has no visual access to the happenings in the other cell, he has a knowledge of what is occurring, and in a certain way, this could be considered an act of surveillance, if only a surveillance of fantasy, which seems to me like an idea Genet himself would be aware of — and enjoy. The boy becomes Fantasy itself. And the attempt of the older prisoner at the end of the film to reconnect with his neighbor by pounding on the wall, reveals the transience, the unreality, of their connection despite their proximity.

Genet has turned the division of the prison into its component cells into something like a compartmentalized mind where dreams and fantasies lay dormant until something of reality sparks them. Like The Balcony, Un Chant d’Amour presents an interior world, resembling something of consciousness itself, being accessed by and interacting with the outside. The film begins and ends with the guard in the open air looking curiously at the arms reaching out of the cell windows. And, like in The Balcony, the film runs in a cycle. Their has been no advance in the prisoners’ relationships, nor in the guard’s position outside of them. They are no more connected than at the beginning. This is why I feel it is the temporarily enabled acts of communication themselves that remain the film’s most important images.

David Feil

On-line Resources
• The film is available to download as an .avi file via UbuWeb.
• A high-quality DVD version can be purchased through the British Film Institute.
• The streaming version of this film (top) is taken from Google Video.

Further Reading & Viewing
• notcoming.com: review
• Jerry Tartaglia’s “Ecce Homo” from 1989 splices clips from Un Chant d’Amour with gay sex films to investigate the homosexual identity and the cultural taboos surrounding it. It is available to watch online at UbuWeb.
• Rainer Fassbinder’s last movie before his death was an adaptation of Genet’s novel Querrelle de Brest. Though Genet was alive when the film was released, he refused to see it because he would not be allowed to smoke cigarettes in the theater.

Part of the reason for my recent absence from That’s Not It has been the long hours I’ve been putting into my other pet project, yet unnamed but which I’d feel comfortable calling the Blackbird Project for now. After a few months of coding and learning, there are now some results to show and because I am attempting to get a grant to continue working on the project full-time this summer, I’ve created a short web page to introduce others to the project. I thought reader’s of That’s Not It might be interested to see what I’ve been working on and so I proudly present: n Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

In essence, the project is an application (as of yet only running locally on my laptop) which is able to recombine texts based on user-defined relationships. Right now the content is inputted in the form of poetic texts, but could conceptually work with anything. I think the real meat of the application is its potential to also act as a novel form of translator, where instead of just two separate texts you have texts in two different languages. This type of translation is interesting to me because it would be completely ignorant of the meaning of the poem, and would only translate the relationships of the words in a poem (arguably, the “poetry” itself). For more information on how the application works, please visit the website, and here’s hoping that grant comes through.

David Feil

Secondly, we’d like to take this time to summarize in short the first two months of That’s Not It. We just had our 1000th visitor (1166 as we speak), and there are even a few feed-subscribers out there. Thank you! We have noticed a steady interests in our poetry/literature/philosophy analyses. This is good news, we think, since a lot of those posts are now placed way back in our archives. That means the format works well and that posts are nicely categorized. Not surprisingly, our posts discussing concrete political issues have a shorter life-span, fading off as the interest in the political issue itself is waning.

Claes & David

ps. Please use the comments form below if you have any feedback concerning That’s Not It’s first two months.