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Forgetting

Gabrielle Dixon-Ritchie

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

UNSW

School of the Arts and Media

Faculty of Social Sciences

May 2018 .. •

• PLEASE TYPE • THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES ' Thesis/Dissertation Sheet • Surname or Family name: Dixon-Ritchie ' First name: Gabrielle Other name/s: Abbreviation for degree as given in the • University calendar: PhD • School: Sct-ool of Arts and Media Faculty: Facuty of Arts and Social Sciences

Title: New Materialism: Forgetting Post modernism

Abstract 350 words maximum:

In their monograph on the emerging cuttural paradigm known as 'new materialism', Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin argue for a transversal approach to dealing with various dualisms that dog thinking, such as between matter and , or between ·realist essentialism and social constructivism" (New Materialism 98). Ttis transversal approach is an affirmative play of conceptual immanence rather than the implementation of a transcendental ordering through the operation of conceptual negation. They contend that new materialism ·cuts across postmodernist and modernist paradigms as it shows that both start from a distinctive pole of what [Claire) Colebrook (2004, 56) has called 'the /materiality dichotomy'" (New Materialism 108). In response to the obscurity that attends this call to ·cut across· postmodernism, this thesis delivers a series of distinct performances - predominantly deconstructionist and deterritorialising - that demonstrate and clarify the details of this transversal action. By engaging specific textual iterations of postmodernism across three diverse media types - prose, film, and poetry - this thesis elucidates how and why postmodernism is productively reconceived in line with various new materialist problems and insights. Ttis thesis argues that new materialism engages postmodernism via a 'dual action'. This includes the recognition of postmodernism, on the one hand, as both actual and able to be negated, and on the other hand, as ethereal and implicated in new materialism's own cultural-theoretical becoming. Part One argues that a distinctly West Indian materialist is at work in Dionne Brand's novel, In Another Place, Not Here, which has partly been construed as postmodern. Part Two draws entirely on the cinematic philosophy of to make manifest several ways that cinematic postmodernism can and should be re-thought for its more material, textt.ral properties. Finally, Part Three contends that Kate Fagan's collection of poetry, The Long Moment, which has also been read as postmodern, is an of complexity theory, or rather, that it mobilises the materialist pragmatics that Deleuze and Felix Guattari defend in A Thousand Plateaus: Gapitalism and Schizophrenia.

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Date ...... Table of Contents

Acknowledgements iii

Abstract iv

Introduction 1

Part One: New Materialism and Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here 30 Doubleness and its In/visible Third Eye 41 Desires Material and Ideal 52 In Limbo: The Event and the Machine 58 “Here Blood was Long and Not Anything that Ran Only in the Vein”1: Dialectics and Deconstruction 66 The Caribbean and Adela 68 Adela and “The Woman They Left Her With”, or, Mirelda Josefena 70 “The Woman They Left Her With”, Adela, and Elizete 72 Verlia and her Family 76 Verlia and her Uncle 80 Verlia’s Caribbean Family (Papa Ti) and Verlia’s Uncle from Sudbury 82 Dialectics and Deconstruction Caught in a Riptide Abena and her Mother 83 The Gravity and of Matter: Derrida to Deleuze 89

Part Two: A Deleuzian Taxonomy of Postmodern Film Chapter I: The Cinema of Spectacle 97 The -Image: Léos Carax’s Boy Meets Girl 107 The Affection-Image: Léos Carax’s The Night is Young 113 The Impulse-Image: Besson and Beineix 124

Chapter II: The Action-Image: Avatar and District 9 136

1 Dionne Brand, In Another Place, Not Here 39.

i Criticism Thus Far: Computing or Perpetuating a Lingering Aristotelianism 143 The Two-Faced Action-Image: Avatar as Utopian ‘Large Form’ and District 9 as Dystopian ‘Small Form’ 148 The Signs of Genesis of the Large and Small Forms: The ‘Imprint’ and the ‘Vector’ as Insemination and Dissemination 157 Noosigns – The ‘Classic Image of Thought’ and the ‘Thought of the Outside’ 161

Part Three: “Aesthetics in Welcome Crisis”2: The Long Moment as Transversal, New-Lyricist, Post-/ Poetry 170 Critical Response Thus Far 171 The Long Moment as Post-/Language Poetry 182 Testing Waters: The Long Moment as Deleuzoguattarian 188 ‘Lighthouse series’ 190

Conclusion 213

Works Cited 216

2 Kate Fagan, The Long Moment 24.

ii Acknowledgements

Deep thanks to my supervisor, Liz McMahon, for providing enduring encouragement and support.

For performing the final proofreads, thanks to Kate Livett and Brook Emery. Thanks Kate, for your kind enthusiasm and for meticulously refreshing the thesis’ works cited list in line with the most recent MLA referencing system. Thanks Brook, for bringing your poet’s eye and measure to the thesis, for seeing what I could not.

Thank you to my co-supervisor, Brigitta Olubus, as well as to Sigi Jottkandt, to Fiona Morrison, and to Lisa Trahair for their insightful feedback as readers in progress reviews over the years.

Thank you to Scott Slovic for being a kind and inviting host in Moscow, Idaho, on a research trip in 2013.

Thank you to UNSW’s GRS for funding both this research trip and a conference trip to Kelowna, Canada, in 2012.

Thanks to my family. To Robyn Dixon, Sue Emery, and Brook Emery, for copious practical and emotional support.

Thanks to my dear friend and gentle-hearted confidence instiller, Helen Rydstrand, for being an inclusive and invaluable source of inspiration and wisdom.

iii Abstract

In their monograph on the emerging cultural paradigm known as ‘new materialism’, Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin argue for a transversal approach to dealing with various dualisms that dog current thinking, such as between matter and meaning, or between “realist essentialism and social constructivism” (98).3 This transversal approach is an affirmative play of conceptual immanence rather than the implementation of a transcendental ordering through the operation of conceptual negation. They contend that new materialism “cuts across postmodernist and modernist paradigms as it shows that both epistemologies start from a distinctive pole of what [Claire] Colebrook (2004, 56) has called ‘the representation/materiality dichotomy’” (108).4

In response to the obscurity that attends this call to “cut across” postmodernism, this thesis delivers a series of distinct performances – predominantly deconstructionist and deterritorialising – that demonstrate and clarify the details of this transversal action. By engaging specific textual iterations of postmodernism across three diverse media types – prose, film, and poetry – this thesis elucidates how and why postmodernism is productively reconceived in line with various new materialist problems and insights.

This thesis argues that new materialism engages postmodernism via a ‘dual action’. This includes the recognition of postmodernism, on the one hand, as both actual and able to be negated, and on the other hand, as ethereal and implicated in new materialism’s own cultural-theoretical becoming.

Part One argues that a distinctly West Indian materialist deconstruction is at work in Dionne Brand’s novel, In Another Place, Not Here,5 which has partly been construed as postmodern. Part Two draws entirely on the cinematic philosophy of

3 Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (Michigan: Open Humanities Press, 2012). 4 The attribution of this citation to Colebrook alone is erroneous. It comes, in fact, from an article co-authored by Colebrook and Abigail Bray, ‘The Haunted Flesh: Corporeal Feminism and the Politics of (Dis)Embodiment’: “a theory of sexual difference that relies on constitutive negation may best be overcome not by turning to the body or attacking representation but by questioning the primacy of the representation/materiality dichotomy.” Signs, vol.24, no.1, 1998, pp. 35-67. 5 Dionne Brand, In Another Place, Not Here (New York: Grove Press, 1996).

iv Gilles Deleuze to make manifest several ways that cinematic postmodernism can and should be re-thought for its more material, textural properties. Finally, Part Three contends that Kate Fagan’s collection of poetry, The Long Moment,6 which has also been read as postmodern, is an aesthetics of complexity theory, or rather, that it mobilises the materialist pragmatics that Deleuze and Félix Guattari defend in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.7

6 Kate Fagan, The Long Moment (Applecross, Western Australia: Salt Publishing, 2002). 7 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (The University of Minnesota: Continuum, 1987).

v Introduction

An embryonic cultural theory, in confrontation with the prospect of its own disciplinisation, ‘new materialism’ is vulnerable to the transcendentalisation that it claims to thwart. Two of the first scholars to propose the contours of this new materialism, Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, maintain that if the movement is to effect a genuine revolution of thought, then it must reveal itself as something other than the negation of ‘previous’ scholarly paradigms; it must not “consist of the dualistic overthrow of a seemingly outdated framework” (87). And yet, time and again, scholars of new materialism are found to situate their work contra the linguistic and cultural turns of the twentieth century, the acme of which is postmodernity.

This seeming inconsistency – new materialism’s problematic burgeoning into a consolidated cultural paradigm that seems hypocritically to refute negation – can be resolved when one registers the details of its twofold and paradoxical action, and grants priority to its operation of becoming.8 The new materialist turn is in one a reaction to the linguistic turn and so comes as a retaliating and negating attempt to shed the desiccated skin of postmodernism and its social constructivist leanings by installing a quasi-essentialist materialism in its place. This is a concrete materialism, which by means of practical and didactical necessity, is not commensurate with the stipulation of scholarly tolerance that Dolphijn and van der Tuin say must be a new materialist hallmark. In another sense however, the new materialist turn struggles to destabilise – or, better yet, to precede – the gridlocked opposition between material reductionism and social constructivism, and so operates as a fertile space of hybrid and multivalent conceptualisations of matter and materialism. Critically, this particular function of new materialism’s emergence undermines the validity of its other ostensible function as a distinct cultural paradigm or as an applicable theoretical-critical lens.

8 In ‘Agentic Capacities and Capacious Historical Materialism: Thinking with New Materialism in the Political Sciences’, Diana Coole compiles a list of some of the most prominent new materialist “trends”, the first of which she says is the precedence given to an ontology of becoming over an ontology of being. 1 To best engage the finer particularities of new materialism’s complex relationship with its cultural-theoretical predecessor – postmodernism – this thesis probes a series of professedly postmodern texts, and in so doing, performatively reshapes them in line with new materialist problems and insights. This thesis argues that new materialism considers postmodernism on the same ‘dual’ terms – via its double action – that it does of matter and materialism. That is, both, as concrete and actual (and oft-times spotted with ideas and realities of brute inertia), and as intensive and propelled by a more spectral power. The first of its actions or modes is more amenable to logical thinking; it is the perspective from which this thesis’ overarching contention has purchase. The other new materialist action unravels the logic of the first and reinstates an element of contingency as its premise. This comes as a type of performative argumentation that yields a selection of smaller arguments that are speckled throughout the thesis. The thesis’ textual scope is large and defies simple integration. However – strange as it might sound – contingency only structures the whole, or the main of the thesis, as a manner of corroding the assurance and authority of a totalising truth claim about postmodernism or materialism – or as a way of engendering openness and indeterminacy, rather than closure and determinacy, as its premise (which is concurrently a playful and shadowy mime of Quentin Meillassoux’s recent metaphysical charge that reality’s only necessity is contingency, which is returned to later in the Introduction). The contingency of the whole is rectified by the internal order of the thesis’ three parts, each of which pursues more focused arguments grounded in textual analyses.

In coherence with the ‘first’ part of new materialism’s ‘double action’, this thesis selects for analysis a series of distinct postmodern texts. But in the spirit of emphasising the primacy of becoming, which is the ‘second’ part of new materialism’s ‘double action’, this thesis shows three of the various ways that new materialism generatively forgets postmodernism. Part One both concurs with postmodernist interpretations of Dionne Brand’s novel, In Another Place, Not Here, and then gently dispels these interpretations by way of illuminating the more pressing Caribbean-materialist-deconstruction that impels the novel. Part Two similarly takes postmodernism as its provisional starting point, though this time

2 focusing on a series of postmodern films and showing how their postmodern designation, though viable in one sense, can also be undercut when one pares the films back to their materialist using the cinematic taxonomy of Gilles Deleuze. Part Three contends that Kate Fagan’s collection of poetry, which has widely been construed postmodernist in its critical circulation, can also be cognised as a new materialist entanglement, where poetry and poetics, or text and world, are not differentiated in the crass, reiterative, and pre-emptive ways that normalise dualism (as in this very explication, which already marks the duality – ‘text and world’ – as discrete and legible, when this is really a kind of imagined abstraction with profound concrete variability).

New materialism is an unusual materialism. This materialism is not the commonplace, if oft-criticised, commodity-driven commercialism that seeds consumerist desire. It is also not the materialism that is commodity fetishism’s strongest opponent: dialectical materialism – although new materialism certainly engages with dialectical materialism in many ways because of its theoretical heritage and propensity. In fact, new materialism simultaneously applauds and divorces itself from a Marxian materialism, wherein some of its most vocal proponents, such as Diana Coole and William E. Connolly, work to retain the echo of a political Marxism in their new materialist projects. 9 New materialism appreciates the political traction that a Marxist materialism established as an alternative to a Hegelian – new materialism withdraws from any notion of an exhaustive idealism (though Hegel was of course no simple idealist), not least among them the social constructivisms espoused by the cultural and linguistic turns.

9 Hailing from the political sciences, Diana Coole and William E. Connolly attempt to list (independently) some of the trends of a new materialist ontology, while endowing the theory with their own specialised Marxist twists. In ‘The “New Materialism” and the Fragility of Things’ (2013), Connolly aggrandisingly indexes its “Ten Tenets” before describing his own critique of neoliberal capitalism as a volatile system amidst other self-organisational systems, and in “Agentic Capacities and Capacious Historical Materialism: Thinking with New Materialism in the Political Sciences”, Coole articulates roughly six points of orientation for a new materialist ontology upon which she then proposes her of a “capacious historical materialism”. The overlap in their cataloguing makes clear the different ways that aspects of new materialism can be assembled from different perspectives and towards a multitude of purposes.

3 Nevertheless, new materialists are mostly inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion that as a dialectical alternative, a Marxist materialism is yet another kind of (humanist) transcendentalism that is predicated on a program of ‘negative difference’. Dolphijn and van der Tuin credit Manuel DeLanda and Rosi Braidotti for hatching the term ‘new materialism’ in light of the influence of French philosophers like Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Deleuze and Guattari; they affirm that DeLanda and Braidotti “first began using the term ‘neo-materialism’, or ‘new materialism’, in the second half of the 1990s for a cultural theory that does not privilege but focuses on what Donna Haraway (2003) would call ‘naturecultures’ ” (153). Hence, they suggest that one of the primary features of new materialism is its attempt to replace dualist thinking with .

Clearly then, many potent Deleuzian currents run through new materialist discourse, and it is for this reason crucial to register Deleuze’s own resistance to the materialist label. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost flag in their introduction to New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, if pressed to advocate a philosophical position, Deleuze would not, “despite his radical empiricism and some evocative descriptions of materialisation” (9), have picked ‘materialist’ at all. Coole and Frost suggest that ‘vitalist’ might hold more traction as a Deleuzian descriptor. In any case, new materialism’s healthy mistrust of its own titular security should fan out into an even more strengthening skepticism about some of the limitations of its role as the cultural theoretical binder for very different (and in some , mutually exclusive) materialist philosophies (some of which would not even necessarily call themselves materialist).

It is easy to see that problems inhere in the different ideas of materialism and matter that are employed both by individual critics who abuse multiple understandings of materiality interchangeably and sometimes without observed distinction, and simply, by different critics who have different projects. In ‘Agentic Capacities and Capacious Historical Materialism: Thinking with New Materialism in the Political Sciences’, Coole helpfully condenses the gamut of often-conflicting new materialist operations and objectives into two pivotal concerns that seem to serve as baselines for new materialist preoccupation. Coole contends that:

4 [T]here are two rather fundamental areas where there is sufficient overlapping around a distinctive reorientation for these areas to serve as identifying markers of new materialist thinking. The first concerns an ontology of becoming, in which the very processes involved in the materialisation of matter are being redescribed, the second entails renewed attention to actual material changes and processes that are currently underway, changes whose very complexity and volatility are congruent with the rhythms of new materialist ontology while also imparting a certain urgency to studies of emergent materialisations. (452-3)

By “actual material changes and processes” Coole imparts a sense of material concreteness and its flux, where objects and things manifest distinction, but are subject to various forms of decay, alteration, regeneration, and exponential expansion. An “ontology of becoming”, as new materialism’s other predominant area of concern, communicates an idea of processes that are not always actual. This is a materialism of intensity, and it is fascinated by the modes of ontological genesis that precede human and that sometimes even precede actuality.

These two new materialist divide the work of Jussi Parikka and Claire Colebrook in two recent essays. In ‘New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter’, Parikka makes a strong case for embracing non- solid, “weird materialities that do not necessarily bend to human eyes and ears” (96), an imperative inspired in large part by his attempt to conceptualise the complex nature of technological media, embroiled in networks that are at least environmental, industrial, political, scientific and commercial, and where abstraction and concreteness are dizzyingly entangled. New materialism, according to Parikka, must register the ephemerality of materiality, it must be “the intensive excavation of [the] where (and when)” of media materiality. Parikka grants that “[t]here is a fair amount of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari involved in saying materialism has to be invented continuously anew – not just discovered for instance in technological specificity or scientific contexts” (98). On the flip side of this materialism of becomings forwarded by Parikka, Colebrook proffers a materialism that seems almost to petrify the aesthetic object in order to avoid the potential collapse of matter and meaning – for matter-meaning conflation is often the dubious quick-fix supplied when critics find themselves accosted by the problematic of this opposition. 5 In ‘Not Kant, Not Now: Another Sublime’, Colebrook argues that the aesthetic object is “radically material”, claiming: “[n]o matter what we do in terms of isolation of their elements – ranging from the sense of events to single words or characters – those projections of meaning are distinct from the material object” (150). Colebrook, like Parikka, is scrupulous about the importance of determining the material specificity of the object or process of inquiry, although Parikka focuses on the side of the spectrum that is concerned with material intensity while Colebrook’s evaluation is concerned with material actualisation (by way of what Deleuze and Guattari would call “double articulation”). Parikka’s and Colebook’s respective positions here typify what would be, then, the Deleuzian enunciation of new materialism’s ‘double action’. There is also a deconstructionist air to their projects because both critics are striving counter-intuitively either to upend science and technology from the actuality with which it is habitually allied (Parikka), or to upend aesthetics from its normative pole of intensity (Colebrook).

New materialism’s ‘double action’ is also at play in individual new materialist projects. Stacy Alaimo’s of “trans-corporeality”, developed in Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, can also be unpicked along the lines of a twofold action, but rather than exhibiting a Deleuzian enunciation, Alaimo is inspired more by the deconstructionism of . Alaimo argues for a renewed consideration of the of nature and a materialist framework – trans-corporeality is a strike against the linguistic turn: it “counters and critiques the obdurate, though postmodern, humanisms that seek transcendence or protection from the material world” (4). However, Alaimo also contends that the nature/culture divide is “not sustainable” (4). In the first instance, Alaimo re-praises nature over culture, and in the second she addles the logic of their opposition. As an extension to this, Alaimo decays some of those stale oppositions that effectively operate in support of the duality between postmodernism and materialism. She objects to the ideological fracturing of “humans” from “environments”, proffering “trans-corporeality” as the register of all those theories now cognisant of the profound permeability of human and non-human material bodies. Suffice it to say, antiquating the self-sufficiency of the ‘human’ and ‘environment’, or ‘self’

6 and ‘world’ can be seen to circuitously lay the groundwork for an interrogation of the opposition between social constructivism and material essentialism.

Alaimo’s project is of particular value to the new materialist scene of action because her work proves that there is space for deconstruction in new materialist thinking. New materialism periodically casts glints of disapproval towards deconstruction for being marooned in language, on reams of infinite linguistic inscription that, like the deep end of social constructivism, can only conceive of material corporeality through the warp of its own textualising mirage. Alaimo, like a handful of other feminist materialists, 10 uses posthumanism as a tool for repurposing deconstruction in materialist terms. If deconstruction is not glued to an obsolete idea of a strictly autonomous human author (which it never really was, in large part), then its functions assume a much broader sweep, it is allowed to penetrate the physical, and to sneak into all of nature’s shifting crevices. Alaimo shows that it is time to debunk the myth that biology and other sciences offer certain fixtures against which cultural studies have impressed their own social indeterminacies. According to Alaimo, biology, nature, and materiality are areas of study which are equally inchoate as cultural studies, alleging: “perhaps the only way to truly oust the twin ghosts of biology and nature is, paradoxically, to endow them with flesh, to allow them to materialise more fully, and to attend to their precise materialisations” (6). Discernably, Alaimo’s reification of the concepts of Biology and Nature (turning them into biology and nature) is itself conceptual. However, her intra-disciplinary analyses (of people suffering from the condition of multiple chemical sensitivity, of environmental justice issues taken up in fiction, of the “material memoir”, which incorporates “science writing, activism, genealogy, and autobiography, interdigitating objective scientific knowledge with subjective autobiographical rumination […]” [23]) really show how the conceptual and the concrete are “interdigitated”, deconstructed, and reconfigured. So it matters not that her undertaking ostensibly begins in writing, or that her “materialisation” of “flesh” is not necessarily the dour ingress to a brute or practical physicality that is supposedly a-conceptual.

10 See, for instance Vicki Kirby’s Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (2011). 7 Already, in explicating the Derridean or the Deleuzian enunciations of new materialism’s ‘double action’ – by way of Alaimo’s, Colebrook’s, Parikka’s, and Coole’s11 projects – it is evident that even while the ‘double action’ serves as an indicator of certain centralising new materialist trends, there is still quite a bit of looseness given to either side of the ‘action’ or imperative, and its relation to the other. This necessary slack is only increased when new theories are enveloped within new materialism’s purview – even already there is some disconnect with the Deleuzian and Derridean enunciations in the examples presented. Obviously this thesis privileges Deleuzian terminology when describing the ‘double action’ along the lines of the actual and the intensive. The actual is the dimension where terms and entities are extended in time and/or space – it is where ideas subsist and knowledge is communicable, and where things can be sensuous and perceptible. The intensive, on the other hand, cannot be directly perceived, but only intuited through its effects. It is on the intensive register that materiality assumes a much weirder and more immaterial magnitude. Intensity is complex, but actuality is no less so for being apparent, for appearing to our senses, empirically or rationally. Furthermore, processes and matters in actuality can be differently mercurial, and change can occur at great speeds in actual affairs also. Actuality is also abundant with its own weird, incorporeal materialities. A summary of their relation via the ‘double action’ might be to say that the intensive (the ‘second’ new materialist imperative) is one of the imperceptible catalysts for actual material change (the ‘first’ new materialist imperative).

Although this thesis recognises new materialism’s imperatives as ‘dual’, from one perspective at least, it would be a mistake to oppositionalise the actions, which

11 Coole also describes her own project – which is an attempt to conceptualise what she calls a “capacious historical materialism” – along the lines of the ‘double action’ that attends her description of the dual ideas of matter that new materialists share. She writes, of her own materialist mission: “In this sense, it does understand matter in a rather straightforward, uncomplicated way as the actual, sensuous, corporeal, milieu of everyday survival; as commodities and consumer durables, the hardwiring and detritus of the cityscape, the vegetative landscape of wet and green stuff. But in order to understand its materialization and, from a critical perspective, the way it is entangled with power relations, it must attend to the microscopic and macroscopic, the molecular and molar. This means tracing politico-economic, geopolitical and biophysical circuits, conduits and networks through which matter passes as it is transformed, given surplus value, degraded, rerouted, hoarded and so on” (‘Agentic Capacities’ 455-6).

8 are only really nominally antinomic. In fact, this thesis’ argument rehearses one of the problems and redresses that are often cited in new materialist discourse, which is the problem of dualism and new materialism’s attempts to think a more enmeshed meta-/physical register that precedes this too-discriminating dualisation. In her article, Coole lists some of new materialism’s emerging trends, one of which is “its refusal of dualisms or of what are considered to be anachronistic categories […]” (454). Coole documents some of the dualisms that are most targeted by new materialists – including subject/object, matter/ideal, human/nonhuman, natural/social – which together show that new materialists are especially invested in dismantling the human of its long-held and self-imposed entitlements and assumptions. Coole also summarily stages the shift from dualism to non-dualism by way of a shift from epistemological framing to ontological framing: “If I can express this rather baldly, dualism is approached here not so much as a philosophical or linguistic problem than as a misreading or idealisation of real processes of emergent materialisation” (454).

Allegedly then, this thesis enacts a kind of “misreading or idealisation” of new materialism’s action, because by describing it as ‘dual’ there is always one shade of it that we mean to suggest and fathom as oppositional. Above we wrote that in a more significant sense new materialism’s imperatives cannot be oppositionalised. In response to potential criticism that this thesis itself falls into an oppositional logic, we must grant that this is correct. An oppositional logic is the perspective of the extreme end of the spectrum of the first part of new materialism’s ‘dual action’. The second action regresses to before this ostensible start point or first part, and is perhaps the more significant of the dual actions for its radical non-oppositionalism. However, the first part of new materialism also gives way to a non-oppositional logic itself.

This variation to the ‘dual action’ has implications for this thesis’ selection of texts for analysis, which has multiple, contradictory justifications in line with new materialism’s own morphing permutations of intensity and actualisation. Its corpus is a contingent selection of postmodern texts (the second part of the dual action). This contingency is made obscure by the first part of new materialism’s dual actions that actualises logical necessity as a premise (this will become clearer when the

9 thesis’ corpus is justified in more rational terms later in this Introduction, and to the detriment of the contingency of its coming-into-being). This extensive manifestation overrides the contingency of the thesis’ corpus. This overriding is in many ways useful, not least because the concept of contingency as the insinuation of intensity can be gradually approached, and therefore better understood, by degrees. In a sense, this thesis includes certain gestures of misreading and idealisation in order to be able to fathom the more accurate process of “emergent materialisation”, as Coole describes it.

In a manner similar to Coole in her article, William E. Connolly – in ‘The “New Materialism” and the Fragility of Things’ – attempts to catalogue new materialism’s “ten tenets”, one of which is the recognition of “ontological uncertainty” and contingency in the world’s ontogenesis. He stresses however, that the predication of dynamism and disequilibrium does not prohibit stages or levels of equilibrium: “A philosophy of becoming set on several tiers of temporality does not […] postulate a world in which everything is always in radical flux” (401). Coole claims the same: she reasons that new materialism emphasis on flux and becoming “does not a priori rule out a quotient of inertia or more or less enduring continuities – such as patterns, path dependency, institutions, systemic logics – whose turgidity and congealing remain particularly important for the analysis of power” (453). Taking stasis and systems theories into account however, to be truly in the vein of new materialist scholarship, intellectual emphasis must rest with the pole of becomings, because new materialism holds that becoming is “ontologically prior” to being. But how, in practical and methodological terms, do new materialists realise and maintain this emphasis?

Not through disciplinisation, aver Dolphijn and van der Tuin, who contend that this is one way new materialism is susceptible to a kind of transcendentalisation. Although new materialism’s paradigmatic standing secures it to a degree against some of the more impoverishing consequences of disciplinisation, this alone is no promise of inviolability, as plenty of other paradigms fall prey to modes of disciplinary habituation. However, new materialism is, in theory, especially equipped to avoid this. Even so, Dolphijn and van der Tuin explain that many new materialists seriously compromise the theoretical value of their work by beginning,

10 in praxis (and perhaps involuntarily, considering, for example, publishing and marketing demands and other bureaucratic determinations), in discrete disciplinarity:

[…] there is a whole range of scholars working on new materialism from their respective disciplinary locations. In these specific disciplinary takes on new materialism, the potentialities of the new materialism get lost in unnecessarily narrow understandings. Introducing new materialism into a discipline entails a transcendental gesture according to which the new materialism and the discipline in question (e.g. ) are positioned as pre-existing or generated rather than generative, and consequently as interacting rather than intra-acting. (101)

To emphasise becoming, Dolphijn and van der Tuin are unpermissive in asserting that new materialist projects must begin in intensity.

This thesis holds otherwise, maintaining that a measure of introductory disciplinarity will not vitiate the claim that becoming is “ontologically prior”, especially if intensity is still observed at some point, and especially if this disciplinarity is engaged in ways that foster immanence rather than through the implementation of transcendent . That said, this thesis sprawls a number of conventional disciplines – primarily english literary studies, film studies, and philosophy – and it does not begin by respecting their disciplinary boundaries. Admittedly, the textual focus of each of its three parts restores a division between literary studies and film studies, but this morphs into a new disciplinary hybrid or becoming (a cinematic-poetry beast) with the evocation of a ‘literary time-image’ in Part Three. In any case, it should be clear from the ‘double action’ that this thesis argues for, that unlike Dolphijn and van der Tuin, it credits beginning extensively, in forms or modes or logics of almost-scientific actuality, before engaging a concept of intensity. The ‘double action’ is only legible as such from the perspective of extensivity, which is more amenable to explanation.

Another means by which new materialists underscore the primacy of becoming, as Dolphijn and van der Tuin recognise it, is to be more accepting and accommodating of outdated theoretical frameworks. New materialism does not quash previous frameworks for being exhaustively erroneous, but considers them as responses to different sets of situated problems. In encouraging this paradigmatic 11 hospitality, Dolphijn and van der Tuin are also delineating a silhouette of re- evaluations around practices of critique voiced by many contemporary theorists. Vicki Kirby explains that Judith Butler and Bruno Latour have for many years now been preoccupied with kneading the reductive ‘kill’ metaphors out of theoretical and political discourse, therapeutically striving to conduct their own critique in a more generous and less universally damning ways. The details of a scholar’s procedures for the critique of another’s work are intricately imbricated in their notions of what matter and materialism are, and how they are ethically engaged, as Kirby makes clear:

If we want to address the question of Nature or materiality in a way that does not presume that materiality can be added to, or subtracted from, something that it isn’t (Culture, ideation), then how we identify our own position vis-à-vis another’s, how we configure this relationship, will anticipate and rehearse this same difficulty. (83)

So bypassing strict critical negation is a new materialist requisite if new materialism is to productively practice what it preaches.

New materialism’s relationship with social constructivism then, must not be entirely predicated on relinquishment. According to Coole, new materialist realism “does not call for the abandonment of constructivist investigations and critiques of power relations but seeks to contextualize them more broadly” (455). Situating her appraisal of new materialist realism in the context of International Relations, Coole feels the pinch of having to explain and justify her recuperation of ‘realism’ against accusations of championing a neo-positivist “raison d’état” and its coefficient of nationalistic moralism. Coole therefore counterpoints this critique by arguing that new materialism: “is far from positivism, while it is normatively agnostic on the question of political realism. It reopens the real to social scientific inquiry, but without renouncing the critical reflexivity that constructivism insists upon” (455). If Coole is accommodating of social constructivism here, it seems to be at positivism’s expense and negation.

However, new materialism actually admits a certain quality of neo-positivism. If one of positivism’s characteristic designations is as an empiricist scientism that opposes speculative , then new materialism’s turn to various forms of

12 scientific proof is neo-positivist, without advocating positivism’s own censorship of metaphysical conjecture. For instance, theoretical quantum physicist Karen Barad ventures the astonishing revelation that some long-debated metaphysical problems, thought only approachable via metaphysical though-experiments (gedanken experiments), have recently found concrete manifestation in newly-developed technologies and laboratory setups. Purely hypothetical abstractions that twentieth- century physicists such as Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and Niels Bohr had mentally wrestled over – and that they assumed impossible to physically actualise – are now empirically realisable, proving, according to Barad, “that there has never been a sharp boundary between physics, on the one hand, and metaphysics or philosophy, on the other” (New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies 63). Barad’s theory, which is a new materialist keystone, is returned to later in this introduction and fleshed out more thoroughly.

If not always or entirely jettisoning social constructivism, new materialists nevertheless tend to begin, or to include within their projects, an assertion that they are wary of a social constructivist lens12: for example, Alaimo writes that “many environmentally-oriented scholars seek to engage with the material world as something more than a humanly made concept or a plastic resource for human use” (8). Likewise, Barad asks: “What compels the belief that we have a direct access to cultural representations and their content that we lack toward the things represented?” (132), while political theorist, Jane Bennett, says that she “will emphasize, even overemphasize, the agentic contributions of non-human (operating in Nature, in the human body, and in human artifacts) in an attempt to counter the narcissistic reflex of human language and thought” (xvi). New materialists recognise that a great deal of the scholarship of the latter half of the twentieth century was infatuated with language and culture – the academy had become the dominion of Culture, beguiled by the power of discourse and the discursive.

12 In ‘Open Forum, Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the “New Materialism”’, Sara Ahmed contends that much new materialist scholarship is misleading in that it rests on inflating the anti-biologist nature of past feminist work. Ahmed’s accusations have been rebutted by some new materialists for having misunderstood the nature of critique being made; Noela Davies, for instance, explains that “what [new materialists] actually criticize in much feminism is the conventional assumption that the biological and the social are two separate and discrete systems that then somehow interact” (67). 13 One way these new materialists argue for the inadequacy of language proper is through elucidating what appears to be the rule in so much contemporary theoretical discourse to lasso concepts like facticity and nature in scare quotes, reimagining them as mythical fruits. Barad disapproves of the way “matters of ‘fact’ (so to speak) have been replaced with matters of signification (no scare quotes here)” (132). This is social constructivism’s subterfuge, reinventing reality as “reality”, as its own childhood pet or imaginary friend, taming the weird nature of reality’s self- scribblings so that they are contained as legible inscriptions within social constructivism’s own scare-quote thought-bubble. Social constructivism’s paranoiac schema is oddly and insightfully accurate in one sense at least – in rightly branding reality with the uncanniness that it merits, though of course its paranoia gets the better of it, mutating uncanniness into its worst and most threatening possible form, and so requiring sedation, which is psychological scare-quote enclosure.

In regards to literature and linguistic imprisonment then, new materialists sometimes envision and enact secular transubstantiations. In Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large, Kirby insists: “Life reads and rewrites itself, and this operation of universal genesis and reproduction is even internal to the tiny marks on this page, which are effective transubstantiations” (xi). New materialists are allied in acknowledging, as do Deleuze and Guattari, that “[r]epresentations are bodies too!” (A Thousand Plateaus 95). They celebrate matter’s fleshiness, without reverting to those essentialist dogmas that cage and domesticate matter, or understand it as passive, ahistorical and inert stuff that bends compliantly, mechanically, and dependently to human hands and . Matter is wild; it has its own multifarious drives and agential powers, which new materialists consider generative, or morphogenetic. They draw on philosophers who attack Aristotelian hylomorphism, which conflates the body (as indeterminate receptacle) with matter, and the soul (as life-shaper) with form.

In Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ Through the Arts, Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt think artistry through the problematic of the hylomorphic schema by referring to Martin Heidegger’s critique of the form-matter synthesis. They suggest that in “The Question Concerning Technology” (1977), “Heidegger

14 undoes the Aristotelian notion of causality. In the place of our accepted notion that things are a means-to-an-end, he proposes a relationship of co-responsibility and indebtedness” (5-6). In ‘Deleuze and the Open-Ended Becoming of the World’, Manuel DeLanda echoes this, professing that: “linguistic relativism […] does not break with the hylomorphic schema” (3). According to social constructivism “[t]he world is amorphous, and we cut it out into forms using language” (3). The non- essentialist model of morphogenesis, by contrast, allows that matter is non- amorphous and productive of its own forms – not beholden to final equilibrium forms.

Aside from rejecting the hylomorphic schema, new materialists concentrate on expounding the agential capacities of matter(s) through other means also. Connolly discusses the matter of the political sciences by enlisting the insights of complexity theory. He renounces the operations of rationalisation that so inform processes of political evaluation in international relations. According to Connolly, is not merely difficult to attribute individualised accountability in the political sciences, but impossible – though of course there are degrees of relative and provisional accuracy. It is worth quoting him at length here because his analysis of political events tries not to disentangle the interacting forces at play, or to streamline myriad actual forces into an easily graspable narrative strand, but to thicken them with their real aspects of indeterminacy. Connolly deliberates over the act of self-immolation effectuated by the Tunisian, Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi, in December 2010, which is frequently credited as being the single catalyst of both the Tunisian Revolution and the Arab Spring:

Perhaps vague frustrations and volatile energies were in the air the day before Mohamed Bouazizi immolated himself in Tunisia. Too intense to be unimportant, too vague, cloudy and volatile to be defined. Did that sad event, in turn, help to trigger a contagion and mode of creative self-organisation that exceeded the power of the trigger? The reassuring faith that our inability to predict such an event is merely an epistemic screen shielding us from solid factors in principle reducible to full determination itself expresses a contestable ontology. […] Perhaps the rebellion arose out of creative reverberations back and forth between a series of singular acts and collective predispositions that were initially cloudy, in themselves. Perhaps that cloudiness became consolidated through modes of self-amplification and teleo- 15 searching processes that both exceeded the triggered moment and contracted initial, vague intensities into something that did not pre-exist the event as a solid possibility simply screened from observers. Perhaps the event was preceded by intense incipiencies laden with real pluripotentiality. (405)

“Perhaps […] Perhaps […] Perhaps […] Perhaps […]” – Connolly works to retain the quality of speculation in his analysis. Connolly shows that many forces – some invisible, some virtual – are at work in this heated state of events.

Widespread multi-systemic disorders, malfunctions, and unrest, because so multifarious, do not have clear causes. According to Connolly and other new materialists, this is not a matter of invisibility and unknowability – it is not, that is to say, a matter of our epistemological inadequacies as human interpreters, but of ontological complexities in material processes themselves. Sometimes it takes a particular trigger (Bouazizi’s sacrificial protest) to retroactively exacerbate and manifest certain causes and avenues of accountability that did not exist in any discrete way before the event’s occasion. A kind of narrative consolidation occurs after the fact of a violent political event.

Like Connolly, Bennett – in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things – works “to detach ethics from [the kind of] moralism” that intoxicates contemporary politics and media culture, so staunchly invested, as they are, in rhetorics of individualised blame. Bennett’s project is interesting in that it stages the political blame predicament by sounding out a methodological fork-in-the-road that reverberates new materialism’s ‘double action’:

It is ultimately a matter of political judgment what is more needed today: should we acknowledge the distributive quality of agency to address the power of human- nonhuman assemblages and to resist a politics of blame? Or should we persist with a strategic understatement of material agency in the hopes of enhancing the accountability of specific humans? (38)

Where autonomy seems to be housed by the sharper end of actuality (the ‘first’ part of the double action), more diffuse agential forces become sources of consideration when intensity is acknowledged (the ‘second’ aspect of the double action). To credit

16 singular persons with blame or with praise is, for new materialists, a specious oversimplification.

Animated by new materialism’s call to endorse more expansive agential forces, this thesis pluralises what would normally serve as references to a single first- person speaker. While this technique is deployed in such pragmatically unifying and universalising styles of writing as the natural sciences and in science journals of the nineteenth century, this thesis intends for its pluralised first-person argumentation as a more philosophical expression that in fact opposes these modes by emphasising the fissures that are the differences within the description ‘we’. Of course, ‘I’ could serve to express these differences, but ‘we’ offers up more slits, or agential eyes of entrance from the get-go. While this Introduction still deploys the singular first-person speaker, this interim usage serves only as mitigation, in lieu of this very justification, for the pluralisation of first-person, which is to follow in the body of the thesis. While this pluralisation places certain impositions on its reader to adjust to what may be considered uncommon grammatical usage in the domain of literary criticism, it is also not a wildly revisionist methodological nuance – for example, it is a tactic habitually used by Deleuze in his singly-authored works to concede myriad prehuman agencies and to upend the presumption of individualism as the only force in a work’s creation.

Apart from political theorists like Bennett and Connolly, Barad’s concept of “agential realism” also describes a decisive shift in our thinking about matter’s agency as the heart of the new materialist soft revolution. In Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Barad develops an “ethico-onto-” that impresses how materiality and discursivity are implicated “intra-actively”. For Barad, relations come before relata – she coins the term “intra-action” to describe the “entangled” state that precedes what we come to recognise as an interaction. With an idea of the discursive that derives substantially from Foucault’s idea of a heteronomous “discursive field” affected by social institutional operations and other forms of power, as much as by , Barad writes:

Neither discursive practices nor material phenomena are ontologically or epistemologically prior. Neither can be explained in terms of the other. Neither is 17 reducible to the other. Neither has privileged status in determining the other. Neither is articulated or articulable in the absence of the other; matter and meaning are mutually articulated. […] The point is not merely that there are important material factors in addition to discursive ones; rather, the issue is the conjoined material-discursive nature of constraints, conditions and practices. The fact that material and discursive constraints and exclusions are intertwined points to the limited validity of analyses that attempt to determine individual effects of material or discursive factors. (152)

Barad’s “ethico-onto-epistemological” position is developed alongside an that an experimental apparatus that measures or qualifies an object or behaviour is at first entangled with, or indeterminate from, the object (Barad terms this state “phenomena” – which is material-discursive entanglement). Subject and object only come into being when the ‘phenomenon’ internally incises itself by way of various ongoing “agential cuts”, giving birth to both the object or behaviour, and itself as something distinct from the object or behaviour.

Barad develops this philosophy-physics out of contemporary findings in quantum mechanics. She explains that early in the twentieth-century, physicists frequently had to confront the astonishing evidence for wave-particle duality. Many experiments were starting to reveal that under the right experimental conditions waves could exhibit particle-like behaviour or, vice versa: under other specific conditions, particles could exhibit wave-like behaviour. Bohr, Heisenberg, and other physicists (including Einstein) wrestled to account for this paradox by constructing various gedanken (or thought) experiments that involved Thomas Young’s two-slit diffraction grating experiment and a which-path detector. Together, Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principal” and Bohr’s “principal of complementarity” comprise the cornerstone of the ‘ Interpretation’ of quantum physics and its understanding of wave-particle duality. Although both theories challenge the classical Newtonian understanding of physics, the epistemological nature of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle assumes that objects have discrete ontologies before measurement processes are allowed to obscure our capacity to observe these qualities; in essence, Heisenberg’s principle “concerns the limits of our knowledge of the behaviour of physical objects, like atoms or electrons” (4). On the other hand, Bohr’s theory of complementarity, or what Barad prefers to term his ‘indeterminacy’ principle, is ontological: 18 For Bohr, what is at issue is not that we cannot know both the position and momentum of a particle simultaneously (as Heisenberg initially argued), but rather that particles do not have determinate values of position and momentum simultaneously. […] [T]here is something fundamental about the nature of measurement interaction such that, given a particular measuring apparatus, certain properties become determinate, while others are specifically excluded. Which properties become determinate is not governed by the desires or will of the experimenter but rather by the specificity of the experimental apparatus. (19)

Bohr hypothesised that if certain alterations were made to the apparatus that was used to measure the particle-like or wave-like behaviour of an electron, then these modifications would actually serve to determine the particle-like or wave-like behaviour of the electron. Barad attempts to cultivate her theory of agential realism on the shoulders of Bohr’s theory of complementarity, and two significant pieces of information bolster Barad’s convincing argument. As mentioned already, certain technological advancements which emerged in the mid-1990s granted scientists the capabilities to test these – what had previously been mere metaphysical thought experiments – in laboratory environments. And yet another reason for Barad’s giving favour to Bohr is her claim that, in his lifetime, Heisenberg eventually consented to Bohr’s view.

Essentially, Barad’s work with quantum phenomena show how certain material processes are not merely, and unfortunately, epistemologically uncertain, but, actually, ontologically indeterminate. While the strength of her argument rests in her productive entanglement of matter and meaning, and of science and philosophy, aesthetics seems to occupy something of a dead zone in her metaphysics. Barad’s analyses concentrate on scientific or industrial models of exemplification (ultrasounds, a Calcutta jute mill, various nanotechnologies, and other biological objects, like brittle stars). Barad’s main bid in theorising agential realism is to unbind the ‘apparatus’ from its narrow prescription as a scientific laboratory setup. This liberation – freeing the apparatus from its familiar laboratory environment – amounts to granting that the insights of quantum mechanics be applicable to everyday macro phenomena in the same way that it is to minute quantum occurrences. However, it is not clear whether she means for the anti-scalar insights of agential realism to be applicable to questions of aesthetics. 19 The tendency for aesthetics to be relegated to conversational ellipses or brackets in much new materialist discussion is usefully understood through consideration of another recent cultural movement occupied by new materialism’s posthumanist brethren, where aesthetics is sometimes even more aggressively driven from conversation. In the ‘Introduction: Aesthetics After the Speculative Turn’ to Speculations V: Aesthetics in the 21st Century, Ridvan Askin, Andreas Hägler, and Philipp Schweighauser recover the aesthetic lineage of ‘speculative realism’, a movement sometimes considered interchangeable with, or at least significantly related to new materialism (arguably, one of its branches), but laying claim to an unusually decisive scholarly birthing by way of a ‘Speculative Realism’ conference, at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2007. According to Askin, Hägler, and Schweighauser, speculative realists have a mixed relationship with the complex aesthetic theories of Immanuel Kant and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Although Kant is habitually set forth as speculative realism’s most urgent “foil”, certain speculative realist projects, such as Steven Shaviro’s focus on “Kantian disinterested pleasure” (15), trouble a purely rationalist estimation of Kant. Speculative realists generally have beef with the “correlationism” that has organized and capped thinking’s potential in continental philosophy for the past two and a half centuries, the inheritance of the Kantian stipulation that things can only be known through ‘conditions of ’ – that they can never be known in themselves and apart from consciousness.

Quentin Meillassoux, who was one of the four speakers (including Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Ray Brassier) to have presented at the original ‘Speculative Realism’ workshop at Goldsmiths, coined “correlationism” in After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Meillassoux proposes a new way of thinking about “ancestral” time, which is time either anterior or ulterior to human life on earth. Though philosophy is, since Kant and according to Meillassoux, hogtied by the idea that thinking cannot grasp this time without reference to itself, Meillassoux proposes that there are important reasons to get outside of ourselves, to retrieve or determine this exteriority, or “great outdoors”, as exteriority. Meillassoux designates “arche-fossils” as those contemporary apparatuses that offer up traces of absolute exteriority beyond human finitude, such

20 as an isotope (Meillassoux 10). Meillassoux maintains that only mathematics can fathom the “arche-fossil” divorced from subjectivity; mathematics comprises the primary qualities of the “arche-fossil” in-itself, where subjectivity grasps only its secondary qualities through sense perception. While claiming to eschew a post- critical correlationism and its potentially superstitional empiricist entrapment, Meillassoux does not entertain a simply pre-critical dogmatism or “naïve realism”. Meillassoux’s stance is as a ‘speculative realist’, who recuperates the realism of classical philosophical thought and its confidence in reason, only to claim that reality’s only necessity is contingency. Without doubt, Meillassoux deems, everything could be radically otherwise at any given moment in time – all objects, phenomenon, and stabilities are “statistical miracles” (Meillassoux 84). The only thing that conditions the ‘laws of nature’, or physical laws, is absolute contingency. The only metaphysical necessity is the absolute contingency of causality.

If speculative realists unite in their shared discomfort of correlationism’s long reign – of its anthropocentric snubbing of realism – Askin, Hägler, and Schweighauser assert that the deficit of questions of aesthetics across the group nevertheless see them divided into two discernable camps: the transcendental empiricists and the transcendental rationalists. They write that for the transcendental rationalist limb, made up of Meillassoux and Brassier, “epistemology qua rational inquiry governs and determines aesthetics” (32) – that is, aesthetics is necessarily human . They therefore have qualms with “the immediacy thesis” of experiential apprehension championed by the empiricist wing (Harman, Grant, Shaviro, and Timothy Morton), which has aesthetics pared back to a raw experience – “taste [as] , sensation, and perception” (31) – stripped of subjectivity:

For all these [transcendental empiricist] thinkers, any encounter whatsoever is always the site of aesthetic experience (and the emphasis rests on both of these terms equally). In these philosophies, aesthetics is other to conceptual knowledge, and prior to it. Given the expansion of aesthetics into the non-human realm, this is also the moment when aesthetics is pushed from the domain of human epistemology to that of general ontology. Ceasing to be a particular kind of human relation to the world, it becomes a general descriptor of relationality of/in the world. […] The choice of the presupposition [“of/in”] depends on whether one favours a relational ontology (of) or a substance ontology (in). (31) 21 Askin, Hägler, and Schweighauser conclude their account of twenty-first century aesthetics with the provocative assertion that “speculative aesthetics in the twenty- first-century is German idealism redux” (38), which ensures Kant’s instrumental, if complex, relevance to the group as a necessary (explicit or implicit) pit stop in any project that attempts to replay the problems of transcendentalism.

As with speculative realists, it would be possible to recognise new materialists as forking into transcendental empiricist and transcendental rationalist camps with regards to how they grasp aesthetics. However, new materialists are, in the main, transcendentalist empiricists in the vein of Deleuze’s philosophy, which was self- professedly transcendental empiricist. Deleuze and Guattari famously write, in A Thousand Plateaus, that “art does not wait for humans to begin” (353), while counterbalancing this more-quoted assertion with the more-overlooked claim that “saying this, however, perhaps has no more than saying that art begins with human beings” (353). The important point here is that for most new materialists, like with speculative realists, the human is sapped of its privileged bearing as exclusive master of art.

New materialists are therefore required to produce and engage with art in new and unusual posthumanist ways, which can prove challenging for new materialist artists, and new materialist critics or readers alike. In Realism, Materialism, Art, Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, and Suhail Malik describe some of the issues that visual and performance-based artists and curators face in thinking and implementing a new materialist practice. There is a branch of Speculative Realism known as Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) that actually predates it, hatched by Graham Harman, and which respects that objects retain their own deep dynamism, or “withdrawal” from human perception and cognition. 13 Human finitude is

13 Interestingly, materialism often has a bad rap in Object Oriented Ontology orbits. Timothy Morton rages against Materialism as much as he does Nature, preferring notions of realism and ecology that account for the “withdrawal” of objects as radically irreducible and unknowable things. Morton claims that: “OOO is troubling for materialisms that rely on any kind of substrate, whether it consists of discrete atoms or of a continuum. Materialism lopes along hampered by a Newtonian- Cartesian atomistic mechanism on the one hand and the formless goo of Spinoza on the other” (179). Obviously Morton’s materialism withers into a strawman upon consideration of some of the complex metaphysics and ideas of matter that new materialists are now employing.

22 therefore considered the adversary in OOO metaphysics. According to Cox, Jaskey, and Malik, a number of recent curated exhibitions that have tried to entertain an OOO thinking and praxis confuse its actual import, and are guilty of “[…] attributing a kind of agency to objects, even reinscribing quasi-human characteristics onto non-human things, and also in some cases delimiting the expanded notion of ‘object’ proposed by OOO to material things” (29). “As such,” further Cox, Jaskey, and Malik, “they have unwittingly and ironically reversed OOO, extending correlationism to specifically material and otherwise inert objects” (29). Some artists sustain human finitude by re-anthropomorphising objects, as well as through enacting a weak and naïve conceptualisation of materiality.

Such misconstruing is, in different ways, not difficult to fall into, especially when one considers the ironies involved in doing art, or practicing art, from a non- human stance. Many of the trademark features of contemporary art production are implicitly entrenched in a socio-historical contextualisation and interpretation. Cox, Jaskey, and Malik say that in terms of art curation, little focus has been directed towards “the dilemma implicit in the term art itself, whose post-Duchampian legacy has focused on the way that signification shifts within linguistic and cultural framing” (30). On the surface of things, many new materialist artworks appear to be conceptual art. The difference lies in various purposes, intentions, agencies, and desires – of artists, installations, viewers, and curators – to think and function beyond the human, which, in art, can manifest as a conceptual shift. New materialist art production might in one way be considered the ‘institutionalised critique’ of art. However, unlike the self-referentialism of conceptual art, which while breaking down any sense of a fourth wall, is still pretentiously devoted to a recursive humanism, new materialism or OOO muffles humanism – its version of self-referentialism points to a deeply receded, unknowable object-self. Importantly, new materialism does not eradicate humanism entirely – an iron-fisted anti- humanism is just as likely to fall flat against many of the same problems as a rigid humanism, for claiming to know how to siphon the human.

One way to frame this dilemma – the problem of miscarried professions of new materialist engagement – is through a lack of intensity, or through the deprivation, in art, of a concept of virtuality. In their monograph, Dolphijn and van der Tuin do

23 not much pursue the problem of how to read art, allowing only a brief explanation of how to deal with artworks in the new materialist province, though gesturing to the importance of intensity:

In terms of artworks, for instance, a new materialist perspective would be interested in finding out how the form of content (the material conditions of the artwork) and the form of expression (the sensations as they come about) are being produced in one another, how series of statements are actualized, and how pleats of matter are realized in the real. In this way, new materialism is different from most post-Kantian studies of art, since in these studies, the material and discursive dimensions are treated separately. After a short description of the materials used following a “crude materialism”, the contemporary scholar influenced by the so-called “linguistic-turn” proceeds to deconstruct its messages. New materialism allows for the study of the two dimensions in their entanglement: the experience of a piece of art is made up of matter and meaning. The material dimension creates and gives form to the discursive, and vice versa, notwithstanding the fact that these transpositions are not unilinear. (91)

Though they recommend encountering art through material-semiotic parity, the details of this approach are esoteric. When Dolphijn and van der Tuin mention exposing the “form of content” and the “form of expression” they are referring to a process that Deleuze and Guattari call “double articulation”.

All in all however, there is a good deal of ambiguity prevailing in how new materialists recognise and approach artworks, let alone the end of the textual spectrum, where film and literature reside. And so, at this point, a working set of research questions crop up. Though these questions have been posed and answered before, it is worthwhile to consider them afresh, insomuch as new materialism’s ‘consolidation’ is newly coming into effect, as well as because in some senses it might do well to return to and remember Deleuze with revivified perspective and depth, and because every new text reinscribes these questions as uncanny and so fizzing with vitality. Some questions that eternally return: how exactly are critics supposed to approach already-existing texts? Many new materialists assert that there is no artwork to begin with – that is, that intensity precedes the artwork’s extensive objectivity. How do we talk about works of art, or texts, from a critic’s or observer’s perspective? Is reading even possible? Is the onus of new materialist

24 veracity on the artist/author, artwork/text, critic/interpreter, or all/some/none? An important question latent in all of this is: What do we mean by ‘beginning’? Which beginning, and why is material-semiotic entanglement considered to be ‘ontologically prior’? While there are important rhetorical reasons for new materialists to want to stress the reality of intensity and becoming, ‘simultaneous reciprocity’ seems to be a more accurate description of the ontological relationship that occurs between intensity and actuality. It is not the case that intensity alone conditions actuality – actuality also dynamises intensity.

Other familiar questions include: how is a critic or scholar to maintain and progress some of the ideas of new materialism without impairing these ideas from the beginning, simply by dint of beginning in a specified field or discipline? Dophijn and van der Tuin already ask a version of this question, and they implement its response in their monograph, but this question needs to be reactivated in line with every new project and text, which all demand different approaches. Additionally, how can a methodological vantage be erased while at the same time also being put to work? Another pertinent question is whether the implementation of new materialist ideas is necessarily obfuscating? Different things are at different stages obscure to particular pockets, or swathes, of audience. Philosophical and critical cognisance and expertise aside though, there seem to be important reasons why new materialists would exacerbate obscurity for the sake of obscurity. For to signal the power of non-human complexity sometimes seems to require the human rattling up against its own epistemological limitations.

This work probes these questions by pooling together various a-/methodologies that are conducted through immanence: the diffractive, grammatological, and cartographical methodologies of Barad, Kirby, and Dolphijn and van der Tuin – approaches which are themselves the rhizomic ephemera of anti-/methodologies conceptualised by Donna Haraway, Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari. Additionally, this thesis integrates its own a-/methodological initiative, which is a forgetting. Part of this thesis’ strategy is to become intensely immersed in new materialism so as to perform postmodernism’s forgetting. This forgetting has a Deleuzian flavour to it. Forgetting is to fly from consciousness and to float in preconscious, inhuman

25 forces. From here postmodernism cannot be recuperated, resurrected, or remembered on its own terms.

Inasmuch as this thesis forgets postmodernism through rousing Deleuze, it also, by turns, forgets Deleuze. In defending one of Deleuze’s faces – his anti- explanatory side – against postcolonial attacks that, in one sense at least, misconstrue his philosophical utility as ‘applicability’, Bruce B. Janz recommends that Deleuze be learnt and then forgotten, before scholarship is to proceed:

Forgetting Deleuze means that we will not apply Deleuze. […] He will not apply another technique for analysis, another concept that captures a bit of human experience hitherto missed or ignored. Nor are we necessarily faced with the Scylla and Charybdis of clearly explaining him in lucid prose, on the one hand (and thus missing or distorting his work), or embodying his aesthetic, on the other, keeping the sensibility intact but just slightly out of reach. There is no virtue in the patois of this tribe, but neither is there any in the plainspoken distillation of concepts, ready to be wielded as if they were a new set of weapons. (24)

While this thesis is punctuated with many instances where Deleuze is forgotten, much is required in the way of learning Deleuze as well. Traditional elucidation and argumentation are necessary and unnecessary, to varying degrees. Part Two is most culpable for applying Deleuze’s cinematic taxonomy as a weighted conceptual reference point, with little reappropriation, mainly because it is such a mammoth task to learn a little of Deleuze’s cinematic metaphysics to begin with.

This two-sided forgetting and remembering correlates with the double action – forgetting opens up intensity, and remembering feeds off systems that are stable in actuality. Forgetting and remembering – though by way of different appellations – are also elements of the grammatological a-methodologies of Derrida and Kirby that inform this thesis. One of the signature features of the grammatological a- is its activation of a ‘double reading’, through which allegiance is paid, as best as can be, to an author’s conscious intentions or to the variegated veracities that a text volunteers (‘remembering’ as soldering in actuality), as well as to the unconscious excesses that are creative by-products of an author’s or a text’s purposes and intentions (see Bradley 110-112) (‘forgetting’ as liquefying in intensity). Where Derrida’s ‘double reading’ bites against ‘logocentrism’, Deleuze’s 26 forgetting does the same, and is one means that his transversal methodology is realised. Transversality, according to Adam Bryx and Gary Genosko, “[a]lso termed an ‘anti-logos style’, […] assembles heterogeneous components under a unifying viewpoint, which is far from totalising” (291). However, with both Deleuze’s and Derrida’s a-/methodologies, which are resolutely counter-representationalist, there is still an all-important respect for a breed of representational accuracy as an antidote to complete relativism and sheer nonsense.

Derrida’s ‘double reading’ seems refractively multiplied by Barad’s methodology of diffraction. As a methodological trope for her book and her philosophical framework, Barad sees diffraction as a process of reading various theories through one another; following Haraway’s lead, she sees it as a substitute for “the well-worn metaphor of reflection” (29). “Both” writes Barad, “are optical phenomena, but whereas reflection is about mirroring and sameness, diffraction attends to patterns of difference” (29). The physical phenomenon of diffraction, from which Barad abstracts her diffractive methodology, accounts for the superposition of waves. Classical physics and quantum physics explain diffraction in very different ways, though Barad gives favour to the latter. Classical physics understands diffraction patterns as the “characteristic behaviour exhibited by waves [and not particles] under the right conditions” (81), whereas quantum physics acknowledges the “wave-particle duality paradox” in its understanding that both waves and particles can produce diffraction patterns depending on the experimental apparatus used to measure their behaviour. Barad explains, by way of partially quoting Haraway:

Crucially, diffraction attends to the relational nature of difference; it does not figure difference as either a matter of essence or as inconsequential: “a diffraction pattern [says Haraway] does not map where differences appear but rather maps where the effects of differences appear.” (72)

Diffraction is “differenciating”. In Deleuzian idiom, differenciation occurs on the register of actualisation and describes how things and concepts are identifiable in their difference from one another (quiddity). This is significant because it means that it is possible to squeeze an idea of intensity out of Barad’s metaphysics, even though she would challenge this. From the purview of the actual realm of

27 , where diffraction patterns can be read, one can also intuit a virtual plane of consistency where difference ‘differentiates’, or where there is only pure individuation or singularity. Barad might call this the “relational” necessity of difference, which diffraction patterns are not capable of displaying directly. Though there is some clumsiness to understanding Barad’s metaphysics in this way, an important aspect of diffraction is that, like Deleuze’s transversal cartography, it is a mapping process.

Methodologically then, this thesis is a conceptual cartograph that renders the psychic-geographic function of a modest archipelago of three islands.14 Its reader would become an itinerant island-hopper, compelled to land and adapt to different, though not incommensurate, terrains – with different biota, climates, and rules of engagement. To put this less figuratively, the thesis is compartmentalised into three major parts, one of which has its own internal chapters. This structural arrangement should impress the radically different focus and strategy employed within each individual part. The postmodern object-of-study of each part has a strictly collateral affiliation, without lineal association. The lineal connection comprises three distinct new materialist theories or philosophies that are engaged to productively undo their respective postmodern objects of study.

Although disparate, our postmodern objects of study are far from random selections. These postmodern texts have been carefully chosen for the specific problems they engage (or just as tellingly, do not engage); these postmodern objects of study have each been selected for certain qualities that perform and dialogue generatively with the specific new materialist theoretical apparatus with which it is mobilised. This thesis is not concerned with making general claims about postmodernism, or postulating on the consistency of its generic consolidation. This thesis is interested in a procedure that credits singularity. This work appreciates the singularity of each of its postmodern texts, it appreciates the singularity of its new materialist theories, and more importantly, it appreciates the singularity of the encounter between the two, a cacophonous entanglement that reproduces the two, anew.

14 See Deleuze’s ‘Desert Islands’, from Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953-1974. 28 There is also another element of precision and determination that informs this thesis’ selection of each of its postmodern objects of study (although it should be noted that this particular determination does not hold in the same way for the action-image films of Part Two, Chapter II). Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here (1996), Léos Carax’s films, and Kate Fagan’s The Long Moment (2002) have been favoured for their rare quality of being poised on the limen of aesthetic postmodernism. Few of this thesis’ textual concentrations exemplify postmodernism in one of its most potent manifestations – that is, as one of postmodernism’s most seductive or persuasive exhibitions. Strategically, this thesis begins on the aesthetic fringe of postmodernism to be able to induce its forgetting. The only exceptions to this rule of selection are the action-image films, which have been picked for the strength of their postmodern realism, and so to show that ‘cutting across’ postmodernism, even when it is at its most tenacious, is both possible and necessary.

As the notoriously fashionable cultural-aesthetial logic of late capitalism, postmodernism is a steadfast humanism, and is therefore one of new materialism’s strongest rhetorical nuisances. Postmodernism is constructed out of a logic of ideology and a myopic anthropocentrism. To disengage from its enticing interpretative mania, new materialists recall Deleuze and Guattari’s sober assertion that “there is no ideology and there never has been” (A Thousand Plateaus 5), the grains of which Colebrook reactivates in ‘Postmodernism is a Humanism: Deleuze and Equivocity’. In this essay – which Dolphijn and van der Tuin earmark for its communication of an important “pillar” of new materialism, which is the understanding that “modern natural science and postmodern cultural theory are both humanisms” (97) – Colebrook uses Deleuze’s conceptualisation of univocity to attempt to wean us off the bottle of equivocity, the sagacity of postmodernism:

Univocity […] is responsible and responsive thinking: not accepting the world as signified, as mediated through signs, but interrogating the emergence of signs. Equivocity, by contrast, is banality, not thinking through the events within which we are immersed; equivocity reads art as representation, selves as constructs and genders as mediated kinds. Equivocity accepts two [radically incommensurable] levels – signifier and signified, and world, representation and the real – without asking the genesis of this difference. (291) 29 Essentially, the equivocity of postmodernism is its reification of a symbolic order at the expense of the real, which it abstracts into an unreachable “transcendental signified” (a Derridean term). By contrast, univocity is immanence. New materialism does not read the world, but engages worlding.

Inspirited by this worlding, Part One draws on the work of critics who have become stirred by the new materialist imperatives latent in the philosophy of Derrida. For instance, in , Derrida attempts to unsettle the hierarchical opposition between speech and writing, and its respective conflation with the presence-absence dualism, holding that every supposedly pure, singular ‘event’ harbors an immanent proto-linguistic contaminant, or determining ‘trace’. Left to the devices of the humanities alone, Derrida’s (in)famous textual projection risks becoming conceptual surplus – unexpectedly, and stiflingly, idle. Part One therefore draws on Kirby’s sociological-anthopological deconstructive insights as incentive, not to pursue her scientific line of inquiry, but to revisit the site of the novel, and to elucidate ways that her deconstructionist-materialist explorations spark, in turn, their own distinct literary traction.

Part Two turns its attention to a range of postmodern movies whose release dates span at least thirty years, and negotiates their material consistency through recourse to Deleuze’s materialist taxonomy of cinematic images and signs. Chapter One of Part Two examines a series of French films produced in the 1980s that have been heralded for encapsulating the dawning of French cinematic postmodernism, the cinéma du look or the ‘cinema of spectacle’. Chapter Two of Part Two swings towards the more commercial extreme of postmodern cinema, manifesting a stark juxtaposition with the previous chapter’s focus on the avant- garde cinema of spectacle, instead concentrating on two contemporary postmodern blockbusters, Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, and James Cameron’s Avatar.

Part Three confronts some of the science that drives new materialist metaphysics. It probes a collection of poetry – Kate Fagan’s The Long Moment – that is substantially informed by the insights of complexity theory. Due to its unusual appearance and Fagan’s innovative ideas about the potential role of the poet and poetry, her collection prompts thorny, unanswerable questions. Is Fagan’s

30 poetry a radically and clinically de-aestheticised poetry? Or is it poetry that is infused with poetics, still aesthetical, but executing a profoundly posthumanist experimentation?

Part One

New Materialism and Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here

In Quantum Anthropologies, feminist theorist Vicki Kirby reengages Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive undertakings with a to drawing his grammatological skein out of its literary-philosophical confines and into embodied, material domains, such as forensics and biology. But Kirby herself admits that her materialist project is “perhaps not entirely […] contra Derrida” (xii), which means that the materialism she seeks to uncover might actually and already be hiding deep down in the belly of a literary deconstruction. This part attempts to productively tease matter out of literature by dis-/interpretatively labouring back to a deconstructive materiality. Part One argues that literary networks are always already complex material networks, but this materiality is less an evocation of something that can be opposed to immateriality or idealism, than it is an acknowledgment of a dynamism wherein matter and materiality are only ever provisionally absent and/or present. This deconstructive materialism, we will argue, is powerfully at play in Dionne Brand’s 1996 novel, In Another Place, Not Here.

Brand’s novel is a non-linear narrative that sketches out the lives of two (or, arguably, three) Black, homosexual, Caribbean-born women who bear the hefty burdens of violent diasporic histories, and who are cast to the peripheries of various Western systems organised by patriarchy, heterodoxy, colonialism and capitalism. Because the novel’s preoccupation with diaspora and displacement issues from Brand’s own experience of dis-/location it refuses to be repressed and contained by the order of mere theme. Instead, her experience animates the novel’s very structure, and so too damages its claim to a kind of orthodox reception, which is precisely what Brand intends. Peter Dickinson claims that: “Because Brand’s ‘here’

31 is necessarily mediated, provisional, evanescent – in a word ‘unlocatable’ – her work remains marginal/marginalizable in academic discussions of Canadian literary canons” (119-20).15 Questioning the fixture of this designation “unlocatable”, Brand contends, however: “I don’t consider myself on any ‘margin’, on the margin of Canadian literature. I’m sitting right in the middle of Black literature, because that’s who I read, that’s who I respond to” (Brand qtd. in Dickinson 113). Brand adopts a “writing enterprise of unfixing the fixed” (Brand qtd. in McCutcheon unpaginated) to ward off “the worst” as indivisible sovereignty; she reinvents the authority of her own position through writing back to white hegemony, cognisant that any metaphysics necessarily relies on its preclusions as much as its inclusions, or as Bina Toledo Freiwald puts it: “[T]he internal logic of ‘being at home’ and belonging is one governed as much by a principle of inclusion as by patterns of exclusion and difference” (38).

In key ways, the project before us is galvanised by the work of Pamela McCallum and Christian Olbey in their 1999 essay, ‘Written in the Scars: History, Genre, and Materiality in Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here’, though the imperative of the thesis is to consider – some seventeen years on – how new materialism clarifies certain theoretical-technical nuances, which were not the purview of McCallum and Olbey’s “cultural materialist” approach to Brand’s novel. McCallum and Olbey sense out both the materialist and the postmodernist aspects of Brand’s novel. They accomplish this by situating the novel in a particular genre: the neoslave narrative. The neoslave narrative, according to McCallum and Olbey, both draws on the “conventions and narratorial strategies developed by the antebellum slave narrators”, while also utilising postmodern formal techniques “in order to take up the challenge of representing recent history” (164). By performing this dual operation, Brand’s novel “can speak more effectively to contemporary forms of oppression and liberation” (165), while “resist[ing] the more disempowering aspects of postmodern disengagement and political impotence”

15 This is not to neglect or ignore the sizable body of criticism concerned with Brand’s work but to acknowledge her own resistance to easy interpretation and marketability. In an interview with Christian Olbey Brand describes wanting her novel to be a “sensory experience […] of language” (88), rather than a recitable plotline, remarking: “I think I lose audience sometimes because of that, but I don’t care because I’m trying to practice the art of it, and I’ve given myself room to fail a lot as we go along” (88). 32 (165). In its use of some of the formal operations familiar to postmodernism, Brand’s novel, for instance, creates a dialogue between different historical junctures, folding antebellum slavery into the politics of the more contemporary Civil Rights Movement, and the Grenadian New J.E.W.E.L Movement (Joint Endeavor for Welfare, Education, and Liberation), led by revolutionary Maurice Bishop, which came to a murky head in 1983 when members of Bishop’s own government (including his Prime Ministerial Deputy, Bernard Coard) organised his execution, and so propelled the United States and its Caribbean allies to invade Grenada (an event the novel theatricalises).

McCallum and Olbey flag in Brand’s text some of the twelve tropes that James Olney 16 says are typical of antebellum slave narratives: “Of Olney’s twelve identifiable conventions, three – flight, the description of work, and the omnipresence of the whip – along with a fourth to which he alludes but does not explicitly list – the construction of collectivity – are crucial to Brand’s novel” (167). All three protagonists in Brand’s novel take flight at some point from a neoslavery South to a supposedly free North (Verlia, to join her uncle/Black Panthers; Abena, as a child to meet her mother; Elizete, in search of Abena-as-an-image-of-Verlia), and this “is a stock convention of the antebellum slave narrative” (167). Though originally this Deep South/Free North dynamic was particular to the United States, and the desired place of flight was non-specific, the “American passing of the fugitive slave bill into law (1851)” (167) served to reify Canada as the utopic target of flight. McCallum and Olbey add that there is more than an echo of antebellum flight in Brand’s decision to situate Abena, Elizete, and Verlia “in the precise geographical location (the strip of southwestern Ontario that runs along the Canada- US border from Windsor, opposite Detroit, all the way up to Toronto where the stories of the three converge) that marked the earlier terminus of the Underground Railroad” (168).

Of course, McCallum and Olbey also explain that Brand employs the trope of antebellum ‘flight’ to be able to deconstruct it, and to write it into a discourse that more readily accounts for some of the hyperspatial, superexploitative structures of

16 McCallum and Olbey refer to James Olney’s essay: ‘“I Was Born”: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature’ in The Slave’s Narrative, eds. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 148-74. 33 globalised capitalism. The utopic vision of Canada is undermined in numerous ways and the antebellum coordinates are reworked through inclusion of a reverse flight carried out by Verlia (from the Canadian North to the Grenadian South), and which, in its own way, is imagined utopic. The other conventions of a generic antebellum slave narrative are reworked in similar ways. The “omnipresence of the whip”, while still an actual threat for Elizete in neo-plantation Grenada with Isaiah whipping her after attempted escapes, transforms, in Canada, into the ubiquity of multiple other threats and abjections, such as the insidious corrosion of sweatshop labour and the devastation of rape – abuses that are, for Elizete, and like the whip was for antebellum slaves, irreprehensible by law. In Brand’s novel it is not only a matter of reworking the antebellum slave narratives, however, because they were themselves “generic hybrids, relying heavily on a mixture of generic conventions of autobiography, romance, picaresque, and melodrama” (169). In this sense, McCallum and Olbey are able to point out how the “omnipresence of the whip” and “description of work” conventions also serve to undercut the romance that is itself a possible feature of the antebellum narratives. The romance between Elizete and Verlia, they argue, though fostered initially through erotic images of sweat, sun, heat, and cool water in the cane fields, is simultaneously thwarted by the reality of hard labour and political ferment.

We would suggest somewhat counter to McCallum and Olbey, that for Verlia at least, much of the romance, far from being only “undercut” by the labour conditions that encompass Elizete, is actually born of these conditions. Verlia’s desire (as intellectual social reformer) for Elizete rests perversely on the fact that Elizete is living, labouring, and the very cruel reality of material indenture. As Raphael Dalleo explains in Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial: “Verlia’s love for Elizete is for her as a person as well as for the oppressed peasantry of which she is a representative” (234); rather than being solely “subverted” (‘Written in the Scars’ 172), romance is complicated. Verlia confounds herself at the yearning of her “damaged soul” (In Another Place 202), which harbours desires much more complex than mere social reform – desires which in fact work to retard the possibility social reform:

34 That she would envy hardship, that she would envy the arc of a cutlass in a woman’s hands. That she would fall in love with the arc of a woman’s arm, long and one with a cutlass, slicing a cane stalk and not stopping but arcing and slicing again, splitting the armour of cane, the sweet juice rushing to the wound of the stem. That the woman would look up and catch her looking and she would hate herself for interrupting such avenging grace. (202-3)

Envy and love are surprisingly entwined when Verlia looks upon this hardship. She sees something beautiful and desirous in this scene of servitude playing itself out, a rhythm hot with its own internal vengeance, and ruined somehow, by the intruding gaze of the social amender. Hard labour then, is one of the predominant forces conditioning the uniquely erotic circumstances in the cane field, and the romance between and beyond Elizete and Verlia.

A final point that we wish to extract from McCallum and Olbey’s discussion is recognition that the “description of work” convention of antebellum narratives served particular political ends:

[…] by detailing the work of the slave population, the nineteenth century slave narrators strive to ground their texts in the material relations of labour and economic exploitation as a powerful way of resisting the tendency for the discussion on slavery and abolition to be abstracted into less concrete, and therefore less urgent, realms of morality, ethics, and philosophy. […] Descriptions of the materiality of slave experience can […] be understood as a textual strategy that works to resist the all too easy collapse of these texts into generic categories presumed to be entirely fictional, a collapse characteristic of pro-slavery commentators on the narratives. (169-70)

Even though Brand’s novel is itself fiction, and not strictly autobiographical (like the antebellum literature described above), it nevertheless also fiercely defies generic categorisation through its particular materialist operations and investments. In part, and like the antebellum slave narratives, this comes through depiction of twentieth century plantation and migrant working conditions (as a way of resisting their evaporation into either theoretical abstraction or, worse, mere hypotheticality), but unlike the antebellum narratives, this also comes through articulating a “crisis of […] historical representation” (165). Essentially, this is the crux of McCallum and Olbey’s argument for the novel’s postmodern neoslave narrative classification.

35 While this thesis agrees with their particular identification of In Another Place, Not Here as neoslave narrative, and while we agree that some of the potential moral relativism of postmodernism is counteracted by Brand’s deployment of the materialities of “flight”, “the omnipresence of the whip”, “the construction of collectivity”, and the “description of work” conventions, we contend additionally that Brand’s text is materialist in a much more radical way than in its description of racial bodies enmeshed in concrete, historical assemblages. Such estimation stems largely from the cultural-materialist imperative of McCallum and Olbey’s project, which “draw[s] on several historical and cultural materialist critics – C. L. R. James, Walter Benjamin, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, and others” (160). Though this thesis likewise considers that these critics are pivotal to Brand’s thinking and craft, and we certainly draw upon their work to varying degrees in our own venture, this thesis nevertheless focuses primarily on the profound Derridean muscle that so fiercely and distinctly powers In Another Place, Not Here.17 This new materialist realignment requires reception of Brand’s novel under the auspices of a fairly unusual materialism; one that Pheng Cheah, in ‘Non-Dialectical Materialism’, calls a “materialism without substance” (72-81). This variety of materialism poses a risk to those in either cultural materialist or dialectical materialist camps – seeming to submit the important racial politics of Brand’s text to an evaporative chemistry, to those abstracting processes that antebellum tropes are specifically geared to concretely confront and combat – so we try to straddle both materialisms (via a double mark, or re-mark), not quite abandoning cultural materialism, but inflecting its active and conscious politicism with the power of a passive and unconscious radical alterity.

In ‘Non-Dialectical Materialism’, Cheah posits two affirmative materialisms that protest a Marxism “[…] irrigated by an ontology of organismic vitalism” (71) (which is the predominant inspiration for cultural materialism). Apart from Deleuze’s (non-organismic) vitalist materialism, Cheah coaxes from Derrida’s

17 In the criticism on Brand’s novel this is often either only tacitly or briefly alluded to (as if critics are under the assumption that the text’s deconstruction is so self-evident that there is little gain to be made in its explicit unpacking) or is addressed briefly, though in the service of other thematics and concepts. Mark McCutcheon’s analysis of Brand’s text would serve as at least one example of an essay that provides exceptional headway into the deconstruction of Brand’s text, though is not particularly concerned with elucidating any Derridean specifics. 36 oeuvre his sometimes very shrouded opinions about matter and materialism and proffers Derrida’s “materialism without substance” (72-81) as a materialism not orchestrated by negation (as a metaphysics of presence). Splicing materiality to textuality demands a lithe understanding of matter that is not straightjacketed by logocentricisms like concrete , realism, sensualism, or presence. “Matter as presence”, Cheah confirms, “is the arrestation of the text in general” (73).18 In an excerpt he extracts from Derrida’s writing (though editing his quote slightly differently to our ensuing, quite lengthy editation), Cheah writes:

The concept of matter must be marked twice […]: in the deconstructed field – this is the phase of overturning – and in the deconstructing text, outside the oppositions in which it has been caught (matter/spirit, matter/ideality, matter/form, etc.). By means of the play of this interval between the two marks, one can operate both an overturning deconstruction and a positively displacing, transgressive, deconstruction. Rigorously reinscribed in the general economy […] and in the double writing of which we were just speaking, the insistence on matter as the absolute exterior of opposition, the materialist insistence […] seems to me necessary. It is unequally necessary, varying with the sites, the strategic situations, the practical and theoretical points advanced. In a very determined field of the most current situation, it seems to me that the materialist insistence can function as a means of having the necessary generalisation of the concept of text, its extension with no simple exterior limit (which also supposes the passage through metaphysical opposition), [and] not wind up […] as the definition of a new self-interiority, a new “idealism,” if you will, of the text. (Positions 66)

So deconstructive materialism – materialism without substance – is, as Cheah summarises, “the thought of the materiality of the reference or relation to the other” (75) and it must be thought of in order to escape the specific materialist oppositions to which cultural materialism is necessarily mired (new materialism is also mired, but immanently so). One way to adjust to this new materialist realignment will be to

18 Cheah braces this with a quote from Derrida’s Positions: “Realism or sensualism – “empiricism” – are modifications of logocentrism…. [T]he signifier ‘matter’ appears to me problematical only at the moment when reinscription cannot avoid making of it a new fundamental principal which, by means of a theoretical regression, would be reconstituted into a “transcendental signified.” …It can always come to reassure a metaphysical materialism. It then becomes an ultimate referent, according to the classical logic implied by the value of referent, or it becomes an “objective reality” absolutely “anterior” to any work of the mark, the semantic content of a form of presence which guarantees the movement of the text in general from the outside” (65).

37 focus a little less on the novel’s historical condition (which is the guidepost for McCallum and Olbey’s cultural materialist analysis) and more on its aesthetic deployment, which is a valuable approach for other reasons still.

In another older essay, ‘Harris, Philip, Brand: Three Authors in Search of Literate Criticism’, George Elliott Clarke decries the inadequacy of some of the criticism being published on three Canadian poets, inclusive of Brand, claiming that: “The trap that too many critics fall into in treating this Trinidadian trio is that in seeking to broadcast their own sermons against racism, sexism, imperialism, classism and homophobia, they either reduce the writers to the status of sociologists or they bleach their work of aesthetic value” (164). And more extensively, Clarke writes of the criticism in Canada:

[…] our critical reception of First Nations and other writers is still shaded by our rapturous, uncritical guilt and our sychophantic quest for absolution at any cost. To be precise, our recent critiques of three Afro-Canadian women writers – Claire Harris, M. Nourbese Philip, and Dionne Brand – constitute miasmas of panacea politics, a politics that eschew any engagement with poetics. Weakly, meekly, we call these writers “good” because their espousal of good policies and programmes makes us feel good – or, well, not so bad. Yet, they are better writers than our rhetoric allows; they are even, arguably, morally superior to us. But they still wait – we all wait – for a criticism that will be upsettingly, even cruelly, apolitical and illiberal enough to analyse how blackness and womanhood remake syntax, grammar and diction to yield undeniable excellence. (163)

Though Clarke’s call to critical arms is dated, his diagnosis is still germane at least with regards to some, or even parts, of the more contemporary criticism on Brand’s work, which sometimes tends towards naïve fawning. The aspect of Clarke’s account that we champion is his summons to aesthetic scrutiny – we attempt to unpack some of the dense theory underlying In Another Place, Not Here, wherein its complex ideas about race, sex, and sexuality emerge with particular clarity and complexity (and certainly as more than the simple egalitarian hype and ameliorative profusion that a few critics are wont to perceive as the content of Brand’s work).

Clarke’s estimation chimes distantly with another point regarding the criticism on Brand’s work, or on In Another Place, Not Here specifically. And though hardly

38 warranting the same kind of furore that colours Clarke’s important detection of the aesthetic forfeiture that runs coterminous to a certain type of ‘too easy’ sociological emphasis, and perhaps not even a critical problem as such, Brand’s text is rather remarkable in its having spurred a collection of criticism that is itself exceptionally vulnerable to deconstruction. This is, perhaps, the necessary consequence of a mode of critique whose job it is to isolate and clarify elements of a text that is itself writhing with deconstructive power, energy, and invention – to laminate methodological g(l)aze atop an a-methodological artwork. In one sense, our reading is complicit with this self- (and text-) sacrificing symptomology – to really keep Brand’s text alive, our project would need be much more radically anti- interpretational than ours is here. Or else, it might be a razer-thin, razer-sharp mimicry – a ballooning double that accommodated all of the novel’s complexity, an interminable critical endeavour. So we try to skate close to the text, but readily admit our critical inadequacy – that our analytical mission positions us as the obligatory “bad reader”.

In the ‘Envois’ to The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, Derrida plays the admonishing schoolteacher and explains why an anticipatory hermeneutics should be avoided:

Because I still like him, I can foresee the impatience of the bad reader: this is the way I name or accuse the fearful reader, the reader in a hurry to be determined, decided upon deciding […]. Now, it is bad, and I know no other definition of the bad, it is bad to predestine one’s reading, it is always bad to foretell. It is bad, reader, no longer to like retracing one’s steps. (The Postcard 4)

This is not to say that critics of Brand’s text do not retrace their steps, or do not deliberate enough, but that the very nature of analysis is to make certain determinations or truth claims about an object, and these truth claims amount to “Laws”, as John D. Caputo notes, in Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, “[that] are always deconstructable”. Whereas, Caputo continues, “the play of traces, in itself, if it has an itself, is not deconstructable” (101), and this is the textual terrain of Brand’s novel – incredibly unsettled, infinitesimally pulling the rug out from under almost all of our qualified estimations. To give some impression of the difficulty of critically confronting this

39 text’s vitality: in discussing whether a particular character serves as a figure for a particular trait or other, one must take into consideration the difference between – at least – how the character seems to embody the trait (for example, either autonomously, or via conflation with some other collective or individual body), whether the character themselves think that they embody this trait (for often characters will actually consider themselves some version of this trait’s opposite), whether they embody this trait in the mind’s eye of other specific characters, and crucially, how this embodiment changes throughout the narrative. So although we are all destined (tongue in cheek here, conserving the predestination that Derrida is trying to mute) to execute bad readings of some stripe, this bad reading has the potential to be, in its own way, generative.

But more to the point, our reading is not that “bad”, and of course neither is the criticism on Brand’s novel. Furthermore, some of its criticism actually already acknowledges a kind of dual materialism in the novel, though in the vicinity of other themes and concepts. For instance, in a thoughtful recent essay, ‘Elsewheres of Diaspora: Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here’, Kristina Quynn argues for the rhetorical importance of “elsewhere” as a “gestural” device (132) evocative of womanhood as other to normative narrative and representational modes. Quynn ventures that Brand’s “non-linear, multi-voiced, and polytonal narrative style” (122) is a “cultural and artistic form of [anti-heteronormative and anti-sexist] activism” (123). Quynn explains that the “elsewheres” in Brand’s novel are sometimes representational articulations of particular diasporic homelands that are rooted in either a nostalgic past or a utopic future (as romanticised, but actual, places). More disarmingly, she contends that many of its “elsewheres” “associate […] with the here and now, spinning through discourse to reveal a feminine that exists just out of sight (131)” (mutable space). Quynn argues for the importance of the ‘blind spots’ in Brand’s novel – for instance, although she recognises the importance of contextually “enriching” critical interpretations which locate “Grenada” as the unnamed island in the novel, Quynn writes that:

I also insist on the importance of the unnamed status of the island for understanding the ways Brand’s novel plays with what is locatable or representable via conventional narrative means and what must be reordered or unnamed to be made visible. (137-8)

40 Quynn concludes her essay “in the middle” in two ways – by, “like Brand”, bucking “the critical turns towards closure that conclusions invariably make” (139), and through referring to the blank page that is intentionally formatted in the middle of Brand’s novel, as a blind spot that houses lesbian love and female intimacy as forces that cannot be located in heteronarrative representation.

Heather Smyth makes a kindred argument in an older essay, ‘Sexual Citizenship and Caribbean-Canadian Fiction: Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night’, though with a focus on sexuality rather than sex. Smyth makes the fascinating point that in Caribbean politics queer equality and feminism are often retrogressively identified with Western ideological intervention and imperialism. Smyth asserts that Brand’s novel is especially forward-thinking in its “linking [of] lesbian and feminist consciousness with anti-racist, anti-colonial politics in the Caribbean and the Caribbean diasporic space” (144). Like Quynn, Smyth posits justification for the unnamed standing of the island in Brand’s novel, though in the compass of a particular dialectic she recognises between the utopic imagining of Caribbean place as a site of lesbian erotics and inclusion, and as a “more materialist” (152) site of political pragmatics that understands the necessity of an uncompromising “activist critique […] of racism and homophobia” (152). Smyth contends:

Brand’s novel partly proposes a utopic space for lesbianism, not by disavowing any of the violent history or present of racism and sexism in the Caribbean and Canada, but rather by leaving unnamed the different [Caribbean] geographies in which the novel takes place. […] This strategy reinforces the novel’s focus on place rather than nation and allows Brand to imagine a utopian space for her Caribbean lesbian characters without the singularity of specific nation-states. (153)

For Smyth, the significance of Brand’s sapphic utopic ‘no place’ lies in its non- existence, or in its function as a fictional sociological thought-experiment. However, Smyth’s “utopia” (along with activist realities) is actually represented in the novel, and so unlike Quynn’s “elsewheres”, it lacks the virtual power that would be one half of Brand’s ‘dual materialism’ as we are arguing for it.

41 Two other critics and essays that advance the idea of the novel’s virtual element (and so skirt with the idea of a dual materialism) are John Corr’s ‘Affective Coordination and Avenging Grace: Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here’, and Simona Bertacco’s ‘Imagining Bodies in the Work of Dionne Brand’, both of which are preoccupied with affect and bodies in Brand’s text. Bertacco argues for the importance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of the body for understanding Brand’s sexually and racially loaded bodies. For Bertacco, Merleau-Ponty has a two-pronged notion of the body as something that expresses its own “volition” and “motility” (13) in the world, and as something that harbours “virtuality” – that is, as an “imagined” (13) body which “allows a person to consider new possibilities for action and to establish a plan of action to acquire those skills” (14). Corr, likewise, finds inspiration in Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation in his detection of two modes of affect and sense in the novel: “emotions”, which are “identifiable moods or mental states” (unpaginated), and “affect” as prepersonal elements conditioning bodily coordination in the novel. Corr notes that “this problem, one of attempting to evade containment by dominant discourses of feeling, persists throughout In Another Place, Not Here as Brand’s characters refuse the conventional vocabularies of love and lust in describing the impulses, sensations, and affective exchange that constitute the basis of their relationships” (unpaginated). So Corr, Bertacco, and Quynn (and to a lesser degree, Smyth) all, in some way, grapple with a dual materialism in the novel, though under the auspices of different vocabularies of concern.

Doubleness and its In/visible Third Eye

In Another Place, Not Here’s pronouncement of itself as “a novel” on its front cover is offered as a double mark – the novel is both novel and non-novel, as well as both novel and used, or innovative and derivative. Its sub-titular declaration comes as a miniscule, almost muted, certification of novel-ness, a whisper that sneaks out cautiously from between the cornered brambles which frame the novel’s cover image, not quite sure of itself, its individual letters linked tentatively, conditionally, yet pronouncedly-so, in red. In this contradictory fashion it dances on

42 and around the laws of its own definition, hinting at the counter-intuitiveness by which this novel, in declaring itself a ‘novel’, is actually bringing into question the very parameters of what a novel is, and what it may do. But beneath all this there is an assumption that the novel’s interrogation cannot come from the novel itself. It must launch from an outside, from some kind of authorship. This novel’s incongruity can only be recognised and suspected as such within the surveillance of authorship; the articulation of a ‘novel’ that might in turn be questioned depends on the confirmation of an author or authors as arbitrary signifier/s. The novel’s meaning relies largely on its difference from an authorship whose presence must be at least momentarily anchored and accepted. It is precisely because of this necessity that Brand signifies, bears and inheres in In Another Place, Not Here, and part of what “guarantees the movement of the text in general from the outside” (Positions 65).

Within the novel’s larger fluctuating threshold, numerous other thresholds tremble amidst the tug-and-pull that is the generation and frustration of meaning, memory, history and on all scales. Although the novel baits us towards the suspicion of its novel-ness via Brand as confirmed author, it stands as a larger framework that engenders provisional security for its contents. Within the protected parameters of the novel as remark, the novel becomes an authoritative premise. The novel’s double articulation is momentarily suspended as the illusion of focus directs us to a smaller organising appellation that is both fuelled and impoverished – its two sections or chapters, ‘Elizete, beckoned’ and ‘Verlia, flying’. This division is a synthetic framework that installs its two protagonists on separate, opposing grounds. This structural woman-to-woman bordering is also a material analogue to their lesbian affair, a facing that demonstrates how these female protagonists are mutually constitutive. But more than this, it shows how they are purposefully framed, or binarised, in a threadbare fashion that necessitates deconstruction, and how each woman contains her absent lover(s). Compositionally, each section is hyper-incestuous, comprised of both first person accounts by the protagonist its title refers to, as well as third person accounts of both protagonists in life and in dreamscape, and a third person narrator who often slips dextrously into free-indirect

43 discourse, further dissolving the preconceived formalities that one might expect between Brand and her characters.19

The temporal discrepancy between the two section titles is geared to disorientate. Brand’s titles play, as do most of Derrida’s texts, with the ambiguity of chronological opposition (as, for instance, in the ‘Outwork’ to Dissemination, with the contradictory trickery inherent in opposing prefaces to their philosophical works; or in The Postcard, where Derrida confirms, “what I prefer, about post cards, is that one does not know what is in front or what is in back, here or there, near or far, the Plato or the Socrates, recto or verso” [13]). Elizete’s section, then, is offered first, but she arrives already superannuated by the past tense verb “beckoned”, whereas Verlia is preserved by the present progressive tense of “Verlia, flying”. Considering that within the narrative, Verlia dies, and Elizete lives, it seems counter-intuitive to cast Verlia under the present continuous veneer and Elizete in a posture of antecedence. In so doing, we are forced to consider that life is endlessly interpolated with loss, to question the value of the kind of tortured life that sees Elizete surviving the end of the novel. We are able to reflect on the permeability of life and death – neither of which are in-/finite. Not only would Verlia’s body decompose and resynthesise into the Caribbean landscape and beyond, but she perseveres so forcefully in Elizete’s and Abena’s memories, effectively persuading Elizete to retread the same trail she had made so many years past. To risk something of a statement about the temporal assemblage of Verlia and Elizete (one that barely accommodates – and so more like misrepresents, as in a “bad reading” – the actual temporal complexity aroused by the novel), we might : though both women are often constructed through presence, Elizete leaks back into a past that promises futurity, whereas Verlia leaps forward towards a future that augurs finitude.

Herein Derrida’s death knell – from Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International – sounds: “...nothing is less sure, that what one would like to see dead is indeed dead” (48). Though morally and emotionally we are inclined not to like to see Verlia dead, allegorically and

19 Many critics cite Verlia in particular as a charactorial echo of Brand, having – among other things – immigrated to Canada from Trinidad at the age of seventeen. 44 philosophically we relish it. Philosophically here, because Brand so skilfully re- invents the complexities of death and the funereal, like Derrida does in his work. Alhough many of Derrida’s texts yield much as instruments of entrance into Brand’s novel, Glas (English: knell), often heralded (along with The Postcard) as one of Derrida’s most ‘literary’ works, has a particular formal arrangement that seems to have informed Brand’s project in important ways. Glas is divided on each of its pages into two columns, themselves often infected by a third column or by other smaller, seemingly self-contained citational fits or “tattoos”. The left-hand column devotes itself to a wild explication of Hegelian philosophy (its initial trip wire, then, is this spatial coordinate which is upset by comprehension of the canonised Hegel as pseudo-right-wing philosopher of the Absolute Spirit, dovetailed, as Fredric Jameson explains in Valences of the Dialectic, with the fact that: “The Hegel commentary will bear centrally on that section of [Hegel’s] The Philosophy of Right that deals with the family as the antechamber to civil society and, beyond it, the State” [104]). Whereas the right-hand column, seemingly counter-intuitively, is dedicated to the literary work of petty criminal become man- of-letters, Jean Genet – who in this context, is the comparatively left-wing, avant- garde literary artist). By orchestrating Hegel’s induction into the kinky company of Genet (and vice versa), Derrida forces many complex, unseemly penetrations.

According to John Sturrock in his review of Glas, Derrida “only ‘reads’ other thinkers and writers in this fashion in order partially to expropriate them of their writings” (unpaginated). Sturrock adds that there is something intentionally ironic in Derrida’s decision to “dispossess” Genet, because Genet had himself garnered notoriety “for having been a convicted thief early in his life” (unpaginated). And this dispossession morphs into something else again, when it becomes Brand’s artistic prerogative to conceptually hijack Glas from Derrida, to tease out some of the authorial limitations of Derrida’s own slippery rogue philosophy, supplanting the gaze of two white European men (real life figures) with that of two fictional Black women from the Americas – supplementing the joke of male campness (Genet was homosexual, while Hegel had been married to a woman) with the sincerity of female queerness in In Another Place, Not Here.

45 In addition to the architectural division of In Another Place, Not Here (and like the Hegel-Genet ciphers in Glas), the characters Verlia and Elizete are further separated according to a series of transparent traits, which collectively operate to render Verlia the Derridean supplement to Elizete’s ‘originality’. The logic of this supplementarity can initially be read as simple derivation – Verlia is derived from Elizete as root. Apart from the chronology of the two sections, which positions Elizete primordially, Elizete is sometimes associated with objects and properties like earth, land, rock, heat, heaviness, duration, materialism, speech, and life in relation to Verlia. She is assembled as the earthly subject of a primitive corporeality, affirming:

Under the saaman tree is where I grow up. It was wide and high and the light between what it leave of the sky was soft and it look like a woman with hands in the air. A samaan is a tree with majesty and I think of this tree as my mother. (17)

Her first-person account is vocalised within the narrative so as to emphasise presence and purity; she is literally raised by Nature, by a single tree that is feminised.20

Verlia, by contrast, is presented in collaboration with air, sea, water, cold, lightness, idealism, ephemerality, writing, and death in relation to Elizete. Her first- person account is largely staged through a series of journal entries. This writerly mode is one of many signposts to Verlia’s absence – writing is the most radical form – the exemplarity – of supplementarity. In Of Grammatology, Derrida writes:

If supplementarity is a necessarily indefinite process, writing is the supplement par excellence since it marks the point where the supplement proposes itself as supplement of supplement, sign of sign, taking the place of a speech already significant: it displaces the proper place of the sentence, the unique time of the sentence pronounced hic et nunc by an irreplaceable subject, and in return enervates the voice. It marks the place of the initial doubling. (281)

20 Although Zoran Pecic claims that the samaan tree, or ‘rain tree’, is “Indigenous to India and brought to the Caribbean in the nineteenth century by the British as part of the colonial project” (107) (see also Dina Georgis 30), which would be interesting because it situates the tree according to its own diasporic history, other sources suggest that the tree is actually native to Central America and the northern part of South America (see Roger G. Skolmen’s Encyclopedia of Life entry on albizia saman). 46 Verlia as writing, as double, as absence, and as death is written liberally into the text, almost every sentence radiates densely with her supplementarity – with the death that had already begun to dreamily encroach on her life from (or before) birth.21

The novel seems then, to follow the logic of Plato’s Phaedrus – the written diary entries of Verlia’s section would seem to have us mark Verlia the ‘discredited’ cultural supplement to Elizete’s actual speech, a vocalisation that trumps up Elizete’s position as natural and as present. Even so, much of the third- person narration actually illustrates a contrary positioning, evident in each woman’s first impression of the other in the cane fields. Elizete’s vocalisation describes the first time she sees Verlia, an incessant chatterer:

[...] one day I see this woman talking, talking like she know what she is saying and everybody around listening. I walk past because I have no time for no woman talking. It don’t mean nothing. It don’t matter what woman say in the world, take it from me. This woman with her mouth flying... cheups. I hear something about co-operative. Black people could ever co-operate? This little girl too fast again. Her mouth too fast, she tongue flying ahead of sheself. (13)

For Elizete, Verlia’s political preaching signifies nothing, it is a Macbethian white noise, full of sound and fury. And in the same way, but on the other foot, Verlia’s diary entries record Elizete’s muteness: “She’s watching me. The woman who won’t talk to me” (211-2). Ultimately the novel sympathises with Derrida’s position in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, from Dissemination, which reads ‘writing’ not as something only inherently lacking or somehow less than speech, but as a pharmakon – that is, as simultaneously a remedy, a poison, and a scapegoat.

21 Toledo Freiwald describes Verlia’s death as a scene that “underscores the palimpsestic” character of Brand’s novel (45). Quynn too recognizes the climactic presaging within which Verlia’s story is steeped and which orders our “readerly expectations”, confirmed by Verlia’s martyrdom: “we have read of Verlia’s leap from the cliff face multiple times in a variety of narrated memories and in multiple figurations that emphasize Verlia’s risk-taking, her way of thinking […]” (127). Even within the strictures of metaphorical teleology, Verlia’s death is not necessarily a loss, or an indication of closure. Quynn conveys precisely this when she describes the representational quality of Verlia’s leap as both manufacturing closure and fulfilling “readerly expectations” and as “perverting” other elements of this closure (with temporal and emotional concertinas) and endowing it with “elsewheres” (127). 47 Moreover, as nature and as presence, Elizete still lacks, she is abandoned at every turn by almost everyone she encounters: orphaned (like Genet); detached by the heritage of Nowhere handed down by Adela; deserted by the two children who tease and hit her under the samaan tree; forsaken by “the woman they left her with” (Mirelda Josefena) who continually renounces her and then dies; surprisingly deserted by Isaiah (after her many failed attempts to run away from him); and then of course too by Verlia – always a remainder (reste). In one sense Elizete is material residue, and is therefore not the insubstantial “remainder” of Derridian thought – she is herself, present, but left behind. However, in her quest and longing for an absent Verlia, Elizete is also a sign referring to the non-present, still-to-come Verlia (who is the ghost of her residual desire) and so ‘is’ Derridian reste. Crucially, this is an articulation of the dual materialisms that we are arguing for in this part – one predicated on the political function of the negative, and the other on the generative action of the positive, which, as an insubstantial materialism of the- other-to-come, is what actually impels Elizete to act, to journey, to launch forward, and to chase (in the limited fashion that her circumstances allow).

An important element of Elizete’s status as material remainder, we argue, is that she is largely a figure of empiricism. The lack of signification into which Elizete is born (her stand-in mothers – Adela and “the woman they left her with” – are both poor societal communicators) is a dearth accented by the fact that, although on an island, she is, nevertheless, land-locked, and this manifests as the perfect blank canvas for an empiricist subject position. Elizete’s naming tendencies are indicative of a knowledge that comes after the fact of sensory experience, a posteriori. Her orphanhood ensures that she cannot even be sure of a veritable genetic communion with Adela or “the woman they left her with” (Mirelda Josefena), or with a past, history, or family knowledge. Beginning in Nowhere, and always left behind, Elizete’s empiricism and materialism means that she seeks and reads ideally. Taken together, these traits also condition her tendency towards aestheticising, rather than politicising, the world.

Verlia, on the other hand, we argue is propelled by a congenital rationalism that pushes her towards modes of escape, modes of flight, consecutively fleeing her family in the Caribbean, her uncle in Sudbury, the Movement in Toronto and then

48 Elizete in the Caribbean.22 Verlia is born into a crowed family who traffic in memories of woe and whose proximity to the sea seems to augment the acuity of their familial hive mind and the intensity of their collective historical-emotional recall. This is clarified by Saint Lucian playwright and poet Derek Walcott’s significant insight that “the sea is history”, which is the case for coastal dwellers, islanders, and especially so for descendants of the Middle Passage. Verlia’s family are then brimming with history, washed over with excessive signage, tainted with grief, and her futural propulsion relies on this a priori knowledge. Verlia’s rationalism is particularly striking in one of her diary entries:

It’s not only my family. It’s the fact. Fact. Fact. Intangible fact of this place. It’s not possible to get rid of that. So much would have to have not happened. It’s like a life sentence. Call it what we want – colonialism, imperialism – it’s a fucking life sentence. Nobody I come from know these words but they do the time. (215)

This rationalism is also encapsulated in the clairvoyant quality of Verlia’s dreams as a child, history riding its waves and auguring likely futures. Because circumstances are “not enough” ideally, Verlia flees and writes materially and politically.

Although Elizete and Verlia’s relationship arguably constitutes the predominant opposition in the novel, the novel’s complex animation actually comes from the teeming multitude of oppositions that Brand has managed to wrangle within the novel’s soft enclosure. Dina Georgis remarks on the novel’s dichotomisation in ‘Mother Nations and the Persistence of “Not Here”’:

In the narrative, various worlds collide; the past and the present, the lives of the two women, the two national histories. Doubleness, in fact, permeates the entire narrative. The story, which chronicles the histories of two women and their relationship to their mothers and to each other, is also an account of their individual struggle with loss and displacement within and in between two nations. Doubleness also structures the narrative. (29-30)

22 Lauren Vedal also observes how Verlia “[…] leaves the Caribbean, Sudbury, Toronto, two lovers and, ultimately, life” (72), and situates this movement as a reaction to her childhood circumstances. Vedal notes that while Verlia confronts severe psychological threats in childhood, Elizete instead gets dished out overwhelming physical peril in childhood. Vedal’s arguments will be returned to at length later in this Part. 49 In reading the construction of the nation in the novel as a maternal symbolic, Georgis argues that Elizete and Verlia have fraught connections to two nations: the Caribbean and Canada. Though she is right to suggest that the novel accentuates doubleness, it only does so as a sort of primary manoeuvre. Its real import comes in its agitation of what appear to be such simple dualisms; Abena is introduced as a third lover who complicates the easy dualism between Elizete and Verlia in the same way that Africa serves as another ‘mother nation’ – an explicit and vital part of the psychic configuration of all three women.

Abena is, in many ways, a temporal, spatial, and figural middle-ground between Elizete and Verlia. Where Verlia flees (as excess) and Elizete chases (as remainder), Abena is a figure of paralysis (or stasis23). These existential modes are always largely a consequence of their familial circumstances. Utterly stifled by her mother’s physical and emotional abuse, Abena internalises all of her trauma, snuffs herself out, and becomes condensed (an “iron fist”, or “glass”24) – no space for any kind of movement. Abena is neither able to reach for what she yearns (more like Elizete) nor to run from what she abhors (more like Verlia), glued to Toronto, she is an emotional clam, unable to express her desires. Where Elizete and Verlia have childhoods that are often married to organic metaphors of flux that tie in with their Caribbean upbringings (i.e. Elizete grounded by a land that grows and changes, Verlia at the whim of a volatile rocky sea), Abena is wrought out of synthetic metaphors that chime both with her immobility and her emotional insincerity (i.e.

23 Raphael Dalleo also notes that Abena is associated with stasis (237). 24 In a powerful reading of the mutability of the “liquid imagery” expressed in Brand’s novel (especially charactorially through Verlia), McCutcheon observes that Brand in one way sets up Toronto’s white world as a “secretive”, “glassy”, leviathan hegemony whose racism resembles oceanic depths in its immovability. Against this mammothly and secretively-rascist white-world Toronto, McCutcheon describes how Brand conjures a “secreting”, and mutable immigrant “territory”, which is the fringe community Verlia tapps into with the Black Movement. It is fascinating to read Verlia’s relationship with Abena against the backdrop of McCutcheon’s reading of “glassy” urban racism. It seems that if, as McCutcheon observes, Brand connects glass and iron to the city’s unbuckling racism, then Abena assumes the bureaucratic contours of this unspoken white sea-monster (even while working in a women’s shelter that would purportedly provide asylum to female immigrants). This also plays into the reasons for Verlia and Abena’s romance rusting – immutable “iron-fisted” Abena is not enough for Verlia-as-liquid. Verlia seeks to corrode racism’s tacit domicile in white cosmopolitanism (to which Abena – even as a Black woman – is so deeply fused, mollusk-like), and so cannot swallow Abena’s ironlike makeup. McCutcheon writes, of iron: “As a material instrumental to forms of slavery both explicit and subtle, iron conjures in these references the legacy of slavery and the empire built on its exploitation. But iron cannot manacle or restrain liquid, which is part of what gives Verlia’s sense of revolutionary Black identity as liquid a mythic power” (unpaginated). 50 “cold brass”). Like Elizete, Abena is the product of a hermitic matrilineal rearing, but unlike Elizete, Abena is bound by a veritable blood connection to her mother, bound too by her mother’s “big smoke” “hands on” approach to child rearing (rather than treating her, as Elizete is, by way of Mirelda Josefena’s garden variety of child rearing, as a plant that thrives on neglect).

Although she is an image of metropolitan artificiality as against Elizete and Verlia’s small island authenticity, as a complex figure of glass, Abena is also a blend (or, rather, a deconstruction) of many features that otherwise binarise or oppositionalise Elizete and Verlia. As glass, Abena manifests both Verlia’s ethereal amorphousness and Elizete’s solidity, or worldly anchorage. Traditionally made predominantly of sand – a figure that itself expresses dual particle and wave behaviours – glass nevertheless becomes its own transparent assemblage, hard but see-through. As glass, Abena at one point in the novel considers her mother as something like a quasi-sadistic glass-blower; Brand forges a remarkable metaphor that consubstantiates abusive mother and artisan. In a moment of emotional release, Abena confides in Elizete:

I often wondered what my mother was beating me into. What the hell were you making, I hear a conversation with her in my head ask years later. What did she see becoming under her hand? Was it an icon, akuaba eyes where her hand descended like a machete, so angular, so severe. And this jowly sullenness – did she see herself kneading and kneading and leaving it to rise or did she want something more stiff, more assuming cold brass, or the stillness of iron? But I know that if I received all her blows, if I interpreted her intention right, I would be the ugliest woman on earth. If she intended to make a shape and if somehow I as her subject acknowledged her movement, gave in to her impressions, her thoughts, her artistic decisions, if she were somehow an artist, then I would be a ruin or less fabulous, put aside, hardly recognisable as human. (236)

The “iconicity” that Abena’s mother tries to beat her into is the approximation of an unidentifiable monster, an aporia of sorts. But Abena cannot register this aporia, she disregards the im-/possible, unthinkable aporia of her own in-/human self, instead desensitising, shutting down, paralysing.

51 The correspondence Abena registers between her iconicity and the akuaba figure is significant. An akuaba doll is a fertility artwork traditionally from Ghana, which is used to stave off barrenness in women. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the akuaba doll is used:

[…] to protect against deformity or even ugliness in a child. During pregnancy, Akan women are not supposed to gaze upon anything (or anybody) physically unattractive, lest it influence the features of her own child. The traits that define the akuaba are meant as prayers or invocations for the physical beauty of an anticipated child. (see Akuaba Figure)

As artist then, Abena’s mother toils to unconceive Abena, or worse, to smelt her out of the self-same foul ore that binds them as mother and daughter, and that ensures Abena’s iconicity as a form whose ugliness directly reflects, apropos of the mother, the iteration of an hereditary diasporic pathology.

Of this charactorial trio (Elizete, Verlia, Abena), Abena is the différance that cannot be absorbed into the regime of Elizete and Verlia (she is the “[n]either/nor, that is, simultaneously either or; the mark is also the marginal limit, the march, etc.” [Positions, 43]), she is an affirmative rupture of conceptual alterity that rewrites the initial binary of Elizete and Verlia. Additionally and importantly, Abena is also rewritten through her encounters with them. Consider the distinction Derrida describes between paralysis and aporia in the ‘Provocation: Forwards’ to Without Alibi:

I would be tempted to say that paralysis is the negative symptom of aporia. Paralysis arrests, whereas aporia, at least as I interpret it (the possibility of the impossible, the “play” of a certain excess in relation to any mechanical movement, oriented process, path traced in advance, or teleological program), would be the very condition of the step [pas], or even of the experience of pathbreaking, route (via rupta), march [marche], decision, event: the coming of the other, in sum, of writing and desire. (xvii)

Abena and Verlia are an aporia of their own, as are Abena and Elizete, and this is precisely (as we will illustrate towards the close of Part One) what enables Abena to pierce (in stops and starts, at least) the confines of her paralysis.

52 Desires Material and Ideal

So a systematic and rigourous reading of the text recognises various intrusions to each duality. It too recognises each side of its oppositions bleeding into and contaminating the others in a variety of ways. Even so, it is critical to distinguish the conditions of its binarised ephemera, for each opposite is wholly imagined only in relation to its partner; its provisional identity depends on the terms of the opposition in which it is embroiled. In what many consider to be the inaugural poststructuralist manifesto, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, Derrida unpacked the terms of this oppositional exchange. On thinking the “structurality of structure”, Derrida wrote:

[I]t became necessary to think both the law which somehow governed the desire for a centre in the constitution of structure, and the process of signification, which orders the displacements and substitutions for this law of central presence – but a central presence which has never been itself, has always already been exiled from itself into its own substitute. (280)

In their desire for each other, Verlia and Elizete imagine each other as the distinct centre that will resolve their own lack, that will act as remedy to their personal deficiencies, but really they are already exiled into their opposite, into each other as a substitute or surrogate lack, as well as into various other things against, and through which, they are created.

It has almost become a rite of passage within the criticism on this novel to devote some space to delineating Verlia’s and Elizete’s desires for one another within the domain of a particular oppositional thematics, frequently brought to pass through a focus on the novel’s opening scene where the women first meet in the cane fields. Our two cents, in this respect, is to unpack more thoroughly the materialism-idealism dualism, as well as to tease out some of the operations of other dualisms that critics have not, or have only partially, cottoned onto, including empiricism-rationalism, synthesis-analysis and aestheticism-politicism.

53 In Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial, for example, Raphael Dalleo explores how their desires are built on the dynamic between a public intellectual and a private folk (or subalternity), including what each offer and represent to the other. Dalleo explains that Brand’s novel draws on two modes of discourse that were specific to the Caribbean’s decolonisation era when revolution was rife across different islands of the Antilles: the literature of the professional North American writer who tries to make amends for working-class suffering by joining their plight, and the literary style of the testimonio, which purports to eradicate the intellectual’s voice “creating the pretense of the folk-subject speaking without mediation, even while prefaces and author’s notes remind the reader of the heroic anticolonial work the professional writer has done in seeking out and setting down this story” (235). Dalleo claims that while Brand pays allegiance to these well-intentioned, historical, anticolonial discourses, she also criticises and reworks some of their own essentialising tropes.

Apart from the public-private and intellectual-folk oppositions that Dalleo sees in the novel, one of its most elemental physical metonomyic associations sets up Verlia as liquid-water-sea, and Elizete as solid-matter-ground. In ‘Rewriting the Mother/Nation: No Telephone to Heaven, In Another Place, Not Here, and Cereus Blooms at Night’, Emily L. Taylor focuses on Elizete as a symbol of land, arguing that Brand revolutionises the well-worn trope of woman-as-earth by replacing the desiring, colonising male gaze with a desiring, emacipating female gaze (Verlia’s). Exploring the other side of the coin, McCutcheon reads Verlia through the metaphorics and metonomy of liquid. McCutcheon explains that Verlia-as-liquid invokes water/sea as “the unconscious” (Campell qtd. in McCutcheon), water/sea as “an archetypal symbol of literature as a whole” (Frye qtd. in McCutcheon), and water/sea as “pharmakon [which] is always drunk like a liquid” (Derrida qtd. in McCutcheon), and argues that: “Brand’s use of liquid imagery flows with these deep-running currents […] and against them” (unpaginated). McCutcheon astutely observes that if Elizete is rock or stone (an iteration of Elizete as earth, ground etc.) then “Elizete’s inadvertent self-laceration at the start of the book [after seeing Verlia-as-water for the first time] foreshadows the inevitable commingling of these

54 distinctions” (unpaginated). This results in the production of blood,25 which is an interesting corporeal element neither/either liquid/matter.

Furthermore, McCutcheon’s revelations prompt renewed appreciation of the incredible dream sequence that Brand constructs of Elizete’s flight to Canada, which marvellously undermines all of the preconceptions that the novel develops with regards to the Verlia-liquid associations that McCutcheon flags. In the dream sequence, Elizete is – even as stone-land-ground – elevated on an airplane (snaking over land and sea) and associated with the unconscious and its ability to morph and mingle dualisms. Elizete’s dreamscape registers how writing and death are also metonymic of her – Elizete is also symbolic of writing (she is a “wordsmith of foliage” [106]), and imagines dying in the volcanic crater of Saint Vincent’s La Soufrière, where lava is the violent liquidification of land (like blood gushing from a body).

Elizete sees and desires Verl as “Grace” and as ideological transcendence; recall the novel’s opening line, Elizete’s first-person experience, looking up at Verlia: “Grace. Is Grace, yes. And I take it, quiet, quiet, like thiefing sugar” (3). Verlia sees and desires Zete as material “Fact” and as political reification; Verlia, in her journal, records, for instance, their different interpretations of Elizete’s husband, Isaiah, taking off: “Elizete’s man ran off and we haven’t seen him since. She says it’s vindication. If I wasn’t a materialist I’d believe her. But I am, so I’m trying to persuade her to come and stay with me” (219). So Verlia thinks of herself as realist, rationalist, grounded materialist, but on so many other accounts she is set up, in relation to Elizete, as vaporous, as unable to escape the power of her own spectrality and idealism. She registers Elizete’s corporeality, for instance, in the cane fields, through distance, through a kind of abstraction: “I can feel her in the field as if she’s looking at me, but when I look over all I can see is her swing. I can feel her like a body against me and she’s hundreds of feet away” (212). Verl and Zete have a quantum correlation as a pair (or what McCutcheon calls “an

25 Debra Dudek examines how blood is a co-opted trope for “transgression” (51) in Brand’s novel. In ‘“Blood Gashed and Running like Rain”: A Diasporic Poetics in Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here and Simone Lazaroo’s The Australian Fiancé’, Dudek focuses on how blood is shifted from its habitual mode as metaphor that supports gendered colonisation via national and ethnic essentialisms to a more fluid diasporic poetics that “trouble[s] the equation of blood = belonging” (45). 55 empathetic connection between the lovers” [unpaginated]), in addition to certain autonomous qualities of their own. In quantum physics, nonlocality describes the capacity of a particle to remain calibrated to the state of another particle, even though separated by potentially great distances. Quantum entanglement proposes that the separated particles might also instantaneously (at faster than light speed) function as an autonomous, single particle, exhibiting the same states and properties. So although this quantum wizardry certainly inflects Zete and Verl’s relationship, it is also characterised by an oppositional lilt that the concepts of quantum nonlocality and entanglement do not account for. And it is this provisional oppositionality that is the force of their desire for one another.

Ultimately, of course, neither woman successfully attains those aspects of the other that they most long for. Their desires are (not entirely) thwarted; Verlia fails in her analytical-material quest, evaporated by synthesis, and Elizete fails ideally, landed by analysis: “For two of we it was the end of a road, she own she write in an arc in the sky and mine, well, it come to grounds” (75). It is important to note that for a time, when they first become lovers, they revel in the quiet satisfaction of desires (undecidedly) met and enjoyed. The following describes Verlia’s satisfaction with Elizete’s local knowledge:

She knew that she was safe with a woman who knew how to look for rain, what to listen for in birds in the morning, a woman who loved to feel her face melting in the sun in the morning through a window. She needed a woman so earthbound that she would rename every plant she came upon. She needed someone that believed that the world could be made over as simply as that, as simply as deciding to do it, but more, not just knowing that it had to be done but needing it to be done and simply doing it. This is what she wanted to believe and what she always had doubts about [...] something made her notice that she was the one who had doubts and what she was saying she merely said but Elizete felt and knew. (202)

Verlia’s celebration of Elizete’s naturalist immanency, empiricism, and small- focused effectuation is registered here in third-person, which distances Verlia (yet again) from this sense of her own satisfaction with these qualities and Elizete’s companionship. When Elizete’s quasi-domestic-aesthetic tunnel vision (a reverberation of her time spent in childhood staring at the spoors of wood lice in the

56 wall, trying to marry their [and her own] imperceptibility with a sense of ‘home’26) finally becomes inadequate and unfathomable to the political-minded pragmatist in Verlia (i.e., when the New J.E.W.E.L movement is splintering and physical combat is nigh at hand in Grenada), Elizete’s lack is one that Verlia comfortably voices in first-person: “I don’t know how she can bear it. She’s busy looking at okra plants and pumpkin vines and rain and talking about when to plant what and how dry this rainy season is. She has no idea. Not fair. I don’t understand her” (222).

Elizete becomes “not enough” for Verlia in actuality, and Verlia records this lack in her journal (or in her head, rationally, thinkingly). Intriguingly, Verlia also becomes not enough for Elizete, but not to the extent that Elizete can think or write this deficit so explicitly, because Verlia’s inadequacy (felt and experienced by Elizete) comes in that she doesn’t exist, she had disappeared (not enough literally, physically not anything, a virtual, a zero, a cipher), and Elizete can only register this loss empirically (i.e., not via a journal). Elizete, often times throughout the novel, reaches and strives for the ideal. As a child, bright and as yet unwilted by life’s tribulations, this hunger for ideality is sometimes quenched, for example, by way of the stories and knowledge of Adela, which are for her a reified delight: “Turned to the wall she could feel the story crawl over her shoulders and up her neck, she could feel it like something brown and sweet making her hair at her neck tremble. Something thick like cake” (33). In maturity she still lusts after ideality but is beaten down by the tough reality of her materiality (again, at the novel’s opening, after looking up to Verl for the first time, she immediately and unthinkingly “sinks the machete in [her] foot” (3),27 which, in turn, is the genesis of a different kind of -shock-faint fuelled transcendence – and this is the microscopy of the event in the machine, which we discuss shortly). Similarly, after Verlia’s death, she endevours, in different ways, to achieve this Verlia-flavoured transcendence, including gravitating to Toronto, but is always prevented from doing so by her material life. Elizete recounts her Verlia-inspired arrival in Toronto, which is laced with memories of her heartbreak-driven actions after Verlia’s death:

26 See In Another Place, Not Here: “She tried to trace them [the wood lice] home, yet perhaps home was these paths, she though, or their way of not being seen, waiting and listening” (32). 27 Many critics have observed this scene (Elizete looking up and Verlia and sinking the machete into her foot) as symbolic of other kinds of impediment. 57 Haunt her into dropping here like a stone. Stone. She tried to mash her own face in with a stone when Verlia went. She’d held it in her hand and pounded and pounded, but Verlia was still gone. Over and over the stone in her hand moved to the pulp of her mouth, hoping. (50)

Elizete’s action appears to be light years from the essentialist hauteur of Samuel Johnson’s somewhat ironically-humanist “I refute it thus”, famously kicking the stone, and so claiming to disprove Berkley’s idealism. In a strange way, Johnson’s motion is symbolically reaffirmed by Elizete, as a figure who cannot surpass matter and the material. Even so, Elizete’s refutation actually recognises the spectre of idealism residing in the stone. She does not kick the stone away and observe it rebound with a little of its own force, an appropriately posh riposte of its own. She brings the stone to her head, repetitively accenting the stone’s frame, which is her brain, and her mind’s desire to become abstracted into grace.28

So the trafficking and swapping of concepts and behaviours causes “identity to be depicted in the text”, according to Paul Huebener in ‘“No Moon to Speak Of”: Identity and Place in Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here’, “as a function of [mutable] relationships” (615). And this mutability is always contingent on un- /reliable binaries. For instance, Elizete’s and Verlia’s desire for each other is borne largely out of the revulsion they each harbour against their respective families; both women try to flee the grief and trauma of their histories by searching for the

28 It is worth noting that while critics often recite the scene of Verlia’s suicide for its significance, rarely is Elizete’s attempted suicide commented on. Verlia’s suicidal bodily cliff jump is presented as a climactic event (a high that comes low), whereas Brand buries Elizete’s suicidal-intentioned head battery (a lowering act that reaches up) to a meager three-sentence third-person confession. Verlia’s suicide is of course metaphorically augured throughout the novel, whereas Elizete’s description of a past occurance is auguring. There is something else to be said about the slightly enhanced, or slightly more apparent, figurative teleology that Brand adopts in relation to Verlia. It is another of Brand’s deconstructive techniques. Those aspects of Verlia’s future that are mapped, or augured, are connected to her rationalism. To a greater extent, things are already written and known for Verlia (she wants to die and evaporate to escape history and its cycles). While Verlia as a character has a great deal of poltical and intellectual individual freedom for having been educated and for having certain social privledges, Brand confines her, formally, to a narrative of design and expectation, and so places certain heteronomous aesthetical restictions on her political radicalism. Conversely, Elizete has no political agency, but is granted a little more narrative uncertainty (reinforced by her empiricism, which is also a symbolic , and so ripe for creation and discovery – not hampered by political history in the same ideological ways as Verlia, she instead has to create and discover the world). We are not given the same kind of conspicuous metaphorical tip-offs to Elizete’s fate. Even so, Brand’s novel is so deeply multi-layered, that it seems wrong even to make this qualitification. For as readers we simultaneously do get a sense of the inevitability of the grief and hardships that are to inflect Elizete’s future – where living does not mean prevailing, necessarily. These tip-offs are more muffled though, more attuned to a metaphorics of muteness. 58 opposite of what their families epitomised, which means searching for themselves in another form – cleverly synthesised through the novel’s homoerotic staging. Though approximately, Elizete represents materialism and seclusion in contrast to Verlia’s idealism and sociality, this duality is fractured and susceptible to being upended with the introduction of any other character. When a contradiction serves to disrupt the logic of a particular opposition, it inadvertently modifies the mechanics of every other opposition: the symbiosis between one binary effectively relies on a whole gamut of other binaries (though even this seems too mechanistic a description of the process occurring here). For instance, in relation to their immediate families, during their respective youths, they are cast as a form of the exact opposite according to the materialism/idealism and solitude/sociality oppositions. Elizete’s family (Adela and Mirelda Josefena) are depicted as solitary figures against whom she nurses a sociality and idealism, whereas Verlia exhibits traits of materialism and independence counter to her own family’s socially congested, nightmarish mentalities.

In Limbo: The Event and the Machine

Even though there are scores of ways that each trait derivative of either Verlia or Elizete can in fact as easily be seen to be attributable to the other of the pair (and the same goes for every other ephemerally oppositional relationship in the novel), there is a particular oppositional example that brings us to the very heart of the philosophical dilemma that the novel diffractedly stages. Two specific passages in the novel (which leak out of themselves and replicate according to different fractal algorithms and scales) are striking distillations of how the novel’s two sections are profound of the inescapable incongruousness of the event and the machine. These two passages show compellingly how Verlia experiences Elizete and the Caribbean as an event and how Elizete encounters Canada and Verlia (in her absence) as machinic, and crucially, how the life, chance, and invention breathes within the machine, and how the event is always-already riddled with deterministic iterations. Crucially, this is no mirror-maze phenomenon wherein the machine… is in the event… is in the machine… is in the event… ad infinitum.

59 Deconstruction is the birthing station for new conceptual produce, which are incommensurate to parent binaries. Each time we zoom in on the event in the machine, the furniture has been rearranged, and the rules of the game are qualitatively different, so that only new conceptual material (which is more than the abracadabra of new neologisms) can register the machine’s, or the event’s, new becoming and entanglement.

As a kind of theoretical sheet music that helps explain the rhythms of these passages, Derrida’s ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, from Without Alibi, sets up the conventional organicity of the event against the machine’s lifelessness:

Why organic? Because there is no thinking of the event, it seems, without some sensitivity, without an aesthetic affect and some presumption of living organicity.

The machine, on the contrary, is destined to repetition. It is destined, that is, to reproduce, impassively, imperceptibly, without organ or organicity, received commands. In a state of anaesthesia, it would obey or command a calculable program without affect or auto-affection, like an indifferent automaton. Its functioning, if not its production, would not need anyone. Moreover, it is difficult to conceive of a purely machinelike apparatus without inorganic matter.

Notice I say inorganic. Inorganic, that is, non-living, sometimes dead but always, in principle, unfeeling and inanimate, without desire, without intention, without spontaneity. The automaticity of the inorganic machine is not the spontaneity attributed to organic life. (Without Alibi 72)

We might usefully wed the distinction between the event and the machine to another tentative opposition roused by the novel: what Bina Toledo Friewald calls “the vital interplay between determination and freedom” (40). Where the event is customarily associated with freedom, the machine is often synonymous with determinacy.

The first excerpt concludes the ‘Elizete, Beckoned’ section of the novel; it is part of a more minute section, which begins with Elizete in Abena’s office in Toronto. Abena’s anxious behaviour triggers in Elizete a recollection of Verlia, of their last day together in Grenada as insurgents rebelling against U.S (and other allied Caribbean) invaders. As the prose drifts from Abena’s office (sometime in the

60 1990s) to the cemetery in Grenada in 1983, softening the distinction between both locations, both times, between both Verlia and Abena, the narration advances in third person, presaging Verlia’s death in a number of ways. A slight recess between paragraphs indicates a shift as Elizete’s first person narration steals in to become the predominant mode of description, chronicling their sombre experience in the cemetery: “We all drift in and out of sleep when the Yankees crack the air, crack it wide open with plane and helicopter” (115). Another small cleft between paragraphs restores the third person narration yet again, describing Verlia’s experience in the cemetery, this time however sinking occasionally into a free- indirect discourse characterised by Verlia’s subjectivity: “Not even the earth sided with them and that in the end was unbearable. What did they think they were taking? Only her heart. And take it then, not even that was hers anyway” (116).

So it is from within an atmosphere of ambiguity that the first extract reveals itself: simultaneously apart of Elizete’s “section”; a fragment that assumes a third- person status; and a kind of free-indirect-discourse that invites Verlia’s subjectivity too – a cocktail of perspectives. The extract reads:

Today the sound of bees and cicadas singing tautly tightening the air, as if they were drawing a map of the place, as if they were the only ones left to do it. Their singing thick as electric wires, cicadas, bees singing thick, suspended the island, mapping the few hills, the dried rivers of the dried season, the white river stones, the soft memory of the people who lived here, the desire of rain when it came to wash rickety houses away, or the desire of the sun to parch old people’s lips, children’s throats, the hot need of hillsides to incline so desperately, to inspire weakness in the knees, the cold- blooded heat of noons heating people into houses and under beds. Cicadas, bees, busy with their cartography, their sound like tender glass above, holding these few things, waiting to set them down again, the simple geography of dirt and water, intact, the way only they knew it, holding the name of the place in their voices, screaming so that the war would pass, interminably pass. (117)

The revolutionists reach for nature, for the local, and for the familiar when confronted with the terror and acute indeterminacy of war.

The presentation of the natural in this passage – an organicity that also accompanies much of the novel’s other descriptions of the Caribbean – comes most

61 obviously from a description of life bursting at its seams – the cicadas and bees in numbers plentiful, fully occupied with their daily operations. There is also a unique form of agency bestowed upon some of the various synechdocal features of nature: “...the desire of rain when it came to wash rickety houses away...”, “...the desire of the sun to parch old people’s lips, children’s throats...”, “...the hot need of hillsides...to inspire weakness in the knees...” (emphasis added). Beginning with “[t]oday the sound...” (emphasis added) registers a present tense singularity that effectively embeds its action in the uniqueness and urgency of the war that Elizete and Verlia are immediately a part of. So precariously close to death, life is rendered all the more precious, all the more significant. So far adrift from the living world of bees and cicadas that are unfettered from the threat of war, they are in a kind of limbo between life and death, intimated through the cemetery setting. Similarly, the “sound” of bees and cicadas singing personalises and particularises the action as something recognisable and meaningful. This transpires in a similar vein to the novel’s reoccurring construction of the Caribbean as a knowable place up and against Canada as esoteric space.

Perhaps pre-emptively, but because we have just briefly flagged it, and because it already simultaneously upsets the previous paragraph’s concluding assessment, we should take this opportunity to suggest that the novel’s general aesthetic choreography is one attuned to the rhythms and movements of limbo, both as a West-Indian dance and ritual, and as that suspended, intermediate period, lying in wait of some kind of event or resolution – the Middle Passage diffracted. Limbo sets up the Caribbean as an uncertain geo-psychic diasporic-archipelago, halfway between many things – Africa and Canada, land and sea – and rent with a particular cadence of tidal rumblings. Historically, limbo materialised on overcrowded, stingily-spaced slave ships as a form of dance and ritual that demanded lithe movement. “The slaves bent themselves like spiders” (195), writes Sonjah Stanley- Niaah in ‘Mapping Black Atlantic Performance Geographies: From Slave Ship to Ghetto’:

Incidentally, the lack of space is also obvious to the visitor of slave castles such as Elmina Castle [Ghana], with low thresholds that the enslaved navigated to move from dungeon to holding room to the ‘door of no return’ (now renamed ‘the door of

62 return’)[29] before boarding the slavers. Consistent with certain African beliefs the dance reflects the whole cycle of life. The dancers move under a pole that is gradually lowered from chest level, and they emerge on the other side, as their heads clear the pole, as in the triumph of life over death. (195)

For Elizete and Verlia in the cemetery, there is a sense that the real triumph (if any) is for Verlia, who fall-rises up-down into death. This movement is analogous to the movement of limbo, with the added significance of determining “the triumph of life over death” in death, which seems bolstered by the fact of the dance’s contemporary manifestation as a rite at Trinidadian wakes. Another of the dance’s ironic metamorphoses (which after globalisation becomes something like post- irony) has been into a form of casual entertainment, sometimes employed as an icebreaker at holiday venues for Caribbean tourists.

Against the spectacle, or event, of this Caribbean-limbo passage, we can juxtapose a second passage that begins with: “The noise, the everlasting noise...” – a generalising, monotonising installation of barren automation. It is situated in a chapter that depicts Elizete’s demoralising experience as an illiterate, illegal immigrant in Canada, with prose that switches between third-person narration and a free-indirect-discourse coloured by Elizete’s subjectivity.30 In a room somewhere in Toronto, in the early hours of the morning, some months after having first arrived in Canada, Elizete struggles still to distinguish her surroundings:

The noise, the everlasting noise came from nothing she could recognise, no particular machine, just the noise of machinery; but machinery past the individualism of a machine, machines lost from identity. The mouth of them wide open in a yawn. She didn’t sleep because of the everlasting noise. She couldn’t get used to it. Couldn’t sleep for thinking what noise it was, wanting to distinguish it, this is the noise of this, this is the noise of that. Icebox and wire and light-brighter-than-the-moon noise, pitch, crack and the iron haw six o’clock noise of the garbage truck, and the noise nobody makes but the radiator, sighing and knocking in its metal slip. [...] This is how she

29 One of Brand’s poetry collections titularly references this door that led from the holding room to the slaver’s ship: A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2001). 30 As Huebener makes clear, and as will become fully apparent shortly: “It is important to recognize […] that Elizete’s disheartening experience in the city does not indicate an idealized or romanticized notion of rural or wild spaces […]” (622). 63 would come to know a place but this place resisted knowing. When she tried calling it something, the words would not come. (69)

It is night time in the metropolis and life hibernates, refrigerated. Elizete alone is fully conscious (having now gowned Verlia’s insomnia, as trace), and is despairingly tuned in to the white noise of the cityscape. Unlike the elements of soporific familiarity that pierced the cemetery passage, and which permitted occasional moments of sleep as the measure of death’s gravity, Elizete enjoys no passing respite here, locked into a cruel pattern of existential and phenomenological endurance.

The anonymity of the cityscape issues for Elizete out of the way it is socially constructed:

What could she call a place that could disappear or that did not exist without the help of people? What could she call a place set out so much to please and ease the legs, the heart, the next thought before you thought it, the next need until need was not a word worth saying? This city was imaginary that’s all. That’s all. (69-70)

In Grenada, Elizete was a prolific creator of names for the natural and domestic objects and processes around her, but this identifying talent was dependant on hard matter, on a nature actualised and articulate with its own agency and needs (recall the “desire” of sun, rain, and hillsides in the Caribbean passage). In Canada, however, Elizete fails to synch with urban machinations, with commercialism’s projection of desires ideologically seeded. The autopoesis of commodification is humdrum, lifeless, and excessive; it is preemptive and of the mind (“this city was imaginary”), rather than adequate and responsive to bodily needs and limits. It is artificial, conniving, without organicity – it is the logic and action, in sum, of commodity fetishism.

Toronto’s machinic air in the second excerpted passage, seemingly dredged of all potential organicity, is nevertheless actually riven with its own inventive vitalism. For instance, Brand personifies the machines. But she does this by way of a dextrous double movement (this double, though, always refracted, infinitely) that envisages anew – although qualitatively differently – the machinic microcosmically within the humanicity of personification. Her descriptions of the “radiator, sighing”

64 and the general machinery – “[t]he mouth of them wide open in a yawn” – although invoking personhood, still retain a sense of drudgery – the boredom or indifference of a repetition so commonly equated with the inorganic, say, with the human installed in inorganic industrial labour, or somehow drugged, chronically desensitised, sapped of desire, lifeless. Whereas in the Caribbean passage, nature actually held, or occasioned the “soft memory of the people who lived here”, the culture of machinery powering the Toronto passage induces a kind of general amnesia, where Elizete is almost dementing – this alien context parasitic on her brain, and her way of knowing (empiricism).

The simple estimation of the nocturnal-city-passage with machinic vacuity is further shaken by the powerful performativity of the passage. It is often taken as read that the event signifies and the machine is meaningless; Brand plays into these associations by illustrating the significance of war in the Caribbean passage, its urgency and consequence is felt acutely, whereas the city passage entertains a tedious inconsequence – Elizete’s inability to name her surroundings seems not to effect anything, she is shrugged off or yawned away. In an earlier description of Elizete’s scattered attempts to get by through shacking up with other illegal immigrants in makeshift dwellings, their political and existential inconsequence is poignantly registered:

Already their stories were becoming lies because nobody wanted to listen, nobody had the time. That’s what happens to a story if nobody listens or nobody has the time, it flies off and your mouth stays open. You end up being a liar because what you say doesn’t matter. And there’s no tracing or lasting to your stories. (60)

It is the cruel fortune of the homeless, the refugee, the uneducated, and the destitute, never to materialise in the collective conscience of wealthy, educated, nationalists.

Herein lies one of the profound aesthetico-political struggles of In Another Place, Not Here: to refigure the subaltern as Event. This is what Brand elsewhere describes as her younger self’s desire for poetry to “act” as the “redeeming of ordinary people’s lives” (Brand qtd. in Olbey 91). To substantialise muted stories through artistic singularity is to declare simultaneously the socio-political value of those who live without promise, without hope of ever escaping the soul-destroying

65 demands of particular racial-economic cycles. There are too many illegal immigrants, too many homeless, too many victims of violence and abuse who are swallowed up by powerful engines of disenfranchisement. Globalisation, liberal capitalism, bureaucracy, as well as seemingly inoffensive (and so all the more sinister [covert indifference hiding in good will]) customs and habits are only some of the complex forces whose iterations are parasitically strengthened by the recursive of various subalternities. If the city excerpt shows that Elizete is not empowered enough to concoct singularity out of the bleak engines that use her as their unacknowledged fuel, then there is at least reassurance in the operation of the passage itself as poetry, of the intense performativity with which it creates and demands spectacle. That said, it is necessary to confront the question of reassurance here: reassurance for whom? In one sense the production of spectacle also clarifies the tragic reality of readership. That is to say, the subaltern in these stories are rarely the ones who will get to enjoy their transformation into poetic singularity – this is an aesthetic sublimity or catharsis reserved largely for certain kinds of privileged literates. Even so – lest we undervalue the novel’s aesthetico- political, materialist force – writing and reading are not simply matters of empirically determinable sender-receiver relay, and this is precisely what Brand’s novel illuminates. McCutcheon says something similar when he insists that: “it is Brand’s own iconoclastic theory of ‘writing as a perfect form of speech’ that remains the most defiantly utopian challenge to unfix our historically determined perception of literature as symbolic and immaterial, in order to restore to the practice of literature its power as a set of material strategies capable not only of descriptive effects but prescriptive change” (unpaginated). Literary networks as transubstantiated material networks clarify the power of textuality to function “descriptively”, “prescriptively”, and weirdly in a different way too (almost pseudo- scientifically) – telekinetically effecting entire universes that hide as forms of absence to actual readership; actual readers and their individual brains are the quantum pinheads that mark the tip of an immense, elementally disseminating iceberg.

If one of the novel’s critical operations is to momentarily arrest and give life to eventful images of subalternity from within interminable reels of overexposed

66 exploitation, then its politicism comes no less from a careful cognisance of the machine relentlessly rebooting itself, cracking into the fabric of crystallised singularity. If in the city passage we witness a kind of zombie life leaking out of the electronic and motorised apparatuses that whelm Elizete, as well as a more revitalising kind of life lit by practises of aestheticisation, in the war passage life- forms and the organic are impelled by politic, structure, organisation, and economy (i.e. “the air dense with its own business” [116]). The cicadas and bees are employed as metaphorical explorers and mapmakers – a personification that riffs off a labour that is desirable and enjoyed, with the scent of autonomy in their proactivity. The contentedness of these ecological mechanisms serenely steering life is registered by Verlia in entirely devastating terms. Verlia reads nature’s repetition – its symphony of sameness – as an insult to her political labour and the significance of the battle that she and her Black comrades are waging in the cemetery. The island refuses symbiosis with their plight, betraying, on the one hand, machinic “indifference, hot and regular like any day” (113). But there is an even fiercer sting in the way that this nature, that rips itself athwart the oppressed fighters (local revolutionaries who are part of generations that have breathed in time with so many of the island’s rhythms) through machinic disassociation, has the gall to simultaneously harbour its own human-independent Event. Nature births its own sparks of singularity that are not subsumed by the war: “The day was beautiful, the heat dry, every tree in bloom. If flamboyant could be redder it would be blood black” (114), and whose exuberance seems accentuated, vampirically and poetically, against the fall of Black humanity on the island.

“Here Blood was Long and Not Anything that Ran Only in the Vein”31: Dialectics and Deconstruction

So far we have hitched a ride on the novel’s activity of scribbling chaotically over, and ripping ecstatically through any tenable event-machine opposition. We have seen that this dynamic activity is a powerful force of a literary materialism; this activity is essentially various re-prioritisations of very many contextually

31 Dionne Brand, In Another Place, Not Here 39. 67 subordinate sides of very many oppositions. Beyond this, the second of the novel’s deconstructive manoeuvres – which will bring us closer still to a literary materialism proper – is to deflate oppositionality itself. This comes through effecting intrusions to its various dualisms – proffering thirds (we have mentioned already the significance of Africa and Abena as exemplifications of some of the novel’s destabilising thirds). However, in speaking numerically, or quantitatively, we run the risk of cementing a new conceptual stasis. To avoid an identitarian politics, a literary-materialist deconstruction invokes the inherent out-of-jointedness of time – that aspect of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that so inspired Derridean temporality. The novel taps into the power of this temporality, or the potential potency of revolutionary otherness, by way of a surreptitious pattern.

The evocation of a pattern may seem an antithetical means of generating a strange Derridean temporality, but Brand tinkers with this pattern so that it is programmed, or coded, for deconstructive invention. We argue that almost all of the character relationships in the novel function according to a particular pseudo- dialectical pattern, which allows for the demonstration of a deterministic mechanism (the structurality of structure) that impels displacement to breed new forms of displacement, punishment to beget new forms of punishment, and for grief to replicate – though in strangely novel ways. This pattern shows, as Derrida articulates in the following passage from Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, that being is inheritance:

To be, this word in which we earlier saw the word of the spirit, means, for the same reason, to inherit. All the questions on the subject of being or of what is to be (or not to be) are questions of inheritance. There is no backward-looking fervor in this remainder, no traditionalist flavour. Reaction, reactionary, or reactive are but interpretations on the structure of inheritance. That we are heirs does not mean that we have or that we receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us one day with this or that, but that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not. (54)

This pattern that we are arguing for consists of a preliminary hatred or disgust of a parent figure, author, or progenitor, initially sublimated, and then inadvertently regurgitated as the progenitor effects a complex haunting on their product, child or

68 derivative in their later adulthood or maturity. 32 This pattern emerges most distinctly in Verlia’s and Elizete’s relationships to their respective families, but it also runs out into some of the more peripheral relationships.

The Caribbean and Adela

Adela, who may or may not be a blood ancestor to Elizete, endured the brutality of the Middle Passage and disembarked in the Caribbean depleted and psychically absent. Like many African slaves, Adela practiced Obeah, a West Indian witchcraft – in this, she resembles some other fictional witches who are also exiled to islands: the Greek mythological Circe, banished to Aeaea, or, even more so, Sycorax (a later version of Circe), from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610-1). Born on Algiers, but marooned on an island for utilising a foul sorcery, Sycorax, like Adela, is many years deceased within the play’s narrative world, and only materialises through hearsay. In The Tempest, Sycorax is portrayed as an evil hindrance to the protagonists, Prospero (the legitimate Duke of Milan) and Miranda (his daughter). Although Sycorax is never visible herself, she has “hag”-mothered what Prospero names a “freckled whelp […] not honour’d with a human shape” (Act 1, Scene 2, Line 282-3): Caliban, who serves as Prospero’s slave from the play’s outset for his attempted molestation of Miranda. Where The Tempest’s moral prejudice depends on the irredeemability of Sycorax’s depravity for the ultimate prosperity of Prospero, In Another Place, Not Here – with its ethical rather than moral charge – eschews a fabulist practice of definitive blame, and explores instead how Adela becomes swallowed up by barbarity, and what occasions her magnificent rage and destruction.

The slaveholders were the progenitors against whom Adela harboured her angst; they were the parental figures who effectively owned her, and who forcibly relocated her to the Caribbean. Adela’s sublimation was to delete the physicality of the Caribbean; against its materiality she projected a negative ideality, acknowledging it only as “Nowhere”. Her psychic insensibility to the Caribbean is

32 This is not to be confused with Dina Georgis’s psychoanalytic reading of the novel’s mother nations. See ‘Mother Nations and the Persistence of “Not Here”’ Canadian Woman Studies 20.2 (2000): 27-34. 69 her self-determined sublimation; she forfeited her sight, or her acknowledgment of its materiality, in ritualistic curses thrown at the estate owner, Oliviere: “Every evening when she come home from the cocoa fields, as was cocoa they mind then, she make sure and pass by the big house and she draw a circle in the ground and sprinkle one stone in it that was her eye and spit the man name, with blood from biting she mouth, into the centre. Rain or sun she do it for three years” (18). That this self-administered blindness issued through the practice of Obeah is significant. Obeah remembers Africa, it is one of the few ways (along with dance and musicality – e.g. limbo) that the Black diaspora of Adela’s era could have contested their situation and reached back to before the Middle Passage to legitimise an African ancestry. So even though Adela’s behaviour may seem negative and violent, on one account it was an attempt to transcend the material circumstances that are the condition of her slavery.

At any rate, Adela ended up inadvertently regurgitating the material suffering that she tried to be free of, birthing a herd of little malformed, semi-aborted, calvaluna (mooncalve) Calibans:

[S]he did not learn the grace of drying up her womb even after eight children. She spill and spill so and she mothered not a one. [...] She eat paw-paw seed until it make them sick in she womb. The charm she tried to use against each one was left half done in them so, till all of she generations have a way so that nothing is right with them neither. Bad mind and goat mouth follow them and discomfort so that none of them sleep, each have some affliction. (19)

This is why Mirelda Josefena (the woman that Elizete is left with as an orphan) has such excruciating headaches (“bad mind”) and is incessantly abusing Elizete with her “goat mouth” (which is a Jamaican or Dominican patois term for jinxing someone33). Because Mirelda Josefena is a blood descendant of Adela, she inherits from her an aching head, the product of Adela’s concentrated efforts to empty her own mind, to repudiate any knowledge of the Caribbean. For Adela, Mirelda Josefena – like all of the offspring that appear to stream out of her – is the

33 See ‘goat-mouth’: “A believed ability, possessed by some individuals to deliberately frustrate sb’s effort or cause some minor misfortune by predicting failure. […] [From the belief or experience that certain plants are blighted or die after having their leaves partly eaten by goats]” (Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage 260). 70 Caribbean slapping her in the face with its materiality. Her children are the unfathomable proof that life endures even in the most harrowing circumstances; they are flesh materialising brazenly, barbarically. So she sheds them in a bid to purge herself of the residue of slavery.

Adela and “The Woman they Left Her With”, or, Mirelda Josefena

In turn, Mirelda Josefena’s sublimating gesture is to disavow Adela’s material denial, instead finding relief in the substantiality of earth, rearing a wealth of vegetables in what Adela had considered inhospitable, sterile land:

Whenever her hand wasn’t in solid soil mashing it up and kneading it down her temper rose and her head ached. She pushed her hands in for the cool feel of earth, for the black feel of it to surge in her hands and to quiet her. She did her planting not standing up but sitting down, solid and spread out, the dasheen root, the yam root between her legs and both arms plunged into the soil. This is how her yield was plenty, soaked in sweat, her dress heavy with provisions. All that temper, all that disagreeableness, kneading and tamping and burrowing, it was the smell like burnt bread and green crushed leaves that quieted her. The deeper she pushed, the richer, the more secret; mingling with the sweat of her arms, the fresh rush of must, the suck of black earth where she was going. Come evenings when she had to rise up, pull her hands from the soil, slow her sweat, the woman they’d left her with would be miserable and throwing words for Elizete and the spirits. (34-5)

The succour Mirelda Josefena reaps from the soil – sensual and sexual – and the abundance of crops that she harvests, act as compensation for the children she refuses to mother; these plants are her surrogate children. It is through her revulsion at Adela’s clumsy, violent mothering that Mirelda Josefena promises not to have children: “If I wanted child I would a make child, don’t you see” (31). In this sublimation, Mirelda Josefena redirects a natural biological desire to bear children, channelling her strength towards the affirmative task of skilfully nursing and harvesting fruits and vegetables. But when Elizete as an orphan is forced upon her, she necessarily yet unintentionally regurgitates the same excruciating parental mode that had oppressed and violated her during her own deliverance into adulthood, disaffirming Elizete’s presence. Mirelda Josefena is flanked on either side by Adela, 71 for Elizete is supposedly the “spitting image” of Adela – a “Jumbie girl” (35): Adela returning as ghost.

In all of the demonstrations of the pattern which is being exposed, we will be reaffirming the spectral nature of the various ‘inadvertent regurgitations’, eventually drawing on Derrida’s concept “hauntology” to detail the exceptional texture of this spectrality; for the spectral appears to dwell in a dimension simultaneously present and absent: “If we have been insisting so much from the beginning on the logic of the ghost, it is because it points toward a thinking of the event that necessarily exceeds a binary or dialectical logic, the logic that distinguishes or opposes effectivity or actuality (either present , empirical, living – or not) and ideality (regulating or absolute non-presence)” (Spectres 63). Before acknowledging this spectrality as the force of our argument, we must account for a certain temptation that necessarily precedes its recognition. For if the first interpretive faux pas is to bank too heavily on the novel’s most transparent and obvious dualities, the second of its decoys directs us to the archetypal thesis/antithesis/synthesis operation that is ordinarily tied to Hegelian and/or Marxian theories. No doubt, this mechanism is an instrumental component of the novel and should be remembered as an interpretative imperative – a necessary bedrock against which caution and a demolitionist critique can be easily directed. It is the Hegelian/Marxist understandings of “aufhebung” as sublimation (both as concepts exceeding themselves idealistically in the Hegelian sense and as historical materialisms surpassing themselves in the Marxian) that the novel exploits and toys with; although it proffers “aufhebung” as sublimation through the operation and design of the various character relationships we are indexing, it will soon become clear that the novel also adopts a Derridean diagnosis of Hegelian “aufhebung” as repetition, and so more accurately works more to preserve what Derrida would call the “undecidability” of its predicaments. Hence, the fancy footwork by which the various syntheses or sublimations degenerate into versions of the initial dialectic problematic that they were supposed to succeed, but in a novel and deconstructive way.

72 “The Woman They Left Her With”, Adela, and Elizete

This particular iteration of the pseudo-dialectical pattern (or, at least the Adela and Elizete hand of it) is probably the most widely recognised in criticism (see Bramble 136, Saul 60-1, Smyth 154). It is considerably and smartly spelled out by Huebener, who discusses the dialogical nature of both Adela’s and Elizete’s relationships to place. Huebener makes clear the unconscious influence that Adela inflicts on Elizete, both in terms of her relationship to the Caribbean and to Toronto, “echoing as it does Adela’s anguish among the dasheen and bamboo of the Caribbean” (622), as well as conditioning Elizete’s fecund seeing and naming in the Caribbean. Huebener and other critics, however, do not register this “transformation” (623) in terms of a pseudo-dialectical pattern that permeates the entire novel via the concepts of ‘sublimation’ and ‘inadvertent regurgitation’.

Subsequent to the anonymous materialism (socially deplete and barren of names) that Adela and Mirelda Josefena bequeath Elizete via their empty or rotting psyches, Elizete sublimates this into the creation of names – a poetic taxonomy which gives meaning and beauty to the landscape around her:

Tear up cloth flowers, stinking fruit tree, draw blood bush, monkey face flowers, hardback swamp fish. [...] Nothing barren here, Adela, in my eyes everything full of fullness, everything yielding, the milk of yams, dasheen bursting blue flesh. Sometimes the green overwhelm me too Adela, it rise wet and infinite on both sides of me as a vault of bamboo and immortelle and teak. Adela, the samaan was my mother. She spread and wave and grow thicker. Is you I must thank for that. Where you seen nowhere I must see everything. Where you leave all that emptiness I must fill it up. Now I calculating. (23-4)

Elizete’s is a kind of dialectical necessitation. Elizete’s logic operates differentially and oppositionally. Huebener writes: “Where Adela was blind […] Elizete now sees […]” (619) – it is precisely because Adela saw nothing in the Caribbean that Elizete’s view is bright and rich. Or, to put it another way, Elizete might have seen less if not for Adela’s acute blindness. Adela’s register of the land’s impotency also 73 facilitates Mirelda Josefena’s green thumb, so that even though Mirelda Josefena inherits careless parental skills, she is still able to offer Nature (including the samaan tree) to Elizete as an emotionally nourishing proxy mother.34 Nature mediates the relationship between Elizete and Mirelda Josefena – it is the remark that satiates and shelters Elizete and Mirelda Josefena in that aspect of their own relationship ruled by lack and an unspeakable desire for the mother and non- daughter that neither suffices to serve for the other.

As an adult in Toronto, Elizete fails to read or know the cityscape, in part, because, congruous to its logic and laws, she remains illegal. Elizete’s childhood sublimation to see and acknowledge the things to which Adela was blind, to concoct a place out of Adela’s “Nowhere” – an idealist to a stark material inheritance – all of this is vitiated when she arrives in Canada. Her voyage to Toronto is a twentieth-century echo of Adela’s traumatic Passage, and Elizete is compelled, by degrees, to yield to a strain of the corporeal affliction of her forerunners, compelled to foster a deafness in this space where her existence is criminal (see Huebener 623). All of her illegal immigrant comrades forfeit some share of their bodies as payment for the opportunity to remain in Canada. Their material bodies are the sole tender they have to barter with (where Verlia’s rebellious ideology is illegal, Elizete’s body is illegal): “Jocelyn pregnant for papers and Miryam in Jocelyn’s mouth losing her leg through laughing and she, Elizete, losing her hearing, every part of the body put to use like a hammer or a bucket, every part emptied like a shelf or a doorway” (82). In this first world economy, their corporealities – as vehicles of labour – are commodified, and their very ontologies become, first and foremost, market abstractions (of loss). The margin between the self as an exchange operator, and the objects or utilities of market exchange – a gap retained more (though far from comprehensively) by the , politics, and mechanics of lawful citizenship – collapse for the illegal worker flatly into one another, which is articulated through metaphors that envision these workers as single operating utilities of manual labour (hammer, bucket, shelf, doorway). These

34 Huebener also takes note of the “mother-daughter relationship” (619) that exists between Elizete and the samaan tree, though only in relation to Adela’s incapacities – i.e. he does not articulate how Mirelda Josefena fits into this. 74 are objects of guileless human elbow grease, rather than of slickly lubricated multi- tasking machinery, or of the fancy light of digitised electronica.

There are important distinctions and resonances between Adela’s journey to the Caribbean and Elizete’s journey to Toronto that help clarify a particular aspect of the nature of Elizete’s deafness as her eventual inadvertent regurgitation: its Hegelianism. Perhaps the most obvious difference (besides historical dates) between the two journeys comes in that one is a violently forced nautical relocation (Adela), and the other is an airborne venture occasioned through a greater degree of free will (Elizete). Ultimately both journeys resonate in their sensory disarticulation (blindness and deafness), however, Elizete’s immigration is simultaneously a direct flight into postmodernity (a truly nightmarish challenge for someone newly experiencing its operations in adulthood), and in her inability to decipher this new postmodern space she resembles Hegel in his incapacity to read and write the dawning of modernity. In Valences of the Dialectic Jameson fittingly refers us to Derrida’s “magnificent speculation that Hegel […]” (109), – and here Jameson quotes Derrida from Margins of Philosophy – “could not think or conceptualize the functioning machine as such” (Derrida qtd. in Jameson 109) – and at this juncture we recall how dumbfounded Elizete was, in the Toronto-event-in-the-machine excerpt, both by the machinery of white noise that engulfed her, as well as by the social constructivism of commodity fetishism. Jameson’s summation in relation to Hegel then, is comfortably adopted as an apt description of Elizete as well: “Perhaps these two unique blind spots [become deaf spots, as Elizete’s story etches atop Adela’s story], the fetish and the machine, somehow come together in the point at which Hegel is aufgehoben by Marx” (109). And so too, this is the instance that Elizete (as a symbol of pseudo-Hegelian bafflement in the face of postmodernity) is aufgehoben by Verlia (as a symbol of a Marxism able to process, analytically, notions of the market, the commodity, and industry (as well as irony, for that matter) – though for her own part, equally out of step and unable to comprehend the synthesis of a Africanised Absolute Spirit – remember the samaan tree and the way Elizete so easily reads transcendence in nature).35 So we appropriately turn now to

35 In the context of Derrida’s well-known reticence to speak to Marxism before the publication of Spectres of Marx, there seems even more reason that Verlia, as a symbol of Marxism on tenterhooks, must die – so that Brand can speak to it more freely. In Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, 75 an elucidation of how the pseudo-dialectical pattern plays itself out in Verlia’s family, though by way of a brief detour: for Jameson’s work is especially profitable in sounding out more of the materialist consistency of the pseudo-dialectical pattern that we are needling out of this novel, bringing us much closer to the vicinity of what we mean by the term “pseudo-dialectical” – though even his excavations fall slightly shy of our particular new materialist mark.

In his tome, Valences of the Dialectic, Fredric Jameson delineates “three names of the dialectic” (3-70): “The Dialectic” (5-15) – with the definite article – refers to an applicable philosophy, a summons both to its comprehensive and exceptional systematisation by Hegel, and well as to its methodisation by various Marxists (systematised or philosophised into ‘dialectical materialism’ not by Marx himself, but by Friedrich Engels, at least). Jameson distinguishes ‘dialectical materialism’, which was the ideological engine of socialist states such as the USSR, from the ‘historical materialism’ of Western Marxisms. “Dialectics” (15-49), the second of its substantive appellatives, by way of pluralising the dialectic mechanism, finds fault with the universality of ‘The Dialectic’, and instead allows for the identification of “dialectical moments” in “non- or even anti-dialectical philosophies” (4-5). “Finally”, writes Jameson, “there is the adjective “dialectical”, which is generally used to clarify moments of non-dialectical perplexity and to rebuke established thought processes” (5). To the design of Brand’s novel then, and to the stretch of dialectical patterns we are outlining and arguing for here, we will register a particular valency: the second of Jameson’s “names”, whereby a constellation of “local laws” or multiple dialectics emit as one expression at least a kind of anti-dialectical deconstruction. But how does Jameson wind up advancing anti-dialectical deconstruction as one of the possible shades of his “many dialectics”?

Jameson acknowledges first that there is an attending problematic within the “many dialectics” (15-49), which is the second of the three immense valencies he hypothesises: namely, the recovery of a conceptual apparatus vacant enough to harbour all of the diverse dialectics, and that manages still in its multifariousness to

Brand claims that she sees the theories of Marxism and feminism “as living things” (see Brand [357] qtd. in McCutcheon). 76 rebuke the universalisation of ‘The Dialectic' without itself metamorphosing into yet another all-inclusive metaphysic. To this end he reconfirms one of ’s marvels:

[I]t now seems possible to abstract an emptier mechanism from the stages of Hegelian logic, one formalistic enough to claim application to an impressive variety of material and disciplinary, social and ideological, contents. In fact, that was exactly what structuralism achieved with the binary opposition, and this is perhaps the moment to celebrate that breakthrough, with which, in my opinion, and unbeknownst to the structuralists themselves, dialectical thought was able to reinvent itself in our time. (17)

If the binary opposition is the blankest and most basic apparatus that can accommodate the many dialectics, the spectrum of possible dialectic valencies swells and augments yet again. In providing his map of possible binary oppositions, which largely depends on the particular “autonomy claimed [by] each term of the initial opposition” (19) – and ranges from the equivalence of dualism (the oscillation “between identical forces […] impossible to adjudicate”), through asymmetrical dualism, to the dialectic of incommensurables which is “revelatory of some ontological rift or gap in the world itself” (23) – Jameson writes that “[o]ur only rule […] will be a strict avoidance of the old pseudo-Hegelian caricature of the thesis/antithesis/synthesis; while our only presupposition will be the assumption that any opposition can be the starting point for a dialectic in its own right” (19). And so it is in this manner that he comes to recount deconstruction’s surprisingly dialectic capacity – or rather, its “family likeness” with the dialectic.

Verlia and her Family

In ‘Immigrant Desire: Contesting Canadian Safety and Whiteness in Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here’, Lauren Vedal provides insight into the ways that Verlia’s and Elizete’s desires reveal mountains about their own subjectivities. Vedal challenges the legitimacy of the hegemony of ‘Canadian safety’, which is predicated on whiteness and the desirability of whiteness; “Normative [nationalist] safety”, writes Vedal, “disregards the transgenerational effects of traumatic memory

77 and the ongoing effects of [immigrant] oppression” (71). Vedal therefore explores some complex alternative models of desirability (not always directed towards obvious standards or compositions of safety) expressed in Brand’s novel, which exist on the fringes of white, normative Canadian safety. In so doing, crucially, Vedal also approximately diagnoses this branch of the anti-dialectical pattern, describing Verlia’s childhood homelife, with its “toxic” “psychological” abuses, as prodding her desire to be “sublimated” into the political. Of Verlia’s family’s sense of despondency, Vedal asserts:

In response to this psychological unsafety, Verlia embraces binary oppositions, rejecting part of herself in the process. She rejects her family. She rejects embodiment. Her first desire, it can be said, is to leave – to jump. For her, desire takes on an abstract, ideological form. Her desire becomes sublimated, and in its first iteration, her desire is white. (72)

Vedal’s intelligent and intriguing contention that Verlia’s desires include the desirability of whiteness is annexed to another interesting argument she makes that Verlia is conditioned by a “binary worldview” (73): “Verlia’s binary view of the world in a rejection of part of herself (the poor, the black, the disempowered) and an embrace of whiteness. […] Her worldview makes clear the way in which Verlia has internalised white epistemologies” (73).

Despite the allure of Vedal’s insights, and not wishing to object to them, instead we suggest that they are credible but deconstructable. It could be that Vedal’s determination of Verlia’s “binary worldview” is a consequence of a reading that only pinpoints Verlia’s sublimation, without recognising that all of the novel’s relationships operate through this binary trading (which is furthermore and on closer inspection, not really binary either, but deconstructive). For instance, the “abstract, ideological form” that Vedal ascribes to Verlia’s sublimation of psychological toxicity in childhood also misses a step (it is not a two-step, but a three-step). It misses the reactionary socialist materialism as the sublimation which precedes Verlia’s ideological realisation as ‘inadvertent regurgitation’.36 So deeper

36 Dalleo, like Vedal, styles Verlia’s relinquishment of the body and material things (233-4) as a “sublimation” (236). Dalleo employs the term for its description of physical purification (chemistry) – or for how it describes the conversion of a substance from solid state to a vapourous one (Velia’s death). However, for our purposes of trying to argue for the ‘sublimation and inadvertent 78 digging reveals that Verlia’s worldview is not so much binary as it is informed by a pseudo-dialectical deconstruction. Furthermore, Elizete’s worldview is no less ‘binary’, though because Verlia is presented as the forefront figure of agency and intellectualism it would seem more like the binary operation is her choice or epistemology rather than a preconditioning determination.

In childhood Verlia is compelled toward sleeplessness, she stands at a material attention, unwilling and unable to succumb to the idealism of sleep and dreams, but rather always alert and ready to defend her family against their own recklessness. This comes as a knee jerk reaction to their compulsion to saturate the things and encounters around them in negative signification, collectively deciphering doom and malice in everything, socially constructing the circumstances of their own grief: “they scanned the scarless flesh of their new born and wrote peril there because peril was all they were familiar with” (124). It is as if answering to her family’s deficiencies that Verlia exhibits characteristics like flight, positive action, insomnia, and ideological materialism. Indeed, Verlia “could dream good”, with rich, vivid and imaginative ideations until her Tante Emilia begins prodding her head and extracting meaning out of her dreams in wey wey, striving to forge the family’s destiny out of Verlia’s mental constructions, and effectively draining Verlia of her capacity to dream, wrenching her into a concrete world of carnal confrontation. Verlia sublimates the biological impulse gleaned from her family – what she considers to be a circus of misfits rehearsing negativity – into a bid for political action grounded in a socialist materialism. Her fixation with the Black Power Movement is her sublimating gesture, as she remarks in Toronto: “The cell has been her life here. Holding her together like family, it’s the only family she can bear. Comradeship chosen, friendship that was not chance or biology” (192).

Years after the initial surprise at having finally lit upon the Movement – which Verlia could previously only have imagined as a hallucinatory fiction – its slow and general ineffectiveness eats away at her. The frustration and fatigue of material regurgitation’ pseudo-dialectical pattern, we are also making use of its psycholanalytic operation, and so we would rather frame Verlia’s desire for the relinquishment of material possessions and bodily things more as a protraction to the rationalism that is the instinctual mode she inherits from her family. Her family conditions her rationalism, which already disavows the body and sensory learning. Her sublimation, in this sense, becomes the promotion of concrete material-political change. 79 inadequacy prompt the spectres of her family to slink inadvertently back into the texture of her behaviour. Despite Verlia’s revulsion at her family’s Black Magic, it is at a moment of material crisis, when she spends three days in prison after having had her shoulder dislocated by a policeman, that she reverts to the same malevolent spiritualism and impulsivity which had characterised her family’s behaviour when she was a child. Upon her release she comes face to face with “the cop who had undone her shoulder”:

She wanted to say something like Che, something tippling off the tongue full of all her anger but peaceful in the end, reconciled to his instinct. You are nothing but an instrument of the ruling class, a brutish automaton lacking humanity, used to repress the body and spirit of the people. Something like that. She wanted to say something to read him back to his mother’s womb; something to wrench his own flesh from its bone as he’d done hers. When it came out of her mouth it wasn’t only out of her mouth but first her finger marking his face, an old gesture marking an enemy, and then she spat on the floor in front of him. “Never have a day’s peace. Look for me everywhere.” Such an old curse creeping out of her. She did not remember learning the gesture. (184)

Not only is it impossible to say whether Verlia’s performance is a display of biological determinism or the emergence of a social, unconscious, and osmotic acquisition, it is also (in a more profound way) the wrong way to frame such a predicament – via either/or’s that restrict, much more than they liberate, thinking.

To consider how the ghosts of Verlia’s family haunt her is to consider how, as Derrida does in Spectres of Marx, Marx is haunted by his “adversaries”. Verlia, who stands in as a symbol of Marxism, adopts “the materialist conception of history” up and against the pseudo-Hegelian idealism and spiritualism of her family (and Elizete), who are the spectral antagonists of her life. Consider how Verlia resembles Marx in Derrida’s description of Marxian spectrality:

In short, and we will return to this repeatedly, Marx does not like ghosts any more than his adversaries do. He does not want to believe in them. But he thinks of nothing else. He believes rather in what is supposed to distinguish them from actual reality, living effectively. He believes he can oppose them, like life to death, like vain appearances of the simulacrum to real presence. He believes enough in the dividing

80 line of this opposition to want to denounce, chase away, or exorcise the spectres but by means of critical analysis and not by some counter magic. But how to distinguish between the analysis that denounces magic and the counter-magic that it still risks being? (46-7)

According to Derrida, Marx was not so much plagued by his “adversaries” as by, among other things, the monetary sign as ghost. In this sense, Verlia is not haunted by her immediate family so much as what they represent (which haunts them also): an economy of slavery. Verlia struggles to stave off the dark apparition of slavery by facing its present-day conditions, by labouring towards political resolve via the Movement. Though on the surface of things we might be inclined to register Verlia’s inadvertent regurgitation of a family curse as the execution of hocus-pocus, Verlia’s sublimating gesture – a “critical analysis” which “denounces [this] magic” by way of a pragmatic and political appeal to “actuality” – only operates to expose its own fragile existence as a kind of counter-magic. The Movement, socialism and Marxism are yet other alchemies, and the difference between sublimation and inadvertent regurgitation starts to give way.

Verlia and her Uncle

When Verlia first moves to Canada, her family intends for her to settle at her uncle’s house in Sudbury. She is overwhelmed by the severity of his White mimicry and his espousal that opportunity is what you make of it:

“We lucky to be in Canada,” her uncle says. “You could do anything here.” Anything, anything he keeps saying but this anything is small. He means there will be no hunger, you will have clothes on your back, you will have shoes on your feet, and that is enough. (148)

Her uncle’s Black denial is predicated on the adequacy of material satiation, but Verlia is unable to stomach the subterfuge that is the cost of such phantasmic gratification. It is her uncle as well as her family back in the Caribbean that are some of the forces which mobilise Verlia towards an engagement with the

81 Movement as her sublimating gesture.37 But they do so according to very different interplays of oppositions. Verlia flew from her family in the Caribbean because of the affectedness of their exaggerated displays of torment and woe; their socially constructed grief. She flies from her uncle because of his artificial display of contentment. Verlia assumes a materialist stance up against the too-negative idealism of her Caribbean family and the too-positive idealism of her uncle; both are for her fraudulent and so provoke Verlia’s clarified impetus toward the Movement – a supposed channel for both positive action and an honest Black identification.

The novel does not afford a pristinely symbolic moment akin to Verlia’s prison spectacle where the inadvertent but precise regurgitation of some trait or other of her uncle’s is distinguishable. Nonetheless, Verlia acknowledges the frozen and manicured lifestyle her uncle and aunt have envisaged for her, as well as the clinical career they fantasise for her, and the surreptitious “bargain” that she suspects is their underlying proposition to her. She admits: “…she is only half the person she expects to be and she might fall for it. She is as much in danger of accepting the perfect picture as her uncle. […] She is terrified at this seduction” (150). This concession of potentiality is equivalent to inadvertent regurgitation (though we would retain the force of difference in this equivalence). Empirically pronounced or not, the ghost or simulacrum rears its head as if tracing the outline of its own possibility, a parody of ontology (though again, we recognise that there are dangers in “calling [a potential] a spade”). Jameson writes that “Derrida’s mocking answer [to ontology’s prioritisation of actuality] – hauntology – is a ghostly echo if there ever was one, and serves to underscore the very uncertainties of the spectral itself, which promises nothing tangible in return; on which you cannot build: which cannot even be counted on to materialise when you want it to” (Valences 142). This is precisely one half of the im/material materialism that we are trying to intuit through literature here; it is one half of new materialism’s ‘double action’ – Derridean trace ensures becoming. Jameson describes trace as “that which is presence and absence together, but in some non-dialectical way” (109). This is, in

37 Quynn also signals Verlia’s aunt and uncle, and their “suburban […] acceptance” as agitating forces that work to “politicize” Verlia (129). Similarly, Ria Julian flags Verlia’s political turn against the “collective psychic space” of her family, calling the move a “reframing” (136). 82 Deleuzian terms (and fed through the rhetoric of the new materialist ‘double action’), the intensive register, where presence and absence are entangled.

Verlia’s Caribbean Family (Papa Ti) and Verlia’s Uncle from Sudbury

Verlia’s relationship to her uncle is always-already compromised by his own fraught relationship with the Caribbean family. In particular, Verlia’s uncle detested his own father – Papa Ti – for mistreating his mother, for having two women on the side. Her uncle’s sublimating gesture then, is in part to forge a path antithetical to Papa Ti’s – he is loyal to his mother in his father’s absence. But the real thrust of his sublimation is to disavow Black misery, to assert opportunity through devotion to White mimicry. When his mother dies, he moves to Toronto with his wife, and then, frustrated with the negativity of their friends in Toronto, they move again to Sudbury. He is never only created in opposition to one thing, but progressively evolves out of heterogeneous relationships; his sublimation is accumulative:

They wanted to strive, not like some who would be held back by malice. Malice is what kept them back in Toronto; friends who ached on all day and all night about how hard it was. “These people,” her uncle would say, “don’t bother with them. Anybody can make it in this country. Is a new country, it have plenty opportunity. Don’t let nobody tell you different.” So they went to Sudbury, fed up with the malice and friends who wanted to keep them down. Her uncle wanted nothing negative, he said, in his life again. “Nobody can’t treat you bad,” he said. “Is up to you, in your mind, to know who you is. People can’t treat you bad. Is only your mind can think that. You just like white people. It have no difference. Is in your own mind. (140-1)

Verlia and her uncle are both propelled out of the Caribbean according to different transactions between various oppositions. What comes as a sublimating operation for her uncle is for Verlia equivalent to inadvertent regurgitation. The two activities are only circumstantially distinct.

83 Nonetheless, her uncle also exhibits his own explicit form of inadvertent regurgitation, assuming those tendencies of Papa Ti’s towards desertion, as well as his physical, or biological lineage. Verlia notes:

Her uncle says this turning from welcoming to brusque, turning away from her and the uncle she thought that she knew. People abandon each other she knows under certain circumstances. They look away when they cannot say what to do any more with certainty.

How is it that his face is like his father’s now? A man he never passed a word to, a man he thought he was growing against, a man he did not want to favour. How she is struck in these moments in her family’s life, even this far away. In this kitchen, the farthest away that her uncle could imagine, his father has come with him, riding in his cheek bones [...] in the cave of his jaw. (142-3)

Papa Ti’s haunting reappearance not only makes its mark in her Uncle’s face but also in his performance of wearied avoidance, and the boundary between genetic and epigenetic causality seems to wither.

Dialectics and Deconstruction Caught in a Rip

Abena and Her Mother

The final exemplification of the pseudo-dialectical pattern is exhibited in Abena’s relationship to her mother, and it is the particularly restrictive and concentrated frequency of this relationship that makes especially obvious its wobbling tenor, its mystifying vibration. Abena’s mother came to Canada as a third-world immigrant and learned a fierce self-hatred from her employers, which she imparts to Abena. Her mother’s abusive grip on her is so tight that Abena has very little room – physically and psychologically – to negotiate her sublimation. Abena’s occupation as a social worker is a kind of sublimation, but her mother and her mother’s circumstances have so retarded her that the source of her trauma becomes confused, laced with undecidability: “Now she wasn’t sure who the hatred was for. The women who kept coming or the thing that hurt them” (230). Brand shows profoundly how heteronomy can become autonomy (and vice-versa). Initially

84 Abena is the wrought material (the abused) and her mother is the artisanal worker (the abuser), but Abena then becomes the (social) worker – a kind of pharmakon, both remedy and poison, to the women that she councils. Abena becomes a version of the fist by which she herself was smelted and beaten, plating out uncompromisingly useless advice, telling Elizete to “[g]o home, it’s not a place for us” (229). So where social work is an ambiguous sublimation, it is accompanied by at least two other similarly stunted sublimations, one of which is Abena’s name change:

The only thing she’d done on her own behalf was change her name and that was long before she met Vee. In a moment of relief from the stiffness of her soul. From June to Abena. She’d though that it might be the beginning of her changing. Ridding herself of the name her mother had given her. How she would not have to hear that name called, pouring out hopelessness. And it was the beginning of change but it was more difficult than she imagined. It was harder to change how she had been made inside. Emotions. She’d cut them off to stave off her mother’s blows. She could not find them when someone, not someone with a belt or a stick, but someone who like her genuinely, when someone like that asked her for them. (238-9)

A name change – a cleansing ripple – though not a vain endeavour, cannot but partially appease injuries as deep and involved as Abena’s. She remains evacuated of emotion.

Elizete is almost the strange key – an unusual gravity – that helps with the final of the minor waves that constitutes Abena’s sublimation. Elizete is just the right amount of attentiveness, just the right amount of crazy, just the right amount of Verlia (as trace) for Abena to be able to unclench her fist, to open up emotionally. Elizete is enough for Abena at one particular moment: “She let it go, making her words float into perfection, slipping off her tongue so sane. ‘Let it go, let it go, let it go’” (238). And so even though Abena fails Elizete in her regurgitation of her own mother’s complex mode of disavowal, providing only imitative help and not really hearing Elizete out, in another sense it is something exquisite that Elizete is finally (if only momentarily) enough. The two women emotionally and accidently satiate one another in an imperfectly perfect encounter that in no way heralds final rectification, marking this ambivalent and difficult instant especially precious.

85 And it returns to limbo – to musical, lyrical undecidability, to an ebb and flow that washes repetitively against the strictures of the dialectic, proffering an oceanic operation and metaphorics in its place. Poet-scholar Edward Kamau Braithwaite’s West Indian remedy to dialectics (its trident usurped, or subsumed, by the sea) is tidalectics. And with tidalectics we witness a beaching of what Braithwaite calls, in ‘New Gods of the Middle Passage’, “the victorious [western] leviathan”: “synthesis” (46). “[I]nstead of one-two-three Hegelian”, says Barbadan-born Kamau Braithwaite in an interview with Nathaniel Mackey, “I am now more interested in the movement of the water backwards and forwards as a kind of cyclic, I suppose, motion, rather than linear” (44). There is undoubtedly an air of the feminine in tidalectics, where this cyclic model of undulating sea replaces the long, linear, patriarchal regime of western philosophy and its masculinised “epiphanic/missile ‘success’” (2000 48).

The dialectical model is problematic for a Black metaphysics trying to account for the experience of Middle Passage descendants because it operates as convenient whitewash, as an illusory screen advertising “false hope”, which Kamau Braithwaite expresses in his characteristically hybrid writing style – what Melanie Otto evocatively calls, in A Creole Experiment: Utopian Space in Kamau Braithwaite’s Video Style-Works, Braithwaite’s “creole cosmos” aesthetics. Braithwaite continues: “we’ll nvr be getting close enough to a close analysis of our own reality to make good sense of it; we’ll always be into imitation alienation/alien nation > chimera, false hope, some. body else’s success model” (2000, 48). Kamau Braithwaite defends his conceptual replacement for its power to speak of, and to, a distinctly Black Caribbean ontology grounded in the sea, in hardship, and in unyielding perseverance:

[W]e contain w/in ourselves, and i speaking of the Caribbean, the vision/xperience of Sisyphus rather than the xperience, certainly, of the conquistadore. Over & over again we discover that when we achieve something – like cricket, World Cup dances, Federation

– that that something is slowly – sometimes almost immediately – once again being eroded//but that our responsibility is not to lament it but to start again. To pick up that burden of Sisyphus and try again and again. (2000, 47)

86 Although Braithwaite here describes the steady endurance of the Caribbean peoples as antithetical to the offensive style and operation of the Spanish conquerors, Pecic sees in Brand’s own particular deployment of tidalectics a project of re-mapping and re-territorialising that does in fact have its own aspect of conquest and colonisation (what Pecic calls her politics of “mapmaking” [111]). Brand’s calculated description of Elizete behaving like Columbus when she first arrives in Canada (47) certainly attests to this.

Sisyphus is not the only mythological-fictional character that inspires Braithwaite’s West Indian ontology. Another crucial spur for Braithwaite is that fierce mother figure that resembles Adela: Sycorax. In this sense then, The Tempest’s significance to Brand’s novel is spliced to a profound Caribbean filtration; to think of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Brand’s novel is to think on its post- and anti-colonial permutations. Contrary to conventional, empire- privileging readings of the play, Braithwaite joins other postcolonial theorists in revaluing its dark and threatening antagonists – Sycorax and Caliban. In fact, Sycorax is what Jonathan Goldberg, in The Tempest in the Caribbean, names “the muse in the machine” (87) that powers Braithwaite’s unique writing style, now customarily known as his “Sycorax video style”. Goldberg explains that this style – the medley of different fonts, sizes, and symbols visible in the Braithwaite excerpts above – is “a computer-generated set of typefaces that Braithwaite has adopted for much of his publication since the 1990s” (87). Braithwaite describes as epiphanic the moment he learnt that the computer’s disk drive confers its information via light (“the forces that created the computer”, says Braithwaite, “are very similar to our gods of the Middle Passage” [Barabajan Poems 378]), and so it is from the technological-spiritual energies of his Mac computers – possessed by, and nicknamed after, the cyber nymphs, Sycorax and Stark – that his florid graphic emerges. Stark is Caliban’s sister, a personality that Braithwaite claims as his “own imaginative invention” (Barabajan Poems 316), and herself – according to Goldberg – blessed by the creative kinesis of several other Black women writers who are a resource-filled braintrust for Braithwaite’s poetic process: “Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, Erner Brodber, Toni Morrison, Maryse Condé, Jamaica Kincaid, Carolivia Herron, and Cynthia James, most notably” (89-90). Goldberg

87 explains that part of the impetus propelling Stark’s emergence as another brainchild of Braithwaite’s was due to her capacity to offset the intense anxiogenic nature of Sycorax’s particular muse power.

Another important element of the “Sycorax video style”, articulated by Elaine Savory in ‘Wordsongs and Wordwounds / Homecoming: Kamau Braithwaite’s Barabajan Poems’, is the way that it challenges the standards and protocol “of Western academe while at the same time provoking the reader’s attention and making her or him sensitive to nuances of intonation and pitch and to the nature of word unites and their contribution to overall sense” (751) – it “brings orality into the written word” (750). Whereas much Western English writing musters its information through generic grammars that preserve a distinction between orality and writing – while at the same time ensuring (often unconsciously) that its writing is surreptitiously (silently, with propriety, and without orality) overcoded by the authority of a generic voice, definitionally highbrow, culturally-economically White – Braithwaite’s “oral” writing style is a reset graphic composition, the performative imposition of an onto-epistemology calibrated to Caribbean, rather than Western, xperience – where West Indian intonation and cultural specificities bud generatively within the framework of the written text, stretching and splintering its conventional orthographic and typographic limits. The particular techno-Calypso flavour of Braithwaite’s writing becomes especially vivid when dovetailed to his live readings, which are the poetic incarnation of a complex Caribbean musicality (often-times shot through with a blithe musical irony that registers the fetishisation of Caribbean culture, frequently zapped of its traumatic historical specificities for tourism etc.) – the acoustic zest of Braithwaite’s ethnic and cultural circulations washed over with his lengthy Barbadian-British-Jamaican-Ghanaian-American migrations.

Braithwaite’s migrations become spoors that, like Brand’s Trinidadian- Canadian-Grenadian movements, permeate In Another Place, Not Here, and occasion its resistance to The Dialectic proper. Braithwaite’s notion of tidalectics and his “Sycorax video style” are both important elements of Brand’s novel. Braithwaite’s celebration of “Black Sycorax, My Mother” regenerates, phoenix- like, in Elizete’s idolisation of Adela as a prized, but problematic, mother figure – both Adela and Sycorax are invisible muses whose particular ferocity tames and

88 occasions – anxiogenically, as Goldberg identified – the exceptional poetic creativity of Elizete and Braithwaite. Like Sycorax possesses Braithwaite, Adela bewitches Elizete, prompting her to forget to take the rice off the stove, or to allow the wind to carry the clothesline away. And in the same way that Braithwaite creatively retrieves Sycorax out of the throes of her colonial negativity, almost proffering the chance for Sycorax herself to heal into something other than fatalistic detrimentalism, Elizete’s empiricist naming is also, in part, an ameliorative offering to Adela: “I say to myself that if I say these names for Adela it might bring back she memory of herself and she true name” (24). And the success of this offering comes in the eidolic way that Abena changes her name, recovering her properly African name, as well as some capacity to speak because of Elizete’s concrete presence in her office at the women’s shelter.

Furthermore, the poetries of Braithwaite and Elizete are inflected by characteristically Caribbean musicality and modes of being that are roughly empiricist and that refuse Western rationalisms, although of course Elizete is not self-proclaimedly inspired by the Western computer in the same fashion as Braithwaite (and here we should add that Verlia’s complex rationalism is as Braithwaitean as Elizete’s empiricism, though in a different way – Braithwaite is no clear-cut empiricist). The following extract from Barabajan Poems shares a family likeness with Elizete’s imaginative empiricist expression and Verlia’s propensity for the written word (and so suggests that the real comparison to be made here is probably between Braithwaite and Brand):

So I am growing up here and dreaming of how to write something that wd catch the gleam of the word of water clink and pebble where th(e) wave folds on/to the sand, the fans of sunlight in the water, its various colours & histories, coralline grains settling/ xploding// fish crab sails empty shells whorls worlds of sea-floor sea-flour sea-flower sea moss moses boats deeper more morose colours holiest grails . how evvathing flows underwater … the waves comin in/ comin in/ tidelect tidalect tidalectic con/nect/ing …. (Barabajan Poems 114)

Savory says that this passage is an exquisite illustration of how “the gift of poetry” has its genesis in both words and nature, which becomes, for Braithwaite, an aquatic submersion that remembers an Igboid spiritualism as a kind of channel-

89 opening, oceanic integrated-circuit (Braithwaite’s spiritualised computer) buried shy of the seabed’s matted ecological surface: “the gods retrieve meaning almost in the way a transatlantic cable does: meaning travels along the seabed from one continent to the another, overturning the slave ships’ intention to sever communication between continent and island” (755). Braithwaite’s transatlantic communicative sea-flour is a saline batter whose marbled pattern folds smoothly into Elizete’s computation of Verlia’s insurrectionary suicide 38 – as Elizete describes it to Abena in the novel’s terminal pages:

‘She jump. Leap from me. Then I decide to count the endless name of stones. Rock leap, wall heart, rip eye, cease breath, marl cut, blood leap, clay deep, coal dead, coal deep, never rot, never cease, sand high, bone dirt, dust hard, mud bird, mud fish, mud word, rock flower, coral water, coral heart, coral breath…’ (241-2)

After the quick crescendo of Verlia’s jump – a “rock leap” – Elizete’s taxonomical parataxis seems to register a faint geological descent, from sand, through mud, to the submarined depths of coral, and this is the coming to grounds, or the coming to seabed, or the habituated loss, of Caribbean identity, always softly and enduringly recovering from its falls. Tidalectically.

The Gravity and Force of Matter: Derrida to Deleuze

Part One began approximately with reference to Pheng Cheah’s description of a non-dialectical materialism at work in the philosophies of Derrida and Deleuze. Through combing Derrida’s oeuvre Cheah unmasks a spectral materialism, or “a materialism without substance”, which is the very condition of temporality in being. “The gift of time” is the impossible gift of radical alterity that occasions the present – it is the mark, or tear, in presence, made by an unthinkable absence, which impels the present to change, and is the relentless catalyst for temporalisation. The ‘now’ is

38 Some critics point out that Verlia’s jump is reminiscent of an event that occurred at Sauteurs Bay, Grenada, in the early 1650s, when the native Carib Indians performed an equivalent act of suicidal rebellion, jumping off the cliffs in order to flee the French military (see Smyth [156], Corr [unpaginated]). Additionally, Verlia’s cliff jump pays homage to the ‘Igbo Landing’ mythology, which variably details African slaves either flying or walking on water back to Africa through suicide rather than surrendering to a life of chattle slavery in the New World (see Vedal [71], Symth [156], and McCallum and Olbey [178]). 90 never only itself, and Cheah shows how Derrida conjures a deliriously anachronistic, precipitous, urgent, and impossible futurity out of the now, within the now itself, as its experiential force:

Yet, despite the scarring, dislocation, and tearing that it inflicts on presence, materiality in the deconstructive sense has a rigorously affirmative and generative character. Because it refers us to the radically other, materiality is also the opening of an unforeseeable future, an à-venir (to come) that cannot be anticipated as a form of presence. […] since the other is that from which time comes, the experience of absolute alterity, however disruptive, must be affirmed, because without it, nothing could ever happen. An understanding of materiality in terms of negativity effaces this messianic dimension because, by positing the other as the same, it closes off the experience of radical alterity. (78)

The messianic is a concept Derrida develops as a way of extending, and in large part contesting, the various religious Messianisms that prophecy the arrival of a male saviour, who – it is supposed – will be identifiable and often accorded a particular historical date of appearance. It is the identifiable aspect of this foretelling that guarantees its negativity – if we know what it will be, we also must know what it is not (as the actual present).

Contrary to this negative operation, in Cheah’s elucidation of Derrida’s “materialism without substance” there is very much an emphasis on the à-venir, or on the anachronism of prematurity as the force of desire and experience, and which productively expunges negativity. However, this is only one half of the force of movement in the novel: an inappropriable difference. In In Another Place, Not Here this is often ostensibly, or initially and before deconstruction, figured through Verlia, who is always ahead of herself, precipitously racing forwards. But there is another half to In Another Place, Not Here’s movement, which is its iterative operation, which produces identities that endure. This might best be thought of as the other half of the trace, not the à-venir half which so preoccupies Cheah’s reckoning of Derrida’s materialism, but the half wherein the present is simultaneously beset by a repetition that ensures temporalisation through harking back to an unreachable, inexhaustible, though also somehow vaguely knowable, past (which is somehow initially personified through Elizete, who is always

91 anachronistically late to the mark, stuck in some ancestral present). Though of course, Brand’s genius lies always in the nimble ways she deconstructs these temporalities, creating a discombobulated – but far from random – temporal concertina that sees the past in the future, and even somehow, a kind of future in the past (for knowability is also an element of futural occasioning, and there are undoubtedly thewy shreds of foretelling in the novel that serve as a kind of counterbalance to the potentially whelming force of its formidable à-venir).

All in all, Brand’s novel is a masterfully kinetic, chrono-generative art that in very many complex ways harnesses the power of the other, the power of other-ing, or of radical alterity, to undo itself, and to keep writhing. It induces, or infers, various traces of the other-to-come through performing the trace’s contingencies and indefinabilities. Sometimes its experimentation with trace would seem to proffer actual present traces of something definable if not extant, and so this is better expressed as symbols-of-traces, or symbolic traces. In his essay, Cheah re- animates one of Derrida’s claims in Spectres of Marx: “The non-phenomenality or non-presence of the other is not an absence or negated presence but ‘“something”…that deviates from the opposition presence/absence (negated presence) [95]” (75). One of the conundrums Brand encounters as author is how to articulate the power or force of this trace without manifesting it or defining it. One way the novel expresses the force of trace is through showing that even when characters do seem to serve as its present actualisation or manifestation (as symbolic traces), the novel emphasises that they are, even in presence, overdetermined by various types of dislocation; even in presence, Brand’s characters are never fully themselves and can never fully know themselves. Brand weeds out the impoverished idea that active individualism is the sole instigator of phenomena; she abandons the idea that rational subjects are their own free-acting, free-deciding agents. She does this by showing that “every decision [is] originarily passive” (Cheah 80), as, for instance, in those moments of involuntary regurgitation.

To come to grips with the strangely passive consistency of this materialism we travelled back from the originary heterogeneity of particular binaries, using as a supreme example, the event and the machine. The novel shows that neither side of a

92 particular binary is superior to the other, both sides maintain their heterogeneity while enacting mutual intrusions that rattle any sense of their original, pure identity. Furthermore, ‘both’ sides in their entanglement are the conditions for the emergence of thirds. What emerges is a real other, but this other is only the real image of a completely unrealisable, unthinkable Other that propelled it into being (a materialism without substance). And with this emergence, the dynamics of every other purported binary alters too. We recognised that the novel murmurs the possibility that this triad is a kind of dialectics that are both Hegelian and Marxian in nature, except that the binarised contradictions of these dialectics were not permanently resolved, or sublimated – either religio-ideally or politico-materially – but instead were in some way regurgitated or repeated (a profoundly aporetic moment for deconstruction ‘itself’). Even so, this repetition is not an identical replica, but is riven with its own possibility of experience, which is difference. So the relationships outlined, which work according to a faint dialectical pattern, are more accurately anti-dialectical deconstruction, in which parent binaries are not synthesised, but are instead interrupted and deconstructed. If the novel were enacting The Dialectic it would respond to its oppositional contradictions by way of a series of self-effacing, self-effecting , but as anti-dialectical deconstruction it answers contradictions with doubt, registering the “undecidability” of the various oppositional predicaments it showcases.39

Even so, anti-dialectical deconstruction is not the novel’s final word. Assuredly, Brand draws on Derrida’s work in vital ways. In one sense, In Another Place, Not Here is deconstruction à la lettre (as misguided a description of deconstruction as this reads). Brand narratively recreates, retraces, and defers Derridean deconstruction, repeating or echoing many of Derrida’s doubts and conceptual routes. But proof of this comes additionally in the incredible ways that

39 See Jameson: “So far, dialectics and deconstruction are consonant with each other: both work to bring up into the light the structural incoherences of the “idea” or conceptual “positions” or interpretations which are their object of critique. But where the dialectic pauses, waiting for the new “dialectical” solution to freeze over in its turn and become an idea or an ideology to which the dialect can again be “applied” (as it were from the outside of the newly reformed system), deconstruction races forward, undoing the very incoherence it has just been denouncing and showing that seeming analytic result to be itself a new incoherence and a new “contradiction” to be unravelled in its turn. […] One of the outcomes thus devoured and unravelled is of course the dialectic itself, which paused too long and became another ideology in its own right, yet another object of deconstruction” (Valences 27). 93 Brand’s text differs from Derrida’s non-dialectical materialism (as in Cheah’s elucidation of Derrida’s non-dialectical materialism), or how Brand’s text continues Derrida’s deconstructive dance by assuming, or rather authorially emerging, as the monstrous Other that Derrida could not himself conceive of: as deploying deconstruction to create an idea of a matter present, as an à-venir unthinkable except for a modicum of the negative. This is a Queer, Black, and Nasty40 à-venir. Where Derrida’s philosophy favours the à-venir as release from sovereignty, In Another Place, Not Here shows that the à-venir of radical alterity is not marked with the promise of something better, only something different. In Another Place Not Here perverts the à-venir by micro-dosing it with a bitter taste of the conceivable; contaminating it with its most unthinkable Other, according to its own standards: thinkability, or worse, predictability.

The novel’s final word propels beyond finitude, but with the mark of endurance – the mark of a Black metaphysics and a Black xperience as its condition of possibility: anti-dialectical deconstruction impelled by force and gravity; or, tidalectical deconstruction. Tidalectics is a little bit of metaphysics, a trace of Black Caribbean metaphysics. But importantly, tidalectics itself is not only about repetition and regurgitation, it has a productive mystery of its own, as Marc Shell, in Islandology: Geography, Rhetoric, Politics, articulates:

No matter its short term utility for asserting regional autonomy (‘European imperial Hegelianism verses indigenous tidalectic’) and interdependencies of the national islands (French, Dutch, Spanish, and English), tidalectics remains unpacked if not […] unpackable: one heuristically useful model for what has historically dogged the more rhetorical of literary attempts to provide a consistent islandology. (20)

Tidalectics and deconstruction acknowledge their own provisional applicability. That they are “heuristically useful” is no mark of inadequacy though, but indication of a more profound acknowledgement of the weird unfixability of phenomena – of phenomen-ing. Tidalectics and deconstruction find their power as ephemera. For in

40 We are here inspired by the recent viral feminist campaign to expropriate the term “nasty woman” from its misogynistic captivity. Spawned explicitly by American President, Donald Trump’s stylisation of his electoral opponent, Hilary Clinton, by way of this designation, the reclamation consists in nullifying its leverage as offensive appellation (while still retaining its value of vulgarity). 94 the other place, not here, the here emerges. Here is the undecidability within both and between both, and perhaps it is the specificity of this undecidability that characterises the new materialism (matter somehow neither/both present/absent) at play in Brand’s remarkable novel.

And now it is possible to chart some points of connection and divergence between the thinking of Derrida and the thinking of Gilles Deleuze, whose philosophy – and in particular whose cinematic philosophy – preoccupies Part Two of this thesis. Derrida’s anti-metaphysical, materialist ‘undecidability’ has a friend in the metaphysical ‘problematics’ of Deleuze, which can also be considered materialist in important ways. Like Derrida, Deleuze takes his cue from Kant in his pursuit of phenomenology’s preconditions – but where Derrida sees complex aporias as the conditions of possibility of being, Deleuze sees a complex flow of differences. If the impossible other is the condition of possibility in deconstruction, something equally as spectral is part of the force of Deleuze’s materialism: a virtuality that coincides with every actual phenomenon. Both radical alterity and virtuality, by definition, cannot be fully cognised, only conceptually skirted around, inferred, or intuited. This is in part due to their non-phenomenality, but also due to their complexity – definitions stifle complexity, definitions are humanist boxes. To intuit these spectral-materialist forces – which are, furthermore, forces of time – Derrida and Deleuze are required to draw on the powers of a kooky logic – Derrida intuits time (real, out-of-joint time) through the aporia of phenomena, whereas Deleuze indirectly intuits time by embracing a plane of consistency. As a philosopher, Derrida works – in Deleuzian terms – to deterritorialise being. He does this in a register of intensity (from a pole of deterritorialisation), which is why there is no outside of the text (only – again, to conflate Derrida with a Deleuzian ‘transcendental empiricism’ – an inassimilable, inaccessible virtual field that ensures immanence and temporalisation). If deterritorialisation is a kind of decontextualisation, so is deconstruction. In deconstruction phenomena are radically alienated from their present being, wrenched from a current frame of reference, which in turn underscores the absolute singularity of the phenomenon in question: this is the bedrock of reproduction, or the genesis of the supplement.

95 ‘Singularity’, as applied here, heralds a problem in terms of grasping Derrida and Deleuze in company however. Deleuze has a very exacting conceptualisation of singularity within the compass of his philosophy, and this does not figure in, or cannot be incorporated into, Derrida’s conceptual schematics. Subsuming Derrida’s anti-metaphysics into Deleuze’s philosophy is only useful to a degree, for the aggrandisation of Deleuze’s philosophy will in some sense come at the cost of diluting and skewing Derrida’s ideas. This is why dedicating entire parts of our thinking to the nuances of each philosopher will help perturb the oversimplified conflation of various distinct materialisms under a potentially inculcating ‘new materialist paradigm’.

Once again, Cheah expertly analyses certain junctures of separation between the materialisms of the two philosophers. Apart from pitching Derrida against Marx, Cheah also recognises Deleuze contra the dialectical materialism of Marx. If the anti-Marxian “force of materiality”, as Cheah sees it expressed by Derrida, “is nothing other than the constitutive exposure of (the subject of) power to the other” (81), then in Deleuze’s metaphysics, Cheah asserts, “the force of materiality” issues instead “as the power of non-organic life” (81). The power of non-organic life refers to an immanent plane of consistency populated by singularities. Where Cheah’s discussion of the plane of consistency registers its alliance with the virtual, it is important to note that the plane of consistency also operates in other ways on various intensive registers (in distinction from the virtual register).

In the same way that we departed somewhat from Cheah’s elucidation of Derrida’s materialism, and saw important reasons to annex another element to the deconstructionist materialism – namely, the force of a matter present – we also recognise that there is something more to Deleuze’s materialism than the power of the plane of consistency (Cheah asserts that “for Deleuze, materiality is nothing other than the plane of immanence” [86]). Once more, we will suggest that there is an element to the force of Deleuze’s materialism best characterised as the power of matter actual. For instance, in Part Three’s focus on the poetry of Kate Fagan, it becomes apparent that a crucial aspect of her struggle towards plane-of- consistency-immersion comes by virtue of serious fascination with concrete and formal matters, both external and internal to poetry. This is a necessary component

96 of her attempts to create a poetry of intensive qualities and potentials, rather than a poem glued together by the strength of its interpretable and abstracted meaning, which presupposes a unity of structure, rather than engaging the world openly.

Similarly, in Part Two, though the force of cinematic materialism seems still to be the plane of consistency, or what becomes in filmic terms a virtual “signaletic material” (Dawkins 8), Deleuze returns us to the predominantly material (or at least a-linguistic) “signs of genesis” as the most-immediate intensive incarnations of a corresponding virtual field of differential relations. This concrete matter is still a strange beast in that this time – as we are dealing with film – it is primarily made up of light and sound, and is perhaps, strictly speaking, more materialist mainly by dint of what it is not. That is to say, for not exhibiting a meaning that is generated out of an already-encoded system of language, but which stems instead from a “plastic mass” from which it differs but simultaneously corresponds (in this sense, Deleuze calls it “a-signifying and a-syntaxic” [Cinema 2 29]). So it appears that the power of Deleuze’s materialism is not just the expressive force of the signaletic material but also the gravity – so to speak – of the material qualities of the cinematic signs and images operating in different ways on intensive registers, and out of which he generates his filmic taxonomy.

97 Part Two

A Deleuzian Taxonomy of Postmodern Film

Chapter I The Cinema of Spectacle

In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze conceptualises a semiotic taxonomy of cinematic signs and images that correspond to filmic matter as “a plastic mass”, or as an “a-signifying and a-syntactic material” (Time-Image 29). By this, Deleuze is referring to the variable, yet concrete, composition of film before it is overridden by the operation of signification – plasticity describes the transcendental conditions that produce signification. Herein, Deleuze attempts to disrupt the authority of the linguistic and psychoanalytic paradigms (for instance, the linguistic model of film interpretation spearheaded by the semiologist Christian Metz) that he recognises as screen studies froth, obscuring cinema’s metaphysical traction as the force of its expression and immanency.

According to Deleuze, “[k]inostructures [movement-images] and chronogeneses [time-images] are the two successive chapters of a pure semiotics” (Cinema 2 263). In the Introduction to The Brain is the Screen, Gregory Flaxman writes that these two stages coincide respectively with an organic regime and a crystalline regime: “while Deleuze develops and describes these systems, more or less dividing them between the two books, the perspective from which he writes is the latter, genealogical one, and this may explain the sense one gets in the cinema books of always anticipating the emergence of the time-image” (51-2).

98 In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Deleuze begins by showing how the movement-image of classical cinema was progressive at least in its realisation that movement and object are inseparable: movement is in the object. However, in pre- World War II classical films, time is still modulated by movement; movement- images are regulated by rational connections and continuity editing, or by the “sensory motor schema”. Much more radically, Cinema 2: The Time-Image describes the time-image as a violation of the sensory-motor schema, where incommensurate temporalities and discontinuous editing provide rudimentary glimpses of the virtual. Artistically then, we might say that films that manifest time- images are actively engaged in new materialist thinking in ways that movement- image films are not (even if they are not mindful of this rhetorical framework as such). Importantly however, and as Flaxman makes clear in his recognition that both of the cinema books are presented as if from the standpoint of the second book’s “geneological” approach, this does not mean that movement-images are invaluable to a new materialist inquiry. In Part Two’s exploration of movement- images, we angle our study – like Deleuze – so as to provide a genealogical time- image (or new materialist) account of the movement-images that are under consideration. Much of the value of this part is as a developmental primer to Part Three, which will in turn elucidate what we will call a literary time-image.

After a brief tour through the landscape of Deleuze’s cinematic conceptualisation and his broader materialist philosophy, this part makes use of Deleuze’s cinematic taxonomy in a consideration of a series of postmodern films. The key aim of this part is to show how new materialism “cuts through postmodernism”, basically by describing each film’s genetic conditions in line with Deleuze’s taxonomy. This part follows the same route that Deleuze forges in explicating the movement-image, alternating between the recapitulation of image- types according to their order of explication in Cinema 1, and a description of those films in our corpus that best exemplify the particular image-type being discussed.

Chapter One comprises a consideration of le cinéma du look (‘the cinema of look’, or ‘the cinema of spectacle’), as an aesthetic register of the still-inchoate nascency of French cinematic postmodernism. The cinéma du look is also a collection of films that only just exceed the historical scope of Deleuze’s Cinema

99 books (which is not to say that many of these films would have merited Deleuze’s philosophical attention); Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (1981) is generally credited as the inaugural film of this corpus, and and Léos Carax are its two other most-heralded auteurs. As a historical succession not only to the Cinema books, but also to La Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave), le cinéma du look might also be understood as a kind of withdrawal from modernist cinema’s increasing captivation with durée, which might implicitly explain some of the antagonism directed at many of these films around the time of their original release, by the leading French avant-garde cinema journal, Cahiers du cinema. These films come as an avant-garde retreat to the movement-image of classic cinema, they re-inscribe the function of a sensory-motor schema. The first chapter focuses on three movement-images: the perception-image, the affection-image, and the impulse- image as various sensory-motor schema affirmations.

Chapter Two of Part Two pursues this vein further, unpacking the powerful operation of the sensory motor connections in what we argue are two popular action-image films: Avatar (2009) and District 9 (2009). A powerful yoke binds these films; they are the absolute obverses of one another. Importantly, this part engages these two collections (the cinéma du look, and the District 9-Avatar duo) as exemplifications of the extreme, almost opposing poles of cinematic postmodernism. The blockbuster quality of District 9-Avatar is perhaps uniquely evidenced in the production costs of each film: District 9’s production costs were somewhere in the vicinity of $30 million,41 while Avatar’s is speculated to sit somewhere between $237-$500 million. 42 The audacity of director James Cameron’s budget for Avatar indicates that he and its other producers had expected the movie to return big money: Avatar is currently the most profitable film ever made, with lifetime grosses presently surpassing $2,788,000,000, according to the Internet Movie Database.43 Juxtaposed to these kinds of dollar figures, the cinéma du look is an altogether different species of cinema.

Part Two’s methodological vantage consists, then, in the ream of films it explores – not least in the very many French films we touch upon to be able to

41 See IMDb: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=district9.htm 42 Josh Dickey, ‘The Wrap’: http://www.thewrap.com/avatars-true-cost-and-consequences-11206/ 43 See IMDb: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/ 100 present some useful commentary on the cinéma du look grouping and development. This part is inspired by the spirit and style of the cinema books, including their mode of vertiginous filmic referencing – though our selection of texts, many as they include, are obviously comparatively modest in scope. This part’s primary objective, however, is to familiarise the reader with some of the aspects and permutations of the movement-image. Therefore, we choose, from the cinéma du look corpus, the texts that are its keenest exemplifications. While not providing an exhaustive analysis of the cinéma du look corpus, our selection is still geared to proffer some insight into its agglomeration. This part focuses on ostensibly postmodern films, with a mind to elucidating some their more material textural intensities, thereby piercing though postmodernism’s transcendental logic and power, and showing that even these films comprise an immanent plasticity as the condition of any form of sharp significance.

*****

In his Cinema books, Deleuze brings to light cinematic concepts that are appropriate to cinema alone, as well as to particular filmic genres and specific films. To accomplish this he draws extensively on the work of Henri Bergson and . In fact, Deleuze contends that Bergson rightly suggests that one of the great problems not only of the philosophy of cinema, but of philosophy tout court, is its tendency to generalise and to eternalise – to create imprecise concepts that “form […] a net so slack that everything slips through” (Bergsonism 45). In Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy, Paola Marrati clarifies this, explaining:

Most philosophical systems produce concepts so abstract (movement, time, being, the one, the multiple, etc.) that they can be applied to anything and everything: to reality, to the possible, and even to the impossible. The explanatory power of such concepts is only superficial: they can account for everything insofar as they are concerned with nothing in particular. (7)

So if at times the Cinema books seem an interminable categorisation, they are; Deleuze means for his taxonomy to provide new and singular concepts for new and

101 singular aspects of existence, both of which are at the whim of a powerful ‘creative evolution’.

For Deleuze, the cinema is not a representation of reality, but a series of “blocs of space-time” that are implicated in the continuous unfolding of reality. This conceptualisation is grounded in the metaphysical wholism of Bergson. Deleuze says that for Bergson, the cosmos is a kind of “vibrational whole” – a pulsating monad, or “single durée” – from which the expression of decipherable spatial coordinates is engendered by the compression of its single durational fabric, while its temporal realm comprises a protracted and more relaxed composition. The temporal dimension, composed conterminously of movementing, imaging, mattering, and lighting – or eternal qualitative differentiation – leaves room for a radical promiscuity or indeterminacy that becomes less possible in the contracting instances of a spatial realm. The tighter spatial realm, ‘by extension’, affords greater levels of predictability through quantification – it is how algorithms and logical formulas come to terms and function. Cinema then, is a “mobile cut of durée [as open] Whole” (Movement-Image 8) and its particular functions as frame, shot, and montage expose various interactions with, or manifestations of, the open Whole.

Light and consciousness are already in images and matter. Whereas phenomenology holds that matter and images are read by the illuminating beam of a transcendental consciousness or subject, Deleuze follows Bergson in asserting that “the eye is in things, in luminous images themselves” (60). So there is, first of all, pure light, pure difference, pure perception, or pure subjectivity, which does not labour within and against an economy of possession: “Subjectivity is never ours, it is time, that is, the soul or the spirit, the virtual. The actual is always objective, but the virtual is subjective: it was initially the affect, that which we experience in time; then time itself, pure virtuality which divides itself in two as affector and affected, ‘the affection of self by self’ as definition of time” (Time-Image 82-3). This unadulterated matter-light produces and encounters certain “special images”, which are like photographic “black screens” that interrupt and reflect the flow of light, and this is how and where we find the assemblage of the subject proper.

102 The “black screen” creates a “living-image” because it halts and throws back light-matter – its reflection is the perception-image. The interim within the living- image is named the “zone of indeterminacy” (this is the birth-space of the subject) because it is a rift in the flow of durée – it is where action-reaction assumes complexity beyond the predictability of cause and effect. Amy Herzog explains that the particular span of the “zone of indeterminacy” is of no small consequence: “[w]ithin each ‘living centre’ exists a potential delay between the moment of perception and the moment of action. The greater this delay or ‘zone of indeterminacy’ becomes, the greater access the subject will have to an alternative axis of movement: that of intuition” (Herzog 6). Even so, it must be understood that the “zone of indeterminacy” is still the attrition of all possible perception, which “implies”, according to Ronald Bogue:

[…] that living images ultimately are not more perceptive than nonliving images, but less so. Nonliving images respond to all surrounding motions and hence have a full perception of their surroundings (what [Alfred North] Whitehead would term a ‘prehension’) whereas living images ignore some movements and recognise others. (Routledge Companion 371)

Essentially, the perception-image creates a closed-system, by “framing”, or “isolating” certain elements of the universe, while filtering out and remaining “indifferent” to all other elements. And importantly, the living-image is not exclusively human; it refers to all living beings: “One should […] conceive of [the] micro-intervals [that constitute the living-image] even in the primeval soup” of elementary life (Time-Image 63). Another aspect of the living-image that Deleuze mentions is its “curvature”, which transpires as a coincidence of its power as a centre within the flux of a-centred variation.

So Deleuze is inspired by Bergson’s formulation of a “sensory motor schema” out of which he fashions the contours and operations of a cinematic movement- image, which is essentially a living-image, or an organismic image. But to be able to account for the way meaning is produced and transferred in relation to this schema, Deleuze also embraces the semiotics of C. S. Peirce. Deleuze leans on the shoulders of both Bergson and Peirce in his pursuit of a “non-linguistic theory of the sign”; Deleuze endeavours to shake the structuralist grip of Ferdinand de

103 Saussure’s semiology, based in the logic of a dual signifier-signified relationship, which in turn has come to monopolise cinematic thinking. Of film, Deleuze writes:

[E]ven with its verbal elements, this is neither a language system nor a language. It is a plastic mass, an a-signifying and a-syntactic material, a material not formed linguistically even though it is not amorphous and is formed semiotically, aesthetically and pragmatically. It is a condition, anterior by right to what it conditions. It is not an enunciation and these are not utterances. It is an utterable. We mean that when language gets hold of this material (and it necessarily does so), then it gives rise to utterances which come to dominate or even replace the images and signs, and which refer in turn to pertinent features of the language system, syntagms and paradigms, completely different from those we started with. We therefore have to define, not semiology, but ‘semiotics’, as the system of images and signs independent of language in general. (Time-Image 29)

Deleuze is concerned to excavate the immanent, material modulatory properties (i.e. “sensory [visual and sound], kinetic, intensive, affective, rhythmic, tonal, and even verbal [oral and written]” [Time-Image 29]) of the sign as it exists before it is overwritten by linguistic semiology, which tends to usurp the cardinality of the material under its own interpretative auspices, a posteriori.

To accomplish this Deleuze weaves together aspects of the theories of Bergson and Peirce, creating a stronger and more rigorous collaborative theory. Deleuze draws upon Peirce’s cognisance of phenomenal activity – “phaneroscopy” – and its three ontological aspects of existence (that is, the three aspects of Being that are expressed simultaneously by every phenomenon in the universe) – Firstness (feeling), Secondness (reaction), and Thirdness (thought) (see Short in David Deamer 23). By way of some intelligent manoeuvring, Deleuze synchronises Peirce’s Being triad with Bergson’s sensory motor schema by theorising three categories of movement-images that issue coextensively, but in different capacities, with a “zone of indeterminacy”, or living-image: the perception-image, the affection-image, and the action-image. But to synch Peirce with Bergson, Deleuze must counter the misalignment that is here manifest, forging a mental- or relation- image that jibes with Peirce’s thirdness (see Deamer). Similarly, to realise Bergson’s full theory of habitual memory, Deleuze is required to append an extra

104 image type to Peirce’s semiotics: the perception-image is one instance of Deleuze complimenting Peirce’s semiotics with a Bergsonian supplement. So, taking our cue from Deleuze, the perception-image is the equivalent to Peircean “Zeroness” (Cinema 2 31-2), though of course Peirce did not himself conceptualise this. This is a critical point because “intensity = 0” (A Thousand Plateaus 169) means that the perception-image operates on an intensive register. And as there is a perception- image in every other movement-image, there is always a degree of intensity in every movement-image.

In Deleuze on Cinema, Bogue provides an amalgamative graphic that illuminates how Deleuze weds the Bergsonian and Peircean models, where the bracketed concepts indicate Deleuze’s most salient touch-ups to the respective Bergsonian and Peircean repertoires:

Perception-image = [Zeroness]

Affection-image = Firstness

Action-image = Secondeness

[Relation-image] = Thirdness (68)

Deleuze knits Peirce’s categories of being onto Bergson’s images in order to recognise a catalogue of cinematic images and signs that correspond to creative life, as well as to trigger the machinic function of cinema, which is its immanent vitality.

The value of Deleuze’s taxonomy resides very much in the capacity of modulation that he affords his images and signs. In describing what he calls Deleuze’s “cineosis” (23), in ‘An Imprint of Godzilla: Deleuze, the Action-Image and Universal History’, David Deamer explains that every cinematic image is situated somewhere on a spectrum between equilibrium and deterritorialisation. So, for instance, the perception-image has more affinity – in sensory motor schema terms – with molecularity, and the action-image finds its footing in degrees of molarity. The relation-image is like molar thinking (Bergson’s “habituated thinking”), which settles the deduction of the movement-image (Time-Image 32) and the time-image, because it escapes sensory motor coordinates, presses deeper towards unthought, or towards deterritorialised thinking.

105 But this spectrum, or continuum, also exists within the vicinity of each particular image type, to which Deleuze ascribes three signs (and again the spectrum spreads through each sign also). This becomes more fathomable if we attend to the specificities of Peirce’s role as a player in Deleuze’s cinema semiotics. The Peircean general theory of signs – semeiotics – includes a trichotomised sign, composed of the representamen, the object, and the , which is complicated through tripart multiplication – that is, Peirce recognised three trichotomies, which are expressed in a tri-square table that indicates each sign’s relative, hierarchical role in the process of sign formation and meaning. Roger Dawkins provides an incisive gloss on the specificities of Peirce’s role in Deleuze’s semiotics. In the Cinema books Peirce’s signs are often fairly well buried. Furthermore, Deleuze tinkers with and revises Peirce’s original tri-square sign schema so that any Peircean residues that we are privy to are oftentimes clue to a post-Peircean lead rather than any resolute Peircean extension – and this Peircean obscurity is further exacerbated by the fact that Deleuze is much more dutifully a Bergsonian than a Peircean (Bogue Routledge Companion 34).

In ‘Deleuze, Peirce, and the Cinematic Sign’, Dawkins explicates what he calls the ten “completed signs” of Deleuze’s filmic taxonomy in line with Peirce’s semeiotics. This is where Peirce’s ‘three aspects of being’ (firstness, secondness, and thirdness) are multiplied by what Peirce recognises as the ‘three aspects of the sign’ (representamen, object, interpretant). Dawkins says that for Peirce, the representamen is the “sign in-itself” (10), singularly expressed. In Deleuze, the representamen becomes a movement-image’s “sign of genesis”. Next, Peirce’s object, which Dawkins says is “the sign’s embodiment in a sign-object relation” (10), becomes the movement-image’s “signs of composition”. Dawkins further explains why Deleuze dedicates so much space in Cinema 1 to clarifying all of the movement-image’s signs of genesis and signs of composition, whilst largely refraining from engaging the equivalent to Peirce’s final sign aspect, the interpretant. “With Genesis and Composition”, points out Dawkins, “Deleuze guarantees that a sign is an existing thing that is meaningful in-itself” (10); “meaning resides strictly in the nature of the embodiment” (8). In fact, it is not until Cinema 2 that Deleuze unpacks the interpretant’s equivalent, as Dawkins confirms:

106 Although Deleuze’s concern for the bulk of the cinema books lies with the way the signs of the cinema are embodied – independently of their interpretation, he does eventually develop a third aspect of the sign quite clearly equivalent to Peirce’s Interpretant. Deleuze calls this aspect of the sign the Noosign, and I argue that it completes the (immanent) structure of Deleuze’s semiotics. (10)

Dawkins concedes that the noosign is still in immanence. Even though Deleuze suppresses its elucidation until Cinema 2, the noosign is a kind of interpretation that is in the image, still a product of its material expression, unlike other forms of interpretation that erect transcendent lenses over their filmic targets. Deleuze is mainly (in Cinema 1) preoccupied with the signs of genesis and the signs of composition because he is erring on the far side of deterritorialisation – of semiotics rather than semiology; of immanence, rather than transcendence. The “sign of genesis” is the more deterritorialised pole of the cinematic sign; it is the signaletic material consolidated into quality or power, or a sign referring purely to itself. The “signs of composition” are the more physical ordinations of actual things. And noosigns are more formalised still, though they are not so formalised as to be trading in semiological codes. In fact, Dawkins maintains that noosigns have their own spectrum of expression, from general interpretation based in the “qualitative”, to a more specific interpretation based in the “factual” cognisance “of an object’s properties”, to the logical interpretation of an object in a network of “laws, judgements or concepts” (10).

Taking all of this into consideration, perhaps the most crucial thing to keep in mind is that for Deleuze, signs are not linguistic. As Deleuze makes clear with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, signs are more like cues that issue from material arrangements that have statistical force:

It is only under certain conditions that strata can be said to include signs; signs cannot be equated with language in general but are defined by regimes of statements that are so many real usages or functions of language. Then why retain the word sign for these regimes, which formalize an expression without designating or signifying the simultaneous contents, which are formalized in a different way? Signs are not signs of a thing; they are signs of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, they mark a certain threshold crossed in the course of these movements, and it is for this reason that the word should be retained […]. [emphasis added] (ATP 75) 107 For Deleuze, the sign is important because it does not transfer meaning by way of transcendent codes in the fashion of semiology and postmodernism. Instead signs may “trigger material processes” (Bonta and Protevi 141) on an intensive register.

The Perception-Image: Léos Carax’s Boy Meets Girl

It is possible to think of perception in broader, immanent terms – as diffuse and in everything. For perception determined thusly – as gaseous and tuned in to “universal variation” (81) – Deleuze refers to the sign of genesis of the perception- image, which is the gramme, or photogramme (part of the significance of this, perhaps, lies in camera-less function of the photogram actual). Dziga Vertov’s cine- eye, for Deleuze, is an apt instance of the perception-image revealing the “eye […] in things” (81), for in Vertov’s cinematic practice – and most noticeably so in Man with a Movie Camera (1929) – the photogramme is not the simple regression to photographic conceptualisation:

[T]he frame is not simply the return to the photo: if it belongs to the cinema, this is because it is the genetic element of the image, or the differential element of the movement. It does not ‘terminate’ the movement without also being the principal of its acceleration, its deceleration and its variation. It is the vibration, the elementary solicitation of which movement is made up at each instance […]. Thus the photogramme is inseparable from the series which makes it vibrate in relation to the movement which derives from it. (83)

Where many would surely read a film like Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera as the acme of humanism, as a communist celebration of human transport, communication, industry, and modernity – applauding its victories, mourning its hardships, but on all accounts embroiled intimately with humanity in Soviet modernity, Deleuze characteristically proffers a very counterintuitive explanation of the film’s anti-humanist expression.

Apart from the gramme’s gaseous perception, it is also possible to think of perception in its more evolved stages, eventually developing, or shrinking in its capacities (i.e. developmental focus), and becoming the narrow, but privileged image of the human eye, whose “relative immobility as a receptive organ means 108 that all images vary for [it]” (Movement-Image 81). Though the camera in its own way is subject to a similar perspectival restriction, Deleuze says that cinema in fact unclenches itself from the singularity of its lens, and finds liberation in montage. One click up from the molecular movement of the gramme then (which is montage at its most dynamic), Deleuze recognises one of the signs of composition of the perception-image – the reume, which is a kind of liquid perception that Deleuze says is operational in the early “French school and German Expressionism” (Movement-Image 77), and in the fondness for water imagery in the work of directors like Marcel L’Herbier and Jean Renoir. Importantly, Deleuze finds that the reume allows for a valid description of cinematic ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’, which he says is a truly Bergsonian definition: “a subjective perception is one in which the images vary in relation to a central and privileged image; an objective perception is one where, as in things, all the images vary in relation to one another, on all their facets and in all their parts” (emphasis in original Movement-Image 76).

The significance of the accuracy of the reume’s valuation on this account becomes clear if we compare it to the dicisign. The dicisign is the other of the perception-image’s signs of composition – it is one click up from the reume, and it is the perception-image’s most molar pole of manifestation. As such, the dicisign, unlike the reume, yields only a “nominal definition of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’” (Movement-Image 76), as “semi-subjective”. From Jean Mitry, Deleuze borrows the concept of “semi-subjective” to designate the peculiar nature of the molar cinematic perspective, which is neither strictly subjective nor strictly objective, but a flittering between the two poles.44 Pier Paolo Pasolini develops this idea further, according to Deleuze, by likening the cinema’s perspectival capacity to the free-indirect- discourse of linguistic analysis (Deleuze is of course quick to excise from this equation, noting that free-indirect-discourse’s true value is its a-linguistic, far-from-equilibrium stylistic function, which is certainly not the homogenising

44 Although Deleuze admits that there are times – in molarity – when the cinema lays claim to either objectivity or subjectivity, this demarcation is yet even more “nominal” – or more reductive – than the dicisign’s definition. Deleuze begins his perception-image chapter (Chapter 5) by describing what might conventionally be understood as clarified instances of objectivity and subjectivity in the cinema, but he quickly complicates these notions with the dicisign (which, in turn, he uses to ease us into a description of the reume and then the gramme). 109 function of metaphor, as it is customarily understood in linguistics). Yet again then, neither is the cinema purely subjective (direct discourse), nor purely objective (indirect discourse), but what Pasolini calls a “free indirect subjectivity”. So cinematographic free-indirect-discourse is a kind of double subjectivity (a “properly cinematographic Cogito” [Movement-Image 74]) that marks a correlation between a “neurotic character” and an “obsessive”, “independent aesthetic [camera] consciousness” (Movement-Image 74); it is “a perception-image and a camera- consciousness that transforms it […]” (Movement-Image 74); it is “a perception in the frame of another perception” (Movement-Image 217).

We contend that instances of this cinematic self-consciousness (the dicisign of the perception-image) are expressed in Carax’s first film, Boy Meets Girl (1984) (we should repeat here – for clarity’s sake – that the Cinema books do not reference any of the cinéma du look films [which were variously and roughly released at the same time or after the Cinema books’ publications], so all of what follows are our own ideas and analyses of the films, drawing on the semiotic particularities of Deleuze’s taxonomy and insight, unless otherwise indicated by reference to another critic/s.). This film is the first of four films in which Carax situates an echo of himself in its main male role, always played by the actor Denis Lavant, and insinuated by the character’s name in each of the four films (in Boy Meets Girl, The Night is Young (1986), and Lovers on the Bridge (1991) Lavant’s character is named Alex, which is Carax’s birth-name [in full, Alexandre Oscar Dupont], and in Holy Motors (2012), “Monsieur Oscar” is taken from Carax’s middle name). In their monograph on Carax (part of the French Film Directors series by Manchester Press), Fergus Daly and Garin Dowd expressly contest the primacy of the elucidation of Boy Meets Girl with the perception-image. Although they do not explicitly use Deleuze’s “-image” rubric, they recognise Carax’s films through an ensemble of Deleuzian concepts (thereby suggesting what many of us suspect of Carax as viewers of his films – that “Carax apparently reads the work of Deleuze” [16] 45), and essentially attempt to situate Boy Meets Girl as affection-image (although they articulate this somewhat abstrusely):

45 Knowing this, it is enticing to re-read Carax’s cinematic projection of self in light of Deleuze’s discussion in reference to Freud, in Difference and Repetition, that real thinking can only occur 110 Carax […] brings to the screen a new sort of character for whom it is not perception that is primary as in the ‘optical dramas’ of an Antonioni. Nor is the emotion of action cinema [...] his goal, but, rather, impersonal affects of which he may form part, what Carax might term ‘First Times’ or Events – the moment of birth of each new affect or depersonalized emotion. This is why anomalous décor, irregular lighting and aberrant movement rule Carax’s world – they free up bodies from stasis, depicting characters in the middle or mi-lieu of events. While Mireille finds the rhythm of her emotion through the body, Alex discovers his on a deaf-blind stroll through a world of strangely dehumanized movements. (41-2)

Daly and Dowd detach Boy Meets Girl from its estimation as perception-image by arguing that the film is not modernist, like the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, but baroque.

In our appraisal of the film as an expression of the perception-image as dicisign, we contend that the film is, in fact, modernist baroque, although it grapples with some of the circumstances of its age, which in some vague way concerns the dawning of postmodernism. When describing the dicisign, Deleuze says that Antonioni’s films, along with those of Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard and Éric Rohmer are masterful articulations of the camera’s poetic double consciousness – each director, for Deleuze, enunciates a unique vision in this respect: Antonioni’s is “aesthetic”, Pasolini’s is “sacred”, Godard’s is “technicist”, and Rohmer’s is “ethical”. Carax’s is perhaps in this sense, philosophical-theatrical (Daly and Dowd might call it ‘metaphysical-mannerist’), producing a camera consciousness especially fascinated by, for instance, the kinetic-performative abilities of its actors – actors who differ from many film actors in that they double as skilled theatrical technicians. Boy Meets Girls adopts the productional rawness or mode of productional inquisitiveness that is characteristic of particular styles of workshop theatre or performance art, and which rely on forms of corporeal discipline and inventiveness to fill out the black canvas of its stage. When Alex attempts to steal some records from the music shop, its two clerks pursue him out of the entrance to the store, and there assume theatricalised postures. As for the philosophical when desire is spent narcissistically on the ego. Where desire is normally oriented by both desire for the problematic “virtual mother”, as well as desire for actual objects, the exercise of narcissism cuts us off from these habitualised investments and dynamises thinking.

111 component to Carax’s camera consciousness, this comes in the film’s success at problematising the myriad questions that its experimentation yields – not least, problematising a clear understanding of a director’s relationship to their actors and to their film/s.

Therefore, Deleuze’s description of Antonioni’s work as the exhibition of the “autonomy of a camera-consciousness” serves too as a description of Carax’s (that is, in all four films where Carax inserts himself through the body double of Denis Lavant):

[…] in it the neurotic, or the man losing his identity, enters into a ‘free indirect’ relationship with the poetic vision of the director who affirms himself in him, through him, whilst at the same time distinguishing himself from him. The pre-existing frame produces a curious detachment in the character, who watches himself act. (Movement- Image 75)

In Boy Meets Girl, Alex stands as witness, or spectator, to the intimacies (affectionate caresses or raucous broils) of various couples that he encounters. He listens and watches, and then inserts himself into one of these relationships, and so watches himself. There are his noisy brawling neighbours. There are the lovers on the bridge who intertwine and spin slowly like they are part of a vertical statuesque rotisserie – as if their success as lovers takes on a performative dimension, they are like ‘young love’ buskers, and so Alex flicks them some loose change from his pocket. Then there are Mireille and Bernard, who are at either end of the apartment intercom, Alex seemingly ventriloquising a voiceover superimposed over Bernard as silent mouthpiece.

Even though they themselves do not agree that Boy Meets Girl is most prominently a perception-image, Daly and Dowd nevertheless signal some valuable aspects of the perception-image as expressed by the film. They see similarities between Carax’s film and Samuel Beckett’s experimental film, entitled Film (1965) – staring Buster Keaton and directed by Alan Schneider. This is significant because Film is an important citation Deleuze uses in Cinema 1 to demonstrate how the three primary varieties of the movement-image are made to extinguish themselves (from the action-image, which is snuffed out and exposes the perception-image’s

112 decisign, which is then itself snuffed out to reveal the pure affection-image). Boy Meets Girl can be seen in various degrees and at varying stages to experiment with similar perceptual trajectories. Daly and Dowd also take note of the trope of ‘body double’, or doubling generally that is a pronounced preoccupation of the film, and are complexly tied to themes like imposture, voyeurism, and “the powers of the false” which are threaded throughout Carax’s work. They flag, for instance, the moment “Alex goes out to the Xerox machines where he encounters what looks like a pair of identical twins”. One of the pair is urging the other on with his duplexing, ordering “Faster”. Daly and Dowd continue: “Intensifying the doubling motif, the twins are themselves reflected in a mirror as they use one particular duplicating machine” (42). And Alex himself has of course come to the duplexing store to photocopy a letter he has written for his ex-girlfriend before going on to steal Bernard’s identity.

Lastly, we recognise an important connection to the perception-image that Daly and Dowd do not register: the film’s quality itself as xerograph. The film is in black and white. In one sense this black and white presentation functions as a means of harking back to an age of silent cinema, when somatic actors like Keaton were a necessity. Additionally though, when digested alongside the film’s sporadic blackouts, a strong case can be made for the film as xerograph. These brief and barely perceptible black shot intervals, in xerographic or electrophotographic terms, are like the dark function in the photocopying machine, when the photoconductive material that covers the drum in the machine acts as an insulator. The photoconductor is a semiconductor, so when it is exposed to light, current may pass through the material to produce the image – we can think of the whole of the black and white Boy Meets Girl in these terms, and the blackouts are like the perception pausing for thought, or, better yet, as first contacts with zones of indeterminacy from which folds of subjectivity in the form of duplication-duplicity emerge. This brings the film a little closer to the gaseous quality of the perception-image: the sign of genesis of the perception-image – Vertov’s photogramme becomes, under Carax’s hand, its more contemporary version, the xerograph.46

46 Daly and Dowd also register the film’s graphic preoccupation, though in relation to its mannerist expression: “Now mannerist filmmakers, in line with experimental filmmakers of every kind, tend 113 The Affection-Image: Léos Carax’s The Night is Young

Beyond the perception-image, emerging on the far side of the living-image, is the action-image, but there is also an image located in-between these two images, within the “zone of indeterminacy” itself, and this is the affection-image, whose quintessential manifestation is the facial close-up.47 Rather than interpret the facial close-up as it is most commonly understood, as “individuating”, “socializing”, and “relational or communicating” (Movement-Image 99), Deleuze says that we really need think of the facial close-up as that which abstracts or “deterritorializes” the face from the logic of extended space and time, and brings affect into relief. Deleuze therefore describes Carl Theodore Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) as the “affective film par excellence” (Movement-Image 106). But he dovetails this with a description of Robert Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) to illustrate that in its extrication from spatio-temporal coordinates, the affection-image does not rely solely on the face or the close-up, but expresses itself in a variety of other means, like Bresson’s medium-shots. Consequently, the affection-image emerges when something – and not necessarily a face per se – has been “envisaged”, or “faceified” (visagéifée), or rather when it exhibits a continuum between the two poles of “reflecting surface and intensive micro-movements” (Movement-Image 88). Put another way, these are the two poles of Quality and Power – the “expression of a quality common to several different things” and the “expression of a power which passes from one quality to another” (Movement- Image 91).

to think of bodies and the décor they are placed in as such graphic or figurative compositions, albeit in three dimensions. Furthermore, there is the aforementioned consciousness of figural history and of the struggle between a wholehearted adoption of a pre-existent style and the desire to express through one’s unique personal stylistic traits. On both counts the limits of style are forced into the realms of artificiality” (50-1). 47 Bogue clarifies Deleuze’s estimation of the face as the exemplary locus of affect by returning to Bergson’s discrimination of amoeba from other species: “in amoeba”, writes Bogue, “the body surface is both a perceptual and a motor organ, whereas in many other creatures there is a specialization of functions, some body parts serving as immobile receptors of outside movement (e.g. eyes, ears) and other as vehicles of locomotion (e.g., legs)” (76).

114 The process of faceification (visagéification) has as its genesis the “any-space- whatever” (espace quelconque), a designation that Deleuze lifts from Pascal Augé, though with his own characteristic conceptual inflection:

Any-space-whatever is not an abstract universal, in all times and all places. It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principal of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible. What in fact manifests the instability, the heterogeneity, the absence of link of such a space, is a richness in potentials or singularities which are, as it were, prior conditions of all actualization, all determination. (Movement-Image 109)

To summarise, the sign of bipolar composition of the affection-image is an “icon” (“bipolar” because Deleuze names both of the signs of composition of the affection- image “icons”), which is the “power-quality expressed in a face or an equivalent” (Movement-Image 110), and its sign of genesis is a “qualisign” or “potisign”, which is an any-space-whatever. And Deleuze describes three modes through which the any-space-whatevers are fashioned: through the contorted shadows of Expressionism, wrought through conflict; through the light and white of lyrical abstraction, which is less conflictual and more attuned to alternation (alternatives); and through the “absorbent” colour-space of colourism.

Amongst the selection of cinéma du look films that we are exploring Carax’s The Night is Young best exemplifies the affection-image. This film, together with Boy Meets Girl and Lovers on the Bridge (which we are arguing are not principally affection-image films), define those two aspects of Carax’s craft which are his most pronounced auteurist virtuosities: his construction of the affect of performative physiology (which is to say, the affect of the body in performance), as well as his construction of the affect of art production. Though many critics recognise Carax’s fascination with physiology (Holy Motors announces its physiological preoccupation from its outset with some historical clips of Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotography), we are specifying this further by recognising Carax’s particularly sophisticated preoccupation with the history of performance art and art production, because this serves doubly to detach Carax’s oeuvre from those of the other two auteurs most frequently associated with the cinéma du look – the quality

115 of Carax’s spectacle has a particularly reflexive performative-artistic-techne dimension which is rarely manifest in the films of Beineix and Besson, and also accounts for its baroque-mannerist designation as expounded by Daly and Dowd. Carax has a powerful knowledge of cinematic history that finds rich supplementation in an equally impressive knowledge of the art and history of non- cinematic theatre, performance, and technology. In addition, for example, to Carax’s citation of Marey’s chronophotography as an overture to Holy Motors, The Night is Young recreates its own imitation chronophotographic sequence wherein its two leading men wrestle behind a shopfront glass-door whose hinges Carax reinvents as the intervals of a reel. These visuals are overlaid with the audio of a heavy thrum as the muted soundscape that one might associate with the zoopraxiscope working to project its chronophotographic images. The two men’s faces and other portions of their shirtless anatomies are intermittently smeared against the glass,48 almost exaggerating the ubiety of the forth-wall, which too becomes its ubiquitous disintegration, emphasising not just the intimacy of the perception-in-things, but the inherent voyeurism-in-things (which demonstrates that the dynamics of perception are coextensive with a dynamics of desire).

Before exploring the any-space-whatever as the sign of genesis of The Night is Young, we can offer up some indication of what we recognise to be its expression of the two signs (or poles) of composition of the affection-image: these are the “icons of feature and icons of outline” (Movement-Image 97), which are the power- qualities expressed by a face or facial analogue. In Deleuze on Cinema, Bogue reminds us that although the any-space-whatever (qualisign) has absolutely no link to determinate milieux (because it deterritorialises “space itself”), “[t]he icon retains a limited connection to commonsense coordinates […]” (Bogue 81) because it deterritorialises the face or facial equivalent (an already embodied thing). The Night is Young’s very many close-up shots of partial objects work to short-circuit its current with a determinate, embodied milieux. From the outset of the film there are shots of segments of faces – segments of angst. This angst also rides as a ‘virtual conjunction’ with objects – for instance, it is the spring, or quivering, of the segment of cord of Marc’s electronic shaver; it is cold steel part-shots of Alex’s

48 The camera lens is here somehow like the glass of a photocopier, with a body part smothered over it in readiness to be duplicated. 116 ‘Smith and Wesson’ gun. Sometimes the film gives the impression that it relies on insinuation to bridge the visual caesuras that are a product of its affectual expression. However, unlike the inference-privileging that is a feature of the relation-, or mental-image of films like Hitchcock’s, Carax really aborts logic in favour of expression (insinuation is merely the by-product, or after-effect of this). This is where the strength of his art lies – in the mesmerising moment when Alex enacts his ventriloquism for his girlfriend, Lise (Julie Delpy); there is a close-up of his squinting eyes, he sings her a lullaby as the camera zooms minutely out, exhibiting his full face and – lo and behold – his immobile lips. There is no attempt to reintegrate this moment into, say, a supernatural logic. This is the ‘spiritual automaton’, his gravelly serenade concluding: “For life is a dream”. Carax consciously divests the close-up of its actualisation, paring it back to pure expressed, stripping it of its rational explanation as ventriloquist trickery.

We contend that The Night is Young is also a collage of (at least) the three any- space-whatevers that Deleuze details. Strictly speaking, Deleuze describes Expressionism and lyrical abstraction in the cinema – like the reflecting unity and the intensive series of the facial close-up – as the two poles of a continuum. Therefore, even though we are arguing that they assume a kind of collage in The Night is Young, we suggest that the film prioritises Expressionism, which marks the type of stylistic “route” through which it travels to reach the other two expressions of any-space-whatevers. In this film there are the Gothic shadows of German Expressionism, operating through flatness (there is sometimes an almost comic- strip, or anime-like film noir aesthetic accented by those brief shots that are sped up and muted, or accompanied by a voiceover that is characteristically existentially adrift), but also sometimes through depth. Deleuze says that the shadow disconnects the any-space-whatever from an established space-time by “forefronting” depth: “The shadow extends to infinity” (Movement-Image 112), and in so doing “it determines the virtual conjunctions which do not coincide with the state of things or the position of characters which produce it” (Movement-Image 112). Although there are unmistakable expressionist aspects and moments in this film’s any-space- whatever, where shadows work to buckle commonsense coordinates (the alleyway scenes, for instance), another important feature of its any-space-whatever (which

117 sets it apart from being purely German Expressionist), or another way that it “extends to infinity”, and not part of Deleuze’s conceptual repertoire, is by way of the tear, the crack, and the blemish (in part, a nod to process art).

Much of the background of this film has been worked over with scissors and brush, so to speak; cut-up and pasted together again (a theatrical decoupage, with cracked, plastered or splotched walls), but in a way that celebrates and prioritises the texture of the incision or mark, and in a way that does not hide its editation with the continuity of “over-real or over-logical connections” (Movement-Image 107). These cuts, rips, or blemishes are ingresses to virtual potentialities and they also serve to clarify collage (both filmic, and non-filmic haptic montage) as another means by which the any-space-whatever is constructed – and which, we argue, comes in this film, as a sort of pastiche of the three any-space-whatevers that Deleuze tracks. Sometimes its collage expression comes through a flat, paperish- ness. For instance, when Alex is returning to his apartment after an evening of work (flipping cards in dark alleyways), he catches a glimpse of his girlfriend whom he wants to avoid. The shot that captures his identification of Lise is also (like the playing-cards he deals) a kind of flip-shot; against a pitch black background, a flattened, almost magazine cut-out of Alex’s torso seems meteorically to turn 90 degrees and flip on its hinges, and altogether assumes the faint quality of a pop-up book, again evoking a cartoonish aspect (we can imagine an equally flat, paperish thought bubble: “surprise!”49). There are also simpler indications of the film’s appreciation of flatness and paper-ishness as elements of process art (granted, flatness and paper-ishness are only certain elements of the film’s general preoccupation with all aspects of art production and performance): in the hotel room where Anna spends one of her nights, the frame on the wall houses an old, crinkled, black and white newspaper – but there is also a shard in the frame, a type of incision, which is a daring dash of red.

49 The film also makes reference, through dialogue, to the thought-bubble (and so to its cartoonish potential). When Alex is trying to persuade Anna to sleep downstairs, he describes having overheard Anna and Marc making love the night before in the following terms: “I was like comic-strip figure with his balloon over his head. A sad balloon”. 118 Yet another any-space-whatever that the film exhibits, equally as present as its layered, cinematic papier-mâché expressionism, is its colour-space.50 Against the black and white backdrop, cracked, torn, and fragmented, and with sketchy shadows (what Daly and Dowd call “a neutral impasto surface” [33]), there is always a vibrant red, blue, or yellow object or aspect, sometimes an ensemble of the three, often bringing lightness or comedy to the general darkness of the scene. When Marc (Michel Piccoli), Anna (Juliette Binoche), and Alex sit at the dining room table engulfed in cigarette smoke (a kind of shadowing used throughout the film), the accoutrement of colourful objects on the table in front of them contrasts with their uninspired state as a monochrome threesome. Or, there is the series of shots where Alex tries to cheer up Anna when she is crying. We recall that Alex is, as his father was, skilled with his hands, a competent lock-picker.51 In fact, Marc has enlisted Alex to help them with their heist now that Alex’s father has died. Additionally though, Alex is a performer: he is a card-trickster as well as a ventriloquist. Both Alex and Anna are here made-up faintly with white faces – the canvas for mime artistry. Anna is the sad clown. “Since I was a kid, when I start crying I cannot stop. A kind of hemophilia of tears…”, says Anna, as Alex’s hands, like an ungloved mime’s, gently and precisely collect the tears on her face. And as Alex performs his magic tricks to cheer her up, all of the objects he plays with (apple, rubber glove, squeaky toy etc.), as well as the tissues that Anna holds against her face, are true to the bold primary colour scheme of its other scenes. The rainbow of tissues is a nod to the ‘old hat’ train-of-silken-handkerchief trick in clowning. Carax cinematically reinvents what is traditionally live-show performance art, always in the context of this colour space-expressionism hybrid. For instance, there is a brief shot that precedes Alex’s trick set – it is a black shot of Alex’s silhouette, and seems to be Carax’s filmic equivalent to the closed curtain at the beginning of a theatre production, with back-lighting that presents an anticipatory silhouette of the actor

50 We could even hazard the tentative proposition of an other type of any-space-whatever, which is not part of Deleuze’s formulation: a geometric-space, as in the shot from the interior of the parachute, of Alex (Denis Lavant) and Anna (Juliette Binoche) once they have jumped out the airplane, which suspends action for the pure potential (“potentialises space”) of geometric space. 51 It seems that forms of manual skill and skullduggery provide good themes for the affection- image; Deleuze analyses Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), describing the way “[r]uin and salvation are played on an amorphous table whose successive parts await the connection which they lack from our gestures, or rather from the mind” (109). 119 behind the curtain, already in character (a kind of gestational expressionist any- space-whatever).

In its complex experimentation with multiple any-space-whatevers, the film’s visuality is much less about signification than it is about tactility. Visuality becomes tactility, for instance, not in the saturating effect traditionally associated with technicolour, but in the absorbency of a film’s colour. Whereas, Deleuze says, Antonioni exceeds the absorbent function of colour through the deployment of cold colours that effectively “eclipse” what they have absorbed, the finesse of a director like Vincente Minnelli rests, rather, in his mobilisation of warmer colours that sop us up into the sumptuous affective space of the musical dreamscape. Once again we see that Carax plays with both absorbency functions to certain degrees; the daylight outdoor scenes sometimes resemble slightly the empty hyper-industrialised, grey- wash of Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964). In Antonioni’s film everything is stifled by smog, the weight of psychosis fighting against a normalcy rendered all the more perversely vibrant in its chromatic artifice, encapsulated poetically, for instance, when its traumatised protagonist, Giuliana (Monica Vitti), outfitted in faintly less- deadened hues and colours (red-brown hair, purple dress) rests next to a fruit vendor whose produce consists of ossified, inorganic, grey ceramic-cemented objects. Daytime outdoor shots in The Night is Young, though generally overcast, grey, and windy, are not the angst-ridden, barren loci of mega-industry; Carax sometimes makes use of generous greenery and natural lighting (most especially when Lise and Alex make love in the woods), but in a way that still maintains the absorbency of colours to preserve the tactility of his dreamscape.52

The film offers up haptic-affective encounters also through its use of props, which are less instruments of narrative propulsion than they are singular artworks in

52 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes that: “Dreams are our eggs, our larvae and our properly psychic individuals” (250) – it is partly by way of dreams that Carax is able to explore larval subjectivity, or molecularity, in his films. Indeed, Carax almost always discloses the nature of each of his films as semi-dream topographies – Boy Meets Girl begins with an image of part of a door and the wall next to it covered in luminescent star wallpaper (like the kind a child might have in her bedroom). We hear footsteps and then some of the peripheral light from the adjacent room, behind the door, is extinguished before a child’s voiceover cuts in and their mischievous philosophical extemporisation can begin. Or, in Holy Motors, Carax wakes into the dream of a hotel room, moving inquisitively around its perimeters in his pajamas before discovering an opening in the wall – cinematic aperture as invitation or ingress towards the transcendental unconscious.

120 themselves, or tools towards artistry: the mirrors; the picture frames; the magnificent horse head sculpture which is a striking remnant of their safe-house’s antecedence in horsemeat production (the beauty of the horsehead as affective implement, however, completely overpowers its rational possibility, which is, admittedly, lyrically dubious in itself). Furthermore, all of the billboards in the subway station – for instance, at the start of the film when Alex’s father jumps in front of the train – are lyrical abstractionist; this space begins in white (one shirtless commuter even perusing one of the blank posters on the adjacent platform as a painterly piece in this underground gallery). The billboards in the street outside the old horsemeat shop are less lyrical abstractionist than abstract expressionist. They are, in fact, the ripped and fragmented remains of many of the older lyrical abstractionist billboard posters but they manifest as reactivated abstract expressionist framings. This abstract content, then, is an expressive deframing rather than an explicit framing. Musing over some of Carax’s most inventive images, Daly and Dowd defend the problematic specificity, which in turn manifests as a cinematic deframing, that is Carax’s spur:

These scenes do not exist for no other reason than that they are visually and/or aurally arresting or striking [sic]. They express, rather, a state of being in the world and a set of aesthetic principals seeking to capture that state at whatever cost to conventions of verisimilitude or even to the limits of the rationally acceptable. It is an unwillingness to negotiate with the material that can lead critics to dismiss or more often ignore such scenes, dwelling instead on the best problematic generalisations about pop-promo aesthetics, about willful obscurity or about the artificiality of the lighting or the resemblance of the image’s texture to that used in advertising. (15-6)

Compared, for instance, to the gaudier Stomboli “Try Another World” billboard poster that Beineix includes as an image of romantic-commercial desire in Moon in the Gutter, we can see that Carax is doing something different to riffing off an advertising aesthetic (although in some sense, so is Beineix, in a less philosophical way). Carax’s billboards do not wittily and self-referentially reflect the ubiquity of simulacra, they are de-referentialised, impersonalised potentialities that express the “dividual” – “that which neither increases nor deceases without changing qualitatively” (Movement-Image 105). Think of the opening subway shot in The Night is Young – the camera tracks with the grain of the decelerating train (painted 121 on its mid-section, at the base of the shot, with a rim of film perforations, i.e. train as film reel again), though in an opposite direction, revealing scraps of each consecutive differential billboard poster behind.

*****

If understood within the cinéma du look category-vortex and alongside its ‘postmodern’ designation, both The Night is Young and Boy Meets Girl are situated at the weaker end of the postmodern spectrum. Raphaël Bassan was the first, in his 1989 essay, ‘Three French Neo-Baroque Directors: Beineix, Besson, Carax, from Diva to Le Grand Bleu’, to turn the tide of criticism directed at each of the three independent directors (Carax, Beineix, and Besson), casting them in a positive light, in large part, through banding them together.53 Bassan’s essay, first published in Revue du cinema, impelled the idea of the neo-baroque as a partially-developed point of affiliation for the trio, recommending them as auteurs on the historical periphery of postmodernism. Truth be told, le cinéma du look comprises a sizeable and eclectic body of films that, on many fronts, have very nebulous things in common apart from periodisation. Though there was indeed great tactical purchase in Bassan’s affirmative grouping, we have a better gauge now, retrospectively taking into account the fuller range of each director’s oeuvre,54 that while le cinéma du look categorisation might work as a persuasive characterisation of both Beineix’s and Besson’s films, it in some ways falls short of being anything but a conversational marker with regards Carax’s cinematic practice.55

That said, on the surface of things all three directors do often appear to prize arrested moments of spectacle at the expense of narrative flow, as indeed, Bassan

53 In his eight-film corpus Bassan includes, directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix: Diva (1981), La Lune dans le caniveau (Moon in the Gutter, 1983), and 37°2, le matin (Betty Blue, 1986); by Luc Besson: Le Dernier Combat (The Last Battle, 1983), Subway (1985), and Le Grand bleu (, 1988); and by Léos Carax: Boy Meets Girl (1984), and Mauvais sang (1986). 54 To Bassan’s original list might now add Besson’s La Femme Nikita (1990), Le Cinquième élément (The Fifth Element, 1997), The Messenger: the Story of Joan of Arc (1999), and his Angel-A (2005), as well as Carax’s Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (The Lovers on the Bridge, 1991), and Holy Motors (2012). 55 Bassan actually registers this himself: “Carax is undoubtedly the most ‘theoretical’. He borrows from his predecessors (Godard, Garrel, Cocteau, Dreyer) and recycles the material within a very personal vision. His films are the closest to the ‘irregular pearls’ of the baroque” (Bassan 20). 122 observed in his essay. However, the quality of Carax’s moments differ from Beineix’s and Besson’s, and we argue that this is connected to the very different intentions and situations that engender their differing oeuvres: put creatively, we could say that where Beineix and Besson are “physicians of civilisation” (Movement-Image 125) (a Nietzschean term that Deleuze references), Carax is rather, a conjurer of the new. To explain the logic of this fork we will return to Bassan’s essay, but essentially our move here is to cast Carax as an affection-image director who leans more towards a cinema of intensity, whereas Beineix and Besson lean more towards a cinema of actuality because they are action-image/impulse- image directors whose films are cultural-historical diagnoses of the beginning of cinematic postmodernity.56

In defending the “irregular [Baroquian] pearls” of his affirmatively minted cinéma du look corpus, Bassan reminded us that “[t]he heterogeneity of registers in a film is not a sign of weakness” (12). Of course, neither is it a sure indication of a film’s success – it becomes necessary to define the quality of this heterogeneity. Bassan suggested that the cinéma du look is characterised by a “videoclip” or “advertising” aesthetic that exceeds the logic of its narrative. But he meant too to complicate this designation, which he saw as a facile label that many critics deployed to skirt real engagement with the ostensibly commercial stylisation in these films. He said that in Beineix’s films there are “[…] non-functional motifs, arabesques, digressions in excess of the film’s initial meaning”, and he continues, “[t]he meaning is displaced from narrative to a visual language which carries other messages” (Bassan 11). Somewhat problematically, Bassan used Beineix’s Diva as his “yardstick” onto the other cinéma du look films, and so, in turn, his less-

56 Bassan recognised a shared “unease” that accompanied both favourable and unfavourable reviews of these films. For the Beineix and Besson arms of the cinéma du look, this might moderately be explained through their strange allegiance to odd, yet largely uninventive, narratives – that is, though stylistically they flirt with affect and with the evocation of any-space-whatevers (especially through spectacle), and are in fact quite adventurous affectually, they are nevertheless not so bold as to relinquish their obedience to quite inane plots. So the hard-to-pin-down sense of amateurish-ness of these films comes less from (as Bassan suggests, and as Hayward and Powrie echo) their construction of spectacular moments ripped from narrative reference (this is very similar, after all, to the affection-image in all its potentialising glory), than what would be a kind of reverse diagnosis, which is how they are too mired in an action-image, which seems to contradict the powerful pull of the affection-image in this corpus. It is as if every time we are about to derail from context and to lose ourselves in pure affect, we are naggingly jerked back to the logic of some bizarre milieu: the subway in Subway; the nautically themed hanger in Diva; the seaside carnival holiday venue in Betty Blue. 123 pronounced suggestion for the corpus as a cinematic barometer recording the advent or stylistic solder of postmodernism becomes stronger than it ought. This, because Diva is the most unambiguously postmodern of all the corpus – Fredric Jameson even baptising it so in a 1982 essay ‘Diva and French Socialism’.

In fact, Bassan seems almost to be perfectly in synch with Diva (and only Diva – though maybe Subway too) when he remarks that:

Postmodernism rejects artistic progress; it places so-called minor modes of expression (cartoons, graffiti, advertisements) on the same footing as major modes (painting, classical music, art films). This does not mean the end of civilization as we know it, as so many purists and nostalgics maintain, but informs real discussion about art. (12)

The tension, in Diva, is between high art purity encapsulated (in the mind of the opera singer Cynthia Hawkins [Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez]) in the unrecordableness of her performances, set-up against the threat of piracy and her music’s mass commercial reproduction. Eventually, Cynthia surrenders to the pragmatism of turning her music into a record. However, it is not so much that the film itself sympathises with ‘the machine’ of commerce and the high-low disintegration (ruling Jules’ [Frédéric Andréi] operatic idolatry an infantilism), but that its function is diagnostic. Beineix does not “[…] reject artistic progress” (for instance, like Godorosh [Richard Bohringer], he seems to recognise “satori”, a kind of newness, even in the “repeated gesture” of buttering a baguette) but he becomes the physician of a postmodern civilisation, recording how high and low modes dialogue with, and infiltrate, one another.

Carax, on the other hand, is not a cultural diagnostician, even though he works out of a historical situation which in some respects must be understood as postmodern – Deleuze evokes the gist of this when he writes of the affection-image: “The affect is independent of all determinate space-time; but it is none the less created in a history which produces it as the expressed and the expression of a space or a time, of an epoch or a milieu (this is why the affect is the ‘new’ and new affects are ceaselessly created, notably by the work of art)” (Movement-Image 99). If Carax’s concepts are properly philosophical, then we could say that Beineix’s work assumes a more marketable approach. This is interesting in light of the visual

124 similarity that Diva and The Night is Young share, both working off roughly comparable 1980s Parisian cityscape imagery and artistry, and enjoying kindred colour palettes (though Diva is far more promiscuous in the scope of its vibrant colour usage). But Beineix diagnoses and determines his concepts so that they might form a “set of product displays” (What is Philosophy 10) – as the “fetishized […] non-functional emblems” (14) that Bassan observes – that can be played in a commercial arena as marketable ideas. This is the difference – that Deleuze and Guattari describe in What is Philosophy? – between the creation of concepts in philosophy, and the creation of concepts in advertising, within the market (or capitalism and its cultural-conceptual logic: postmodernism).57 Or, in other words, the difference between Carax’s inclination towards producing affection-images as very dilute or weak manifestations of postmodernism, and Beineix’s and Besson’s inclinations towards stronger manifestations of postmodernism via action-image films that have very potent impulse-image aspects.

The Impulse-Image

The impulse-image is another image that Deleuze, in variance to Peirce, sees wedged between the affection-image and the action-image, and this image substantially inflects the films of Besson and Beineix. In his description of the impulse-image, Deleuze flags Eric von Stroheim, Luis Buñuel, and Joseph Losey as three of its most paradigmatic composers. The naturalist degradation which is at the heart of the impulse-image reveals itself in the form of different “configurations” for each director: in Stroheim’s films degradation comes in the form of entropy; in Buñuel, degradation is a “precipitating repetition, eternal return” (127) – that is, there is a cycle instead of an entropic slope; and in Losey, degradation is “the

57 At length, Deleuze and Guattari write: “Marketing has preserved the idea of a certain relationship between the concept and the event. But here the concept has become the set of product displays (historical, scientific, artistic, sexual, pragmatic), and the event has become the exhibition that sets up various displays and the “exchange of ideas” it is supposed to promote. The only events are exhibitions, and the only concepts are products that can be sold. Philosophy has not remained unaffected by the general movement that replaced Critique with sales promotions. The simulacrum, the simulation of a packet of noodles, has become the true concept; and the one who packages the product, commodity, or work of art has become the philosopher, conceptual persona, or artist. How could philosophy, an old person, compete against young executives in a race for the universals of communication for determining the market-able form of the concept, Merz?” (What is Philosophy? 10-1). 125 reversal against self” (137). For our purposes, this section flirts with the possibility that Beineix’s Betty Blue and Besson’s The Big Blue are gaudier types of Losey’s “reversal against self”; so too this section floats the idea that Beineix’s Moon in the Gutter is ordered by a Buñuellian “precipitating repetition, eternal return” – notably, in the continual relegation of its protagonist to his blue-collar domicile. Though it is probably a little too much of a stretch to consider these films impulse- images in the vein of Deleuze’s study, this section will test their consistency as impulse-image, if only to get a clearer sense of what it takes to meet the peculiar demands of an impulse-image classification. In the end, we argue that these films are action-image films with very potent impulse-image components. This section does however argue that one of Besson’s films – The Messenger – is an impulse- image more than an action-image.

So, stuck “between firstness and secondness […]”, writes Deleuze, “there is something like the ‘degenerate’ affect, or the ‘embryonic’ action” (123). This is “Empedocles’ world” of elemental sketches where characters are animalistic, driven by impulse. Already then, many cinéma du look films would appear to hold some kind of affinity with the impulse-image – even films like La Femme Nikita (1990), or (Léon) The Professional (1994). Importantly however, this affinity is best thought of in representational, rather than expressional, terms. The finale of Beineix’s Roselyn and the Lion (1989) is a case in point, serving in many ways as a representational grain of the impulse-image – of its double archaic-futurist articulation (the circus on this account is a milieu particularly vulnerable to the mesmerism of an originary world). All is encaged in the circus ring – cages within cages – as the erotic, pseudo-lioness, Roselyn, descends from a cage in the ceiling. Whip and prod fall from the sky into her hands, marking the ring an arena of dominance and submission. A conquering wall of mock-gargoyles vent dry ice, smoke billows with light, cracks of synthetic lightning pierce the stadium. The trainer is the Grim Reaper entombed in skeleton robes, arbitrator between the originary world and its diamanté encrusted circus milieu. The rawness, the fire, the apocalyptic animality of the originary world is harnessed, or tamed, by the shimmer of spectacle; all that is baroque here is performatively so, with a strong air of

126 kitschness (i.e., rock n’ roll-baroque) which, while not necessarily inimical to the impulse, nevertheless does not carry over into the rest of the film.

Moreover, the film lacks the subliminal self-annihilating vice that is the heart of the impulse-image. It is not enough that the film is about big cats, that it presents footage of ferocious animals; in the impulse-image, according to Deleuze, the milieu serve a necromantic function – the originary world infiltrates the milieu, so that the milieu is overruled by the “law […] of the steepest slope”; the originary world consumes and depletes the milieu, contaminating it with a “death-impulse”, so that the originary world as virtual non-background is “both radical beginning and absolute end”. Furthermore, the originary world and the milieu are inseparable and non-discrete: “the originary world has no existence independent of the geographical and historical milieu which serves as its medium” (124). The originary world foments the rage, mania, and violence that the given milieu already has within itself.

It is in this vein that we might be inclined to consider Betty Blue or The Big Blue as impulse-images, with the protagonists of both films progressively and compulsively turning against themselves, undoing themselves in a Losey-esque fashion. Betty (Béatrice Dalle) is plagued by a sporadic and debilitating anger that eventually turns into psychosis, impelling her lover (Jean-Hugues Anglade) to suffocate her with a pillow rather than to allow her to be paralysed by an institutionalised vegetative existence. Jacques Mayol (Jean-Marc Barr) in The Big Blue is plagued by the spiritual gravity of an originary world via oceanic riptides – he is a remarkable deep-sea diver and his family, as he considers it, is made up of whales and . In a post-drunken depression, Mayol breaks down in front of his human love interest, Joanna Baker (Rosanna Arquette), showing her a photo in his wallet, and reflecting, “What kind of man has such a family?” – the photo portrait, as well as the dolphin-framed underwater snow globe he gives her when they first meet at the diving station in Peru, are ‘relics’, which is one of the signs of composition for the impulse-image.58

58 Deleuze writes: “[…] the two poles of the fetish, fetishes of Good and fetishes of Evil, holy fetishes [relics] and fetishes of crime and sexuality [‘vults’ or voodoo objects] also meet and interchange […]. [These] are the two aspects of the same symptom” (Cinema 1 130). 127 Nevertheless, relic or no, these films are more properly speaking, action- images. Bassan comes, in a way, to the same conclusion when addressing an entirely different criticism of The Big Blue: “People wrote that Le Grand bleu was nothing more than one long pop video. It is difficult to see how. This film is a realist drama (the beginning in black and white recalls the pared-down feel of Le Dernier combat) where the mythical dimension only appears in Jacques Mayol’s excessive passion for the ocean depths” (16). Indeed, in this film the action-image smothers the naturalist “indecency” of the impulse-image, overpowering it with the force of its realism. Deleuze remarks that in certain American films a sense of the impulse-image sometimes leaks into the action-image by way of particular female characters who function as an embodiment of an originary world. 59 Betty is irrefutably this embodiment in Betty Blue. Mayol however, as the male equivalent in The Big Blue, serves to show that masculinisation changes the equation significantly. That is to say, his impulse-drive is less about depravity (for instance, he is so piously or distractedly less interested in sex than Betty) than a kind of salt water transcendence, as if the charactorial figure of an originary world, when masculinised, is somehow sexistly cleansed of its obscenity – libidinal attrition here becomes synonymous with, or is overpowered by, a spiritual awakening. More to the point, both Betty and Mayol are only impulse inserts, component parts of a more commanding action-image.60

Another cinéma du look film that has strong impulse-image components that are nevertheless overpowered by the force of action-image is Moon in the Gutter. From the outset of Beineix’s 1983 film noir we are privy to the insinuation of the rape and suicide of a young woman, who lies dead in provocatively-ripped white garments, as a semi-luminescent moon in the gutter; the partial object: her virginal

59 “The action-image represses the impulse-image, which is too indecent because of its brutality, its very restraint, and its lack of realism. If there are naturalist pressures in the American cinema, they are perhaps to be found in certain female roles and through the intermediary of certain actresses. Indeed, the idea of an originary woman is easier to assimilate than all the other elements of naturalism, and in particular for the Americans” (Cinema 1 134) 60 We can compare Mayol to his childhood friend/rival, Enzo (Jean Reno); Enzo is like Mayol in many ways, he shares Jacques’ outlandish elemental desire for communion with the deep, (and certainly he is the first to perish in the arms of the ocean – the first, after Jacques’ father, to fulfill the death-drive), but when he is alive he is more in tune with the actual, derived milieu than is Jacques – Enzo’s behavior (as competitive extrovert) is not of the same autistic-mystic caliber as Jacques’, who is really the lone figure of impulsion motoring this film. 128 white shoe.61 The predominant impulse-symptoms are a rage and an eroticism that permeate the film whose violence is masked by the initial placated levelheadedness and sensitivity of the victim’s brother, Gérard Delmas (Gérard Depardieu), who is the soother to the hostile or self-destructive characters that surround him: his strange brother, his alcoholic father, his militant step-mother, his jealous girlfriend. From the outset, this subdued rage melts across the frame in the form of bloodied clouds smoke-screening the moon. But Delmas is in fact the film’s most concentrated kernel of rage and arousal, first fully expressed when he slaps Loretta on the pier after she refuses to give up the photos she has been taking of him – though there are glimmers of his staunched rage in earlier scenes too, in, for instance, the glacial and formidable way that he wins the ice-eating wager, showing the wealthy Newton Channing that he is as capable of penetrating the bourgeois realm as Channing is at slumming it with the poor in hot, seedy bars. There is a sense in which both men sometimes properly, and sometimes illusorily, belong to the realm that is not their upbringing – the realm that is (at least desirously) more compatible to their respective natures, though they perpetually find themselves returning to the rank of their birth, by way of what might seem, at least superficially, to be a kind of ‘stylistic chiasmus’.

This seeming Buñuellian “precipitating repetition, eternal return” also partitions the women in the film: the chill, the coolness of the rich – Loretta (who is Newton’s sister) always with some light breeze whipping at her hair and clothes – is played against the passion and heat of the poor – Bella’s sultry jealousy. So then, Loretta driving Delmas to the docks comes as yet another ostensible eternal return – Delmas explains that he is a stevedore, and that he had been dreaming of a place less dirty – of white, of fountains, and of trees (of her); he mutters, “you woke me up to show me where I work”. This is not the primeval struggle between light and dark, but the grapple – whose shadow sometimes reveals its simultaneous nature as a love-making – between hot and cold; blue and red are the coolness and the heat, sometimes together (mixed), sometimes swapping (in their obedience to high and low respectively), and sometimes holding their ground, their autonomy. When

61 Another fetish, or partial object, is the neon blue “Try Another World” sign that serves as the view from Gerard’s dilapidated family house – a cooling advertisement for thirst-quenching Stromboli that also productively confuses the originary world with the moneyed class.

129 Loretta and Gérard go to the cathedral to get married, they are showered in red, blue, and purple hues – it is a teasing union, a fluttering red and blue tangle, without absolute fusion.

In their monograph on Carax, Daly and Dowd sometimes offer up passing remarks on Beineix. They register, for instance, the way Beineix gives class a kind of thermo-colourist texturality, contrasting him to Carax:

[T]hough Beineix may be said to be superficial, and La Lune dans le caniveau taken as the ultimate example of cinéma du look, in some ways Beineix scientises the movement just as it can be said that Carax in Boy Meets Girl [sic] philosophises it. He turns wealth and poverty not into a political issue but an issue of texture; as a mode of behavior based on tangible and intangible matter. (88)

To this they add, seemingly wishfully: “Might the point be stretched to say that Beineix’s mannerism is not metaphysics but physics itself?” (88). From this peculiar esotericism we might be able to recover some clarity through recourse to Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?, as well as to specify that that Moon in the Gutter is not an impulse-image proper, but an action-image with strong impulse- image components. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between philosophy and science by arguing that philosophy is the creation of concepts on a plane of immanence, whereas science is the operation of functions on a plane of reference. Where Carax’s philosophising is an act of problematic concept creation (metaphysics), Beineix’s scientising then, discovers textural solutions by actualising its classist ‘laws of nature’ (physics). Rather than being in touch with virtuality through the Nietzschean ‘eternal return’ that Deleuze sees in Buñuel’s films, Moon in the Gutter is the inverse of this. Beineix’s film is not then, the eternal affirmation of pure difference (a forgetting), but a ‘bare repetition’ as the confirmation of sameness and habit: Delmas returns, without changing, to red, to Bella, to his lowly identity in the gutter.

Thus far, we have contemplated some of the ways that various films associated with le cinéma du look cannot legitimately be named impulse-images. Rather, these films are action-images with robust impulse-image elements. We do however conclude this section by arguing that one of Besson’s later films – a particular

130 cinéma du look descendant – is an exemplification of an unambiguous impulse- image: The Messenger. Our purpose, in highlighting the impulse-image aspects in these films, is to underscore a midpoint, or progression, from the affection-image films of Carax to the conspicuous action-image films that are the of the chapter that follows. We are suggesting that there is a correspondence between the strength of the postmodernism exhibited in these films and their expression as affection-image, impulse-image, or action-image. That is, Carax’s films, by dint of tapping into intensity, can only ever exhibit a weak or vague postmodernism, the films of Besson and Beineix are stronger displays of cincematic postmodernism, as action-image films with potent impulse-image elements, and the Hollywood blockbusters that we explore in the following chapter are very strong postmodern manifestations because they represent actuality and lean on powerful tropes of clarity and identity. Through illustrating this spectrum of cinematic postmodernism we are also reinforcing the thesis’ central claim that new materialism engages postmodernism via a ‘dual action’, though we are also conceding that this dual action is really only a useful putative description of the more dynamic intra-action that occurs between intensity and actuality and the ways through which postmodernism is expressed and engaged.

Besson’s 1999 film, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, with its psychotic martyrdom, is an articulation of a Losey-like “reversal against self” (Cinema 1 137). Jeanne is, correlative to the way the film is edited, frenetic – in the film’s opening, as a child, she scuttles along with the ecstasy of what appears to be the positive extremity of bipolarity across field after field of sheep, poppies, lavender… a giddy rainbow of idyllic manifestations. It is this mania (the film seems slightly, almost imperceptibly, sped up here too) that creates its strange undercurrent of slapstick. The intensity of this paradisal excess also prognosticates the severity of her eventual fall (both here as a child tripping over, and then in her later adolescence when she is burned at the stake), seesawing as violently down (“the steepest slope”) as she ever was high. Moreover, with its peculiar blend of conviction and farce, the film’s naturalism is a kind of melodramatic naturalism. Deleuze says the naturalism of the impulse-image “[…] is not opposed to realism, but on the contrary accentuates its features by extending them in an idiosyncratic

131 surrealism” (124).62 And while it could be argued that The Messenger’s satirical naturalism is an expression of Jeanne’s (Milla Jovovich) vacillating self-assurance – the film does, after all, literalise her Conscience (Dustin Hoffman), and in so doing appears to actualise (and so destroy) the originary world – we nevertheless contend that the originary world in fact retains its trace, or virtuality, precisely in the ambiguity of the film’s caricature.

In ‘Jeanne d’Arc: High Epic Style and Politicising Camp’, Susan Hayward also tries to account for the “ungraspable” nature of Besson’s depiction of Jeanne, arguing that his film is an unusual epic because it endeavours to explore Jeanne’s psychology, and in so doing discovers her humanity and uncertainty, which are not normally the concerns of the historical realist epic. Hayward says that Besson’s decision to embroider Jeanne’s story (appending the historically inaccurate, yet character-incentivising incidence of her sister’s rape and murder by the English) helps to cement Jeanne’s psychology and desires as the focus of his depiction: “this falsifying of ‘history’ […] gives Besson the way in to shake down the myth of Jeanne d’Arc and bring the icon down to earth […]” (166). If this fictionalisation does successfully demythologise Jeanne in one sense, bringing to her a motivational ‘relate-ability’, it also, in another crucial way, is compromised by the film’s tendency towards mockery, which exceeds the limits of Jeanne’s psychosis. One of the significant challenges this film throws us is the puzzle of how to read the currents of self-ridicule that percolate the film. Hayward, for instance, provides a fascinating reading of camp and androgyny in the film – in particular of Jeanne’s androgyny alongside the campness expressed by both herself and many of the other male characters in the film. According to Hayward (who draws on the insight of Mark Booth), while the feminine campness of the men is a “self-mocking display […] (to the monarch) of their political impotence” (167), Jeanne’s camp androgyny (especially on the battlefield) is the reverse of this – a demonstration of political power, and so partly answers for her death at the stake. Hayward’s focus on the

62 There are flickers of surrealism in both Betty Blue and The Big Blue (the shot of Betty’s face when sitting at the kitchen table after a particularly violent psychotic episode, her delinquency written starkly yet sheepishly in her clowned-up makeup; or the rather stunning premonition to Mayol’s death, where the ocean water drops downwards to engulf him in his bed), but this surrealism is contained by the logic of each protagonist’s unique psychosis – the scene with Mayol, for instance, is a dream sequence. 132 spectacle of re-gendering in the film to some degree eclipses what we would suggest is the film’s more general allegiance to caricature – that the film’s mockery is concerned with more than gender alone is evidenced in, for instance, Besson’s language accent choices for his characters.

Besson’s decision (sticking, again in this respect, to the stylistic vein of his other movies) to culturally expatriate France’s most popular historical narrative of patriotism by setting the dialogue in English is one of its features that inevitably antagonises many critics. Hayward explains that Besson intended the film much less as a kind of Americanisation, than as the “exportation” and celebration of Frenchness. Referring to some of the figures of the film’s success and popularity in the USA, Japan, and France,63 Hayward reckons that “Besson’s claim that he is a cultural ambassador for his nation is not unreasonable” (162). Yet, if, in production and distribution terms, one of the effects of the establishment of the film’s portrayal in English is to promote and applaud French culture on a global scale, another of its artistic effects – somewhat regressively – is to caricaturise France as patria (in both senses of the word, so that there is at least a glimmer of redemption in France’s role as a heaven from which Joan-of-Arc’s commercial exile to Hollywood is only a temporary finitude – so then the real soul of the story always belongs to heaven, to France). Though much of the leading cast, including Joan, King Charles VII (John Malkovich), Yolande of Aragon (Faye Dunaway), Jean d’Aulon (Desmond Harrington), Joan’s Conscience (Hoffman) have American accents, most of the peripheral French-interested characters have heavy French accents. Unlike their English counterparts then, who have the privilege of dialoging in their mother- tongue, this stylistic accenting would seem to present the French in especially caricatural terms. Admittedly though, Besson in fact manages to undergird even the English/Scottish/American-French etc. with this caricatural energy. One of the homogenising features of Besson’s film is the creative variability of the accents (some of the French soldiers even have strong English accents) – not to mention the late twentieth century venacularised English with which the film is scripted.

63 Hayward’s numbers are: “2,000 copies released in the USA, 400 in Japan and 595 in France (of which some 500 are French-language versions) […]” (162). 133 So, to return to Hayward’s essay – though willing to accept the camp play- acting that is the film’s expression of de- and re-politicised gendering,64 she is less persuaded by other of the film’s theatrical eccentricities. In particular, Hayward is critical of the scene where Jeanne lays siege to : “as Jeanne and her faithful follower Gilles de Rais discuss, in the foreground, the failing fortunes of her campaign (and he urges her to stop), background action is unconvincingly staged – indeed it has vague resonances with a Monty Python farce (as in Life of Brian, Terry Jones, UK, 1979)” (163). It is curious that Haywood has flagged this moment in particular as one that breeches the bounds of the film’s credibility. Certainly, there is a strong air of a Monty Python in this scene – its comic defeatism and comic exhaustion are extremely Pythonesque. But really, farcicality stalks this entire film, and this scene’s singularly acute theatrical flimsiness (with its defeated, half-invested players, and Jeanne with her relentless, pompous desperation) is less an indication of half-baked directorial instruction on Besson’s part, than an attempt to aesthetically mirror the preposterousness of the narrative stakes, or the utter improbability and hilarity that this offensive on Paris – with completely fatigued soldiers, so few in number – will prove triumphant (not to mention, as Hayward herself explains, that the Parisians themselves were not even on side with Jeanne, as representative of the Armagnacs and Charles VII). The film’s manifestation of exhausted soldiers, delusional liberationist, and underwhelming mis-en-scéne are here purposefully expressed. They are purposefully irritating. Interesting here, is the way Hayward’s expression of discredit comes as the blind-sidedness of a certain definitional cognisance of the cinéma du look as stylistic excess – read within the discourse of the cinéma du look, there comes this inability to read the viability of stylistic deficit as an equally resourceful artistic method.

So it is the film’s general use of caricature, not just camp, that allows for its identification as impulse-image. The film’s naturalist indecency as melodrama, as caricature, is not causally explicit, it erupts quite cunningly out of terms that would

64 Hayward informs us of the fascinating apolitical roots of campness – although contemporary manifestations of camp are often highly political acts, they are the legacy of what was essentially a kind of apolitical posturing and performance in Franco-monarchial courts around the seventeenth- century; courtier men “were kept from being a threat to the monarchy by having to be at court” where “a politics of play, display, wit and amusement […] prevailed [–] not true politics” (167). 134 be primarily sincere (á la mileu65), and in this way becomes the black cloud of an originary world:

[T]he originary world only appears when the invisible lines which divide up the real, which dislocated modes of behavior and objects, are supercharged, filled out and extended. Actions go beyond themselves towards primordial acts which are not their components, objects towards fragments which would not reconstitute them, people towards energies which do not ‘organise’ them. (Movement-Image 124-5)

Caricature has an “indiscriminate” appetite in this film; it “take[s] possession through guile, but violently, of everything that it can in a given milieu, and if it can, [it works] to pass from one milieu to another” (128-9). And though it rides and impels Jeanne’s impulse-driven journey from battlefield to battlefield, to prison cell, to trial room, Jeanne serves only as something like its host organism – and she is only one of many that it infects and exhausts.

*****

We have stated already that much of Part Two’s import is as a preliminary instructive to Part Three. Part Two lays the theoretical groundwork to be able to fully appreciate the emergence of a time-image, or, as a spatial enunciation of this, a Body without Organs. An important part of this preparation consists in familiarising the reader with the image types that correspond to the ontological experiences of Zeroness (perception), Firstness (affect), Secondness (action), and something midway between Firstness and Secondness (impulse). In addition to this, Part Two presents a series of original analyses of a handful of cinéma du look films, and offers up some distinct remarks about the corpus in relation to Deleuzian thinking. Part Two provides working distillations of Deleuze’s complex discussion in Cinema 1, it makes his cinematic philosophy more digestible to literary scholars, and it sets up a nexus of dialogue between cinematic and literary materialisms. Part Three recommends an alternative route wherein it is not only films that prove capable of responding to films’ entanglements – Part Three proposes alternatively

65 We are not here suggesting that milieus are always characterised by sincerity. 135 that written poetry is also capable of proffering a unique ‘solution’ to some of cinema’s ‘problems’.

That said, this part does more than simply function as a primer to Part Three – it is not just an exercise in the preliminary kino-aesthetics to Part Three’s focus on chrono-choreo-genesis. This part delivers an analysis of a series of cinéma du look movement-images without reversion to abstract universals to provide a transcendental reading of these films and this cluster. Instead, Part Two uses Deleuze’s taxonomy as a springboard for tapping into the conditions of plasticity of these films, and it therefore cuts through postmodernism’s social constructivist- humanist logic. The following section’s focus on the action-image illustrates the apex of this constructivist logic – its focus on modes of cinematic equilibrium and metaphysical stasis expressed by the action-image drive us climactically towards a tipping point, catalysing Part Three’s emphasis on a far-from-equilibrium aesthetics.

136 Part Two

A Deleuzian Taxonomy of Postmodern Film

Chapter II The Action-Image: Avatar and District 9

The image warmest to narrative, though always qualitatively anterior to it, is the action-image, which Deleuze often refers to as “organic representation”. In accordance with the Platonic Theory of Forms, Deleuze recognises two types of action-image: the Large Form action-image and the Small Form action-image. The Large Form consists of a Situation, which then contracts into Action, and finally manifests an Altered Situation (the formula, SAŚ). Alternately, the action-image may be Small Form, which consists of an initial equivocal Action, which then reveals a “partially disclosed” Situation, from which an Altered Action arises (the formula, ASÁ). The sign of genesis of the Large Form action-image is the “empreinte” (imprint, -space) and its two signs of composition are the “synsign”, and the “binomial”. The synsign, writes Deleuze, “is a set of power-

137 qualities as actualised in a milieu, in a state of things or in a determinate space- time”, whereas the binomial is “what is properly active in the action-image” (Movement-Image 142). Accordingly, the synsign is an englobing, it is a kind of environ of forces that bear down on the character repeatedly, tightening into various duels, or binomials.

Deleuze notes that there are five laws that govern the structure of the Large Form action-image: 1) The first law decides the global, respirational architecture of the landscape; there is a protective, respirational curvature blanketing the hero, which is punctured by “detached” (151) elements of either menace or support. 2) Secondly, there is a law that “governs the passage from S to A” (152) – early on the Situation begins to branch into, or give birth to, two milieus which are two lines of action that frequently merge or “rhyme” (152) with one another in a kind of “alternate convergent montage” (152); so the synsign produces a “double line” before constricting into a binomial. 3) The third law requires that the two rivals of the duel come face to face in a single shot, as pure Action (this is “[André] Bazin’s law or the law of ‘forbidden montage’” [153]). 4) The fourth law demands duels within duels, so that the predominant duel is like the main braid from which a number of other duels sprout. 5) Finally, the fifth law demands a “big gap”66 between the initial Situation and the Action because the hero is still somehow unequipped to confront the demands of the Action; instead the hero stumbles along for a while in a process of maturation laden with setbacks.

Besson’s first full length film, The Last Battle (1983), is in one sense a Large Form action-image. It begins with a tracking shot of a ruined office space, littered with sand, and accompanied by an audio of heavy panting. The panting and the image eventually coincide as the tracking shot lands on the body of The Man (Pierre Jolivet), who is having intercourse with a sex doll, which deflates right before he comes. This is the neo-primitive, post-apocalyptic, woman-less Situation – it presents a well-defined challenge for the hero. In fact, even in this first scene the synsign (as the ravaged, socially and culturally destitute, city-become-desert- scape) bears down on the hero in a way that turns him into a binomial. In this

66 This is part of the obduracy of male heroes – the overrepresentation of man as hero comes from a crude geometry that recognises the filling capacity of a phallus. 138 instant there is a duel between the barrenness of the landscape and The Man’s own impotency (in this unpeopled, womanless environment), which ensures that The Man (Action) and the post-apocalyptic situation are, like Deleuze says, both “antagonistic and correlative”. Furthermore, the five “laws of organic composition” are clearly in operation in this film – The Man has to progressively lose his correlation with the incivility of the Situation, he has to rehabilitate and civilise himself to be able to prove enough of an opposition to the encompasser.

Another element of the Large Form action-image, as stated above, is its sign of genesis of the two poles of composition, which is the “impression”, or “imprint”. To describe the impression, Deleuze refers to the method acting technique ascribed to the Actors Studio, where the inner emotional space of the actor is married analogously to an “emotional object” (159) on set. Realism, according to Deleuze, is completely conscious that its content is theatrics, or “sham action” (158), and so the Actors Studio offers up its method so that the actor might identify internally and emotionally with the fictional situation. The impression in The Last Battle is Woman; Woman is the “emotional object” (159), from the dummy in the first scene, to the blond in the last.67

This brief explication of The Last Battle as Large Form action-image is meant mainly as a kind of preparatory prequel to the real focus of this section, which is an explication of two contemporary postmodern films – both released in 2009 – as Large and Small Form action-images respectively: James Cameron’s Avatar, and Neill Blomkamp’s District 9. This section shifts away from the cinema du look preoccupation of the preceding section – no longer are we dealing with arthouse cinema, nor with a kind of arthouse-Hollywood hybrid (Besson), but with films that are firmly manufactured and packaged on the Hollywood production line. And it is precisely because of this that Avatar and District 9 are remarkable – almost model – expressions of the action-image (remarkably, these films metaphorise the action-

67 In The Last Battle, one might mistakenly take The Man’s voice, or speech to be the impression. On a few occasions, The Man tries desperately to speak, even when alone, but one of the catastrophic by-products of the Situation for humanity in this world is an inability to vocalise. The Doctor invites The Man to breath some gaseous substance that allows the men, briefly, the barest of dialogues. But Speech in this film is more appropriately an “index of lack”, which is one of the “signs of composition” of the Small Form.

139 image itself). In fact, we will see that Avatar and District 9 serve to elucidate particular aspects of the action-image that are not explicitly unpacked in Cinema 1. A focus on these films will thereby assist us in adding a different texture to Deleuze’s taxonomical explication of the Large and Small Forms, not least through initiating recourse to Deleuze’s older, oft-thought seminal work, Difference and Repetition.

Where the affection-image accorded with firstness, the action-image corresponds with Peircean secondness and this explains the way it is entombed in metaphoricity. Deleuze explains that the action-image is:

[…] the reign of ‘secondness’; everything here is two by itself. Already, in the milieu, we distinguish the power-qualities and the state of things which actualizes them. The situation, and the character or the action, are like two terms which are simultaneously correlative and antagonistic. (142)

While each film expresses secondness by itself, this pair of films also expresses secondness together – in fact, Avatar and District 9 can, in large part, be considered a single text. In terms of “correlation”, and as several critics have pointed out, the films share some striking similarities: both movies narrate a white man’s anatomical transformation from human form into alien form and his coterminous psychic development. Both films depict militarised corporations as imperial institutions for which the protagonists of each film initially work – the antihero, Wikus, in District 9 as a South African bureaucrat, and the hero, Jake, in Avatar as an American ex- marine become military spy / pseudo scientist – before they each flip allegiances and end up batting for the alien side. Both movies find resolution in the eventual annihilation of the maniacal military man, while more sinisterly allowing the equally psychopathic corporate mastermind who is the instigator of the colonial abuse a get-out-of-jail-free pass. However, it is not their correlative similarities, but their uncanny antagonistic inversions that more compellingly draw the films towards one another.

This antagonistic magnetism transpires largely out of each film’s generic form as either utopian (Avatar) or dystopian (District 9). In fact, a sub-argument fueling this section is the contention that utopian and dystopian structures lend themselves

140 to the Large and Small Form action-images. We are not suggesting that all utopian films are Large Form, or that all dystopian films are Small Form. In fact, The Last Battle serves to problematise this easy reduction – it shows that a dystopian film might just as easily be Large Form action-image. Nevertheless, our argument still holds that certain structural elements of each Form make the Large more congruous with utopian manifestations, and the Small more so with dystopian ones. Furthermore, we might risk another assertion which is that the ideological structures of the utopian and dystopian are mired in ‘hypnotic thought’, or in dialectical thinking (in the non-Deleuzian sense). Deleuze’s ongoing colloquy and meditation on ‘utopia’ recurs through progressive conceptualisations of it (most notably, in collaboration with Guattari, in What is Philosophy?) that are far removed from our sense of it here as a conventionalised aesthetic, generic form.

In the ‘Geophilosophy’ chapter of What is Philosophy? Guattari and Deleuze68 chop and change as they productively wade through a raft of concepts and thinkings on utopia. At their most charitable, they argue that the future-thinking of utopia, partnered with the cognisance of actual political circumstances, is propulsion for the creation of concepts in philosophy:

[I]t is with utopia that philosophy becomes political and takes the criticism of its own time to its highest point. Utopia does not split off from infinite movement: etymologically it stands for absolute deterritorialization but always at the critical point at which it is connected with the present relative milieu, and especially with the forces stifled by this milieu. Erehwon, the word used by Samuel Butler, refers not only to no- where but also to now-here. […] The word utopia therefore designates that conjunction of philosophy, or of the concept, with the present milieu – political philosophy (however, in view of the mutilated meaning public opinion has given to it, perhaps utopia is not the best word). (99-100)

This final abrupt turn to cold feet is a response to the dynamism that is a feature of utopia’s plethora of conceptual usages.

68 In objection to the complacency of the alphabetised hierarchy maintained by the staid designation “Deleuze and Guattari”, or, “Deleuzoguattarian”, we inconsistently flip the word order (jumble and revamp the ‘order-words’) to throw the balance of power some. 141 Animated rather than repelled by the germen traffic of “mutilated meaning” spawned by the promiscuity of the utopian concept, Fredric Jameson instead prefers to subject the concept to the judiciousness of his critical inventory, and in so doing gives us some notion of where Deleuze and Guattari veer, in thinking philosophy- as-utopia, from the more programmatic, model-driven utopias. At the outset of Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and other Science Fictions, Jameson says that much utopia scholarship recognises a division between its configuration as “form” and its configuration as “wish”: that is, “between the written text or genre and something like a utopian impulse detectable in daily life and its practices by a specialized hermeneutic or interpretative method” (1).69 He plots a historical trajectory from utopian ‘form’, whose inception is traceable to Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), to the utopian ‘wish’ apparent in German-Marxist Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope (1954), though he cautions against conflating form with the reflexive and wish with the non-reflexive. Utopian form Jameson defines as a “program” or “realization” absorbed by a “commitment to closure” (4); in the utopian program: “Totality is then precisely this combination of closure and system, in the name of autonomy and self-sufficiency and which is ultimately the source of […] otherness, or radical, even alien, difference […]” (5). Jameson’s word choice, ostensibly germane to our discussion of Avatar and District 970 as “alien” movies, really just attests to how intensely and generically programmatic the films themselves are. Guattariodeleuzian utopia is, however, an anti- programmatic dimension of thought that embraces the unknowability of the future and of a collective people-to-come (Jameson frames this as the unconscious, or anagogical, utopian collective) and in this intensive sympathy with becoming it is the antithesis of the action-image.

The action-image, Deleuze writes, “is Realism”; unlike other movement- images, with the action-image “[q]ualities and powers […] are actualized directly in determinate, geographical, historical and social time-spaces” (141). The utopian/dystopian program of the respective films, far from posing a drawback in this respect, is key to determining their realist milieu. In his elucidation of the

69 Jameson also swiftly appends a third configuration, “political practice”, but shortly thereafter reintegrates into the general impetus of “form”. 70 Though it seems wrong to include District 9 – which is dystopian – in this utopian inventory, the reasoning behind this move will become clearer at the close of this section. 142 action-image, Deleuze gives examples from a number of westerns, documentaries, and historical films. Even so, the realism to which the action-image belongs does not preclude science fiction, or speculative realism. This realism:

[…] does not exclude fiction or even the dream. It can include the fantastic, the extraordinary, the heroic and above all melodrama. It can include exaggeration and lack of moderation, as long as these are of its own type. What constitutes realism is simply this: milieux and modes of behavior, milieux which actualize and modes of behavior which embody. The action image is the relation between the two and all the varieties of this relation. It is this model which produced the universal triumph of the American cinema to the point of acting as a passport for foreign directors who contributed to its formation. (141)

This is undoubtedly the case for Canadian-born James Cameron, who is one of the masters of blockbuster action-image production, and differently so for South- African born Blomkamp, who, while having cemented his action-image focus with other dystopian films like Elysium (2003) and Chappie (2005), still tends mostly towards the less popular Small Form, thereby retaining a kind of symbolic tripart citizenship with South Africa, Canada, and America (whereas Cameron is symbolically a fully expatriated American auteur). Furthermore, Deleuze says that particular “genres or states of genres correspond to the two formulas of the action- image” (163) and some of his examples include the Large Form Fordian Western, against the Small Form Hawksian Western; the Large Form crime film, against the Small Form detective film; and the Large Form historical film, against the Small Form costume film. Our endevour here is to add the generic states of the utopian and the dystopian to Deleuze’s list.

As generic forms, the Avatar-District 9 duo constitutes two sides of the same mainstream, collective, capitalist-environmentalist psyche: one catering to the conformist imaginary, and the other to the anarchic imaginary, both predominantly, and perhaps surprisingly (given that both films narrate a man’s journey from human to alien form) difference-phobic, representing empirical difference rather than working with intensity or difference-in-itself. Neither are these films concerned to experiment with the conceptualisation of real alienicity rather – in following the formal preoccupation of the action-image – they are concentrated on photoshopping

143 alienicity out of an image of humanicity (alienicity only serves as metaphoricity in both films – that is, as metaphors for ethnic-otherness from an ethno-normative Caucasian perspective). Surreptitiously then, this section acts as an invitation to re- think the ‘no-place’ in the most radical of Deleuzian terms, as the ‘thought of the outside’, which means problematising the very epistemological premises of the utopian and the dystopian by frustrating their formulaic functions – for instance, frustrating the assumption that the no-place is one of either a good or a bad fantisisation to begin with (we say “to begin with” here because admittedly the formula for fiction decrees that utopias very often degenerate, and dystopias often tend to find an aspect of redemption within chaos). This section flags the obstinacy (the necessity, in fact) of utopic and dystopic tropes – some of utopia’s most mulish allegiances are to, for instance, desire, identity, closure, inside, and clarity, against dystopia’s stiff utilisation of tropes like fear, difference, openness, outside, and obscurity. Ultimately, this section is answered in the thesis’ final part, which looks at a selection of poetry that is utopic in the Deleuzian philosophical manner – that is, which is creative of new concepts and which enacts confrontations with time, rather than exhibiting loyalty to a utopic program and to the realism of the action- image. We intend this final chapter as an echo of Deleuze chronological route from Cinema 1 to Cinema 2 – the study of movement-images presented in this part and concluding with action-image kindles a frustration and restlessness (with the nightmarish ubiquity and potency of the “dogmatic image of thought”) from which we find a kind of (problematic) liberation in our final part as the theorisation of what we will call a literary time-image.

Criticism Thus Far – Computing or Perpetuating a Lingering Aristotelianism

In the comparative literature on these films there is either a tendency to remain oblivious to the real identity preservation that sustains the films, or, less often, to express irritation at this face-value reading. In step with this latter vantage in ‘Don’t it Make My Black Face Blue: Race, Avatars, Albescence, and the Transnational Imaginary’, John G. Russell reads the films by way of a compelling account of the varied processes of albescence that take command of the representations of most

144 black, brown, red, and yellow physiognomies in science fiction and fantasy films, explaining that the problematic overrepresentation of whites in fantasy roles is partly a consequence of their recognised profitability to foreign and home investors. Russell claims that Avatar and District 9 are two very unique examinations of what he calls “didactic xenoface” which, as a variant of “didactic blackface”, describes a complex process wherein species (or racial) mimesis is rhetorically geared by its human (or white) actant to both amuse as well as to foster a more biting social awareness of black experience. Despite being cloaked in – and oft-times truly substanced by – sympathy, Russell clues us in to the disturbing way that this tactic nevertheless draws on “the privileged I/eye witness testimony of white authority as a means to authenticate the black experience by making it ones own” (208). As race allegories, Avatar and District 9 tackle race issues superficially, while remaining profligate in re-inscribing much of the conditions of racial inequality and white dispensation.

A case in point, according to Russell, is the environmental racism that Avatar purports to abhor:

Ironically, his [James Cameron’s] critique of technological excess is accomplished by marshalling the same environmentally destructive technophilia and corporatism it attacks. The vast array of computing electronics that allows audiences to share vicariously Sully’s experiences of alien fauna and flora is itself dependent on the exploitation by multinational corporations of “conflict minerals” in the Congo such as coltan and tantalum which have fueled conflicts that have despoiled actual environments and claimed the lives of over six million Congolese and displaced millions more since 1996 (Musavuli, Delevigne). (212)

Russell reactivates Renato Rosaldo’s concept of “imperialist nostalgia” (1989) to describe the manner in which brutal interventionist colonial practices are, after the fact, sometimes romanticised and remembered with an air of longing pleasure: “Cameron captures this yearning even as he ostensibly critiques the ideology that fuels it” (212). All this, in the name of preserving one particular identity type: white man.

145 Unlike Russell,71 George Aichele and Richard Walsh commend both films for depicting visceral, physical transformations (of white men). In ‘Metamorphosis, Transfiguration, and the Body’, Aichele and Walsh critique the Biblical “transfiguration stories” next to Avatar, District 9, and Franz Kafka’s 1915 short- story The Metamorphosis, arguing that the latter three fictional works describe material transformations – or metamorphoses – whereas the gospel stories merely narrate the ideological, or revelatory changes – or transfigurations – of their various Jesuses. Aichele and Walsh wonder at the reservation of biblical translations to express the corporeal aspects of Jesus’ change, affirming that:

Metamorphosis, as Avatar and District 9 demonstrate, disrupts and challenges identity, even if reforming it, in ways that the gospels’ chain of identifications between Jesus, messiah, and resurrected One cannot abide. One might even say that the gospel lives by denying metamorphosis in favor of mere transfiguration, preferring bright shining lights to human bodies, and replacing mystery and uncertainty with authorizing heavenly voices (theological understanding and security). (269-70)

Aichele and Walsh’s argument is mobilised to accentuate their gripe with the too- sanitary expression of various transfiguration in the gospels, which they see as metaphoric of “glorification/deification” (268). They contend that the metamorphoses of Avatar and District 9 are more progressive for representing monstrous, human, physical change as a “change of identity [which is] not a metaphor” (263). Contrary to their reckoning, however, we will argue that Avatar and District 9 – while including physical, monstrous depictions – are still metaphors, and still safeguard very particular identity types.

Lorenzo Veracini’s essay, ‘District 9 and Avatar: Science Fiction and Settler Colonialism’, probes the “thematic and narrative convergence” (356) of the films in order to discover the settler colonial narrative at the heart of each. Much of our analysis will closely echo and extend Veracini’s comparison of the films. However,

71 Russell is quite staunchly against the physicality that both films assume as a necessary requisite to racial understanding: “Herein lies their pernicious conceit: racism – or, in the case at hand, speciesism – cannot be understood intellectually but must first be experienced viscerally, if not by walking in the shoes of another, then by assuming, if only temporarily, his color, her physiognomy, its scales. Both films are premised on this belief and as such reproduce existing regimes of white privilege by erasing and displacing the Other and ultimately erasing the voices (real or imagined) of those they replace” (208). 146 Veracini admits to adhering to certain methodological parameters that work as a “limitation” to his capacity to provide a “conclusive” analysis of this pair of films (though conclusion is not our corrective here). Veracini says that his “article focuses primarily on the narratives and tropes that these films mobilise, rather than on their filmic qualities, or their contribution to the cinematic genres they are drawing on” (356). The following analysis widens Veracini’s net, not least because in so doing we can begin to fathom that the settler-colonial expansionism that Veracini registers as the thematic motor of both films is really only the extension to the settler-colonial episteme which is the engine of large scale blockbuster film distribution – this is the imperialist force of Hollywood apprehended in, and productionally occasioned by, the action-image. Deleuze frequently flags the action-image’s very special alliance with American history and its obsession with theatricalising The Dream. In his description of the action-image, Deleuze writes: “the American cinema constantly shoots and reshoots a single fundamental film, which is the birth of a nation-civilisation, whose first version was provided by Griffith” (148). It is little wonder then, that Avatar and District 9 are at base settler- colonial stories, for this has long served as the action-image’s lucrative domain of expertise.72

But we can stretch out the purchase of Veracini’s argument further still: for the real discovery here is that the epistemological fabric undergirding transnational blockbuster commerce and distribution according to this inherently settler-colonial operation is that it is premised on an Aristotelian philosophy and function. It functions in line with an Aristotelian school of representation, which is grounded in a hierarchical structure and in the metaphysical supremacy of identity over difference. This logic is profitable, both practically – in commercial and distribution terms – and aesthetically (which is practical in itself) – as it constitutes the filmic style to which the viewing masses are conditioned to direct their custom. Though it may seem peripheral, it is important to note that the economic strength of this representational logic is bolstered by a certain perception of philosophy – sculpted out of its ancient Greek image and history – as a mode of thinking that uses

72 In Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity: Narrative Time in National Contexts (2006), David Martin-Jones provides a fascinating elaboration of the rejuvenation of the action-image’s characteristic American triumphalism after certain historical national threats (i.e. say, after its endured damages from the Vietnam War, or from the First Gulf War). 147 judgment to arrive, pleasurably, at wisdom and truth. For his part, Deleuze criticises the tendency towards oversimplifying and mythologising philosophy and its processes in this way – a process that prizes western thinking and that, in one of its extremes, leads to the unquestioned acquiescence of Hollywood as a kind of Delphic incarnation of artistic-commercial truth (and thus, to its settler-colonial function). To illustrate Hollywood’s Aristotelian logic, we can observe how Avatar and District 9 together memorialise the illusion of representation, while fearing difference-in-itself.

At the outset of the ‘Difference in Itself’ chapter of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze clarifies how an Aristotelian conception of difference – based in ideas of identity, analogy, opposition, and resemblance – haunts the orthodox deployment of any act of reason or judgment.

There are four principal aspects to ‘reason’ insofar as it is the medium of representation: identity, in the form of the undetermined concept; analogy, in the relation between ultimate determinable concepts; opposition, in the relation between determinations within concepts; resemblance, in the determined object of the concept itself. These forms are like the four heads or the four shackles of mediation. (29)

This also explains the strength of metaphor as the mediating force in Avatar and District 9, itself dependent on the categorical function of the identity of the concept. In fact, Avatar and District 9 are rather exquisite illustrations of the Aristotelian thought that the greatest difference is specific difference (or species difference) – that is, the greatest difference is that which exists between any two species (known as oppositional contraries) that subsist as part of a particular genre. Specific difference is most potent (or perfect), according to Aristotle, because it exists under the scope and authority of one categorical genre, thereby allowing for a greater and crisper specification.

While Aristotle’s categorisation is meant in biological terms, we can make a useful (though not completely accurate) connection here with the filmic genres of our two films (utopian and dystopian generic sets) as the generic determinates of further subsets, such as the specific difference between humans and aliens (and we should underscore again the fact that though both movies chronicle transformation –

148 which is not ‘becoming’ in its radical sense, but the cementation of the same; both characters are ultimately fully outfitted as alien ‘other’, thereby preserving the categories human/alien). Essentially, this is the consequence of both films’ phobia of difference-in-itself. As Deleuze continues in this vital passage from ‘Difference in Itself’:

Difference is ‘mediated’ to the extent that it is subjected to the fourfold root of identity, opposition, analogy and resemblance. On the basis of a first impression (difference is evil), it is proposed to ‘save’ the difference by representing it, and to represent it by relating it to the requirements of the concept in general. (29)

This is precisely how Avatar and District 9 manage real difference – representation acts as the medicinal mediator safeguarding against the supposed wickedness of real difference.

In each movie we witness two alternate ways of deadening and coping with difference-in-itself: Avatar ignores it entirely and concentrates on depicting clarity and identity (admittedly, later in this section we will consider how Avatar’s promiscuity with simulacra in fact defies the power of this allegiance to identity), whereas District 9 aggressively fears it (another approach is to ridicule it, like the Small Form burlesques that Deleuze describes). So we are returned to the classical Greek image of philosophy and its “selective text”, deciding either to muffle difference with the opulent myth of a sagacious tamer (Avatar), or to represent the monster itself (District 9), which, when represented, will always remain a domesticated encounter:

It is therefore a question of determining a propitious moment – the Greek propitious moment – at which difference is, as it were, reconciled with the concept. Difference must leave its cave and cease to be a monster; or at least only that which escapes at the propitious moment must persist as a monster, that which constitutes only a bad encounter, a bad occasion. At this point the expression ‘make the difference’ changes its meaning. It now refers to selective test which must determine which differences may be inscribed within the concept in general, and how. Such a test, such a selection, seems to be effectively realized by the Large and the Small. (29)

149 The Two-Faced Action-Image: Avatar as Utopian ‘Large Form’ and District 9 as Dystopian ‘Small Form’

Utopian and dystopian genres serve as indicators to the unique identity-difference dialectics that buttress either film. We will show how the genres that each film respectively appeals to, the cinematic devices, production decisions, production scale, and public reception of each are an essential component of the identity- difference dialectical tropes and narratives projected by each film.73 In each film, the landscape that the aliens inhabit is parroted by their biology and behavior in transparent ways (as Veracini makes clear), but this diegetic content is also synecdochic of the respective genres and technologies employed by either film, as well as each film’s bearing as utopian/dystopian Large and Small Form action- image – this oppositional consonance, which is in fact a dialectical logic (the “dogmatic image of thought”), is conspicuous at every level.

The aliens, as collectives in either film, are constructed according to this logic. In Avatar the aliens live on their home planet, Pandora, in “Home Tree”,74 which is an essentialised, holistic place safeguarded by the pantheistic goddess, Eywa. Their planet is pristine, with pre-historic plants and animals made fantastical with vibrant tie-dye colours and bioluminescence. The aliens, who call themselves Na’vi, are a peaceful, compassionate and attractive people who live privileged and spiritually abundant lives. Comparatively, the aliens in District 9 are displaced from their home planet and reside instead in the industrial slum known as “District 9”, which is a polluted, heavily exploited space. The unattractive and impoverished aliens, who do not experience the luxury of self-naming, are pejoratively referred to by humans as “prawns”. Essentially, the construction of the aliens in either film, in line with their utopian and dystopian dictates, are meant to arouse desire (Avatar) and goad revulsion (District 9). Many critics have therefore signaled the importance of

73 It might be worth remembering here Deleuze’s assertion that many, though far from all, Small Form films are often more “experimental and creative” by very dint of their economical constraints (which rings true with District 9). 74 Both movies are dense with conspicuous metaphors that link and interact involuntarily with features of the action-image and its reciprocity with a more comprehensive Deleuzian ontology. This “Home Tree” example is an unintentional metaphor for the arborescent model of thought, decidedly situating the film in its non-rhizomatic aesthetic terrain. 150 the representation of alien language and communication in either film. For instance, Veracini writes:

Even their respective languages confirm a repulsion/identification pattern: District 9’s alien language is constructed around unwelcoming and distancing ‘clicks’ (distinctive of San, Khoi, isiXhosa or isiZulu language, see Valdez Moses 2010: 156); the language of the Na’vi, on the contrary, is a dignified and sophisticated constructed ‘indigenous’ language developed for the movie by University of Southern California professor and linguist Paul Frommer (Milani 2009). (359)

Further, the prawns’ insect-like language is always presented to us via subtitles. In Avatar, Neytiri mostly speaks to Jake in English (with a strong Na’vi accent) and the Na’vi are only occasionally subtitled – that is, when they speak to each other in their native tongue, such as at the leaders’ meeting when they discover Jake’s deceit (as a distancing, alienating mechanism).

Already then, from this brief summary of either film’s attempt to architect their aliens in the image of their generic utopic or dystopic premises, we get a strong sense of what Deleuze calls the Large Form’s “respiration space”, in Avatar, up and against the Small Form’s “skeletal space” in District 9 (another unintentional metaphor for the skeletal space creeping in here – the prawns are literally composed of an exoskeleton, playing both with the ossature aspect of skeletal space and with its topography of outsided-ness).75 District 9, as Small Form, begins in equivocal action: we learn that the alien spaceships have already arrived from a documentary- style relay; we are immediately immersed in the political chaos and of local alien habitation in Johannesburg. Already then, the mocumentary bears confusion, it is an “index of lack” (one of the small-form’s “signs of composition”) for it is not yet clear whether it is fiction or nonfiction documentary. Furthermore, there is no synsign here, instead there are, as Deleuze says, “increasingly incongruous and mixed makeshift groups” (167): complex alliances between different factions in the

75 One the contrasts between utopian and dystopian narrative is the transplantation of ‘real world’: for utopian fiction the no-place erects itself by creating a mostly unbridgeable gap (the waters on an island, the vacuum between planets etc.) between itself and the diegetic representation of ‘real- world’. In movement-image terms, we can think of this as a functional respirator – a life-support apparatus viable precisely due to its exclusion of Other, and maintenance of internal harmony. Whereas in dystopian fiction this gap is profusely corrupted, ventilation is punctured by sharp skeletal incisions and gaps, with the reciprocal suffocation of ‘real world’ and fantasy world. 151 slum (apartheid is rattled by hostilities that eat through the initial illusory, or at least largely socially constructed segregation of Black/White) – the Nigerian gangsters, the prawns, other immigrants who form their own alliances, as well as complex corporate-military alliances. This is a skeleton space – rather than the curvature and englobing that is particular to the Large Form, we have tangential movement and ellipses, both rhetorical (“index of lack”) and geometrical (“index of equivocity”).

On the other hand, Avatar begins with a process of englobing. Jake is on the spaceship which arrives on Pandora – this is a clean entrance or landing onto the military base set up on the planet. This is in itself the synsign (human military- scientific milieu intravenously transposed into alien environs – already, then, mileux are in conflict with themselves) englobing or actualising the binomial to strike forward clumsily and hopelessly in many ways, many times over, and then finally, successfully. Avatar is thus about clarity, it is about seeing as being as Jenna Ng has pointed out in her article ‘Seeing Movement: On Motion Capture Animation and James Cameron’s Avatar’, whereas in the Small Form, “the action advances blindly and the situation is disclosed in darkness, or in ambiguity” (160), which is District 9’s obscurity.

Deleuze dedicates an entire section in his Small Form chapter to an explanation of Howard Hawk’s Westerns as exemplary Small Form action-images, and all of his insight tallies remarkably well as a description of District 9 as Small Form ilk:

In Hawks, pure functionalism tends to replace the structure of the encompasser. The claustrophilia of certain of Hawks’ films has often been noticed […]. This is because in the obliteration of the encompasser, there is no longer (as in Ford) [as too, in Avatar] communication between an organically situated interior and an outside which surrounds it, giving it a living milieu which is a source of assistance as much as aggression. Here, on the contrary, the unexpected, the violent, the event, come from the interior whilst the exterior is rather the location of the customary or premeditated action, in a curious reversal of the outside and inside. Everyone enters and passes through the room where the sheriff is having a bath, as though it were a public place (El Dorado). (165)

This is like Wikus’ mutation, which occurs largely under public scrutiny in a space that is violently exposed and elliptical. Avatar’s organic structuralism – the

152 interiority of its healthy respiration – is reversed in District 9, becoming an immanent and unpredictable functionalism that works according to the “law of the index” – that is, where a “slight difference in the action brings out an infinite distance between two situations” (170). Deleuze finds excellent demonstrations of this in the comedies and burlesques of Charlie Chaplin. In The Great Dictator (1940), Chaplin plays two identical-looking characters, which are nevertheless, worlds apart: the Jewish barber and the Hitler-dictator, Adenoid Hynkel. The film’s “laughter-emotion circuit” – where neither response outstrips the other – has a vanishing point, which is the minimum difference between each man’s moustache; Deleuze relays André Bazin’s astute recognition “that The Great Dictator would not have been possible had Hitler not, in reality, appropriated and stolen Charlie’s moustache” (171).

Deleuze’s deployment of the idea of “slight differences” (although he does not mention it in the Cinema books) seems to stem from his work on Gottfried Wilhelm Von Leibniz’s concepts of compossible and incompossible series, or possible worlds. According to Deleuze, Leibniz’s compossible series is one ordered by the “law of non-contradiction”, whereas an incompossible series is one in which the series is interrupted, or vice-dicted, by divergence – and this divergence allows for the emergence of two simultaneous worlds. Where Leibniz considered these worlds to be impossible, Brett Nicholls (in The Deleuze Dictionary) says that Deleuze,

[…] proposes that incompossibility is a condition of compossibility. Rather than governed by the metaphysical law of non-contradiction, the world is multiple and the subject can be defined in relation to foldable, polychromic temporalities, where incompossibles and compossibles co-exist. We might think, therefore, of the divergence of series not as negation or opposition but as possibility. (146)

So the Small Form’s “index of equivocity” works off the ambiguity of a particular minor action that houses or cues two incompossible scenarios.

Either film’s expression as Large and Small Form action-image is also consonant with the utopian/dystopian forms and temporalities utilised by each film (so here we start to tread a little further afield than Veracini, moving beyond tropes like the aforementioned alien conceit projected by each film). Avatar employs a

153 fictional cinematic narrative set in an imaginary future (clairvoyance), whereas District 9 draws on both a cinematic narrative and a mocumentary mode, and is set in the recent past/present (remembrance). In a superficial way, Avatar fantasises an idyllic future, where District 9 remembers, unreliably, a messy historical past. Avatar’s hugely expensive computer-generated imagery (CGI) and special effects brandish themselves as the movie’s centerpiece. The film goes to great artistic and monetary lengths to create a seamless production, to hide its construction beneath a chronological romance narrative (to create an inside, or identity). 76 The film attempts to disguise its simulated aspect precisely because it is so profoundly simulated – more than half of the movie frames are CGI. Within the film’s narrative, the protagonist Jake enters an avatar virtually, his brain controls his avatar remotely as if he is playing a video game, trying to forget the reality of his crippled legs. The film enacts the same virtualisation (not least through its use of stereoscopic CGI), and it is telling to consider what ideology it tries to forget in its fantasisation. Not only does it represent (and covertly champion, as some critics suggest77) escaping the reality of disability – it also attempts to forget queerness and polyamory by fantasising a world of monogamy and heteronormativity. Avatar is narratively about assimilation in the same way that it cinematically enacts assimilation – it is an assimilating force that tries to absorb difference, to muster the masses with an appeal to monogamy, among other things. In significant ways, Avatar’s production was more deterministic than District 9’s. In the ‘making-of’ Avatar we learn that most of the action is filmed in-studio, in front of a green screen, with the actors performing scripted dialogue. The filmmakers assert that the movie is innovative because its CGI relies largely on performances by real actors rather than on animation processes.

District 9 also prides itself on its innovation, but this comes through an appeal to modes of free-play that are more radical than those of Avatar. Where Avatar’s filmic determinism is rooted in its virtualisation and hyperrealism, District 9’s free-

76 We are giving Avatar the benefit of the doubt and referring only to its 3D cinematic manifestation. Much of its aesthetic utopic credibility is lost in its non-stereoscopic DVD version with much more production fray sneaking into it representation – long shots of Pandora, for instance, sometimes appear a little more like a miniaturised set puppeteered with prop pieces. 77 See Michael Peterson, Laurie Beth Clark, and Lisa Nakamura’s ‘“I See You”: Gender and Disability in Avatar’, Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture 11.7 (2010). 154 play is grounded in photo-realism (or at least a kind of political realism). This realism is predicated on many of the film’s procedural choices: instead of flaunting its CGI, it softens the distinction between its ‘real’ footage and its CGI. Instead of chronicling Wikus physical transformation with CGI, Blomkamp elected to use prosthetics, which appear to be a much more dicey mode for filmmakers today.78 Furthermore, the actor that plays Wikus, Sharlto Copely, remarks in the DVD ‘extras’ that the filming process became overwhelmingly taxing for him as the prosthetical sculpting became increasingly extravagant; he would be in make-up sometimes for several hours more than the other actors both before and after shooting, would lose consecutively more sleep – all of which contributed to the intensity of his onscreen performance. As did Blomkamp’s decision to refrain from shooting the movie in the New Zealand production studios using a green screen – as they had originally planned – opting instead to film in the callous conditions of an actual South African shantytown.

Boosting even further the film’s realistic quality is the improvisational approach that Blomkamp encouraged from the actors. The free-play/determinism dynamic does not only operate rudimentarily between Avatar and District 9, it also functions internally to District 9 (Peirce’s “secondness” everywhere rearing its head), and in so doing reveals that if District 9 is radical, it is only really so in comparison to Avatar and other science fiction movies, which for the most part eschew experimental techniques like improvisation. Significantly, Blomkamp formulated the script for District 9 as a framework (another kind of ossature generating the film’s production) around which the actors were free to improvise.79 The dual freedom and anxiety inherent in this kind of approach helped to give the performances an emotional realism, according to Blomkamp.80 This is a rather

78 Blomkamp, quoted in the DVD extras: “It kinda really stressed me out before we started shooting because I wasn’t sure if [Wikus’ makeup and prosthetics] was going to work or not. I’m so comfortable with visual effects and I’m a lot less comfortable with practical effects. The original thinking was more along the lines of a virus – a rash – where you could have a point that would be extremely contaminated and then a gradient or falloff into health. I kind of figured out one day that it didn’t need to be that way, it needed to be a more psychological, violent, repulsive protrusion”. 79 Blomkamp, quoted from the DVD extras: “The thing to remember that is important is that the story is set and the points along the timeline are set – what it does is it allows the actors to fluctuate within that timeline and to change their tone and to get into how they want to portray the character at that particular time”. 80 Blomkamp, quoted from the DVD extras: “One thing that’s sort of a by-product of the whole process that I am really proud of is the amount of emotion that comes through Wikus. And a 155 fascinating point to consider in relation to Deleuze’s reference to Method Acting as the predominant technique utilised by actors of the Large Form action-image. Deleuze writes: “There is the rule of the Actor’s Studio: only the inner counts […]” (Cinema 1 158). In so many ways, the reverse holds for District 9: only the outer counts – the actor identifies with his role by being completely saturated by it physically – both prosthetically and environmentally. It is tempting to look for the cue to this operational reversal in one of Method Acting’s rival techniques, ‘practical aesthetics’ although, to be frank, it is still the inner that is of consequence, but as a kind of internal hubris that is wrenched inside-out, publicised, again, like the Sheriff bathing in El Dorado (1966).

Further still, in its attempts to tap into a gritty, politically inflamed realism, District 9 appeals to the free-play of mocumentary, which is not a free and spontaneous mode in and of itself but one which draws on the documentary’s supposed account of real, unmediated action (itself never without significant degrees of staging). The comparative freedom of the mocumentary mode and the determinacy of the cinematic narrative soon collapse into one another. District 9 has three distinct temporalities: MNU (Multi-National United) archival footage, such as the opening scene where Wikus introduces himself to an audience that he, at the time, presumes will be watching a documentary about the forced relocation of the aliens from “District 9” to “District 10” (much of this footage has the MNU logo). This material is embedded in the ‘actual’ documentary, which recalls Wikus’ involvement in the events of “District 9” in hindsight, via interviews with various specialists and experts. Its third temporality is the non-documentary cinematic narrative that begins with the alien, “Christopher Johnson”,81 along with his son and his friend, searching through some garbage for the oil-like liquid that is capable of powering the command module that may eventually return them to their home planet. The non-documentary narrative has a privileged view of the events unfolding in time, uncontaminated by the rhetoric and hyperbole of the interviewed

mixture of the parameters that were written for him because it was improv[isation] predominantly but we wrote the parameters that he would operate inside of. From a character level his ability to draw you in and this framework we placed him inside of created a surprisingly more elevated emotional experience than I was expecting”. 81 Aichele and Walsh note that the alien protagonist’s name is indicative of imperialising processes where “colonized or enslaved peoples [often] bear names that mimic those of the ‘masters’” (256). 156 experts and non-experts and various editing techniques that incite panic. It is also shot on a different, crisper, type of film. However, the first temporality converges with the third when Wikus attempts to evict Christopher Johnson’s friend from his shack, and it is roughly around this point in the film that the documentary editing begins to leak over into scenes that are not officially documented. For instance, when Wikus gets contaminated by the alien substance, the diegetic sound of audio feedback – the screeching of what we are led to believe is an off-screen microphone getting caught in the kerfuffle – is soon integrated into the un-documented narrative as a non-diegetic sound effect.82 Similarly, we start to get shots that have a documentary-style typescript (e.g., “74 Hours After Exposure”), even though they are not logically part of any of the film’s documentary footage, and cannot be explained by a particular diegetic camera or gaze monitoring the scene. Hence, this is the moment that we start to feel that we are being surveilled, we too are implicated immanently in its surveillance – this is the heteronomy of dystopia. This is also a kind of camera-consciousness that names both Wikus and us its neurotic characters. In Avatar, there appears to be more of a choice, not least because you can actually choose whether to watch the film in 3D or 2D, but because it is a stimulating video-game-like experience, which conserves our sense of self-control and of virtual transcendence.83

Even though the filmic form and filmic procedure of Avatar seems to be deterministic relative to District 9’s procedural and formal indeterminacy, the protagonists of each film are constructed in the reverse image of their respective films. In Avatar, Jake is presented as having a great deal of free will; choice is a significant feature of the Na’vi philosophy. In District 9, Wikus has no power to choose – yet though his journey is over-determined by circumstance, he is apparently still culpable, as one character in the mocumentary notes: “I’m not

82 Hence, they may seem to become the first rumblings of a time-image – pure sound signs [sonsigns] that fracture the sensory motor schema, but are more rightly Small Form “indices of lack”. 83 Jonathan Mulrooney explores the interesting phenomenon of “Avatar blues” discussed in online forums where fans complain of the depression they feel after viewing the film because of the marvellous intensity of its utopic immersion. Mulrooney suggests that “the economy of [blockbuster cinematic] desire” (204) rests as much in exacerbating “alienation and longing” (204), and in maintaining cinema as a dream experience which is separate from reality, as it does in proffering a teasing taste of the utopic dream (i.e utopia’s desirability is conserved and enhanced due to its unreachability). 157 saying that what he did was right, but he took the choices that were given to him”. Wikus’ lack of autonomy can in part be attributed to the fact that Blomkamp conceived of the prawns in the image of the worker bee – the prawns supposedly “take commands, they have no initiative”, as one interviewee in the film remarks. The deterministic character of Wikus’ transformation is also conflated with both primitivism and posthumanism, whereas Jake’s free-will is in many ways humanist, and this hinges in large part on the way the prawns are analogue-mechanised and the Na’vi are digitalised-organicised.84 For instance, although both breed of alien – the prawns and the Na’vi – are humanoid, Avatar emphasises the human homology by actually referring to the Na’vi as humanoid. In District 9, even though the aliens are constructed as bipedal creatures and have a gaze that can be easily registered and empathised with by human audiences, they are catalogued through their difference to humans (less-than-human), rather than their similarity. In addition, for most of District 9, Wikus is a corporeally hybrid monster, physically becoming alien, with the lines between alien and human demonstratively more ambiguous, or posthumanist. In Avatar, Jake is never an intermediary, at least in the sense of being a physical hybrid – though emotionally he is conflicted, he is never a monstrous mutant, he is either alien form or human form and the categories are more explicit – in addition, he can choose to leave his avatar when he wants.

Finally, while we have largely been discussing aspects of each film in relation to necessity and chance, it is of course the dialectic between the two that counts for their ‘no-place’ permutations: dystopia has its premise in a negative free play that oppresses its spawn as necessity, whereas utopia begins with necessity, the necessity of an identity which engenders free will. Moreover, it is in these respective dialectics that we find a fertile correspondence to the respective Large Form and Small Form action-images; our sub-argument holds that the autonomy that is utopia’s joy and desire, and the heteronomy that is dystopia’s plague and terror are apt annexations to the Large Form’s equilibrium-sustaining movement from Situation-Action-Altered Situation (SAŚ), and the Small Form’s bent towards disequilibrium via skeletal procession from Action-Situation-Altered-Action (ASÁ). In the final bite of this section we will show that the correspondences

84 Admittedly, the Na’vi are also post-humanised, but in a more futuristic, humanistic, and spiritual way. 158 between utopia-as-Large-Form and dystopia-as-Small-Form are reinforced by the concepts of organic and orgiastic representation that Deleuze develops in Difference and Repetition, but first we take a look at either film’s conscious depiction of processes of reproduction, including the judgment with which these processes are powerfully and inherently attended.

The Signs of Genesis of the Large and Small Forms: the ‘Imprint’ and the ‘Vector’ as Insemination and Dissemination

According to Deleuze, the Large Form action-image is the realm of realist violence and behaviourism – therefore, unlike naturalism (the impulse-image), its “structure is like that of an egg: a vegetable or vegetative pole () and an animal pole (acting-out)” (155). So in Avatar, the vegetative pole is (rather problematically) Jake’s crippled body, which becomes hard and animal when he is in Pandora. The hero is gradually infused, or “permeated” by the situation, which causes him to behaviourally detonate, or “explode” every so often, so that within the “global mission [of] SAŚ” there lies a string of “local missions [internal smaller situation 1, internal smaller action 1, internal smaller situation 2, internal smaller action 2 etcetera]” (157). It is not a mistake that this sounds sexual (and more specifically, heterosexual). Admittedly, we need to tread very carefully here because Deleuze is largely critical of a “puerile” 85 sexual metaphorical interpretation that sculpts itself attractively over the very basic flesh of the “plastic mass”. As exquisite action-images, Avatar and District 9 are infused with a sexual metaphorics, but the important thing here is that we can pare this back to a basic formal expression: this is about reproduction as communication, biosemiotically and cybernetically.

Veracini acknowledges that in Avatar and District 9 certain “contacts … initiate each protagonist’s transformation” (357) into alien form. What Veracini and other critics have not yet flagged as part of the comparative criticism on the films, is

85 In Cinema 1, Deleuze says of the famous creamer scene in Sergei Eisenstein’s and Grigori Aleksandrov’s The General Line: “Psychoanalysis has subjected these famous images of the creamer and what follows to such puerile treatment that it has become hard to rediscover their simple beauty” (181). 159 the quality and significance of the “contacts” as a gendered insemination (in the case of Avatar) and its opposite, asexual dissemination (in the case of District 9). In Avatar, Jake is rained on by an organic, feminised landscape, or what Neytiri calls the “seeds of the sacred tree – very pure spirits”. In District 9, Wikus is polluted by a technological, phallic contraption, which ejaculates black oil onto his face (it also fractionally splatters the camera screen itself, thereby implicating and contaminating us as viewers). Where Jake’s insemination is a purifying, welcomed, clean, consensual and private heterosexual encounter with mother-nature and, by extension, Neytiri who is another female privy to the event, Wikus’ infection is a violent, filthy, unwanted, public, homosexual (or, more accurately, masturbatory) encounter with a phallic device, and with male-only spectators who are recording the event – effectually it is a kind of voyeuristic defilement. Strictly speaking then, Wikus’ contact is not insemination, but dissemination, which conventionally holds negative connotations. This is not the prophylactic of an avatar body, with a clean organic engendering (which is nevertheless an artificial insemination in Avatar, in vitro, in glass), but a pathogenic transference, where the autonomy of a host- organism is dissolved. Wikus’ body is a vector, which is the sign of genesis of the Small Form action-image. This is the asexual reproduction of things like spores (and in the special features section of District 9 we learn that Blomkamp did indeed fashion the prawns in the image of worms, for the fact that they are monoecious). In Avatar, on the other hand, Jake and Pandora are gametes, clearly sexed, man and woman.

This is perhaps most clearly emphasised in either film’s initial depiction of the arrival of a spacecraft to a planet, which functions as the augural precipitant of the individual insemination/contamination of each film’s hero. In Avatar, the spaceship deposits its se(a)men (remember Sully was in the U.S. marine corps) through an erect ship phallus that is part of a purposeful ongoing intercourse depleting Pandora of her unobtainium.86 The gamete analogy is clear from one of the film’s very first

86 Jake wakes up from six years of cryopreservation, a dreamy mist haunts the early part of the movie, his consciousness embryonic, his body bound in the cryo-capsule like a newborn in its blanket. He is the child of this rape – white, racist, all-knowing, power-hungry father (humanity), African-American or Indo-American spiritual mother (Na’vi) (this is why Jake is American nationalism-exceptionalism par excellance, because he represents the offspring of both sides of the American Civil War – like the war, Jake represents the psychic cementation of the U.S.A as a 160 shots of the military spacecraft approaching the ‘virgin’ planet – the spacecraft is miniscule, like a sperm, when scaled to the ovum-like dimension of Pandora. In District 9, the spacecraft (not human, but alien), which resembles an oilrig (and so appearing primed to rape the earth of resources), is parked above Johannesburg – we only learn retrospectively how the spaceship had arrived. Unexpectedly, the spacecraft had hovered in its position for three months – not only were the aliens enfeebled due to undernourishment, but the aircraft’s appendages (a multiplicity of flaccid piping and scaffolding designed presumably for harvesting and extraction purposes) are symbolically branded sexually impotent. And as Veracini notes, in cosmo-political terms, the prawns are essentially “refugees [in need of] humanitarian assistance” (356). In fact, it is the South African government and MNU (Multi-National United) – highly aggressive and masculinised institutions – that eventually moved to invade the aircraft (or mother-ship) by forcefully penetrating her with their tools and machinery.

While not necessarily compromising an estimation of either film as Large and Small Form action-images, this ‘spacecraft-arrival foreshadowing’ does demand the reconsideration of the sufficiency of our previous cataloguing. Quite apart from those films that are either a Large Form action-image, or a Small Form action- image, Deleuze says some films are, in fact, a complex interplay of both forms; reflection-, or transformation-images, are images that express a transformation from Large to Small Form, or vice versa. Both Avatar and District 9 could be considered as such. For instance, Avatar actually begins equivocally itself, encapsulated – ironically – in the two spherical moisture droplets whose merging is the first thing Jake sees after waking up. The droplets-become-droplet, while serving as an introductory metaphor of unequivocal unification, is also an “index of lack” because it prompts us to question the circumstances of Jake’s sleep; he is not merely waking up from a normal siesta, we realise, he is in outer space, confirmed shortly thereafter by the voiceover: “In cryo- you don’t dream at all…” coupled with the gravity-free environment. The droplet’s equivocality is piercing in a more powerful sense still: it is the first moment that the film reaches out haptically, stereoscopically – a spectacle of equivocal audience implication or participation (i.e

Nation State). He is raised by his father, full of Father’s ideology at the start of the movie, but there is more of Mother in his blood, her special genes, her “seeing”. 161 Avatar, like District 9, forces audience immersion, but it is set up in a context of desire and choice). But the important thing to recall here is Deleuze’s claim that there is always a predominant image-type; within Avatar’s initial equivocity (local Action) there prevails a much more tenacious univocity (global Situation).

Jake’s insemination (read, then: the unification and authentification of American-nationalism) is exclusive and deterministic – the soft, flowery, jellyfish- like, white seeds are drawn towards him from an all-encompassing outside (Whole) as if he is the already-chosen target. This exclusivity manifests through the interiority of female ejaculation as encompassing destiny and providence; only one man fits inside the woman, the glove (or in this case, Pandora’s box/jar – the figure of unpredictable chaos wrangled by man). Moreover, Jake’s free-will actually dovetails the peculiar way that his insemination is deterministic. The film fashions Jake’s heroism – his exceptionality – through framing him in misfortune: he has led a grueling military life; he is crippled; and his brother’s death haunts the early part of the movie. We are set up to believe that Jake deserves happiness. On the other hand, Wikus’ insemination (read: outside the periphery of American nationalism- exceptionalism) is random – the crude, toxic-looking black substance disseminates outwards, a multiplicity of impotent men as soldiers, as blank shots that only happen by accident to infect Wikus because he fiddles around with the unknown device. District 9 emphasises Wikus’ mediocrity by framing his inadequacy in privilege: Wikus is married to the CEO’s daughter, he has recently been promoted, and he appears to have lived a comfortable, middle-class life. Additionally, as the critic, Dennis Walder, explains in ‘Hysterical Nostalgia in the Postcolony: From Coming Home to District 9’: “Van der Merwe is the name of an Afrikaans Everyman, the butt of many jokes in South Africa” (9). Hence we are in many ways programmed to enjoy, at least in part, his trauma.

Noosigns – The ‘Classic Image of Thought’ and the ‘Thought of the Outside’

The politics of protagonist preferentiality that structures each film is significant because it functions as a “noosign” – an image of thought. This particular “noosign” – spectatorial judgment as metaphorical inflection (hypnotic thought) – is classic,

162 and is therefore more evidence that both films function as movement-images. In fact, this noosign is the second of three thought-images that Deleuze says are “encountered together everywhere in the cinema of the movement-image” (Time- Image 163). They are: “the relationship with a whole which can only be thought in a higher awareness, the relationship with a thought which can only be shaped in the subconscious unfolding of images, the sensory-motor relationship between world and man, nature and thought. Critical thought, hypnotic thought, action-thought” (emphasis in original Time-Image 163). Deleuze spotlights Sergei Eisenstein’s dialectical image of thought to elucidate the noosigns of classic cinema, though he maintains that Eisenstein creates a strictly dispensable dialectic out of what are essentially the “very general aspect[s] of the movement-image and montage” (Time- Image 160). Hence it is Eisenstein that Deleuze quotes to cement his case for the particular way that a classic image integrates judgement within itself: “Eisenstein called [it] ‘the new sphere of filmic rhetoric, the possibility of bearing an abstract social judgement’” (161).87 Deleuze further points out that there is no ordination between the three noosigns of classic thought, each noosign a “moment, equally present in the two [others]” (Time-Image 161).

The third permutation of the classic image of thought, the action-thought, will seem familiar because it coincides with the action-image itself, which we have now observed is at work in both films at every level – dialogue (scripted/improvised), production (green screen/on location shooting), modes of spectatorship (immersive 3D/alarmist mocumentary coupled with traditional cinematic narrative), as well as multifariously at play in the narratives themselves. Action-thought is “the [mutual] identity of concept and image” (161), each in the other; it is the monism that makes the Whole (concept) a metaphor of man (the “Dividual” masses), and man a metaphor of the Whole. Avatar and District 9 are exemplary in this respect because nature and man literally merge in the figures of Sully and Wikus, enabling the explicit narrative exposition of sensory-motor unification. Deleuze writes that: “[i]n the sublime there is a sensory motor unity of nature and man, which means that nature must be named the non-indifferent” (Time-Image 162). Pandora and Sully, as

87 More fully, Deleuze writes: “[m]etaphor is sometimes extrinsic, sometimes intrinsic. But, in both cases, the composition does not simply express the way in which the character experiences himself, but also expresses the way in which the author and the viewer judge him, it integrates thought into the image […]” (Cinema 2 161). 163 Nature and Man in Avatar, interact in positive symbiosis; as is to be expected, an MRI scan lays bear Jake’s “gorgeous brain”, a forecast of the smooth neurological sailing that will characterise his sensory-motor (comm)union with Lady Box Nature. That Pandora’s aquatic egg-stars have aligned for Jake is apparent everywhere – when Jake first enters his avatar, against a stage of lab-coat protestations that he must adapt to the new body slowly, and partnered with a libidinal thirst to drink in his lost ableism, we learn that his sensory-motor coordination is instantaneously pitch perfect, in total harmony with the planet’s low gravity environment.

In District 9, the landscape is not sympathetic, but neither is it plainly indifferent. Its poverty-stricken, industrialised cityscape is actually inhospitable more than it is indifferent, and so there is a certain sensory-motor unity of discordancy – nature as geopolitical-extraterrestrial unpredictability is in harmony with the hostility and erraticism of antihero Wikus. There are certain proofs of this harmony: compositionally, the action-narrative emits commonsense spatio-temporal coordinates that afford spectatorial sympathy with the predicament of the alien protagonist, Christopher Johnson, as well as his gentle and loveable son, and his resourceful escape plan, seemingly harrowingly improbable. Narrative proof of sensory-motor harmony is Wikus’ adaptation to his alien body. Even though his transformation is excruciating, it is neurologically successful. At the MNU laboratories, the corporate scientists test whether he has ergonomically acclimatised to operate alien weaponry – his pincers, susceptible to neurological pain, are like prosthetic master keys capable of driving all kinds of alien technology. Man is in harmony with nature, but this is not a sublime nature in the romantic sense, it is the nuts and bolts nature of modernity – machinic nature.

Herein lingers a skepticism that sometimes accompanies District 9’s estimation as movement-image. That is to say, both films, by dint of being films, administer a “nooshock”, a physiological jolt that comes from automated movement transferring “vibrations to the cortex” (Time-Image 156). Deleuze says that “the shock is the very form of communication in images” (Time-Image 157), and that “the shock has an effect on the spirit [collective mind or brain], it forces it to think […]” (Time- Image 158). Precisely what the nooshock forces us to think depends on whether the

164 image in question is classic or modern, movement or time. As noted, the nooshock that engenders the noosigns of the movement-image impels us to think the Whole (the operation of the sublime). The nooshock that engenders the noosigns of modern cinema, on the other hand, compels us to think an outside that shatters the Whole:

[M]odern cinema develops new relations with thought from three points of view: the obliteration of a whole or of a totalization of images, in favour of an outside which is inserted between them; the erasure of the internal monologue as whole of the film, in favour of a free indirect discourse and vision; the erasure of the unity of man and the world, in favour of a break which now leaves us with only a belief in this world. (187- 8)

This description stokes a suspicion that has haunted our entire evaluation of Avatar and District 9 as unambiguous movement-images – that is to say, does not this seem like a remarkable description of District 9’s anarchic thought?

Indeed, there is a powerful, but ultimately mistaken, argument to be made for Avatar and District 9 respectively standing in as representatives of either side of the distinction between classic and modern cinema. While Avatar is pristine movement- image, it is tempting to regard District 9 as a time-image. For instance, the classic- image-of-thought’s utilisation of internal monologue against the free indirect discourse and vision that accompanies the thought-of-the-outside is performed or staged, respectively, by either film’s depiction of video corroboration. Where Jake records a private video diary for scientific purposes (meant as an honest account of his experience learning and adapting to the Na’vi awareness), Wikus is publicly recorded and surveilled by a number of organisations (and his story is refabricated according to various corporate/military/media interests). Aichele and Walsh note that, Avatar itself, as a film, assumes Jake’s monologic authority and intimacy through the device of voice-over: “although both movies feature video- documentaries from their protagonists, only Avatar provides voice-over narration from the protagonist’s point-of-view. Consequently, the audience is ‘closer’ to Jake than to Wikus” (258). It is interesting to learn that contrary to Aichele and Walsh (and contrary, for that matter, to our earlier estimation of District 9 as working to create in the viewer a strong aversion to Wikus), Veracini reads each films’ video

165 documentary as confirmation of viewer identification with both Jake and Wikus (i.e. he sees the monologic function of both films):

Both movies go to extraordinary lengths to facilitate the viewer’s identification with the protagonist, and both movies experiment with narrative devices that allow the main protagonist to address the viewer in a way that is unmediated by a narrator. ‘Documentary’ footage of Wikus’ activities is shown in the opening scenes of District 9, and Jake compiles a series of self-reflecting videologs: as the main protagonist is laid bare, as the protagonist speaks directly to his viewers, we witness a sustained attempt to establish a special bond between them […]. (358-9)

In District 9’s narrative world, documentary construction is not unmediated (as we stressed earlier) – the film is in fact leaning on the ideal of objectivity that documentary production customarily professes (documentary is more insidious than fiction in respect of its façade of objectivity), whilst conveying all of the vying biases that are the real mediating factors conditioning our relationship with Wikus as viewers. Even so, Veracini hits on an important point – one that ultimately trumps our simple evaluation of Wikus as only repellant. For our relationship with Wikus is more complicated than with Jake88 – we are, in fact, meant to identify with Wikus (as that ordinary, narcissistic bureaucrat in all of us – that side of us which we believe is more a consequence of our circumstance than anything else) and his bildungsromanaic moral ripening. And to a degree this comes through the ‘documentary’ footage of Wikus – through some kind of exasperation at the injustice of his unfavourable representation by the documentarians. But because we also harbour a significant antipathy for Wikus ourselves, we should prefer to say that the real force of our identification with Wikus comes from the cinematic narrative proper, which is built from a more monologic glue and where we witness the dawning of his self-deprivational compassion towards the aliens. Internal monologue ends up eclipsing the effects of District 9’s free indirect discourse. Similarly, where the abandonment of figures is another indication that a film might be a time-image, District 9’s abandonment is itself figural, which means that in an important sense the film is a movement-image predominantly.

88 Admittedly, we have mixed feelings for Jake also; we are, for instance, meant to be quietly ill-at- ease with the much of the deceptiveness and self-interest that colours Jake’s initial encounters with the Na’vi. 166 In one and the same stroke then, District 9 is both radically different from Avatar (more progressive), and just as orthodox. To understand the nature of this paradoxical relationship we must turn to the Large and Small Form action-images via a pit stop at Difference and Repetition. Deleuze’s account of the action-image in Cinema 1 sometimes perplexes in its unbalanced detailing of the Large and Small Forms respectively. A case in point would be Deleuze’s reference, in Cinema 1, to the Large Form action-image as “organic representation”. When he unpacks the Small Form, he describes it more or less as a “topological deformation” (166) of the Large Form. Though he does not say so, our contention is that the Small Form has its rough equivalence in the “orgiastic representation”, which is the Hegelian and Leibnizian conceptions of the infinite as limit, that Deleuze criticises in Difference and Repetition:

When representation discovers the infinite within itself, it no longer appears as organic representation but as orgiastic representation: it discovers within itself the limits of the organized; tumult, restlessness and passion underneath apparent calm. It rediscovers monstrosity. Henceforth it is no longer a question of a propitious moment which marks determination’s entrance into and exit from the concept in general, the relative maximum and minimum, the punctum proximum and the punctum remotem. (Difference and Repetition 42)

With orgiastic representation, we encounter difference at it maximum (Hegel) and difference at its minimum (Leibniz).

Matters concerning the classification of Avatar and District 9 as Large and Small are here complicated, or compounded, considerably, for it seems that the Large and Small each harbour the possibility of containing a further large and small within themselves:

[C]an it be said that we have exhausted all the resources of the Small and the Large in so far as they apply to difference? Or will we not rediscover them as an alternative characteristic of the extreme forms themselves? For it seems that the extreme can be defined by the infinite, in the small or in the large. The infinite, in this sense, even signifies the identity of the small and the large, the identity of extremes. (42)

Therefore, there are perhaps two primary points of view from which to comprehend these films as pair: the Avatar perspective, which absorbs District 9 into an 167 Aristotelian framework (while simultaneously marking District 9 as the crack capable of breaking the framework asunder), and the District 9 perspective (which we will focus on now), which re-colours Avatar in light of an understanding of “orgiastic representation”. From the perspective of District 9’s “orgiastic representation”, District 9’s difference takes on a Leibnizian character, whereas Avatar assumes its own orgiastic character in line with the Hegelian notion of contradiction as the limit, the maximum of difference, where the Aristotelian categories are opposed and then amalgamated and elevated in the creation of a new concept.

In Hegel, difference achieves its maximum limit in contradiction, with the negation and synthesis of the identity of the concept. This is the transcendent ‘birthing’ Jake undergoes at the close of Avatar, fully shedding the remainder of his attachment to human corporeality – one identity (or two oppositional identities) is fully outstripped, or contradicted by the power of a superior identity. The chaotic ground that is a feature of orgiastic representation is, in Avatar, a kind of bacchanalian reproduction of virtuality (in the non-Deleuzian sense) – a frenzied production of layers of conceptual-technological artifice. Avatar’s organic Aristotelianism is undone, in this sense, by its indifference to originality – by its postmodern romping with simulacra. Hegel’s understanding of the infinite is, unlike Leibniz’s, still based in essences (even though these are destined to be negated). This means that Hegel’s conception of difference-as-limit still leans a little more towards Aristotle than does Leibniz’s. Additionally, this means that Hegel’s conception, which is theological in nature, is more in line with a utopian program, where the orgiastic ground is still the determinacy and actuality of contradictory autonomies.

In Leibniz, on the other hand, difference passes away into the infinitely small, which is the virtuality of indeterminacy that grounds District 9’s dystopian representation. Infinitely small differences are insignificant and inessential in the sense that they do not impact variables and their reciprocal determination in actual affairs. By the time we reach the domain of essences, categories, and negative difference, we cannot see or pinpoint the inessential, infinitely small differences from which they are delivered. When Wikus plays with the canister that, in turn,

168 contaminates him, this is a chance encounter, but it is not an infinitely small difference. Infinitely small differences are those differences so small that they prefigure the film’s conscious representation – for instance, this could be the ‘how?’ or ‘why?’ that conditions the arrival of the prawns onto the planet. It is the heteronomous chance, or unexplained circumstances, that ground and frame the film’s Small Form representation; it is the difference-as-limit encapsulated in the final mission of Christopher Johnson and his son escaping District 9 and vanishing into space – difference vanishes into the inessential unknown.

A last crucial point to bear in mind in this meditation on the applicability of Hegel’s and Leibniz’s ideas of the infinite to Avatar and District 9 is that while both philosophers manage to escape the identity-prioritising Aristotelian model of “organic representation”, Deleuze nevertheless reckons that “infinite representation does not free itself from the principal of identity as a presupposition of representation” (emphasis in original Time-Image 49). So even though we are able to muse at both films as embodiments of an orgiastic vision, we must concede that orgiastic representation is nevertheless not successful at realising difference-in- itself – its drive towards one of either the maximum infinite as contradiction or the smallest infinite as vice-diction is still confined as limitation: “[o]rgiastic representation can discover the infinite within itself only by allowing finite determination to subsist: better, by saying the infinite of that finite determination itself, by representing it not as having vanished or disappeared, but of vanishing and on the point of disappearing, thus as also being engendered in the infinite” (43-4). Even though District 9 in particular – more so than Avatar (because it is Small Form action-image) – does try to think the outside, it nevertheless subordinates this thinking to behavioural coordinates, and smothers time by smoke-screening it with its own dystopic neuroses.

Where, or how, then, to undertake to encounter real difference-in-itself? Of course, Cinema 2: The Time-Image maps this possibility in cinematic terms. The time-image has its own complex varieties and permutations, from hyalosigns (crystal-images), to the two types of chronosigns, which involve either “the order of time” (“the simultaneity of peeks of the present” or “the coexistence of sheets of the past”) and “time as series” (“becoming as potentialization, as series of powers”

169 [275]). This latter chronosign, never entirely divorced from the prior, has as its power the Nietzschean “power of the false” (puissance de faux), which works to elicit real thought from its ordinary stupefaction and its fealty to truth by instead expressing perpetual metamorphoses as the disillusionment of identity. Part of this also includes thinking a “problematics”, rather than an “axiomatics”, as Deleuze articulates in Cinema 2:

Far from restoring knowledge, or the internal certainty that it lacks, to thought, the problematic deduction puts the unthought into thought, because it takes away all its interiority to excavate an outside in it, an irreducible reverse-side, which consumes its substance. Thought finds itself taken over by the exteriority of a ‘belief’, outside any interiority of a mode of knowledge. (175)

Real thought involves the acknowledgment of the power of an outside that tunnels within – or the acknowledgement of the power of heteronomy. In this sense it is similar to dystopian forms. However, real thought does not judgmentally frame the power of heteronomy as a dreaded projection. Instead, it comes as a willingness, or openness towards chance experimentation with the involuntary processes that precede consciousness (or the “passive syntheses”). And needless to say, cinema is not the only art form capable of eliciting receptivity to the unthought within thought.

Deleuze’s cinematic thinking is so valuable because it forces us to rethink representation, it frees thinking from staunch linguistic, and other, models or images of thought, and reaches for an “image of a thought without image” (see Daniela Voss 28-9). But where does this leave literature? Is literature then, by dint of its linguistic form, bound by the representational illusions from which cinema is potentially liberated? If we have only looked at movement-images in this part, it should lead us naturally to the next part as a kind of literary time-image.89 Rather than the predictability that is an inherent feature of Avatar-District 9 as movies that, in every sense and at every level, use comfortable, well-rehearsed tropes and metaphors of utopian-dystopian thinking, in the final part we look at poetry that

89 This thesis circumvents the relation-image or mental-image, which corresponds to Peirce’s “thirdness”; Deleuze finds valuable exemplifications of the relation-image in the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

170 refuses to pander to the speciousness of commonsense, instead asking how we think thought’s real conditions. This will be, of necessity, a disorienting and demanding encounter – what Deleuze often declares a “violent” act – because this poetry tries to demilitarise processes of thinking and learning by rote, consuming almost all coordinates of familiarity, boasting no form of epistemological mastership, swearing only an apprenticeship to plasticity – to an hic et nunc that deterritorialises as quickly as it materialises. We turn our focus from what Deleuze names an organic, kinetic regime, to a crystalline, or chronic regime.

Part Three

“Aesthetics in Welcome Crisis”90: Kate Fagan’s The Long Moment as Transversal, New-Lyricist, Post-/Language Poetry

The question of futurity is today often framed through our climatological and geological predicaments by way of the precarious anthropocene. Australian poet- musician Kate Fagan’s 2002 collection of poetry, The Long Moment, invites confrontation with the radical unpredictability of such far-from-equilibrium zones, with the aesthetic crisis that runs coterminous to the climatological, and other, crises. Her project, in this sense, is incongruous with much contemporary eco- poetry, which grounds itself in the idea of a homeostatic model that assumes the bio-system can absorb and recover quickly from fluctuations, and which presumes that the bio-system’s processes are reversible. Such ideas have poetic consequence, they foster an aesthetics that is predominantly comprehensive, legible, and loyal to a particular system (for eco-poets this is sometimes a pseudo-Gaian system). Such

90 Kate Fagan, The Long Moment 24. 171 reversible systems do exist, but only as pockets in a larger process of evolution and entropy. Far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics teaches us that at the limit of a system, strange and random things can happen. For instance, a new type of order may erupt out of chaos.91 Or additionally, as Fagan writes: “[t]he smallest actions [may] return storms of consequences” (8). That is, minute fluctuations, which in equilibrium are digested back into the system to maintain its habitual patterns are, in a far-from-equilibrium state, highly volatile, and can direct the system towards an entirely new and unforeseeable mode of functioning. And far-from-equilibrium, we will argue in this part, is The Long Moment’s predominant topographical provocation.

But this is also far from its only artistic provocation, which is evidenced in the modest bundle of criticism that concentrates on this collection, and which positions it, for the most part (though, perhaps, in less explicit terms), as a complex, twin lyricist-postmodernist collection. This diagnosis is, in itself, progressive, considering that generally, critiques of Australian poetry tend to reintroduce and puppeteer the weary polemic between lyricism and postmodernism. Taking its preponderant readings as lyricist-postmodernist into account then, and by no means seeking to negate these readings substitutively, this part will show that new materialism can be shot through with postmodernism. The Long Moment’s radical experimentation with becoming, with the materialisation of “one hundred- thousand” (The Long Moment 59) ‘lines of flight’ works to actualise reams of possible readings that might, for instance, interpret the collection as Language poetry (an extreme linguistic preoccupation), or as an exceptionally uninterpretable new materialism (Deleuzoguattarian). In this part we illustrate a fold that brings a transcendental postmodern exterior – in the form of Language poetry – face-to-face

91 In Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, Ilya Prigogine (who won a Nobel prize for his work on the second law of thermodynamics), and Isabelle Stengers, write: “A system far from equilibrium may be described as organized not because it realizes a plan alien to elementary activities, or transcending them, but, on the contrary, because the amplification of a microscopic fluctuation occurring at the ‘right moment’ resulted in favoring one reaction path over a number of other equally possible paths. Under certain circumstances, therefore, the role played by individual behavior can be decisive. More generally, the ‘overall’ behavior cannot in general be taken as dominating in any way the elementary processes constituting it. Self-organization processes in far- from-equilibrium conditions correspond to a delicate interplay between chance and necessity, between fluctuations and deterministic laws. We expect that near a bifurcation, fluctuations or random elements would play an important role, while between bifurcations the deterministic aspects would become dominant” (176). 172 with immanent new materialism. We show that this poetry fends off the cheap seduction of a metrical space-time through its experimentation as a literary time- image, or, as a “Body-without-Organs”.

Critical Response Thus Far

The Australian antipodean context has been a predominant lure of reception for Fagan’s poetry, where she has been unpacked as an exemplary figure of what David McCooey dubs “the new (Australian) lyricism” (2005, 2007). 92 In ‘Surviving Australian Poetry: The New Lyricism’, McCooey cuts to the bone of coextensive contemporary poetical manifestations that seem to incarnate a “recombinant poetics”93 in the face of Australian poetry’s symptomatically-anomalous publishing and marketing predicament of being dually “dangerous” and “endangered”. McCooey flags three tropes as distillations of this new lyricism: “worldliness, the uncanny and lyricism” (66-7). This ‘lyricism’ is a resuscitated lyricism, always- already mindful of the follies of the traditional lyric mode. This ‘uncanny’, as a dilemma of the proper and the natural, remembers the question of Australia, and recognises that beginnings (including colonial ones) are phantasmal immaculate conceptions, necessarily vexed and untidy. And of the last of his tropes, ‘worldliness’, McCooey says that in contemporary Australian poetry, “[t]he old arguments about British or American influence seem passé. […] [T]he contemporary Australian poet is attracted to the ‘recombinant poetic’ that can be found through any number of antecedents not determined by nationality” (66). If these poets and their poetry are no longer inspired by an image of Australia, and especially if this adventure is a tactical one designed to evoke other lines of determination, then there is some irony in the criticism that now compulsively recollects them anew under a ‘State of Australia’ tag, and this is mainly where Fagan’s poetry finds itself.

92 Most (though not all) of the criticism referenced in this part is at least eleven years old. It remains relevant because it constitutes the published discourse on The Long Moment, which remains quantitatively lean. 93 McCooey acknowledges that this phrase is borrowed from Michael Brennan and Peter Minter’s Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets (Sydney: Paper Bark, 2000). 173 Of course, McCooey’s project aims to describe and account for Australian poetry and the way it “survives” (in many ways because of) its vulnerable publishing and marketing predicament. It makes sense that the question of Australia should not escape his criticism, and nor should it be jettisoned from the criticism of others, necessarily. Like McCooey, Stuart Cooke, in ‘Eventing: Wandering Through the Physiology of Australian Narrative’, reads Fagan’s poem ‘Ecologue’ (from The Long Moment) for its particularly Australian – but this time – “post- Romantic” piquancy: “If the voice [of Ecologue] seems shaky or uncertain it is because it is speaking of an ecology of uncertainty, where the meanings of the landscape are unclear, and the light the speaker sheds on it is only partially effective” (121). Cooke argues for a “proper Australian poetic” that is not bogged down by its colonial filiation with Britain. He draws on the contrast that Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra conceptualise between an “expatriate syntax” and a “nomadic syntax”. Cooke conflates Australia, along with the rich Australian poetic exemplified in poetry like Fagan’s, with the fluidity of a “nomadic syntax”.94

But it is not only the ‘new lyricist’ or ‘post-Romantic’ readings as endemically Australian phenomena that have claimed Fagan’s poetry. McCooey again, in an earlier review of The Long Moment titled ‘Salty Pleasures’, reflects simultaneously on Fagan’s poetry beside what were three other newly published collections of (again, Australian) “postmodern” poetry by Alison Croggon, Jill Jones, and Kate Lilley. His reading positions itself as yielding to what he sets up as the surprisingly- enjoyable aesthetic dimensions of their works: “[w]hen people complain about ‘postmodernism’ in poetry, they are usually, for all their talk of form and technique, strangely indifferent to its intense aestheticism. […] For all that Language poets and others press their political case, pleasure is the guilty secret of postmodern poetry” (56). Albeit nodding as he does to the postmodern and/or Language poetry trajectory of filiation, McCooey’s more-shrouded point here is to read the lyric back into the flavourless theoretical stodge of postmodernism. That is to say,

94 Cooke’s argument seems to be a more polarised echo of Michael Brennan’s in ‘“A Moment Along the Way”: A Venture in Publishing Australian Poetry’ (2005). Himself inspired by David Malouf’s claim in ‘Made in England: Australia’s British Inheritance’, that the “venture we call ‘Australia’ was always an experiment”, Brennan makes even more of this conflation between Australia and tropes of “provisionality”, “mobility”, “improvisation” and “freedom” by clocking its resonance with contemporary Australian poetry and its scene of action. 174 ‘postmodernist’ is the premise from which McCooey then apprehends not the real as linguistic prison-house, but atypically, the “real as nature”: “[Fagan’s] theorising has a Romantic quality, seen not only in her interest in romantic love, but also in her approach to the real as nature, even if the natural world is always approached from a position of loss and nostalgia (or rather, especially because of that approach)” (57). McCooey then quotes Fagan: “[w]e continue to occupy this world, it appears in erratic scrawls, patient and actual. Where nothing refers to nothing” (The Long Moment 11). These Fagan lines are impressive because they can be read in what might seem to be mutually exclusive ways. Their performance of straightforwardness cleverly portrays less their own referential stance than they indulge the contextual literacy or bias of their reader. Thus, the fragment can be read an existential statement of supreme nothingness (where both “we” and “this world” that she mentioned in the previous line, though “actual”, are nevertheless and more profoundly, nothings, which ever only relay their own superfluity). Or if you prefer, it can be read as a claim for referential frenzy (everything refers) and this in turn could either be a vitalist claim of extreme presencing (difference differing), or one grounded on deficit (identity differing). McCooey adopts the latter of the second interpretation, reading reference as a logic of “loss and nostalgia”, utilising the fragment as evidence of the romantic quality of The Long Moment.

This part of the thesis, crystallized, reaches for those other vitalist, affirmative, and realist possibilities that are perhaps the less apparent offering of these lines. Alison Croggon comes close to pinning this down in her review of Fagan’s second book of poetry, First Light: “Fagan seeks to unmake alienation: to re-perceive the intimate connections between the minute and the immense, the personal and the impersonal, the felt and the thought, the natural world and human beings, life and death” (unpaginated). In an appropriately “uncanny” way, McCooey’s ‘new lyricism’ lounges in the very fabric of the approach that we are here hinting at, without quite synching with it. When describing ‘new lyricism’ he says that “[i]t is musical and so forth, but generally in a more self-conscious way; it often has a kind of muscularity about it, even a toughness that is bedded within the lyrical expression […]” (2005 69), and he dovetails this “toughness” with a “metatextuality” belonging to the many operations of postmodernism. We are

175 proposing that (at least in Fagan’s case) there is another way to register this toughness, this muscularity, and that is as a materialism.95

Fagan’s own critical passions, as tantamount to her poetic portraiture, are indicative of her fascination with a materialist aesthetics. In ‘Distant Lines – Some Thoughts on Australian Line and Space’, Fagan flits through some poetic snippets by Gig Ryan and Alejandra Pizarnik to pincer out the materialist urges guiding their formal utilisation of line and space. Fagan tells us that:

Line is a term of arrangement, a way to think about the spatiality of a poem. Line is different from a line or the line. It tells us about a poem’s height, its volume, what happens between lines, between stanzas; how the poem is a three-dimensional thing and how it gets it thingness. In short, line shows us something about a poem’s place. It drags us off the flat page and into material time. (11)

The two-dimensional poem for Fagan is an itchy, stuffy, and uncomfortable logic. She notices its ‘scratch and sniff’ potential. By excoriating, tooth-and-nail, some of poetry’s formal mechanisms (like ‘line’ here) she prompts its smells to spill forth, making space for awareness of multi-dimensional manifestation.

Working and preserving these pungent aromas (as the raw awareness of materiality) in yet another essay – ‘“Originals of Revisable Originals”: Sampling and Composting in the Poetry of Peter Minter, Paul Hardacre, and Kate Lilley’ – Fagan tills the miscellaneous topoi of Jed Rasula’s This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry, turning (or reading) into his “regenerative ferment” three contemporary Australian poets – Minter, Hardacre, and Lilley – as exemplary of the compilatory poetical mode “in which origins are prolific and source materials resist classification along ‘stable’ lines of heredity” (67).

95 A materialist aspect is by no means a cut and dried quality. Signaling The Long Moment’s materialism demands setting it apart from other contemporary poetries that also think and practice theories of materiality, such as Concrete poetry, Conceptual poetry (sometimes called Visual poetry), Sound poetry, Haptic poetry, OuLiPo, and Flarf. The Material Poem: An E-Anthology of Text-Based Art and Inter-Media Writing (2007), edited-curated by James Stuart, is an ebook that exhibits many of Fagan’s collaborators, colleagues and creative contemporaries – artists that orbit in some of the same academic/social circles as her, and who draw on certain notions of materiality that are quite different from her own. The materialism that we focus on in this part is a Deleuzoguattarian one.

176 This composting-collagist aspect of this type of materialism – that is, the acknowledgment of the prolificacy of interlaced strings and clots of inheritance, whose plucking, strumming, or bursting effects retroactive resonances that continuously change their contemporary consistency (and where the few well-plied “stable lines” self-make their own critical glut through this reinforced “stability”) is exhibited in another of Fagan’s essays: ‘“A Fluke? [N]ever!”: Reading Chris Edwards’. Fagan here considers Australian Edwards’ jesting poem, A Fluke: A Mistranslation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Un Coup De Dés…’ With Parallel French Pretext, as well as his more recent volume, People of the Earth (a collection which includes the former poem reprinted) by way of a constellation of Modernist writers – including Stéphane Mallarmé, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams – themselves variously clued in to the writing forms of ancient Egyptian, Mayan, and Chinese . She begins by examining Christopher Brennan’s risky but enthusiastic early Australian (1897) Francophilic exposition of Mallarmé’s formally innovative ‘Un Coup De Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard’ (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance) – itself goadingly titled Prose-Verse-Poster-Algebraic- Symbolico-Riddle-Musicopoematographoscpe and Pocket Musicopoematographoscope – as a precursor to Edwards’ poem. She yields to what she admits is a wonderfully juvenile or distracted point of ingress into Brennan’s work, which is that “it lay sequestered in the Chaplin Collection of the National Library of Australia” (1) for some eighty four years before finally enjoying the light of publication.

Playing with those pre-talkies, Chaplin-synonymous attributes of “silence” and “comedy” (and its rough splicing onto an antipodean context), Fagan implies parallels between the visual work of the literatures of Brennan (and, in turn, the compositing work of Edwards), and cinematic images. Although this reference to film is more a clever way that Fagan bookends her article than its main substance and focus, it is an intriguing way to register the graphic musicality of Edwards’ poem, which includes calligraphic and hieroglyphic imagistic installations. She calls Edwards (who happens, in addition to being a poet, also to work as a graphic designer and freelance editor) “a filmic sculptor who tricks visual fragments into new entities”; his poems are “grammatically seamless, and [their] motion from

177 scene to scene is subtle and kaleidoscopic. He rarely deploys the self conscious jump-cuts of some of his precursors, including quite a few poems written under the mantle of Language Poetry […]” (8). Fagan’s references to a vocabulary of cinema (as well as visual art – “sculptor”) in describing Brennan’s and Edwards’ literary novelty also works to coax forth the synesthetic-aesthetic quality of their poetries. Fagan does not herself comment on this, or make an explicit claim for this synesthetic aspect of their poetries. And yet, her analysis of their poetries excites their synesthetic potential, and itself works to enkindle various critical synesthetic experiences. In this case, critcism or poetry acts as a stimulus (if it has just the right materialist ingredients) that induces a fully haptic and visceral laspse between the experience of the mediums of literature and film.

Strictly speaking, synaesthesia describes the physiological phenomenon where an exterior stimulus that normally effects one internal sense region gets confused with, or interpreted by, an entirely different internal sense or cognitive region, such as seeing alphanumeric colours – that is, seeing individual colours that coincide with different letters and numbers. In this way, another particular paradox that Fagan works to tease out in this essay perhaps better exemplifies the synesthetic quality of the poetry she examines. Fagan illuminates how the musicality of Edwards’ poems comes from its silence – or rather, its comedic silence, which is a mixture of astute comedy (punning, contorting secure lines of reference and meaning and so on), and a graphic scoring that exceeds the delimitations of its own ostensible markings. Fagan turns to Derrida’s reading of Mallarmé in Dissemination, in which he argues that the bare, or non-written aspect of a page of literature – its “blanks”, or “whites” – are as vital to its meaning production as are its written components. What Derrida, by virtue of Fagan, names “operative silences” and “‘non-phonetic’ excesses of language” (2) are the dynamising factors that further sonorise Edwards’ already-musical imagistic writing. Fagan explains:

Derrida offers a series of formal devices in which the potential energies of alphabets might be seen in moments of kinetic and diacritical transformation: punctuation, figure, spacing. Here are a poet’s tools of observation and fathoming. Here are points of inscription where language and philosophy are at work in a dual mime, Chaplin and Pierrot. Language in the hands of the mime ceases to bear a transparent relation to a

178 world of things and becomes slippery, manifold and visual, something Christopher Brennan seems to have understood […] The best collagists and parodists mine the spaces between materials – words, ideas, things, diacritics – in order to render them anew, estranged and humming with kinesis. (2)

If, according to Derrida by way of Fagan, “punctuation, figure, spacing” are some of the devices that poets work with in order to take in and engage the world in unique ways, then synesthetic-aesthetic experimentation would be one of the poet’s tools perhaps more-exclusively aligned towards tinkering with a reader’s processes of perception and cognition. Playing with enabling a synesthetic experience for readers is also about tunnelling into “the spaces between”, and forging new proprioceptive-cognitive connections.96

Though she does not experiment symbolically-typographically like Edwards, most of what Fagan has to appreciate in his poetry is at work in her own. Unlike Edwards’ poems though, the filmic kinesis of The Long Moment comes more, perhaps, through a phenomenological self-consciousness that is akin to the perception-image’s perception-in-things. In the Edinburgh Critical Guide to Contemporary Poetry, Nerys Williams’ reading of The Long Moment includes recognition that the poetry “perform[s] ‘phenomenologically’ or establishes a perception of perception in the poetry” (121). Williams also shines an important light on Charles Olsen as progenitor of a certain kind of poetic musicality (the rhythm of the breath rather than the “metronome” of form) that informs Fagan’s practice (121). In this sense, Olsen’s high regard – in championing his ‘Projective Verse’ – for the typewriter as an instrument well-designed to hone poetry’s musical potential (“It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had” [Olsen unpaginated]), means that Fagan’s poetry is graced (by Olsen’s account) with a

96 Aleksandra Mroczko-Wąsowicz and Danko Nikolić argue that is better understood as “ideasthesia”, describing the way a sensory stimulous in infancy is unable to be conceptually accounted for without the requisite knowledge to be able to do so. The sensory stimulous therefore manifests a space that is not sensorily ambiguous but semantically so – it produces a “semantic vacuum” from which the individual may forge its own coordinates in line with another sense- perception (2014 unpainated). 179 particular musicality which is quashed in Edwards’ embracement of a graphic radicalism. That is, Fagan conforms to the non-symbolic typographical limit that Edwards’ poetry flamboyantly transgresses.

The musicality and the phenomenological performativity that Williams recognises in Fagan’s poetry also feeds into the synesthetic-aesthetic component of Fagan’s own materialism. Because Fagan’s materialism, as manifest in her poetry and poetics, rubs against itself, or is concerned with its own processes and consciousnesses, an intense charge or multi-stimulation allows her to experiment with slippage between different sensory and cognitive loops, and so too between the processing of different artistic mediums. Further, we can see now how Fagan’s acknowledgment and appreciation of heterodox origins and materials in the compilatory-composting poetry of Minter, Hardacre, and Lilley also aids and figures into her own materialism and its aspect of producing synaesthesia – that is, by embracing heterodox heredities, Fagan’s poetry becomes more creatively entangled, and is thereby better positioned strategically to experiment with different triggers that might induce the crossing of particular sensory and cognitive wires.

Though the materialist drive remains a strangely critically untapped, or more surreptitious aspect of her work, other of Fagan’s scholarly and artistic preoccupations are more apparent in the criticism she pens. For instance, her interest in Australian postmodern poetics manifests in her collaborative reading (along with her partner Peter Minter) of John Tranter’s The Alphabet Murders. And another joint project with Minter and John Kinsella saw the three poets edit a special edition of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities on ‘Ecopoetics and Pedagogies’, testifying to Fagan’s knowledge of aspects of contemporary ecocritical issues. Although the environment, music, postmodernism, poetics, and modernism are some key reoccurring themes in her own critical analyses, they are generally broached with an eye towards a materialism that can in large part be considered Deleuzoguattarian.

In addition to illustrating Fagan’s own materialist interests, there are other pragmatic reasons for wishing to usher audiences towards this Guattariodeleuzian approach to her poetry. In A Thousand Plateaus, Guattari and Deleuze sometimes

180 use a hydraulic model to detail the very complex intra-play between smooth and striated space (geological concepts that are given complex (meta-)/physical expression by Guattari and Deleuze). The hydraulic model, associated with smoothing processes and heterogeneity, is itself one of the characteristics of a “minor science”, which Deleuze and Guattari nominally oppose to the classical mechanical positivism of “major” or “Royal science”.97 One important feature of such a model is that it assumes the ontological primacy of flow over stratification:

[W]hat is primary is an absolute deterritorialization, an absolute line of flight, however complex or multiple – that of the plane of consistency or body without organs (the Earth, the absolutely deterritorialized). This absolute deterritorialization becomes relative only after stratification occurs on that plane or body: It is the strata that are always residue, not the opposite. […] There is a perpetual immanence of absolute deterritorialization within relative deterritorialization. (63)

By tapping into the hydraulic model, Fagan’s aesthetic meditations are “becomings” whose relative de- and re-territorialisations, by turns, prove amenability (and, occasionally, resistance) to each of the critical readings thus outlined; a new materialist approach does not leave the new lyricist, post-romantic, postmodern, or question-of-the-nation interpretations by the wayside. Rather it asks, and prompts us to ask, how are they born, and how do they fizzle?

In fact, we would go so far as to say that Fagan’s experimentation is romanticist, lyricist, modernist poetry, as much as it is post-romantic, post-lyrical, postmodernist poetry. But again, it is as if these aspects of the poetry come at us as minor cells, or as small tissues of logic, whose permeable membranes are connected to a more powerful play of flow and flux. With regards to lyricism, for instance, Fagan confirms in a Five Bells interview with Jeffrey Side:

I definitely think of my poems as lyrics, they are sonic architectures, responses in language to the world’s materials, and they fall somewhere on the broad map of lyrical poetry. The word lyric carries traces of its Greek root lyrikos, from the song of the mythical lyre played by Apollo. So lyrical poets are writing in the bright shadow of music every time they begin. To me, lyricism is a sense of heightened awareness to

97 “There is a kind of science, or treatment of science, that seems very difficult to classify, whose history is even difficult to follow. […this minor science] uses a hydraulic model, rather than being a theory of solids treating fluids as a special case […]” (ATP 398). 181 the music of relations between things – whether words, ideas, places, objects, people, or states of mind. Lyricism is born of music but also creates it. I always have some kind of musical riff playing in my inner ear when writing poetry, and hope this opens my work to the acoustic promise of words. Words are alive in the way we speak or sing or sound them, so music is always a huge part of their orbit of meaning. (16)

As a commercial folk singer, raised in a family and a community of politically- engaged blues and folk musicians, lyricism and its promise of musicality, enjoyment, rhythm and synthesis, appear to be powerful parts of Fagan’s identity and artistic practice. But this identity does not prohibit Fagan from scrutinising lyricism, and keeping a firm critical eye on the potential squeeze of its tendency towards prosaicness. In ‘return to a new physics’ (from The Long Moment), Fagan maintains this reservation: “lyric interjects / demanding specific / impatient approval // quick like junk, / memorial about position / and meaning” (25).

Equally as important to her writerly identity as this lyricist-post-lyricist aspect, however, is her Language poetry inheritance, which we will be naming her postmodern aspect.98 Significantly, Fagan wrote her PhD dissertation on the poetry and poetics of Lyn Hejinian, who is now considered to be one of the seminal figures of the founding Language poetry movement. For her own part, crucially, Fagan doubts certain attempts to constellate Language poetry, including those that routinely tack Hejinian to this contingent cluster.99 “It is extremely common”, writes Fagan in her doctoral thesis, “for Hejinian to be read first as a Language poet and second as anything else – a dilemma calling attention to the difficult join between theory and praxis” (11). It reads something like an accidental reparation then – and no less a product of temporal and contextual flux – that there are only inklings in the scholarship on Fagan that she is a Language poet – a review of Fagan’s more-recent First Light, by Libby Hart, makes mention of the Language poetry connection (1), and of course there is McCooey’s brief signaling. Paul Dawson more aptly names Fagan a post-Language poet (33), and registers

98 This oversimplification we can justify mainly in light of Language poetry’s routine appointment in anthologies of postmodernism. 99 Fagan writes: “One of my key methodological intentions in this thesis is to disentangle Hejinian’s poetical and philosophical project from narratives that relegate and interpret her work according to pre-established and manifesto-like lists of vocabularies, compositional techniques, intentions, and historical occurrences that often serve to delimit a particular grouping – Language poetry – within American poetics” (10). 182 additionally the resemblance that McCooey’s ‘new lyricism’ shares with the American critic Mark Wallace’s definition of a post-Language poetry (33).

More likely too, there is only a trickle of criticism that appreciates Fagan in this post-/Language poetry vein, quite simply because the commentary on Fagan’s poetry is (especially compared to Hejinian) so slim. With all of this in mind, we opt not to come at Fagan in a way that echoes her own judicious approach to the study of Hejinian, which gives a wide berth to the Language poetry classification and broaches Hejinian instead by means of the variegated “forms and compositional methods that guide Hejinian’s poetics of encounter…” (doctoral thesis ii). Instead we place The Long Moment smack in a Language poetry context, and play up the strong postmodern characteristics that this school of poetry engages. Allowing a post-/Language poetry reading to become a new materialist experience works to productively derange certain misguided definitions of the two cultural theories in which they are pitted against each other, and assumed to be mutually exclusive: linguistic-constructivism against fibrous matter. Yet Fagan’s poetry fuses them – though not by way of some simple conjugation that renounces evolution, contradiction, nuance, or the play of conceptual autonomy. Under her hand, and like The Long Moment’s other sometimes-inimical qualities, problems and hostilities are probed and worked, spurring varied and knotty readings. So, persuaded already by the mixed readings of Fagan’s poetry, persuaded especially by McCooey’s (and, importantly here, Claire Nashar’s) inclusive ‘new lyricism’ take on her poetry, the following investigative experimentation rockets his ‘worldliness’ motif off into outer-space (inoculating it by injecting into it a good dose of another of its strains – the uncanny), figuring it not only as a kind of internationalism that “puts the designation ‘Australian’ under numerous creative tensions” (Thirty Australian Poets xvii), but as a type of cosmicality or universality that puts the world, the earth, and being into creative turmoil.

The Long Moment as Post-/Language Poetry

Troubled by the naivety of the proliferative workshop poetry emerging as a travesty of the American Confessionalist poetry of the 1950s and 1960s, Language poetry is

183 part of a reactionary trend that gained momentum in the 1970s and 1980s to exploit complex poststructuralist theory in a process of re-intellectualising and re- politicising the creative realm of poetry. Due largely to its poststructuralist directives and corollary fealties to heterogeneity and deconstruction, Language poetry is most comfortably rendered through a description of what it is not (or the ideals it reacts against), than through what it is. By its own deconstructive standards then, Language poetry may amount to nothing more than a fictional idealisation, the ghost of coherence projected belatedly onto a series of linguistic experiments that never intended and would always resist consolidation into a categorical movement or school. Thankfully, as Lee Bartlett notes in ‘What is “Language Poetry”?’: “For poets as well as critics the idea of a school is often a useful fiction” (741). Perhaps those who benefit most from the idea of a consolidated Language poetry school are those unfamiliar readers who, if widely-read, cannot help but apprehend a series of remarkably similar tendencies manifesting amid a mass of notoriously difficult poetical texts. Of course, Language poetry is not only a “useful fiction” – such a charge downplays the profound creative and theoretical collaboration occurring between a group of poets who clearly share a crucial concern to question and to reinvent the inadequacies and indulgencies of language-as-artifice – who are all absorbed in exploring and making manifest the socio-political ramifications of language as an inescapable signifier or power structure.

Fagan’s The Long Moment is fascinated by linguistic dilemmas and the politics of cultural production in a manner consistent with much Language poetry. Consider the following excerpt taken from the poem ‘(november)’ in the series ‘Calendar’, which opens Fagan’s collection:

Hyperrealism arranged in parataxis. Sharp coriander, its immaculate perimeters. It is accepted that no story has a beginning, a middle or an end. Three floors of a warehouse shaken with traffic. A history of pages flung into the air, patterning the shift. Our speech starts to reinterpret mathematics as we sink into artificially warm water. (10)

Language poetry often prioritises tropes like metonymy, synecdoche, and parataxis, over metaphor, which it broadly associates with the naïve realisms of the various Modernist poetries that it reacts against, including Confessionalist poetry, Black

184 Mountain poetry, Beat poetry and New Formalist poetry. In contrast to metaphor, metonymy avoids the superimposable window-up-to-reality logic by operating contiguously, proffering what some Language poets might call a more genuine experience of reality – a kind of “hyperrealism”. Or as the first sentence of the excerpt suggests, parataxis – by the same token – stifles easy comprehension. It thereby invites polysemy and encourages the reader to participate in the creation of meanings. Notice that the second sentence is itself arranged paratactically, confounding clear decipherability, which too seems compounded by the obscurity of the subject matter – that is, “coriander” as the object which is described as sharp and (somewhat curiously) marked by “immaculate perimeters”. It could be that Fagan is here illustrating Language poetry’s emphasis on the ‘materiality of the signifier’ – a comment then on the shape of the word ‘coriander’ itself, or its spoken sound as ‘sharp’ and with ‘immaculate perimeters’. It could also be that Language poetry’s significant Steinian resonances are here kicking in, in what may very well be an experiment with the possibility of complete referential severance.

Although Gertrude Stein is one of the generative thinkers who inspired much of Language poetry’s experimentation with non-referentiality, these practices can also be imputed to certain embryonic left-wing political convictions. In 1984, well- known Language poet Ron Silliman wrote in Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World:

What happens when a language moves toward and passes into a capitalist stage of development is an anaesthetic transformation of the perceived tangibility of the word, with corresponding increases in its descriptive and narrative capacities, preconditions for the invention of “realism,” the optical illusion of reality in capitalist thought. These developments are tied directly to the nature of reference in language, which under capitalism is transformed (deformed) into referentiality. (125)

It is fascinating that in a book with a title (Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World) that seems rhetorically geared to denounce social constructivism under the aegis of realism – a title that could easily be mistaken as the label on some environmentalist literature – actually suggests that realism and referentiality are the bedfellows of commodity fetishism. So where the Language poetry and the Nature Writing of the early 1980s both held the commodity fetishism of liberal

185 capitalism accountable in some capacity at least for various fraudulences and social atrocities, Language poetry tried to shield itself from the referentiality that it recognised as the sinister fuel of Capitalism’s consumerist engine, whereas the Nature writers of the same generation were lunging after a realist mode as their primary weapon against the relativity of social constructivism, or against a cavalier ‘smoke-and-mirrors’ postmodernism.

Fagan’s poetry suggests that she holds similar left-wings views, but she neither aborts nor clings to a pristine mimesis, seemingly cognisant that, as Marjorie Perloff claims: “writing that is fragmented, asyntactic, nonsensical, etc. – can be just as fetishized as anything else” (162). When, in the last sentence of the excerpt, Fagan writes: “Our speech starts to reinterpret mathematics as we sink into artificially warm water”, we can discern both a recognition of the procedural propensities for which Language poetry is now renowned, whereby the utilisation of highly systematic mathematical arrangements as formulaic guides has become indexical of the movement’s endeavour to highlight process over product. In addition to signaling Language poetry’s propensity to foreground artifice, Fagan is perhaps also shrewdly intimating that Language poetry now risks sinking into the dangerously comfortable “warm water” of its own conventionalised proceduralism.

Nonetheless, in the first section of Fagan’s collection, titled ‘Calendar’ (from which this excerpt is taken), every new page and poem is designated a calendrical month of the year, starting from April (harking back to T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’100) and continuing consecutively until December. By ulitising this form, by employing the calendar’s chronological logic as a regulatory apparatus, the poetry announces its constructedness. Granting, however, that this section adheres to what Lisa Samuels calls Language poetry’s “motivated proceduralism” (107), the rest of the poetry in this collection is not as overtly systematic – it is all, for instance, free verse. Some of the poetry is narrative driven and restless with the obsessive reiteration of language-centered fixations, decidedly turning to materialist themes and subject matter. When on page eleven Fagan writes: “We continue to occupy this world, it appears in erratic scrawls, patient and actual. Where nothing

100 From ‘The Wasteland’: “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire…” (Poetry Foundation unpaginated). 186 refers to nothing” (11), we could imagine this to be lifted from the poetry of some well-known contemporary Nature writer.

It is these features of Fagan’s poetry that prompt a reconsideration of its classification as Language poetry, inasmuch as we are able to concede that such a classification had bearing to begin with. In ‘Definitions in Process, Definitions as Process / Uneasy Collaborations: Language and Postlanguage Poetries’, self- proclaimed post-Language poet, Mark Wallace, provides a valuable “provisional” definition of post-Language poetry. Wallace suggests that there are two significant features of almost all post-Language poetry: hybridity and resistance to definition. Fagan’s compilation accords with these entwined features – through embracing heterogeneous forms and procedures The Long Moment is remarkably difficult to define and approach. Not only does Fagan utilise composite forms, but some of her poetry in this collection actually engages an aesthetic and a thematic that skirts counterintuitively around anything that might cogently be called Language poetry. This, according to Wallace, is another feature of post-Language emergence: “[P]ostlanguage poets have tended to use genres and forms often explicitly rejected by some language writers […] without returning to the sort of naive justifications of those elements that continue to be a feature of more mainstream American poetry” (unpaginated). Pivotal to post-Language excursions into new and different formal environments – or rather its various returns to established forms – is a concurrent renovation of theoretical or contextual cause – a return with a difference, then.

Though Wallace makes mention of the theoretical or contextual justifications that accompany many post-Language reversions to previous forms, this ‘eternal return’ often manifests through various attempts to dislodge the poetry from its intensely theoretical practices, as he writes:

For the language poets at the time of their emergence, literary theory was a marginalized discourse that freed them to ask questions about the relation between language and cultural production that academic discourse and the established poetry networks of that time ignored and even denied. For postlanguage poets who are usually 10-30 years younger than language poets, literary theory often seems a dominant discourse of academic and literary power. While offering theories about their practice was a revolutionary move for the language poets, albeit one with a long

187 history, postlanguage poets often feel that theorizing their practice is a burden. (unpaginated)

Fagan does not have a published theory of poetics to accompany her poetry, as do many prominent Language poets. Without this corpus of supplementary theoretical material, Fagan and other post-Language poets alike are uniquely positioned to be able to realise one aspect of Language poetry’s early anti-referential ideals – where experiments with non-referentiality are not speciously tethered to dense theoretical reference books. Wallace and Marjorie Perloff both voice their uneasiness regarding post-Language poetry’s downplay of theory, claiming that much post-Language poetry is conceptually unsophisticated, oblivious of and insensitive to its theoretical heritage. In its wake, post-Language poetry has exposed, according to Perloff, “a good bit of ‘soft’ theorizing…” (171). For Fagan at least, it would be wrong to presume that without a book of poetics her poetry is less theoretical than other Language poetry, or that theorising for her is “a burden”. The Long Moment extends the purview of Language poetry so that it might comprise theories of materiality as much as it does theories of language and discourse. And certainly, without a reference book of its own, The Long Moment is still implicated in nebulous networks of relationally constructed performances of referencing. In a manner, we are prompted to re-learn what Language poetry had already learnt – that when working through language and with the unfolding of new meanings, to toil after permanent non-referentiality is as doubtful as it is useful.

Referencing is not a simple transaction between language and world, or vice versa. This mistakenly assumes that language and world are separate and oppositional. The “pluralaesthetic” assemblages that combine multiple forms (for example: “language arts in conjunction with such non-word based arts as music and the visual arts” [Wallace unpaginated]) are, according to Wallace, a feature of some Language and post-Language poetry alike. The “pluralaesthetic” is therefore difficult to mobilise as yet another touchstone for advancing the post-Language quality of Fagan’s poetry. Moreover, Fagan’s poetry is not “pluralaesthetic” in the sense that Bob Grumman – to whom Wallace attributes the term – conceptualises it; Fagan’s collection is comparatively traditional, in its printed literary form.

188 Even so, there is definitely a “pluralaesthetic” technique and style to the cover image that Fagan has selected for the collection – Rosalie Gascoigne’s Hung Fire (1995), described as a “retro-reflective road sign on wood” on the book’s nether page. An Australian sculptural artist, Gascoigne’s approach was to scavenge around the Canberra hinterlands in search of weathered commercial and industrial debris with which to fashion her assemblages. Vici MacDonald asserts that Gascoigne’s bright, staccato, reflective road-sign collages are, in-life, much more startling than their comparatively dim photographic reproductions might impress: “these works have real physical presence in a room: varying chunks of weatherbeaten signboard refracting the light, sometimes a haunting glow, sometimes a harsh glare, the random scratches and slashes recalling years lolling mutely in Canberra’s scrubby bush, reacting only to fleeting headlights and thumps from passing wildlife” (unpaginated). Gascoigne’s artworks are fiery experiments with de- and re- referentiality; MacDonald observes that Gascoigne’s practice is concerned to “deconstruct […] obsolete road warning signs” (unpaginated). While much Language poetry, likewise, experiments with non-referentiality in ways calculated to elicit a sense of the ‘materiality of the signifier’, Gascoigne’s artwork and Fagan’s poetry are perhaps more ferocious about taking this to a limit. Hung Fire, defective with mere glyphs of English alphabet, manifests a new affective power that radiates precisely from the fact that it reemerges out of a space that is at least temporarily extinct of semiological meaning. This artwork might then in turn come to re-/signify, but we can momentarily appreciate it without reference to anything else – as it is, materially and affectively.101

The final feature of Fagan’s poetic practice that rings true to Wallace’s working definition of a post-Language poetry is her geographical positioning – Wallace observes that most Language poets reside in North American cities, whereas post-Language writers hail from diverse global locations and so have very different frames of reference and thematic interests. Marjorie Perloff would also have us remember that while Language poetry had thoroughly explored ideology

101 The cover-image for Fagan’s more-recent volume of poetry, First Light, is a collage by Australian poet-artist, Nick Keys (also titled First Light). In a review of Fagan’s First Light, Luke Beesley observes that because much of its poetry is charged with articulating the “book’s book- ness” (27), the poems cannot be sundered from their cover-image – the poems reward and enrich readings that acknowledge this material-conceptual “intimacy” (27). 189 and class – a consequence of its Marxist heritage – it was much more apathetic in its tendency not only toward internationalism but toward issues of gender and race (162). The fact that we are now familiar with gender and race issues in this kind of experimental poetry is one indication at least that we are already sunk deep in post- Language terrain. Post-Language poetry’s adoption of race, gender, and multicultural concerns, its increased embracement of a “pluralesthetics”, and its de- emphasis of theory might be identified as the various symptoms of a shift angled toward a new materialist paradigm.

Testing Waters: The Long Moment as Deleuzoguattarian

To appreciate the truly revolutionary import of The Long Moment means setting aside (or forgetting) this reception that cognises it as post-/Language poetry. Instead, we become favourably fugue-like, hoping to observe its differences differing. In the translator’s forward to Guattari and Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi writes that its “reader is invited to lift a dynamism out of the book entirely and incarnate it in a foreign medium, whether it be painting or politics” (xv). Massumi says that Deleuze and Guattari relish it when tinkerers of other mediums share in the fruits (or contagion) of their labour, in the same vein that they enjoy pillaging and trampling through a variety of exotic disciplinary fields. Grinning from ear to ear, with the stain and juice of Deleuzoguattarian metaphysics on her face and hands, Fagan wields The Long Moment as evidence of her appropriationalist culpability. And yet – guiltily, comically, and paradoxically (looking us dead in the eye) – she asks us to forget: “there is pleasure in forgetting” (65), she encourages us.

Already then, there are two things to forget: we forget the post-/Language poetry interpretation the moment we introduce a Deleuzoguattarian reading, but we are also compelled to forget the Deleuzoguattarian aspect because it is Guattarian and Deleuzian nature to forget itself. And this leaves us where? Not where we started, at least. The Long Moment is hyper-intensive – so triumphantly vague and uninterpretable that it thwarts most extensive readings, successfully opening itself up to rich and persuasive of affect. In fact, there is irony in this extensive

190 attempt to interpret the poetry as a Deleuzoguattarian phenomenon, which at times seems to come at us so irrefutably in her poetry:

[…] We all begin to share a body memory of forgetting,

noise in a cloudy margin, persistent and entomological.

I carefully arrange songs and imagine a rapid flight out. (5)

This reductive return to the wharf of referential stability is a neccessary kind of dutiful pruning that in turn excites exponential proliferation so that shoots as “lines- of-flight” materialise in multiplicities. The “rapid flight out” (5) that Fagan dreams of can only be thinkable after she vigilantly un-paves well-worn paths, after she un- braids lines-of-reasoning or commonsensical networks, searching for that wired, schizophrenic, and entangled zone that Deleuze and Guattari call the “anomalous” belt (remarkably similar to Lyn Hejinian’s “border zone”) where possibilities, or “lines of flight”, are most charged.

Fagan’s practise is “entomological” not because it is a classificatory study of insects, but because it is a study of becomings-animal and becomings-insect; and further, of becomings-minutiae, and becomings-Kafka. It is only through amnesic relinquishment that becoming is experienced. In his Bloomsbury Reader’s Guide to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, Eugene Holland summarises the necessary selectivity of becomings, which is its ethical dimension:

[E]xperimentation with the anomalous borderline of becomings entails determining whether adding a specific dimension to our current assemblage – that is to say, entering into a specific becoming or into a double-becoming with another assemblage – will augment our power to act and/or enjoy being affected by other assemblages or not. If it does, the experiment will have been an ethical success. If not, we stop and go experiment elsewhere and otherwise. (107)

It is in this “anomalous” border-space, then, that the Language poetry interpretation electrifies, rather than stifles, the Guattariodeleuzian surges in Fagan’s work. Language poetry is already ‘minoritarian’ – it is a minor study and a minor form that constantly confronts itself in alien and improvisational terms.

191 ‘Lighthouse series’

In this section we perform a close-analysis of a portion of The Long Moment titled ‘Lighthouse series’, but this is only a kind of inaugurating gesture. It should quickly become evident that the meaning-deducing techniques of close-reading practices are insufficient to realise properly the open forces guiding this poetry. As in complexity theory, The Long Moment is not the sum of its individual poems, nor are the poems the sum of their component stanzas, lines etc. Furthermore, The Long Moment is not in any definitive way an insular study; it is charged with streaks of (f)light that ever- recast and ever-renew futurity and its possibilities. The myopic study of individuated sections of the poetry as sterile closed-systems manufactures blockage where there is in fact profound emergence. We might say that the lighthouse themes spill over into all the other poems, but this is misleading. The lighthouse themes102 (or any of the collection’s possible themes) only come into being through a tightening of difference. This close-reading attempts to show that postmodernism endures in new materialism – we contend that the affective Deleuzoguattarian molecular aesthetic of Fagan’s poetry is not inimical to its possible interpretation as Language poetry. But it is almost as if we will arrive at this realisation backwards: firstly we demonstrate those characteristics of The Long Moment that make it enduringly rhizomatic, or that make it an art which is intrinsically pragmatic, and so allows – secondly – for the immanent emergence through stratification of several “regimes of signs” that produce postmodernism, and whose own magnificent conceit becomes to retroactively colonise all matter with its textualism, or through recourse to its ‘’. Our backwards approach has the advantage of disallowing the habituated scenario of hostageship to the postmodern paradigm and its self-serving, self-propagating logic of linguistic captivity. Backwardsness entails that postmodernism is remembered and recalled in the vaguest of terms – its significance will come to blink faintly within a more complex new materialist fog.

102 Even though there is certainly a limit to the exegetical viability of the lighthouse as a trope in this poetry, there is nevertheless a certain sonic privilege afforded to the lighthouse as a “Glass harmonica” in The Long Moment – that is, as “[…] a prism, a crystal of space-time” (ATP 384). As a Glass harmonica, or refrain, the lighthouse: “acts upon that which surrounds it, sound or light, extracting from it various vibrations, or decompositions, projections, or transformations. The refrain also has a catalytic function: not only to increase the speed of the exchanges and reactions in that which surrounds it, but also to assure indirect interactions between elements devoid of so-called natural affinity […]” (ATP 384). 192 *****

‘Lighthouse series’ functions as an exemplification of post-/Language poetry. The poem has resonances with Lyn Hejinian’s procedural intentions in her book of poetry My Life. Where My Life interrogated the complex relationship between language, reality, and the person, the lighthouse poems forgo inquiry into personhood, instead investigating the dizzying relationship between language, waves, and perception, among other things. Hejinian’s mission statement for My Life proves a useful beacon for elucidating how the lighthouse poems might also be guided by similar descriptive intentions.103 In what appears to be a description of My Life’s operation in ‘The Person and Description’, a chapter from Hejinian’s book of poetics, The Language of Inquiry, she writes:

I attempted to write a work that would not be about a person but which would be like a person. Actually, what I said to myself was that I would write a poem which was to its language what a person is to its landscape (defining landscape in the broadest possible way so as to include culture and society as well as particular rooms, cities, or natural vistas, etc.)

The poem would be both in language and a consequence of it, and it would be both identifiable (real) and interpretable (readable).

It could not pretend to be anything other than a thinking of, for, and around itself – it would be encompassed by the context it encompassed.

Subsequently I began that work and wrote other things as well, always thinking about the unstable existence and recurrent or persistent experiences of a person, drawn into the world in and by perception, implicated by language, moving around in life, and unwilling to give up attempts at description. (203-4)

If these are the sorts of procedural intensions governing Fagan’s poems, they are doing so in ways very different to Hejinian’s. Fagan resists lapsing into the false

103 In “The Person and Description”, Hejinian never explicitly cites, but rather, hints at My Life as the project (perhaps part of a broader, ongoing investigation) informed by these particular meditations on personhood, selfhood, and description – the correspondence seems conspicuous. 193 security of Language poetry’s conventionalised proceduralism, and yet something procedurally vaguer certainly seems to be guiding the ‘Lighthouse series’.

Though her poems are still “thinking of, for and around [themselves]” (‘The Person and Description’ 203) in the meta- fashion that Hejinian’s are, Fagan attempts to loosen even more the humanist bridle, which is a bold and unnerving move because Hejinian is already so slackly tethered to any kind of humanism. My Life is a risky and radical form of experimental poetry, but the ‘Lighthouse series’ throws even more caution to the wind by embodying a ‘freefalling’ “posthumanist performativity” (Barad 146-153). Ironically, My Life’s very own proceduralism prevents it from doing so: the mathematical or structural perimeters that guide the poem are the 37 sections informed by Hejinian’s 37 years of age (which were extended and expanded as Hejinian accrued years – the second edition had 45 sections when Hejinian turned 45 years young), and they assume both the “person” and a chronological Newtonian time while admittedly questioning both. Part of what makes Fagan’s poetry so intensely difficult is the lack of these assumptions even to begin with. Fagan seems almost to assume nothing, which can be infuriating for the reader who needs an epistemological crutch to clutch on to – which is to say, all readers. The nonaggressive and suggestive quality of her poetry risks incomprehension, but it is actually an extreme form of acknowledgment; a performativity that yields to the possibility of unthinkable and unpredictable assemblages of otherness.

In recruiting Hejinian’s mission statement as a possible marker for the ‘Lighthouse series’, it becomes clear that rather than being about a lighthouse, the ‘Lighthouse series’ could be experimenting with what it might be like to be a lighthouse (and this means that the poem is not a thematic description of a lighthouse (content), but that it experiments with being a lighthouse formally). Fagan perhaps determined to: “write a poem which was to its language what a [lighthouse] is to its landscape […]”. Hejinian wrestles similarly with how the person might be literarily. But what exactly is a lighthouse to its landscape? On one account it is a kind of beacon that illuminates some things at the expense of others. As an aid to navigation, the lighthouse’s lens sometimes rotates and sometimes flashes light.

194 Our first clues to the ‘lighthouse method’ which might be informing the ‘Lighthouse series’ are the various indications that the poem is a kind of turning or rotating apparatus: the word “series” alludes to the succession of poems, “strophes”, and lines – to the turning pages of The Long Moment – as well as to the reoccurring succession of the lighthouse as it winds around itself. Fagan’s description of “[o]ur dervish light at sky’s edge […]” (62) brings to mind the frenzied spinning of a whirling dervish whose gyrating skirt she renders oceanic, geologic, and stratifying: “fresh waters disperse / in silicic creases” (62). Additionally, in “Evolving map / spitting up a whale, dragged skein of a whale...” (56), we might consider the view of the ocean and landscape from the perspective of the lighthouse, which might register a whale in the distance as a kind of unfocused, painterly dot; spat, stretched out, and lagging, like a fuzzy little thread, against the ocean’s voluminous shadow. The landscape is not static but profoundly metamorphosing, as is the gaze apprehending it – entwined semi-amorphously in this sensual, frantic heat that has their perimeters perpetually re-determining themselves. The multiple definitions of the word “skein” also suggests the coiling of a lighthouse, as well as the twisting of lines and words which write their own inky landscape. The poem self-referentially acknowledges its own role as an “[e]volving map”, spitting up words, like “whale”, in an antistrophic manner – from west to east – and so generating its own printed, materially-semantically “convolvulate” (58) skein.

In addition to its action as a kind of pivotal mechanism, the poem seems to be drawing on the patterned light performance of a lighthouse’s lens, technically known as its ‘light character’:

Most lighthouses rhythmically flash or eclipse their lights to provide an identification signal. The particular pattern of flashes or eclipses is known as the character of the light, and the interval at which it repeats itself is called the period. […] [E]ssentially a lighthouse may display a single flash, regularly repeated at perhaps 5-, 10-, or 15- second intervals. This is known as a flashing light. Alternatively, it may exhibit groups of two, three, or four flashes, with a short eclipse between individual flashes and a

195 long eclipse of several seconds between successive groups. The whole pattern is repeated at regular intervals of 10 or 20 seconds.104

The poem’s reference to a ‘light character’ is evidenced to some degree in the poetry’s content, or themes: “From every point on a sand crescent / a remnant worded, punctual as light” (56). But it is also largely enacted in the poem’s form: although the ‘Lighthouse series’ might be considered one poem, it is divided into ten smaller sections, each of which has its own page (or turning), and each of which “flashes” five strophes, which are themselves each comprised of three lines.105 This approach to the poetry, via its ‘light character’, relies on its formal structure, interpretable and operational because it follows certain rules and regulations, mathematic and linguistic.

As an alternative106 to this (perhaps too hard-line) classificatory approach, Deleuze and Guattari’s cartographic methodology also informs Fagan’s poetry. “Writing”, they claim, “has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come” (ATP 5). Fagan’s poetry is suffused with this knowing – ‘Lighthouse series’ unfurls itself as a compilation of shifting corporeal topographies: “cartographies of belly and spine, / moray hide flecking / out of fingered transit…” (60). Whether we are pointing at the biologic moray that is cumulatively cloaking itself beneath layers of sea, whether we are charting with our index finger our readerly progress across the line, or whether our eyes are enacting this “fingered transit”, the processes of apprehension/apprehended are material and dynamic. Fagan is not interested in erecting rigid historical structures – structures that are easily traumatised by change. The trick, as she gleans

104 ‘Lighthouse’. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2015. Web. 20 Jan. 2015 105 Of real significance here, the ‘light character’ pattern need not only be an analogy. Literally, a light characteristic might refer to the graphic or textual component that is used as a reference to a particular aid to navigation. Indeed, if the ‘Lighthouse series’ is a kind of light characteristic (i.e. a textual/graphic description of a lighthouse’s patterned display of light), it does not operate in the same fashion as other light characteristics. That is, it does not register its measurements on a nautical chart or on a Light List with navigational abbreviation notations. Nevertheless, the motivated pattern that structures the poem possibly suggests a light characteristic of sorts, as do the textual themes. 106 “Alternative” is of course an entirely inadequate way of accounting for the different theoretical tensions possessing this poetry. We are entertaining or engendering a certain superficial fracture, a pedagogically useful division in the poetry, which is not properly expressed by it. Indeed, this analysis is stretching apart this distinction between a post-Language and a materialist aspect, hopefully only to be relentlessly toppled over and overcome by these simplified interpretive contortions. 196 it from the nomadologic methodology of Guattari and Deleuze, is not simply to preach from the dusty archives of historical time, but to live or become gypsy, to become earthly roamer; not bogged down by the glue of a particularly archaic and objective temporality but free “to dance the problem / of space” (The Long Moment 23).

Fagan gives artistic flesh to Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisation of “geophilosophy”, not only by eschewing philosophy’s focus on “temporality and historicity [at the expense of] spatiality and geography” (Bonta and Protevi 92), but by “suggest[ing] a place outside the lock of subject/object dualities”, a space that she names “extra-subjective thinking” (emphasis in original 151). Fagan offers up this term in Chapter Two of her Ph.D. dissertation where she unpacks Hejinian’s idea of guest/host relations as conceptually akin to Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of communities and Guattari and Deleuze’s idea of “neighbourhoods”: “Perhaps ethics can inhabit zones of extra-subjective and inter-objective linkage, and be experienced primarily as a matter of locale (geo-). If [as Deleuze and Guattari assert] ‘thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth,’ then community obligations might extend beyond anthropocentric relations and toward neighbourhoods of non-sentient matter” (152). Fagan explores this inhuman possibility intensely in The Long Moment, but perhaps the case is especially so in the poem that issues directly after ‘Lighthouse series’, itself appreciatively titled ‘Geophilosophy’. A morsel of it reads:

[…] Language in extreme

generation, all scenes saturate in story, shouldn’t we behave as

this, decide to uncouple from closing, and how? […]. (67)

And, of course, the poetry performs and reverberates a nebulous reply: by relinquishing centrisms; by becoming inhuman; by becoming imperceptible; by reaching for ‘absolute deterritorialisation’.

197 ‘Lighthouse series’, or The Long Moment more-broadly, encourages the poetic cognisance of difference differing.107 This means that the ‘Lighthouse series’ thinks “absolute deterritorialisation” as a Body without Organs (BwO). It might be useful to imagine Fagan as a kind of pilot of philosophy, flying us to the lip (or, a lip108) of the BwO, which kisses the plane of consistency. In this zone of intensity, we relinquish preconceptions (including our selves) and become immersed in the intensive processes that function to produce discrete objects and actions, which in turn become the subject of representationalist thinking. Contrary to the extension of representationalism, intensity thwarts metaphoricity:

[I]f we consider the plane of consistency we note that the most disparate of things and signs move upon it: a semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an electron crashes into a language, a black hole captures a genetic message, a crystallization produces a passion, the wasp and the orchid cross a letter … There is no “like” here, we are not saying “like an electron,” “like an interaction,” etc. The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor; all that consists is Real. These are electrons in person, veritable black holes, actual organites, authentic sign sequences. It’s just that they have been uprooted from their strata, destratified, decoded, deterritorialised. (ATP 77)

Wrestling with the charm of lyricism, where clouds are so often deployed for their quality of nebulosity – as perfect poetical putty for a simile – Fagan instead defiantly writes: “cloud as cloud is” (65). In this poem, unlike representationalist poems that are about clouds, or – to remain with our roving motif – about lighthouses (either as themselves or as metaphors), there is no lighthouse to begin with, there is a mesh or fog of flows or intensities from which perception then effects certain inside-outsides – or through which perception forges meaning. In this fluid terrain, being does not precede becoming. From illimitable becoming, readers buoyed by nothing other than their semi-amorphous perspectives are spurred to

107 I think that Fagan’s other poetry concerns itself with this as well, such as her more-recent book of poetry First Light – although in its own distinct way. 108 The BwO doesn’t belong to anyone, therefore it disarticulates, in part, by way of an indefinite article (i.e. Fagan writes: “a hand”, or “Your light picks out the convex thought / of an eye […]” my italics [55]). Guattari and Deleuze clarify that the BwO: “is always a body. It is no more projective than it is regressive. It is an involution, but always a contemporary, creative involution. The organs distribute themselves on the BwO, but they distribute themselves independently of the form of the organism; forms become contingent, organs are no longer anything more than intensities that are produced, flows, thresholds, and gradients” (ATP 182).

198 clock being. ‘Lighthouse series’ thinks, and tries to prompt us to think, the Deleuzian virtual.

But the rub is that the virtual can only ever be intuited from the “plane of consistency”, or from a BwO. Absolute flow is a pipedream (i.e. contained by determinable structuration, which nevertheless becomes porous or dissolves – differential warp and woof ad infinitum). And on the other foot, striation (voyage through metric space) and molarity (controlling powers of State bodies) are unavoidable. There might be something of a clue to the poem’s engagement with molarity in its remark (with coterminous dentistry horseplay): “unable to gouge / a twisted molar cavity, / quiet desecration perplexing” (56). That is to say, even in a molecular aesthetics, the molar is never cast off completely, shored up precisely by the fact that we can, in this fashion, interpret these lines as clues, as referential – that is, predicated on a “majoritarian” logic of lack and being, rather than on the sufficiency or abundance of absolute becomings. However, this should not undermine the metaphysical purchase that comes through the inauguration of an aesthetic voyage on a silken premise, as Deleuze and Guattari assure us, “[t]he smooth always possesses a greater power of deterritorialization than the striated” (ATP 530). It matters, that is, that Fagan’s poetics begin as a BwO, so that she can dip freely toward the actual and the virtual.

The poetry’s practice as a BwO comes, in part, through the disinterment of things physical and metaphysical, literal and (sometimes even) metaphorical – though this is metaphor that is shorn of its irony, almost post-ironical and become literalised (the soldering of the figural and the literal in immanence). It speaks of cadaverous remains emerging as BwOs on coastal margins, as “lysis / at a shoreline” (70). ‘Anti-landscape: lighthouse beach’ reads:

You are walking among ribs

waking

each skeleton composed to the height

of a hand

199 falling upward into sky,

into grace

ocean’s caress a touch

lighter than history,

arrives as history,

exacting and dense and drifting sand

away from these

unconcealed remnants,

timely exposures

beached and collected in gestures

of appalled compassion

We remark that this stretch of land could write us eternally (53)

This stretch of land is also the stretch of a sentence, the stretch of language (something accentuated by the almost sandy tint of The Long Moment’s pages). This paring back, this laying bare, this is an exhumation of the intensive, where lines are boney protrusions, where skeletal poems “the height / of a hand” are awakenings. This intensive enlightenment is surreal (or, Fagan writes, “not surreal but hyperreal” (72)): “falling upward into sky, / into grace”, and it relies on the

200 hand of the virtual for its power, for its possibility: “ocean’s caress a touch / lighter than history”, but nevertheless arrives as actuality, “arrives as history”.

In ‘November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?’ – Chapter 6 of A Thousand Plateaus – Guattari and Deleuze explain that the three types of strata that most powerfully authorise, or “bind”, humanicity are “the organism, significance, and subjectification” (176), so the BwO works mainly through “disarticulating” these three strata. The Body without Organs is one of Antonin Artaud’s concepts, most notably animated in Artaud’s final composition, the controversial, surrealist radio-play recorded on November 28th, 1947, ‘To Have Done with the Judgment of god’, which was itself famously shunted by radio producer Vladimir Porché right before it was due to air. Its irreligious visceral discharge manifests in Deleuze and Guattari’s echoes throughout ATP that the strata are holy articulations, or “judgments of god”, mainly because the “theological system” of God ordains order and organisation, and so detests the BwO (hence Guattari and Deleuze concede that the BwO is largely an erroneous appellation: “the BwO is not at all opposite of the organs. The organs are not its enemies. The enemy is the organism” [175]).

Deleuze and Guattari cite certain expressions of masochism, drug addiction, courtly love, and Taoism as BwOs. BwOs are concerned with riding the “spatium” betwixt growth and deterioration, the plateau of positive, immanent desire – which is desire not indebted referentially to a lack or to a transcendence for its power, desire that does not culminate orgasmically, but that purrs along: “[t]he tantric egg” (170). “Every time desire is betrayed, cursed, uprooted from its field of immanence”, write Deleuze and Guattari, relentlessly punctuating ATP with this sacrilegious inflection, “a priest is behind it” (171). The priest then becomes the psychoanalyst in modern times, they say. And in TLM the priest-psychoanalyst erects itself in additional garb, becoming the literary author (or the lyric poet, as one who traffics in a particularly romantic ideology and program: an aesthetics of anamnesis) forging organicity-as-organisation from stanzas, lines, and significance.

Real desire – the desire of the BwO – has nothing to do with ideology, its expression is of plain matter: “[t]here is desire whenever there is the constitution of

201 a BwO under one relation or another. It is a problem not of ideology but of pure matter, a phenomenon of physical, biological, psychic, social or cosmic matter” (183). Fagan yields to this desire:

we tease apart a rain

of spectra

cast in sentences,

each spit of matter

volatile, capable (43)

But of course this is merely, in one sense, writing about matter. Fagan additionally incites the material volatility in language-matter through manoeuvering and roughhousing the material properties of the poem, and in particular, through the political performance of parataxis.109 Eschewing the subordinating mechanisms of hypotaxis, The Long Moment is experimental poetry at its most materially, formally anarchic:

Characters’ trace between s& dollars,

sight, a person, a harbour

providing our lingua franca,

handfuls of commas attesting

truth to context as slow and silent

109 At Experimental: A Symposium on Experimental Writing held at the University of Sydney in July, 2014, Fagan teamed up with poets Eddie Hopely and Astrid Lorange in an experimental, performative, and erotic, triple-braid affair. Theirs was a para- choreography entitled “Paragraph, parataxis, paratext: collaborative writing and ethics of transmission ‘after’ Language Poetry”. Not only floating many of the problems and ideas around acts of collaboration in poetry and poetics, but also exhibiting themselves as individual conductive material elements of a productive messy weave, of an experimental poetry assemblage – as members of this scholarly marginalia (experimental poets who think the post-Language poetry), they are each always already fierce pack animals – each a becomings-wolf – rather than the heard animals that are more content to reinscribe language’s “universal constants” (see “Postulates of Linguistics” ATP). They sat, and read, astride (or para-) one another, piping up by turns to entrust a small meditation on each of the three topics – paragraphs, parataxis, paratext – and meant both as a kind of egalitarian gesture and, perhaps more compellingly so, as an exercise in collaborative immanence.

202 these bodies enact

their mutual abandonment

, this and that unhinged, afloat. (62)

“There is no mother tongue […]” (ATP 8), there is no origin, and definitely no original language, but instead there is the proliferation of lingua francas, or “au milieu” as the “in context” and “un milieu” the “in-between”. So we begin in- between, and then we project certain truths onto an ontologically indeterminate past, effectually distilling those truths with apparatuses of grammar (which are articulations or versions of “apparatuses of capture”), such as the comma, which “attest[s] / truth to context”. The dance of the plane of consistency (which we earlier gestured to as realm devoid of metaphor), Guattari and Deleuze call “A silent dance” (ATP 77). So by glacially unmooring itself from comma docks and their declarations of abstract landed truths, The Long Moment discovers oceanic complexity, “complex as water” (The Long Moment 28).

Playing into marine and maritime thinking is an important aspect of Fagan’s project and has important implications for both of the interpretations gestured to in this section. Of the briny blue, Guattari and Deleuze write:

[T]he sea is a smooth place par excellence, and yet was the first to encounter the demands of increasingly strict striation. The problem did not arise in proximity to land. On the contrary, the striation of the sea was a result of navigation on the open water. Maritime space was striated as a function of two astronomical and geographical gains: bearings, […] and the map […]. (529)

This new materialism ‘reading’ then, thinks that Fagan’s poetry starts with the sea (or more precisely, flow, because sea can be figurative flow and in this poetry the coast is as fluid as the sea) and then effects certain striations, such as more contemporary manifestations of bearings and maps, and the functions of various aids to navigation (the lighthouse), or in short: . Meanwhile, our post- /Language poetry reading thinks that this poetry begins in (linguistic-mathematical- mechanical) striae – in the metric ‘motivated proceduralism’ of an aid to navigation

203 – and from this vantage it observes molten liquid snaking between, watches its ironic foundations melt. Even though they start with different assumptions and have different concerns (grossly exaggerated, think nature verses culture as premise), in a way they both end up in the same place – acknowledging complexity and resisting the force of a totalising closure.

Another important means by which ‘Lighthouse series’ disengages from closure is though its consideration of the operations of open systems. Mark Bonta and John Protevi, following the insights of Manuel DeLanda and Brian Massumi, argue that Deleuze’s “geophilosophy” is informed by the science that is commonly referred to as complexity theory, or nonlinear dynamic systems modeling. Complexity theory is the study of how dynamic (open), material systems adapt and self-organise. It proves that systems cannot properly be comprehended as component parts of an aggregate whole; “[i]f a system is understood as complex”, writes John Marks, “then it is acknowledged that the complete structure and functioning of the system remains in some way unknowable and unpredictable” (10). Bonta and Protevi suggest that Deleuze and Guattari’s utilisation of complexity theory allows for “the seemingly unsolvable structure/agency dilemma” (3) to be thought of anew – in part, through demonstration “that at critical thresholds some physical and biological systems can be said to ‘sense’ the differences in their environment that trigger self-organising processes” (4). Although it is tricky to offer instances of ‘Lighthouse series’ ‘sensing’ difference, it certainly experiments with (real system) thresholds and their correspondence to bifurcators in the (phase space) model (examples of which are provided in the following paragraph). Potentially and excitingly too then, ‘Lighthouse’ method aside, there are other ways still that The Long Moment might be configured as striated post-/Language poetry: in this case, poetry as complex systems modeling.110

‘Lighthouse series’ draws on complexity theory by insinuating that the lighthouse’s projection might be likened to a kind of ‘trigger’:

Desecration is a sharp

110 Of course, The Long Moment functions not only in the phase space, as complex systems modeling (i.e. from the ‘striated post-/Language poetry’ perspective), its province is also language- matter and its real systems thresholds, or poetry as a real system (i.e. from the new materialist perspective). 204 and brilliant beam, splitting

each rotation to usher in

complex removal (74)

It too follows the insight of complexity theory in disputing the notion that structure is only deterministic: “Landscape is undone, / our structural safety zone […]” (75).111 To moor these penetrations to the operation of the lighthouse is almost too heavy-handed (or too-leading, rather than misleading). Although it is tempting to favour the lighthouse as mechanical, optical system, by now we should fully acknowledge that The Long Moment collects together very many different systems, which pulse to the rhythms of various types of negative (homeostatic) and positive (entropic) feedback loops. Frequently and minutely, these systems tip towards a climactic and chaotic contraction:

Each deft scale

edges toward instauration. (96)

Or…

translucent coin of olive oil

nudging at a glazed edge

and promising relief. (63)

The systems often then birth new forms of unpredictable order, intimated by “&” in the following:

Memory, saturate until the membrane

will admit nothing more.

The system shifts & (64)

111 Deleuze and Guattari contend: “[I]t is an illusion to believe that structure is the earth’s last word” (ATP 46). 205 ‘Lighthouse series’ introduces many complexity flashes into the powerful warp that is its predominant project of artistically and poetically realising transcendental empiricism, or transcendental immanence. This, we argue, is the success of the poetry, it is the heart of what it is trying to do, and it is how it establishes a sense of difference differing. To put its artistic process into words like this is a “reterritorialisation”, a slowing down or “congealing” that drains the experience of its accelerationism, which is its force and glory. But we need also to throw a spanner into this easy equation of speed with “line of flight” – an equivalence that Guattari and Deleuze warn against:

Absolute deterritorialization is not defined as a giant accelerator; its absoluteness does not hinge on how fast it goes. It is actually possible to reach the absolute by way of phenomena of relative slowness or delay. Retarded development is an example. What qualifies a deterritorialization is not its speed (some are very slow) but its nature, whether it constitutes epistrata and parastrata and proceeds by articulated segments or, on the contrary, jumps from one singularity to another following a nondecomposable, nonsegmentary line drawing a metastratum of the plane of consistency. (ATP 63)

Actually, the poem is a kind of slowing down itself (it is an extension of what might be one contracted second’s worth of intricacy into a lengthened moment – The Long Moment), but it slows down (a conceptual congealing) only for us (and not as slow as us), so that we might, however obscurely, fathom the way it rears and buckles up against the virtual. The speed that we evoke here is more a question of complexity and consistency – irreducibility that translates as a kind of incomprehension speckled with situated bursts of cognition, which mutate the probabilities and potentialities for future landscapes and perceptions.

In the same way that consistency is not commensurate with speed-as-physical- velocity, it should also be detached from the metal-headed logic, or valorisation, of furious chance – a kind of nosedive into death, an enkindled “death drive” (ATP 177). This is an exceptional point, well worth highlighting not least in relation to Fagan’s work, but due to an indefatigable tendency to corroborate Deleuzoguattarianism as the neon sign for a kind of creative, theoretical-aesthetic ‘anything goes’. In one instance at least, repudiating this becomes about reading, rather than ignoring, the silent, empty, or sandy-hued sweet-not-nothings that buoy

206 The Long Moment’s textual “smatterings of percept” (The Long Moment 35). Its breath, its space, and its recoveries, are – what Deleuze and Guattari would call – an articulate sobriety. There is a difference, they argue, between the level-headedness, or thoughtfulness, of a becomings-child and of a becomings-mad, and the fervor of “the modern valorization of children’s drawings, texts by the mad, and concerts of noise” (ATP 379). An overindulgent abandonment is liable to become a stratification of its own:

A material that is too rich remains too “territorialized” […]. One makes an aggregate fuzzy, instead of defining the fuzzy aggregate by the operations of consistency or consolidation pertaining to it. […] The material must be sufficiently deterritorialized to be molecularized and open onto something cosmic, instead of lapsing into a statistical heap. This condition is met only if there is a certain simplicity in the nonuniform material: a maximum of calculated sobriety in relation to the disparate elements and the parameters. (379)

Further, they remind us elsewhere in ATP that “[s]taying stratified” – organized, signified, subjected – is not the worst that can happen”, the real risk comes through the thoughtless “suicidal collapse” approach aforehandedly mentioned, which may serve to cause the strata to backfire upon us with escalated ferocity (178). So while we can say that The Long Moment is predominantly a deterritorialising adventure, Fagan is deeply aware of the territories and strata that bind her work, and with which she is eruditely renegotiating.

In fact, the intense speed of The Long Moment, quite apart from being a product of its powerful deterritorialisations, actually has much to do with the particular “mega-strata” within which it operates. For, though thus far we have contented ourselves with describing some of the ways that this poetry de-stratifies and de-territorialises, its experimentation is also implicated in processes of stratification and can be heeded for its anchorage in the “mega-strata” known as the “alloplastic register”. If we began this section by forgetting, then it is at this juncture that we turn most decisively to remembering by explicating the Deleuzoguattarian concepts of strata and stratification. In Deleuzoguattarian ontology, there are three major strata (what Eugene W. Holland names the “mega- strata”), which are the inorganic, the organic, and the alloplastic – these are the

207 three major registers of steady state, near equilibrium dynamics, which might, according to Holland, be roughly coincided to “matter, Life, and culture respectively” (23). It would be a mistake to think of these strata in evolutionary terms, as if their movement was one of simplicity to complexity; of all strata (not just mega-strata), Guattari and Deleuze affirm: “If one begins by considering the strata in themselves, it cannot be said that one is less organized than another. This even applies to a stratum serving as a substratum: there is no fixed order and one stratum can serve directly as a substratum for another without the intermediaries one would expect there to be from the standpoint of stages and degrees” (ATP 77). Stratification conceptually deflects the illusionary allure of an evolutionary hierarchy largely because the relationships between different strata are relative, depending on different scales, as in a multi-dimensional web, where “[e]ach stratum serves as a substratum for another stratum” (ATP 81), along at least both vertical (epistrata) and horizontal (parastrata) axes.

Instead, strata distinction arises out of the different ways that these abstract machines (or self-organising systems) operate through “double articulation”. Double articulation is the fundamental operation of stratification that “residually” produces strata, hence it explains how becoming conditions, or thickens into, being, via what Holland evocatively names its “thickening agents”, such as coding and territorialisation (56). Double articulation (or stratification) is one of Deleuze and Guattari’s most valuable concepts because it offers a comprehensive means of departing from all those psychoanalytic and Marxist materialist theories beholden to Saussure’s persuasive idea of the sign (consisting of an arbitrary signifier-signified relationship). Whereas in the Cinema books, Deleuze mobilised C. S. Peirce’s semiotics from his “phaneroscopy” to propose a theory of pragmatics, in ‘The Geology of Morals’ plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, Guattari and Deleuze instead enlist the services of the Danish linguist, Louis Hjelmslev, who they playfully convert into a “Spinozist geologist” (48), thereby restyling him an expansive materialist rather than a confined linguist.

Contorting Hjelmslev’s theory for their own purposes – as they readily admit – double articulation (itself originally a term coined by another linguist, André Martinet) supplants the linguistic model of signifier-signified with a pragmatic

208 process that operates instead by way of manifesting “content” and “expression”, which are each themselves compounded into both “forms” and “substances”. So beyond the limited case of language, every self-organising system in the universe synthesises itself through four operations, or through the of a “double pincer”, of which they write:

There is never correspondence or conformity between content and expression, only isomorphism with reciprocal presupposition. The distinction between content and expression is always real, in various ways, but it cannot be said that the terms preexist their double articulation. It is the double articulation that distributes them according to the line it draws in each stratum; it is what constitutes their real distinction. (On the other hand there is no real distinction between form and substance, only a mental or modal distinction: since substances are nothing other than formed matters, formless substances are inconceivable, although it is possible in certain instances to conceive of substanceless forms). (ATP 49)

Although they maintain that content and expression are real, discrete planes, their relational situation is arbitrary112: “the same x, the same particle, may function either as a body that acts and undergoes actions [content plane] or as a sign constituting an act or order-word [expression plane] depending on which form it is taken up by […]” (ATP 96). Neither plane represents the other; neither plane causes the other, or is its origin. Either plane “inserts” itself or “intervenes” in the other in various ways; “signs are at work in things themselves just as things extend into or are deployed through signs” (ATP 96). Because of this, neither the Saussurean signifier (of the signifier-signified relationship), nor the Marxist base (of the base- superstructure relationship) determines the other in a causal fashion.

Bonta and Protevi explain that Guattari and Deleuze retain the geological terminology even when the double articulation exceeds the inorganic register; they say that its two “pincers” consist of “sedimentation” and “folding”:

112 Hjelmselv reinforces, for them, the particular relational whimsicality exhibited by these planes: “Through all of this”, they write, “Hjelmslev’s warning should not be forgotten: ‘The terms expression plane and content plane …are chosen inconformity with established notions and are quite arbitrary. Their functional definition provides no justification for calling one, and not the other, of these entities expression, or one, and not the other, content” (ATP 50).

209 The first articulation is ‘sedimentation’, which determines (1) a substance of content, that is, the selection of homogenous materials or matter from a subordinate flow in a milieu (= territorialization), and (2) a form of content, that is, the depositing of these matters into layers (= coding). The second articulation is ‘folding’, in which there is (3) a form of expression, that is, the creation of new linkages (= overcoding), and (4) a substance of expression, the creation of new entities with emergent properties. (151)

In ‘Deleuze, Materialism and Politics’, Delanda expertly explains that the first articulation of sedimentation, or the content plane, describes “formed materiality” (164), where the second articulation of folding, or the expression plane, describes “material expressivity” (164). Furthermore, in unpacking Deleuze’s illustration of double articulation through Foucault’s famous study of prisons and the judicial system (i.e. prisoners and prison as constitutive of the content plane, and penal law and delinquency as constitutive of the expression plane), Delanda reveals that “Deleuze is distinguishing the two articulations roughly along the lines of the non- discursive (territorialisation) and the discursive (coding)” (167).

If the emergence of literature is acknowledged by way of double articulation, in one sense we might say that the book’s material consolidation is a “form of content”, whereas its “form of expression” is its “order-words”, or the complex play of ostensibly communicative meanings that take discursive flight from this presupposed content. To borrow from and appropriate Bonta and Protevi’s discussion, the initial articulation, or sedimentation, would be the determination of (1) a book-machine (substance of content) from a subordinate flow in a milieu: all of the non-discursive materials (paper, pages, ink, template symbols, institutions like publishing houses, publishing apparatuses and so on), and (2) these matters are installed by authors, editors, and technologies as layers of words, lines, and sentences that are part of discourses whose meaning derives from complex statistical arrangements (a form of content). The second articulation, or folding, determines (3) literary rules, forms, styles, and genres (form of expression), and (4) the reader, or readers (substance of expression), are the non-discursive new entities with emergent properties.

In terms of cinema (the cinema of the movement-image specifically), we might say that regarding the plane of content, the moving image is the form of content

210 (coding), while the substance of content consists of the textural and tonal aspects of colour, sound (territorialisation), which are themselves actualised out of the signaletic material that precede them on a plane of consistency. The second articulation of cinema – its plane of expression – is where Deleuze’s cinematic taxonomy finds its footing, as a semiotic regime of signs where the form of expression is the sign-of-genesis/signs-of-composition/noosigns (making up the ten “completed signs” that Roger Dawkins explicates: overcoding). Finally, the substance of expression is the face, the viewing face, or the abstract machine of faciality.

If strata are defined as self-organising systems, then the distinction between the three “mega-strata” is determined by way of their independent expressions of double articulation. On the inorganic register, content and expression operate through a process that Guattari and Deleuze name induction: here, territorialisation and coding coincide physically (they are “coextensive”); expression in its capacity as a proto-discursive multiplicity is therefore three-dimensional, “voluminous or superficial” (ATP 66). On the organic register, transduction explains how expression develops a different geometrical configuration – it excels linearly, as in the form of a one-dimensional chain (“the nucleic sequence”) beyond the three- dimensional content that is its isomorphic inverse; “expression becomes independent in its own right, in other words, autonomous” (emphasis in original ATP 65-6). And finally, the alloplastic register grants an even more exceptional expressional liberty or flight from a “plane of content”, in what Deleuze and Guattari call translation: “[t]his process of overcoding or superlinearity explains why, in language, not only is expression independent of content, but form of expression is independent of substance: translation is possible because the same form can pass from one substance to another, which is not the case for the genetic code, for example, between RNA and DNA chains” (ATP 70). Unlike in transduction, where the expressive line of departure was spatial, in translation the line becomes temporal, or “superlinear”, which allows for the emergence of the operation of representation.

The augmentation of expressional deviance from the inorganic (Matter), to the organic (Life), to the alloplastic (Culture) registers entails important consequences

211 for the emergent capabilities of agents on each strata. These include, according to Guattari and Deleuze, an escalated potential for deterritorialisation, as well as the capacity to reproduce: “only something deterritorialized is capable of reproducing itself” (ATP 66). Additionally, where the alloplastic register has more enhanced deterritorialising capabilities than the organic register because expression is even more “detached” from its “mutually presupposed” content, this very content becomes technological.

So how is The Long Moment involved in this complex play of stratification and destratification? In one sense, it is definitely caught up in, or a product of, the vortex of a Lobster-God’s judgment as the grand stratification of the alloplastic register – and firmly ordered too by other commanding pincers, such as the conventional book-form, or book-machine, as a powerful content plane. However, whereas postmodernism, on this account, divorces itself aggressively from the plane of content, consummating an absolute degree of deterritorialisation and sundering itself completely from the Real (and from a mutually presupposed plane of content), The Long Moment instead retains and fosters persistent and rigorous connections with both a plane of content and a plane of consistency. That is to say, it fosters connections with the concrete material elements of the poem, and with a virtual field via its “particle-signs”, which are its signs that precede content-expression discrimination (see Bonta and Protevi quoting from ATP: particle-signs are created out of the “‘imbrication of the semiotic and the material’ brought about by consistent assemblages” [123]).

Another way to put this, which is finally to get to the heart of the ‘dual materialism’ operational in The Long Moment (and so too, to show that our own description of a dual actual-virtual materialism in the collection is really not more than a helpful cosmetic summary), is to acknowledge that the poem is a “territorial assemblage”. One half of its four-fold valence (“tetravalence” [ATP 98]), or one axis of the territorial assemblage consists in stratification and destratification. This is the process of double articulation through which The Long Moment self-organises – how it enacts a million miniscule stratifications, or “agential cuts” (to use a Baradian term), that reinscribe different content planes (“machinic assemblage of bodies”) and expression planes (“collective assemblage of enunciation”). But there

212 is also another element or function accounts for the variability of both content and expression and permits their “intervention” within one another:

We must therefore arrive at something in the assemblage itself that is still more profound than these sides and can account for both of the forms in presupposition, forms of expression or regimes of signs (semiotic systems) and forms of content and regimes of bodies (physical systems). This is what we call the abstract machine, which constitutes and conjugates all of the assemblage’s cutting edges of deterritorialisation. (ATP 155)

The territorial assemblage’s other axis concerns its degrees of re- and de- territorialisation. That is, beyond its double articulations, or rather within either side of a double articulation there are “quanta of relative deterritorialisation[s]” (ATP 97). It is as if Guattari and Deleuze attach a little volume control, or tuner, to each of their concepts, which are never fixed in-and-of-themselves, but often travel along a spectrum of de-/re-territorialisation.

As a consequence of this, neither the “collective assemblage of enunciation” nor the “machinic assemblage of bodies” is systemically more deterritorialised than the other; “[s]ometimes the semiotic components are more deterritorialised than the material components, and sometimes the reverse” (ATP 97). In the case of The Long Moment, both semiotic and material elements are highly deterritorialised. Language, in and of itself, potentially affords one of the most accelerated forms of deterritorialisation, outpaced only by money in a Capitalist economy, according to Deleuze and Guattari – so by very dint of working in a literary medium, Fagan’s project has a particularly deterritorialising aspect. In addition to this however, Fagan deterritorialises the poem’s material and formal components. Furthermore, in its exercise as a BwO the poem is a destratification. All of this taken into consideration, The Long Moment is highly adept in functioning as a “territorial assemblage” – across registers both actual and virtual in the production of emergent properties.

Kate Fagan’s The Long Moment is an experiment with how matter-meaning actual is conditioned by the virtual – it is about the richness of imperceptibility, and of becomings-imperceptible. There is no transcendental (and especially no

213 overshadowing postmodern) interpretation of Fagan’s poetry that will ‘get it right’. Its writing re-writes and rewires with intractable flickers of complex meaning that reconfigure as quickly as they manifest, so that we adrenalin-trip over shifting (mis)calculations and on to others with extreme rapidity. The poetry retains this cognitive velocity through its transcendental empiricism, which seeks not transcendence or sublime consecration, but asks instead how transcendence emerges, how difference emerges – it is able only to ask this question by adhering to a strict program of extreme immanence as a kind of unpredictable literary time- image. Its experimentation is romantic, lyrical, modernist, Language poetry as much as it is post-romantic, post-lyrical, postmodernist, post-Language poetry. And a Deleuzoguattarian new materialism is distinctly equipped to map all of this – The Long Moment’s beautifully unremitting, dynamic, lightning play.

Conclusion

This thesis has argued that in relation to its cultural-theoretical precursor, postmodernism, new materialism exhibits the same twofold and paradoxical action that it expresses towards ideas of matter and materialism. In one way it credits actualised materiality (including sometimes concrete or insubstantial materiality) and the double articulation that “residually” produces actual strata. It is in this way that new materialism has purchase as a theoretical paradigm that can be thought of as proceeding on from postmodernism and as reacting against postmodernism. In another way, new materialism is impelled by an idea of pure difference, and by intensive registers where matter and meaning are “imbricated” or “entangled”. In this terrain, new materialism does not shun or express its own superiority over postmodernism. By giving credit to ‘becoming’ in this way, new materialism also undoes the very logic of the ‘dual action’ that we have argued for, instead revealing

214 teeming spectrums of mutual effectuation, movement, and metamorphosis between actuality and virtuality.

The range of postmodern texts considered in this thesis suggest that there is great variability and variation in new materialism’s entanglement with, and relationship to, postmodernism. This conceded, the only rule – and only an ephemeral rule – of their entanglement-relationship is new materialism’s ‘double action’, which stipulates the ontological necessity of becoming. In Another Place, Not Here and The Long Moment are chosen as examples of texts suspended on the aesthetic limen of postmodernism, which favour becoming, but which also exhibit strong elements and echoes of postmodernism. The selection of filmic texts chosen for analysis exhibit a progression from more molecular expressions of cinematic postmodernism to more molar manifestations, though in all cases we have been utilising Deleuze’s semiotics to reveal the material elements that precede any film’s semiological or signifying overlay. Furthermore, this thesis engaged ‘forgetting’ as an aspect of its methodological process, which is not to concede scholarly sloppiness or negligence. Forgetting deterritorialises the conscious agency of an individual subjectivity and strikes an unconscious flow. As a methodological element, forgetting is passive rather than active, and so in large part it cannot be candidly explicated.

Part One explored Dionne Brand’s novel, In Another Place, Not Here, and illustrated how a new materialist engagement with this novel supercedes – though does not negate – any postmodern interpretation. While some commentary and criticism on this novel has certainly already skirted around such engagement, we mobilised the theory of Derrida alongside new materialist insights to pursue this exploration further and in greater detail, proposing that Brand’s novel is a tidalectic pseudo-dialectical deconstruction.

Parts Two and Three turned from the thinking of Derrida as a predominant theoretical source to the thinking of Deleuze as a prevailing theoretical source. Parts Two and Three were more enmeshed in their performative explication of the thesis’ central claim that new materialism is implicated in a ‘dual action’. In one sense Part Three answered, or was at least prompted by Part Two’s preoccupation

215 with filmic movement-images, to test out the possibility of a literary time-image, which is essentially a poetry-poetics that experiments with far-from-equilibrium, material-semiotic becoming.

Part Two analysed a series of postmodern films in order to show that new materialism’s ‘dual action’ is applicable to different artistic mediums. Using Deleuze’s cinematic taxonomy of signs and images, Part Two pared these films back to their semiotic consistency and thereby illustrated how new materialism ‘cuts across’ a cinematic postmodernism. Additionally, Part Two’s compilation of varied postmodern films provided a panorama of cinematic postmodernism that spanned the perception-image, the affection-image, the impulse-image, through to the action-image, and thereby further illustrated how new materialism might consider cinematic postmodernism in the same ‘dual’ way that it confronts matter and materiality, although admittedly it also detailed the spectrum between the ‘duality’ of intensity and actuality. That is to say, the perception-image and the affection-image films of Carax coincide with a weak postmodernism and a strong intensity, the action-image films of the cinéma du look that have strong impulse- image components coincide with a stronger postmodernism, and the highly territorialised action-image films of Cameron and Blomkamp coincide with a stronger postmodernism still due to their fidelity to realism, humanism, and identity.

Part Three argued that Kate Fagan’s collection of poetry, The Long Moment, is a “territorial assemblage”, one axis of which concerns itself with stratification and destratification, and the other of which concerns itself with degrees of re- and de- territorialisation. To straddle and rework both of these axes Fagan probes the material, textual, textural, synesthetic, and phenomenological aspects of poetry, creating a poetry-poetics that manifests as a literary time-image.

Fagan’s poetry, Brand’s fiction, and the collection of cinema texts chosen for analysis, have all been construed at some point or in some capacity, as postmodern. As a way of escaping the hamstring of a strictly linguistic or social constructivist postmodern interpretation of these texts, this new materialist engagement marked a an initial turn to what are the ostensibly material or formal elements or absences in

216 these texts, to be able to contemplate, in the next, a realm of virtuality where language and matter, or matter and meaning, are entangled, and where pure difference reigns supreme.

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217 Chappie. Directed by Neill Blomkamp, Columbia Pictures, 2015.

The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie [Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie]. Directed by Luis Buñuel, Twentieth Century Fox, 1972.

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Diva. Directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, Compagnie Commerciale Française Cinématographique, 1981.

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The Great Dictator. Directed by Charles Chaplin, performance by Charlie Chaplin, United Artists, 1940.

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Lovers on the Bridge [Les Amants du Pont-Neuf] Directed by Léos Carax, Gaumont (France), 1991.

218 Man with a Movie Camera [Человек с киноаппаратом, Chelovek’s Kino- Apparatom]. Directed by Dziga Vertov, VUFKU, 1929.

The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc [Jeanne d’Arc]. Directed by Luc Besson, Gaumont, 1999.

Moon in the Gutter [La Lune dans le caniveau] Directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, Gaumont International, 1983.

Mr Klein [Monsieur Klein]. Directed by Joseph Losey, Studio Canal (UK), 1976.

The Night is Young [Mauvais Sang]. Directed by Léos Carax, AAA Classic, 1986.

Nikita [La Femme Nikita]. Directed by Luc Besson, Touchstone Pictures, 1990.

The Obscure Object of Desire [Cet obscure objet du désir]. Directed by Buñuel, First Artists (United States), 1977.

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Red Desert [Il deserto rosso]. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, Rizzoli (USA), 1964.

Roselyn and the Lion [Roselyne et les lions]. Directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, Gaumont, 1989.

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