James Coleman. Photograph. 1998–99. Images Courtesy the Artist. Girl Love

James Coleman. Photograph. 1998–99. Images courtesy the artist. Girl Love

KAJA SILVERMAN

Photograph (l998–99) begins like the story of creation: a “formless void and darkness cover[ing] the face of the deep.”1 Before long, a wind “sweeps over the face of the waters,” and light begins to separate itself from darkness. But the creation with which Photograph begins gives rise to a gray-and-white world, not the Technicolor one we usually associate with the inauguration of time; it is as if color has not yet been conjured forth. On a first screening of the sequence I have just described, we have no idea what kind of a text we are looking at. The opening images resemble one of those Gerhard Richter paintings in which a newspaper photograph has been abstracted to the point of unrecognizability. The subsequent play of light on water does with gray and white what a late Turner painting does with color.2 But these images appear to move, as if they are passing through a film projector. Here, too, we are not on firm ground. The viewer who takes advantage of the freedom James Coleman gives her by turning around to look at the film projector is astonished to see, instead, the usual three slide projectors, one on top of another. If she goes closer to the screen, she is in for an even bigger surprise. The rippling of the water comes to an abrupt halt, and then congeals into the unreadable materiality of a still photograph. The opening images of Photograph are accompanied by the almost liquid sounds of a young girl sighing. After a few moments, she begins to speak. Her language is evocative in its cadence, elisions, and ornateness of an earlier moment in time, but one that is impossible to locate. It sounds like a twentieth-century imitation of a

1. I quote here and in the sentences that follow from Genesis 1: 1–6, in the translation provided by The New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy (New York: Oxford University Press, l994), p. 2. 2. Rosalind Krauss characterizes these images as “blurs” in “First Lines: Introduction to Photograph,” James Coleman (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, l999), pp. 22–23, and Mieke Bal refers to them as “stains,” in “Memory Acts: Performing Subjectivity,” Performance Research 5, no. 3 (London 2000), p. 103. The account of performativity, which is at the heart of Bal’s essay, helps us to theorize the different accounts each of us offers of Photograph’s black-and-white images: Each viewer “‘plays’ the part scripted by the work” in a way that is speciﬁc to her (p. 102).

nineteenth-century version of a yet more archaic mode of speech.3 “Almost with pain, and bursting from control, and finding first their pathway free, could a rose brave the storm? Such might her emblem be,” the girl says in the opening sequence. At times, she seems to be quoting from a specific text, but it is unclear which. It is also difficult to say where quotation leaves off and invention begins. The meaning of the girl’s words evaporates almost as soon as she articulates them. This permits them to become a vehicle for the expression and conveyance of affect, rather than—as is classically the case with language—an agency for social intercourse and the binding of affect. I say “conveyance” because the words the girl uses are “open,” like unconscious forms of symbolization; each word transmits its full “charge” to the next one. But this kind of speech is like an electrical current: Its charge only registers when it finds an outlet. We provide this outlet; it is at the site of our subjectivity that the girl’s words come into their own. Even if we refuse to be part of the libidinal conveyance system and struggle, instead, to understand what the girl is saying, we are brought back to affect since it is about her state of mind that the girl speaks. As in Background (1991–94), another of Coleman’s “projections,” this state of mind is melancholy. The girl’s melancholy is, however, ringed by ecstasy; it is the sorrow of someone who is encircled by a joy that does not reach her; she is present to a “bright stillness” from which she remains “afar.” Because of the biblical resonances of the opening images, we at first assume that the radiance and joy to which she alludes were once available to her, but have since been taken away. Like the child described by Wordsworth in “Intimations of Immortality,” she came into the world trailing clouds of glory.4 Since then, though, this glory has faded, making the world a dark and narrow place. But it soon becomes evident that Coleman is not mapping the story of the fall onto that of creation. The joy about which the girl speaks at the beginning of Photograph is not one that she has already forfeited, but rather one that she has not yet reached. The melancholy or “woe” that she presently experiences is also not opposed to this joy; it is “beneath” it, or “behind” it. As the girl herself puts it in the opening sequence of this installation, “The dark hours wring forth the hidden might which hath lain . . . in the silent soul.” Surprisingly, the images that dissolve into photographic grain when we approach the screen regain their watery consistency when we return to our earlier viewing position. How can our textual knowledge evaporate in this way? The answer is that Coleman is as much a phenomenologist as a modernist. Although intensely self-conscious, and determined to work outside conventional photographic

3. Krauss writes that the girl’s language “rings with the tones of verse learned in high school, so that it is both terribly familiar . . . and depressingly uninhabitable from our vantage as adults” (“First Lines,” p. 14). Bal also notes that the lines she speaks “belong to the treasure-house of language handed down at school,” but nevertheless feels profoundly “addressed” by them (“Memory Acts,” p. 104). 4. The lines in question read: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; / The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, / Had elsewhere its setting, / And cometh from afar: / Not in entire forgetfulness, / And not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home” (“Intimations of Immortality,” lines 59–66, in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. Arthur M. Eastman et al. [New York: Norton, l970], p. 580). Girl Love 7

and narrative codes, he is not opposed to what is often called “illusionism.” Indeed, he does not even recognize the category. There is not “being” on one side, and “seeming” on the other. Rather, things are what they seem to be, and this “seeming” shifts over time. The photographic grain of the opening images no more constitutes their truth than the rippling water we see when we first look at them. I am not saying that all forms of perception are equal in Photograph. The installation is—among other things—a kind of bildungsroman of the look; it charts the girl’s journey from a perception that is at war with the colors and shapes of the world to one that embraces them. But this is a voyage from solitariness to love, rather than from fiction to truth. In journeying away from solitariness, the girl could even be said to move away from truth. At the beginning of Photograph, we learn, her look sheds “too clear a light” upon what it sees, one that is “too sorrowfully true.” Although the images in the opening sequence of the installation still appear to be moving when we return to our original viewing position, they no longer look exactly the same. What earlier seemed to be an amorphous mass of shadows and light passing over a body of water now consists of two discrete layers: one showing the waves and play of light, all in perfect focus, and another, intervening between us and the first, which forms a cloudy mist. This cloudy mist is the mark that the girl’s sorrow leaves upon the things she sees. In Freud’s account of melancholy, the shadow of the object falls on the ego.5 In Coleman’s, the formula is reversed; it is the ego that casts its shadow upon the object. This is what it means to be at war with the forms and hues of earthly things. It might seem paradoxical that the girl should equate this darkening effect with “too clear a light.” However, when intensified beyond a certain point, a spotlight does, in fact, tarnish that which it illuminates. Melancholy can be this kind of a spotlight, diminishing beauty, magnifying imperfection.6 The girl herself later characterizes the kind of light she casts on things at the beginning of Photograph as an “unsettled fire.” After her look has been tempered by love, it burns “calmly” and “brightly,” in harmony with what it illuminates. Since it must be clear by now that Photograph is bristling with references to earlier texts, I hope that I will be forgiven if I introduce another biblical analogy— one that further clarifies the work’s visual allegory. Like the child about whom Paul talks in 1 Corinthians 13: 11–13, the girl through whose eyes we look at the outset of this work sees through a glass darkly. Later, however, she will be “face to face” with the world.7 The agency of this visual clarification will again be love, the

5. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works 14, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 249. 6. For a further elaboration of this point, see my discussion of Coleman’s Background, “Melancholia 2,” in James Coleman, ed. Susan Gaensheimer, trans. Roger M. Buergel (Ostﬁldern/Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2002), pp. 107–19. Many of the other issues addressed in “Girl Love” ﬁgure both in this essay, and in my essays on Lapsus Exposure and I N I T I A L S, which are included in the same volume. “Girl Love” also derives from this book, which was the catalog for a retrospective of Coleman’s work at the Lenbachhaus Munich. 7. The New Oxford Annotated Bible, pp. 243–44. 8 OCTOBER

affect that the Apostle privileges above all others (1 Cor. 13:13). Fortunately, though, the girl’s scopic conversion will not require her to put aside childish things. It will happen not on the road to Damascus, but rather in the rooms and environs of a lowly grade school. The love that will enable it will also be of an emphatically terrestrial kind.

The black-and-white sequence with which Photograph begins constitutes the first of three such sequences, which are spread out at long intervals over the course of the installation. The rest of the work consists of a series of linked and overlapping images shot inside and outside a school. These images are vividly colored, featuring the bright reds, yellows, and blues of children’s clothing and toys. Most of them are devoted to tableaux of schoolgirls, either in couples, or larger groups, although on several important occasions they also include boys. Sometimes Coleman shows his schoolchildren engaged in a physical activity and, at other times, in conversation or repose. The human figures in Photograph almost always appear against the backdrop of a wall, which serves to eliminate the depth of field that is generally assumed to be an intrinsic feature of the photographic image and to signal its continuity with perspectival painting. This does not mean, though, that these images are semantically “flat.” The walls in front of which the children stand or sit are parti- tioned by blackboards, wainscoting, and two-tone color schemes, rendering them graphlike. The children themselves seem to have been drawn over this graph, constituting a second layer of writing on the same surface. Thus, although there is a

Coleman. Photograph. 1998–99. Girl Love 9

dramatic foreshortening of space in the installation’s images, they still require us to read figure in relation to ground. As becomes evident around the middle of Photograph, the schoolchildren are readying themselves for a dance, which takes place in the final sequence. The girl refers to this dance at several points in the installation as a “round,” and at others as a “circle.” The children perform the circle—both in the sense of dramatizing it, and creating it—by joining their bodies together. It is thus clearly a signifier for something like “society,” or “social formation,” which it encourages us to conceptualize in terms of unity and closure. But Photograph abounds in references to chalk, as well as circles, both at the level of the voice and at that of the image.8 Its school setting also foregrounds this substance as an instrument of writing. On two important occasions, the girl brings the terms “chalk” and “circle” together, thereby equating the dance, toward which the installation moves, not only with a generalized sociality, but also with what could be more precisely defined as the symbolic order or domain of language. At the beginning of Photograph, the girl positions herself emphatically outside the chalk circle. Coleman repeatedly displays her in situations that foreground her isolation. She stands or sits in an empty schoolroom with one of her friends, far from the tumult of the larger group. The girl also characterizes herself as a “lone spirit” in the first sequence, a characterization that seems tonally consistent with subsequent sequences. It is her reluctance to speak, she helps us to understand, that is responsible for her solitude. In the first sequence, she describes herself as a “silent soul.” In the second—as we look at images of two girls turning first toward, and then away from each other—she invokes not only the concept of “silence,” but also those of a “breathless pause,” and the “hush of hearts.” In the third sequence, she claims to be ready, finally, to speak, but complains that she cannot do so in the location in which she finds herself. On a first viewing, it seems that the girl recoils from speech because of the mortifying effects of the linguistic signifier—because, as Lacan puts it, the symbol murders the thing.9 She uses the word “lime” on three separate occasions, each time linking it to the circle. “Lime” is not a simple synonym for “chalk”; it is, rather, the signifier we select when referring to the latter as a disinfectant of corpses. The melancholy that suffuses the first few sequences of Photograph consequently appears to be that which is induced in all of us by the loss of the real. Through her silence, the girl attempts to reverse this loss. In opting out of speech, though, she also opts out of subjectivity. In the opening sequence, she repeatedly refers to herself in the third person, and in the

8. Krauss relates the metaphor of the circle to Coleman’s medium. As she puts it, “circularity” is “built into his apparatus through the form of the carousels” (“First Lines,” p. 11). And “the two, superimposed circles of Photograph—that is the social order in which the protagonists are caught and that of the slide carousel through which they are projected—could be thought of as relating to each other as content to form, or signiﬁed to signiﬁer” (p. 15). 9. Jacques Lacan, “Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, l977), p. 104. 10 OCTOBER

following sequence, she signals her presence as a speaker only with the oblique possessive “my.” Her silence consequently puts her in an untenable position. Over the course of the work, the girl slowly returns to language. In the third sequence, she lays claim to the first-person pronoun. In the next sequence, she joins the rehearsal, and makes her first, tentative dance moves. Later, she becomes a more practiced dancer. And she occupies a central role in the performance with which Photograph ends, signaling her full accession to the symbolic order. A whole host of details, however, disable this reading. First of all, in their rendition of the chalk-circle dance, the children do not form a complete circle, but only half of one. This half-circle is also made up of smaller clusters—little groups of boys and girls. If it represents a symbolic order, then, it is one without either unity or closure. The girl also repeats some of the words in the final sequence of Photograph that she uses in its opening sequences. “There felt a moment’s silence round,” she says again, “a breathless pause . . . the hush of hearts that beat.” The fact that these words can appear again here suggests that rather than accommodating herself to the linguistic signifier, she has somehow shaped it to her desires. Coleman indicates this in other ways as well. At no point does the girl’s speech conform to what might be called a langue or generalized language system. It is, on the contrary, consistently idiosyncratic and poetic. Her diction and syntax also seem to derive from an earlier age, rather than from the verbal universe implied by the installation’s costumes and setting. Finally, rather than portraying the girl’s capitulation to mortification, the final two sequences of Photograph abound in metaphors of resurrection. The mass ornament she forms with her schoolmates makes “a blighted place all green with life again.”10 Their cries do even more: They are “the sounds of how all things shall speak and quicken.” Both are clearly signifiers for a redemptive form of symbolization, one capable of raising the world from the grave to which the linguistic signifier has consigned it.

Through the many references that Coleman makes in Photograph to circles and chalk, he links his text to a thirteenth-century Chinese story, The Circle of Chalk. This story is available in English in two translations, both of which are based on prior translations—one rendered by Francis Hume,11 from Stanislas Julien’s French translation; and one undertaken by James Laver,12 from Klabund’s German translation. The Klabund derives, in turn, from the Julien. Since Coleman draws on the Laver translation of the Chinese tale, as well as on the Hume, his installation could be said to be a translation of a translation of a

10. I take the term “mass ornament” from Siegfried Kracauer. See his “The Mass Ornament,” in The Mass Ornament, trans. Tom Levine (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, l995), pp. 74–86. 11. The Story of the Circle of Chalk: A Drama from the Old Chinese, trans. Frances Hume (London: Rodale Press, n.d.). 12. The Circle of Chalk: A Play in Five Acts, trans. James Laver (London: William Heinemann, l929). Girl Love 11

translation of a translation, spanning four different languages and cultures. Many textual “layers” consequently intervene between Photograph and the original story. Coleman does nothing to conceal this fact; on the contrary, he foregrounds the distance between his “translation” and the others by dramatically reconceiving the narrative they recount. He also organizes his work itself around the metaphor of a palimpsest, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “a parchment or other writing material written upon twice, the original writing having been erased or rubbed out to make a place for the second.”13 In all of these ways, Coleman indicates that there is no such thing for him as a “faithful translation”; every commutation of a text from one language to another language creates a new text. Both through his own reliance on secondary and tertiary versions of The Circle of Chalk, and the centrality that he gives to the metaphor of the palimpsest, he might also seem to be suggesting that there is no way of getting back to the original text. In fact, though, the author of Photograph manifests an absolute obsession with origins. He is as committed to accessing the erased part of the palimpsest as he is to creating new textual layers, and he ultimately shows the second of these projects to be dependent on the first. Coleman introduces the notion of a palimpsest in the third sequence of Photograph. In the first image of this sequence, a black girl sits on the floor in a classroom, her back almost flush with a white wall. She wears red sports pants and a striped top, the sort often worn by schoolchildren. But a black stripe runs down the outside of each trouser-leg, within which a white motif repeats itself, transforming this “uniform” into a kind of fancy dress.14 A white girl stands in right frame, leaning against the same wall. She, too, wears conventional clothing—a red T-shirt, and black sports pants. To them, though, she has added silver shoes and a red-sequined cummerbund. This ensemble effects an even more emphatic break with the everyday. The white girl’s upper body extends into the space of a blue square, 13. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, l994), p. 1260. 14. Bal suggests that the costumes in Photograph are evocative of commedia dell’Arte. See “Memory Acts,” p. 109.

Coleman. Photograph. 1998–99. 12 OCTOBER

which defines itself over and against the white of the larger wall. This square is situated at the end of a long blackboard, which not only further striates the wall, but also constitutes a literal writing surface, on top of which Coleman has in effect “drawn” the girls. But the notion of a palimpsest is primarily present through its absence in this sequence. For the first time in the installation, the girl utters the word “I,” and indicates her readiness to speak. She also tells us what makes both things possible: the countless “verse[s] and sign[s]” that have been written on the blackboard by previous students. The idea of the blackboard as a “palimpsest” is, however, immediately canceled out by the blackboard itself, which is completely blank; it bears, as the girl puts it, “no Cretaceous trace of all that hearts ha[ve] dared and done.” This makes it a chilling reminder not only of what would happen to her own words as soon as she uttered them, but also of the loss that gave rise to her linguistic difficulties in the first place. If a blackboard is erased at the end of every school day, it is to make room for the discourse of the next day. If this did not happen, there would soon be an illegible jumble of letters. It might therefore seem difficult to understand how Coleman could attribute the girl’s refusal to speak in this sequence to the blankness of the blackboard’s surface. He is working here, however, with an implicitly psychoanalytic model of symbolization. Rather than directly evoking a signified, as in Saussure’s account of the sign, the Colemanian signifier refers back to a previous one, which itself does the same.15 By erasing what earlier generations of children have written on the blackboard, the implicit janitor or teacher has consequently rendered null and void everything that the present generation might want to say. I characterized this model of signification as “psychoanalytic” because more is at issue here than the by-now-familiar assumption that there can be no signification ex nihilo, since every utterance depends on a preexisting language system, and the uses to which it was put by earlier speakers. The author of Photograph is concerned with the psychic as well as the textual bases of symbolization. Since he also makes clear that desire is at the heart of both of these forms of symbolization, he implicitly prioritizes the first over the second. And, whereas the notion of a “beginning” is more or less inconceivable when we are talking about textuality, its conceptualization is the precondition for thinking about psychic meaning. In Interpretation of Dreams and “The Unconscious,” Freud maintains that every signifying act in a given subject’s life refers back, in some ultimate sense, to a primally repressed term, which is most frequently the mother.16 We do little more during our stay in the world than search for substitutes for this lost object. To make something a substitute for the mother is to transfer onto it the psychic value

15. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966), pp. 65–70. 16. See Freud, “Interpretation of Dreams,” in The Standard Edition 5 (1953), pp. 509–621, and “The Unconscious,” in The Standard Edition 14 (1957), pp. 166–208. Girl Love 13

that “properly” belongs to her. However, displacement becomes more and more circuitous over the course of the subject’s life. Each new object of desire takes its place within an ever-expanding symbolic network, and it does so only on the basis of its affinities with other elements. In order to arrive at its meaning, then, we cannot simply leapfrog over all of the terms that stand in for the mother in order to get back to her. Rather, we must slowly retrace the trajectory marked by desire, referring each signifying element to the one that preceded and enabled it. Within the Freudian model, this regressive journey finally leads to a term capable of functioning as a signified. This is of course the mother. In my view, however, the mother does not constitute the full stop of meaning. She classically provides the first signifier for a more primordial loss: the loss of what Lacan variously calls “presence,” “being,” or the “here and now.”17 Unlike the other signifiers of the hic et nunc, though, she has nothing to which she can refer back. What she stands in for psychically cannot provide this function since it is precisely what escapes signification. Although serving as the support for libidinal symbolization, the mother is consequently devoid of semantic value. It is not she who gives all of the other signifiers of desire their meaning; it is, rather, they that determine what she can mean. To go “backward,” libidinally speaking, also is not finally to touch “ground”; it is, instead, to apprehend the groundlessness of all signification. Coleman helps us to see how liberating this can be.

With the metaphor of the palimpsest, the author of Photograph promotes a synchronic rather than a diachronic apprehension of time. The past coexists with the present, on a different level or layer. Temporality is also gendered. Coleman seeks to access female subjectivity prior to the castration complex, which is almost completely erased by what comes later. Like Freud, who compares this period in woman’s history to the Minoan and Mycenean civilizations concealed behind the Greek, he also conceives of his project semiotically.18 He is in search not of a lost nature, but rather of a forgotten form of symbolization. In order to understand this part of Coleman’s project, we have to retrieve the story over which he writes his own. This story, The Circle of Chalk, has a Solomonian premise. In its climactic scene, two women and a young boy go before a judge, both women claiming to be the boy’s mother. One is the boy’s biological mother, and the other is the ﬁrst wife of the same father. Whereas the former loves and cares for the child, the latter wants him only for the inheritance he will secure. The judge draws a chalk circle and puts all three characters inside it. He then decrees the true mother to be the one who will succeed in pulling the boy out of the circle. In the ensuing

17. For an extended elaboration of the argument presented in this paragraph, see my World Spectators (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000). 18. Freud, “Female Sexuality,” in The Standard Edition 21 (1964), p. 226. 14 OCTOBER

tussle, only the “false pretender” is able to do this; the biological mother lets go of the child so as to avoid injuring him. The judge then reveals the apparent contest to have been a test of maternal love, and awards the boy to its “loser.” There are no literal mothers, no judge in Photograph, and although several boys appear in it, none of them constitutes its primary focus. It is therefore difficult, at first, to see how it relates to the Chinese story. Coleman’s work nevertheless does reprise the story of a child who is pulled in two directions. It is simply that this child is a girl rather than a boy, and that the directions in which she is pulled are libidinal rather than physical. But even after we understand this, we are in danger of going astray. At its simplest level, Photograph tells the story of a girl who resists being incorporated into a group dance because she prefers to be alone with a beloved female companion. But she also loves a boy, as does her female companion. Coleman alternates sequences in which the girls appear together, and sequences in which a girl appears with a boy. He therefore seems to be reiterating the Freudian claim that the human subject is initially bisexual, but is later forced to “choose” between homosexuality or heterosexuality.19 What once again makes this an impossible reading is that the two scenes in which Coleman stages an encounter between a girl and a boy are affectively consistent with those involving the encounters between girls. The same language issues also emerge in both. The transitions between the sequences dramatizing these two different relations are, furthermore, remarkably fluid; one never has the sense that the latter constitute an erotic binary. Finally, in the dance performance with which Photograph ends, there are both boys and girls. The girl in this installation is pulled not between a female friend and a male friend, but between two mothers, just as the boy is in the ancient Chinese story. These mothers are personifications of the fantasies through which the female subject apprehends her actual mother at two radically disjunctive moments in her psychic development: phases that I have elsewhere theorized under the rubrics of the “negative” and “positive” Oedipus complexes.20 The girl in Photograph is on the other side of the double Oedipus complex, but she refuses the destiny to which it is supposed to lead. The negative Oedipus complex conventionally precedes the positive in the case of the female subject and lasts until the “discovery” of what Freud calls “anatomical difference.”21 During this period, the mother is perceived by the girl

19. Freud advances this argument in “Three Essays on a Theory of Sexuality,” in The Standard Edition 7 (1953), pp. 135–243. 20. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, l988), pp. 101–86. The reading of Photograph that follows permits me to integrate this account of female subjectivity with the model of symbolization that I develop in World Spectators. It also comes as a clariﬁcation of my assertion in the latter text that “it is through loving the mother that we are able to love the world” (p. 123). 21. See Freud, “Female Sexuality”; “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,” in The Standard Edition 19, pp. 248–63; and “Femininity,” in The Standard Edition 22, pp. 112–35. Freud refers to the period before the female castration crisis as the negative Oedipus complex in “Female Sexuality,” p. 241, but more typically calls it “pre-Oedipal.” Girl Love 15

to be phallic, or nonlacking. This permits her to serve both as the girl’s love object and as a fulcrum for pleasurable identification. The girl’s feelings for the mother classically express themselves through the wish to give her a child, and to receive one in return.22 However, this is, in my view, a complex and multifaceted attachment, which sets the wheels of unconscious symbolization in motion and establishes the girl as a full-fledged subject. It is here, and not within the positive Oedipus complex, that female desire begins. In order for the girl’s early love for the mother to serve all of these functions, it must yield to displacement, just as the boy’s must. Were the girl’s Oedipal structuration to end here, her subsequent desiring history would also parallel his; it would be by tracing the associative paths leading from her mother to other creatures and things that she would find her way to them. This is not, however, what usually happens. Instead, the girl is called on by her culture to substitute her father for her mother as the template for her desire, and this summons proves difficult to resist. In the classic psychoanalytic account, the girl’s exposure to the male genitals leads her to see first herself and then her mother as “castrated.” If anatomy is able to play this role, though, it is because it has been lifted out of the real, and into the domain of meaning. The phallus is not an organ, but rather a signifier for power, privilege, and wholeness.23 It assumes these values through its absence at the site of the female body. In a stunning tautology, the girl’s supposed anatomical lack then becomes the pretext for depriving her of the symbolic legacy to which the boy is heir. Within the present discussion, the all-important feature of the narrative I have just recounted is what happens to the girl’s libidinal economy as a result of the female castration crisis. She “loses her enjoyment in her phallic sexuality,” and, often, in all forms of erotic pleasure (Freud, p. 126). Her self-love is morti- fied—and so profoundly that she will be forever after narcissistically wounded. Finally, she not only abandons her mother as a love-object, but also begins to “hate” her (Freud, p. 121). She eventually extends this hatred to all other women (Freud, p. 126). This devaluation of self and mother leads to the positive Oedipus complex. The girl turns to her father for what she believes herself to lack, and, later, to other men. But she will only ever experience any real satisfaction, Freud tells us, if she gives birth to a male child (Freud, p. 124). What I am calling the “positive Oedipal mother” is another product of this process of devaluation. Not only is she herself now seen to be lacking, but she also becomes the cause of her daughter’s lack (Freud, p. 124). At various moments in “Femininity,” Freud suggests that the girl would have arrived at this view of her mother sooner or later, even without the castration crisis, since she has always

22. Freud, “Femininity,” p. 120. Hereafter cited in the text as “Freud.” 23. Although I formulate it slightly differently than he does, this observation derives in the ﬁnal analysis from Lacan. See “The Signiﬁcation of the Phallus,” in Écrits: A Selection, p. 285. 16 OCTOBER

been full of reproaches against her (Freud, pp. 121–24). The mother’s insufficien- cies simply come into sharper focus after the disclosure of her anatomical “insufficiency.” Freud thereby imputes an illusory status to the negative Oedipal mother. However, in a key passage in “Femininity,” he compares the girl’s love for the mother to a civilization that has been buried under a later one, much as he does in “Female Sexuality.” In this passage, he also suggests that the female psyche consists of two strata. One stratum preserves the negative Oedipal relation to the mother, and—by implication—this mother herself. It is covered over, but not erased, by the second, which immortalizes the positive Oedipus complex. In the same passage, he maintains that it is only by accessing a woman at the level of her negative Oedipal libidinal economy that a man can love her. By doing so, he underscores the pathological nature of what happens to the girl at the castration crisis; she becomes a subject no one could love. He also shows us what a complicated thing heterosexuality is: A woman’s identification with her mother allows us to distinguish two strata: the . . . one which rests on her affectionate attachment to her mother and takes her as a model, and the later one from the Oedipus complex which seeks to get rid of her mother and take her place with her father. We are no doubt justified in saying that much of both of them is left over for the future. . . . But the phase of the affectionate . . . attachment is the decisive one for a woman’s future. . . . It is in this identification too that she acquires her attractiveness to a man, whose Oedipus attachment to his mother it kindles into passion [Freud, p. 134]. Freud’s famous lament that “a man’s love and a woman’s are a phase apart psychologically” occurs in the same paragraph. It is generally assumed to refer to the fact that women direct toward their children the love that their husbands desire for themselves. However, this complaint can also be read in another way— as suggesting that so long as the negative Oedipus complex remains hidden from the female subject herself, she will not be able to respond to the desire it arouses in the male subject. As should be evident by now, the narrative of female subjectivity begs the same question that is addressed to the judge in the climactic scene of The Circle of Chalk: “Which mother is the true mother?” The answer that the latter gives to this question, however, is diametrically opposed to that advanced by Freud. Whereas, in the standard psychoanalytic story, the true mother is the lacking mother, in the Chinese story she is the loving mother. At least in the Laver/Klabund translation, she is also the loved mother. The judge in this text not only privileges love above all other manifestations of motherhood, but also remains in love with the woman to whom he awards the child throughout the entire course of the narrative, in spite of the fact that she has neither money nor status, and works, at one point, as a prostitute. This translation thus provides a dramatic instantiation of the Girl Love 17

refusal to devalue the mother. It also establishes love as a kind of law—indeed, as the supreme law. “The secret truth love made to appear, / The darkness was through love made clear. / Love confounds the lying tongue, / Love is triumphant over wrong, / Love is like the sun in heaven, / Love the calm that falls at even, / Love will cheat death of his prey, / And never, never pass away,” says the true mother exultantly.24

In Photograph, Coleman also asks: “Who is the true mother?” Although it is within primarily psychoanalytic parameters that he poses this question, it is within those mapped out by Laver and Klabund that he answers it. The true mother, he helps us to understand, is the one who both loves and is loved. But Coleman goes even further in his reimagination of femininity than do the various authors of the Chinese story. The love at the heart of his work appears to be, at first glance, simply that which circulates between girls at a young age, before their egos have fully formed, and before narcissism and love have become sufficiently differentiated to allow for the distinction of subject and object. Both because it constitutes a form of self-love and because it often represents the first erotic investment after the Oedipus complex—and is therefore strongly colored by it—such passion can be extraordinarily intense. At the same time, it is more labile than later loves will be, after language has performed its stabilizing function. Coleman underscores the lability of what might be called “girl love,” at both the level of the subject and at that of the object, by situating Photograph’s voice in a very special relation to its images. Until now, I have referred to the speaker as “the girl,” as if she were a single character. This is, however, not the case. Coleman links the text, which the female voice speaks, more closely to the narrative enacted in the images than he does in a number of his other works.25 At the same time, though, he makes it impossible to assign this text to a single character. In the second sequence of Photograph, for instance, he shows us the black girl in a green T-shirt, and a shorter white girl, in red. At first, they turn toward each other, like friends. Later, however, we see them facing away from each other. Over the latter images, the speaker says, with infinite sadness: “My friend—where art thou, day by day . . . gliding like some mournful stream away,” echoing in her words the sense of estrangement that the girls communicate with their bodies. It is impossible to know, though, to which of these two figures the voice “belongs.” In subsequent sequences, Coleman introduces more and more claimants to the identity of the speaker: other girls of the same age; older girls; even at two points, a boy and a girl. Oddly, this proliferation of bodies does not serve

24. The Circle of Chalk: A Play in Five Acts, trans. James Laver, p. 105. 25. Photograph can be contrasted in this respect to three of Coleman’s other “projections,” Background, Lapsus Exposure, and I N I T I A L S. 18 OCTOBER

to detach voice from image, but rather to create a much more dispersed subjectivity. It is as if the voice migrates from girl to girl, like a bee among flowers. Never has the first-person pronoun more warranted its status as a shifter. There are also many claimants to the category of “friend,” and, once again, all claimants qualify.26 But “friend” is not really adequate to the task with which it is entrusted. The affective relation at the heart of Photograph has hardly ever been spoken about, let alone celebrated. We do not have a name for it, and it is only with violence that it can be made to fit inside any of our existing categories. It is not simple friendship, or sisterhood, but it also does not conform narrowly to any available definition of “lesbianism.” In order to address her female companion appropriately, the girl must coin a new, compound noun. “My friend,” she says in a voice charged with emotion, “My heart’s first friend.” There is also nothing primordial about this relationship, which I will henceforth call “girl love.” It does not represent a contin- uation of the female subject’s early love for her mother, but, rather, its symbolic recovery from a later moment in time, and there is no limit on when that can occur. Finally, the lability, which Coleman dramatizes both through the endless circulation of the first-person pronoun and through his refusal to link the girl’s voice to any one body, is not the symptom of either an incomplete subjective differentiation or an inability to commit to a single erotic object. It testifies, rather, to the libidinal “openness” of the semiotic upon which girl love is based. In “Femininity,” Freud describes the three narratives that are available to the female subject after she has passed through the positive Oedipus complex. She can give up “her phallic activity, and with it her sexuality in general, as well as a good part of her masculinity in other fields”; she can “cling with defiant self- assertiveness to her threatened masculinity,” hoping until “an incredibly late age” to get a penis “some time”; or she can slowly and circuitously “reach the final female attitude, in which she takes her father as her object” (Freud, p. 230). As is painfully obvious, none of these narratives is psychically tenable. A woman embarking on the first refuses to invest in the phallus, but is no longer able to access her negative Oedipal relation to her mother. There is consequently nothing else for her to do but to close down desire altogether. A woman heading off on the second of these paths also protests against the options that have been given to her, but she negotiates a partial “settlement” with them by acceding to the privileged value her culture confers on the phallus and participating in the devaluation of the mother. The woman who pursues the last of these itineraries to the end capitulates to the castration crisis, and generalizes the sense of impairment with which it leaves her to all women. She becomes—as I suggested above—the subject no one can love. In each case, the affective legacy of the female subject’s Oedipal structuration is a profound melancholy. 26. As Bal notes, “although clearly a young actress’s,” the voice in Photograph “emphatically declaims the verse is no-one’s”; “flowing in and out of personal discourse, wavering between first/second inter- activity and third-person narrative, the romantic discourse . . . is, in fact, primarily, insistently, effectively, antiindividualistic”(“Memory Acts,” pp. 104–05). She sees the voice’s anonymity as the “motor” for the very different performance of the work that each of us enables. Girl Love 19

This melancholy should not be confused with that which follows the entry into language. The former provides the impetus for allegory, and—through it—a redemptive relation to the world. The melancholy to which the female castration crisis typically leads, on the other hand, is based not only on the loss of the mother, and a narcissistic wound that never heals, but also on the closing down of the possibility of this kind of redemptive symbolization, with catastrophic consequences for the world. In Photograph, Coleman dramatizes a radical alternative to these three narratives. Girl love undoes the devaluation to which the castration complex subjects both mother and daughter. It also maintains faith with the negative Oedipal mother in its emotional investment in the femininity. But the intense affect that links one girl to another in this work poses an even greater challenge to paternal law than it does to the female subject’s original desire for the mother, in that it comes after the event that is supposed to “regularize” libido. Coleman emphasizes this by extending girl love well beyond the temporal limits of childhood. Although the first girls he shows to be in tender communion with each other are quite young, some of the girls he later shows together seem almost old enough to graduate from high school. Coleman also represents girl love as the basis for the two heterosexual pairings in Photograph. In doing so, he directs us back to the passage in “Femininity” in which Freud identifies the female subject’s early attachment to the mother as the precondition for the male subject’s love. By itself, this would not lead to a happy heterosexual relation since the female subject would still have no access to this attachment. But girl love enables a new kind of heterosexuality, one predicated on a reciprocal access to the negative Oedipal mother. Finally, Coleman maps girl love across the racial divide. He makes its primary representative the relationship between a black girl and a white girl. This is extraordinarily important since the distinction between “blackness” and “whiteness” can also be traced back to a kind of castration crisis—this time one in which “whiteness” emerges as the privileged trope, and “blackness” undergoes a radical deidealization.27 As the author of Photograph helps us to see, the binaries of race find their necessary support in the one that creates gender. Were we to succeed in undoing the latter, we would also cancel out the former.

It is immediately after uttering the words “my friend . . . where art thou . . . day by day . . . gliding like some dark mournful stream away” that the girl coins the neologism “my heart’s first friend.” The virtual simultaneity of these two pronouncements makes evident why she is reluctant to speak. She wants to convey to

27. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1969), for a brilliant discussion of this deidealization. 20 OCTOBER

her beloved friend the feelings she has for her. To be more precise, she wants to communicate with her in a way that will actualize their love, and—in doing so— provide both of them with a way out of the melancholy of normative femininity. This message, however, cannot be delivered by means of ordinary words. Not only is conventional language inadequate to the task of describing the girl’s affect, but it is also designed to kill it. Silence consequently seems the only option, but it maintains the two friends at an irreducible distance from each other. The notion that language is inimical to affect is of course well established in psychoanalytic theory. This is not because one is effable, and the other ineffable, but rather because they represent two dramatically different forms of meaning- making. Freud’s name for what might be called “affective symbolization” is the “primary process.”28 The primary process, which prevails at the level of the unconscious, is driven by the desire to make repressed visual memories perceptually available once again. It is, however, extraordinarily adaptable; when there is a prohibition upon a particular visual memory, it simply displaces the latter’s psychic charge onto a similar or contiguous visual memory. It also constantly searches for the affinities that will facilitate future transfers. Its defining feature is libidinal mobility. When words are most conventionally “wordlike,” on the other hand, they bring displacement to a halt. They do so by insisting upon difference, over and against similarity and contiguity. Indeed, in a certain sense, the linguistic sign is nothing but difference. “Mother” signifies “not father,” “not brother,” “not sister,” etc. When we write or speak, we also articulate our words, i.e., we “cut” them off from each other graphically or acoustically. Even the “arbitrariness” of the linguistic sign represents part of this process of differentiation. The lack of affinities between it and the referent, as well as between the two terms out of which it is itself comprised, puts further obstacles in the way of libidinal transfer. The linguistic sign is consequently a poor conveyer of affect. When one expresses one’s love to another person in words, one seldom feels that one has in fact transmitted this feeling to the other, and the listener is likely to experience an equal or greater dissatisfaction. Freud associates the linguistic signifier with the “secondary process,” which predominates at the level of the preconscious. But the girl is in an even greater dilemma than I have so far indicated. Thwarted in her desire to communicate her feelings for her friend by the linguistic signifier, she cannot simply retreat to the perceptual signifier. Left completely to its own devices, the unconscious is mute; it can communicate one memory’s psychic value to another memory, or even to an external perceptual stimulus, but it is powerless to transmit one subject’s feelings to another. It is also the case that during the first few sequences of Photograph the “palimpsest” remains “sheathed,” as the girl puts it; she has no access to the unconscious signifiers that make possible the feelings she entertains for her friend.

28. Freud, “Interpretation of Dreams,” pp. 588–609. Girl Love 21

But I have of course exaggerated the opposition between words and images—or, to state the case more precisely, between words and the visual memories that nestle within what we see. Words can come under the influence of unconscious desire, and start acting more like images. The converse is also true: Images can come under the influence of the preconscious, and start acting more like words. As its title signals by bringing together the words “photo” and “graph,” Photograph is profoundly committed to these kinds of semiotic crossovers. It is itself made up of images that have been put under the sign of writing. And, although much of the first half of this work is given over to the incommensurability of conventional language and girl love, the protagonist’s speech passes more and more profoundly over to the side of the unconscious, until it, too, becomes a form of visualization. At the moment that this happens, the speaker is finally able to say what she feels. As we have already seen, in the third sequence, the girl expresses her readiness to speak to her beloved friend, but only in the conditional tense: “I could have poured out words on that pale air, to make your proud votaries ring.” The “votaries” to whom she refers are those who serve what she calls “long-departed verse and sign.” She thus not only establishes the discourse of the past as the necessary reference point for her own, but also characterizes it as a poem. It is by adding another line to this poem that she will communicate both with the past and with the girl she loves. Coleman reiterates this last point at the level of the enunciation by establishing a “rhyme” between Photograph and one of the texts over which it is superimposed: the Laver/Klabund translation of Chalk Circle. In this translation, a minor character says that “verse making and lovemaking correspond to the same fundamental emotion in the soul.”29 The speaker makes a more explicit connection between girl love and versification in a later sequence. Over a series of images showing the black girl standing together with a white girl outside the school, she says: “Shall I then fear the tone and rhyme that breathes from worlds unknown? Surely these joyous aspirations shall grasp their full desire.” But in both the fifth and the eighth sequences of Photograph, she uses the word “dream” to characterize her relation to the past, suggesting that it is still only in her sleep that she is able to access the negative Oedipal mother. The sentence “there was agony to the word; less, less, to the cadence of a word” also appears in the latter of these sequences, which makes evident the girl’s continued resistance to language. The eighth sequence gives way, though, to the third and last of the watery sequences, during which the speaker again resorts to nonverbal sounds suggestive of rippling water. Toward the end of this last watery sequence, a swath of orange bleeds through the gray and white, mitigating its gloom. A moment later, the obscuring fog dissipates altogether, disclosing the source of the bright color. The black girl emerges from it in an orange fleece jacket, indicating that it is her look that has undergone this miraculous clarification. She stands in front of a wall, 29. The Circle of Chalk: A Play in Five Acts, trans. James Laver, p. 3. 22 OCTOBER

which has been recently whitewashed, a bucket of water at her feet, and a brush in her hand. Her athletic shoes match her fleece jacket perfectly, again converting standard clothing into a kind of fancy dress. Because it is so evidently through a rhyme that this conversion is effected, clothing now explicitly functions as another agency for versification. The wall against which the black girl stands has been painted so as to cover the graffiti that generations of schoolchildren have written on it. It is in obvious dialogue with the one involving the blackboard; once again, the voices of the past have been erased. Now, however, the black girl—who is the character most frequently linked to the speaker—embarks upon the laborious project of undoing this erasure. Coleman shows her scraping away the whitewash so as to expose the letters hidden behind it. The metaphor of what might be called “de-erasure” carries over from the image to the voice in a quite extraordinary way. The speaker invites her “faithful sister and friend” to conduct at the site of the words she addresses to her a similar excavation to the one that she herself is performing upon the graffiti wall: “Lay bare an innermost scroll, shrouded in voices that are gone.” If her friend does this, she will be able to access the speaker’s feelings for her—to read the “fluttering” of the latter’s “breath” and “joy.” The longed-for communication will finally take place. This is an astonishing invitation since it solicits the participation of the girl’s beloved friend in the disclosure of the “ancient word.” It seems that it is not enough for the girl herself to access the maternal signifier through versification; the one to whom she speaks must also do the same. Only if her friend hears the rhyme will what has been confined to the domain of sleep and darkness emerge into the light of day. Only

Coleman. Photograph. 1998–99. Girl Love 23

then will the “image” of “bright new dreams,” which shines within her waking words, also “dwell” or remain. In this scene, Coleman forges an even stronger link between girl love and versification. He also, once again, establishes versification as the privileged agency for recovering what has been written “out” of female subjectivity. Through the evocation of nocturnal images, he indicates that this kind of speech conforms more to the logic of the unconscious than to that of conscious life. At the same time, though, he makes clear that it requires a reader or listener; unlike our dreams, versification constitutes a form of relationality. Through the girl’s solicitation of her friend to read “through” her words to the ones that lie behind them, Coleman also brings us into the libidinal transaction; he implicitly invites us to play a similar role in relation to his own discourse. But if it is by moving closer to perception that language is made adequate to the negative Oedipus complex, it is also through the resulting “versification” that the girl’s vision is clarified. The black-and-white sequence that dissolves into the black girl’s orange jacket ends with a dissipation of the “fog.” The celebra- tion of poetic language with which Coleman concludes his work also marks the inauguration of a different scopic relation to the world: one that illuminates rather than darkens. The moment has arrived to reveal a certain “secret.” The watery sequences congeal into the grain of a still photograph when one approaches the screen onto which they are projected because Coleman created them by superimposing and linking a large number of slightly discrepant close-ups of the graffiti wall. It is thus not only the case that these images appear to have two layers, they in fact do. In the unintelligible form in which the close-ups present the letters that have been written upon this wall, they provide an even more compelling instantiation than does the blank blackboard of an erasure that must be reversed. At the moment when the lower stratum of the palimpsest is finally narratively revealed, the watery sequences logically cease. It is not enough to say that this is the most complexly self-reflexive sequence in Photograph. The relationship between the black-and-white sequences and the one of the graffiti wall also constitutes the most profound of the many rhymes that link the installation’s enunciation to its diegesis.

We come now to what is perhaps the most extraordinary of the many thoughts that Photograph allows us to think. The castration crisis does more than bury the negative Oedipal mother and cripple the female subject. It also alienates all of us from our capacity to symbolize lack in a way that is utterly our own, and that quickens other creatures and things. This is because the “discovery” of “anatomical difference” leads to the mortiﬁcation of language. I am not speaking here about the death that the word deals to the thing, but about the atrophy of signiﬁcation itself. 24 OCTOBER

A language dies when one of its signifiers succeeds in passing itself off as the signified to which every other signifier ultimately refers. This imposture requires two steps. First, a signifier must present itself as autonomous and self-defining by erasing the prior signifier or series of signifiers on which it relies for its meanings. Then it must install itself in the place of origin. As we have seen, although the maternal signifier actually occupies the latter position, it is incapable of masquerading as a signified, since there is no earlier term to which it can refer. It marks the site where meaning finally and fully fails. It is classically the paternal signifier that claims to constitute the bedrock of meaning, and it does so by writing over the maternal signifier. In Photograph, the girl suggests that we have all been cast for a very long time under a “lime-encrusted spell.” This spell compels us to say the same name “over and about,” as if in a trance. In doing so, we confer upon our symbolic order the qualities of identity and closure, which make it resemble a chalk circle. The girl never utters this name, presumably because to do so would perpetuate the spell. However, it is obviously the Name of the Father, which, “from the dawn of history,” has been “identified” with the “law.”30 In “Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” the text from which I have just quoted, Lacan also attributes the identity and closure of the symbolic order to the paternal signifier. The latter, he tells us, provides “the guarantee” that “the voyage on which wives and goods are embarked will bring back to their point of departure a never failing cycle [of] other women and other goods.”31 It is also immediately after this passage that Lacan proffers his oft-quoted account of the symbolic order as “a network so total that [it joins] together, before [the subject] comes into the world, those who are going to engender him ‘by flesh and blood’; so total that [it brings] to his birth . . . the shape of his destiny . . . so total that . . . [it will follow] him right to the place where he is not yet and even beyond his death.”32 As long as we keep repeating the Name of the Father, there can be no libidinal surprises. By uncovering the maternal signifier, Coleman pulls the rug out from under its paternal counterpart; he shows the father to have only borrowed “clothes.” This breaks the spell, and gives us access to an entirely new kind of symbolization—one without either authentication or limits. The subject who opens herself to its possibili- ties burns not only the bridges behind her, but the land as well. But she now faces what Nietzsche calls “the horizon of the infinite”;33 she is free to displace in whichever direction desire takes her. This subject also has access to a language more powerful than that imputed to the divine Creator. By establishing ever new correspondences between her memories and the world’s forms, she can finally let things Be.

30. Jacques Lacan, “Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” p. 67. 31. Ibid., p. 68. 32. Ibid., p. 68. 33. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, l974), pp. 180–81. Girl Love 25

The images in Photograph would seem to have been inspired in part by the illustrations in the Hume translation of The Circle of Chalk. The latter, too, are dramatically two-dimensional works with a traditionally Chinese organization of space and frame characters against striated walls. But they have the qualities of a multilayered writing surface for several other reasons as well. First, Coleman is working with the metaphor of a palimpsest visually, just as he is narratively and verbally. This is true on a “substructural” as well as a “structural” level, since the images that connote “palimpsest” emerge from the superimposition of one slide on top of another. Second, just as Coleman seeks to shift language over to the side of the image, so too he seeks to move the image closer to language. It is difficult at first to see how this furthers his project. The images in Photograph are photographic in nature, and the still photograph is generally assumed to have an evidentiary value.34 Therefore, it would already seem to provide the ideal vehicle for accessing the loved and loving mother. Roland Barthes uses it in precisely this way in Camera Lucida, and his larger project parallels Coleman’s in other ways as well. He, too, searches through a series of photographs for a lost mother; defines the latter as the “radiant, irreducible core” of subjectivity; and finds her in a young girl.35 In Camera Lucida, however, Barthes makes painfully evident the temporal limits of the conventional analog image. The photograph in which he is able to see his mother does not return her to him; it merely says, over and over, “this was.” Since girl love is not based on representational access to an irretrievably lost mother, but on her recovery in a new form, it can neither be depicted nor enabled by a photograph whose value is primarily indexical. It requires one capable of assuming its place in a chain of signification. Girl love is also social in nature; for every speaker there must be a listener, and for every writer, a reader. This principle of intersubjectivity carries over into the visual domain as well, although here it requires three actions, rather than two. An act of seeing must extend into an act of showing, which, in turn, makes possible another act of seeing. Since in Photograph this principle bears more fully on how one sees than on what one sees, what this really means is that one look must make available to another the kind of symbolization on which it is based. By constituting his images as two-layered palimpsests, Coleman does just this. He shows us that everything we see is propped on something we have previously seen—that perception is a semiotic event. He at the same time releases photography from the univocality of the “this has been,” and into the open-ended temporality of “becoming.”

34. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 226. 35. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 75. Right and far right: Coleman. Photograph. 1998–99.

The girls who appear in the second and third sequences are remarkable in Coleman’s oeuvre for their refusal to pose. I say “refusal,” because the way in which they hold their bodies expresses wariness about being inducted, against their knowledge, into the “lime-encrusted” circle. In Photograph, the pose is first and foremost an element of dance; at the outset, it also signifies the accommodation of the body to a pregiven position. Therefore, it would be possible for a girl to be interpellated into the group performance without ever joining it, simply via her stance. But at the same time that the girls eschew the pose, their bodies are expressive; they constitute an “assertion,” as Barthes says of his mother, of “gentleness.”36 In the fourth sequence, the black girl joins a group of dancers. She participates only halfheartedly; she lifts her arm up to the level of her chest, more as though to look at a watch than to display her body. The dance itself, however, begins to undergo a radical resignification. This sequence begins with an image of a girl in a yellow leotard, who reaches out with her arms to the corners of the frame. Far from suggesting conformity to a preexisting paradigm, her pose connotes “affective expansion.” Indeed, it seems to be part of that expansion—a prolongation of an exclamation, as Valéry once said of lyric poetry. The speaker also associates dance with an ecstatic individuation, while, at the same time, stressing that it is not one to which she yet has access. “The rolling clouds,” she says, “they have the whole blue space above to sail in. My soul shot with them in their breezy race, o’er star and gloom. But I, I had yet to fly to a secret spot.” Later in Photograph, the girls assume even more idiosyncratic and airborne poses. The black girl also begins to flutter her wings, and the speaker indicates that she has found her secret place, albeit now via an aquatic, rather than an aerial, metaphor: “She moved through some sustaining passion’s wave, in the springs of affection, deep as bright.” Coleman dramatizes this passion by showing us a series of girl couples, of many different ages. In the most important of these pairings, two girls declare their love for each other by assuming identical dance poses.

36. Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 69. The images I have just described come immediately after several showing schoolgirls readying themselves for the final performance. Although still two-dimensional, these images now consist of three, rather than two, textual layers. In each case, two girls stand directly in front of the wall, as is so often the case in Photograph. In front of them, though, is another group of girls sitting at a table with a mirror. They seem to have been painted or drawn on top of the girls in the background, just as the latter have onto the wall against which they stand. Every layer of this palimpsest is also legible. For one signifier or text to write over another no longer means to erase it. That these images are first and foremost about the kind of symbolization opened up by girl love is evident in other ways as well. Two of the girls sitting at the table are wearing costumes covered with what appear to be black paint-strokes. All of the girls in these images are also engaged in a kind of writing: the one we call “makeup.” Once again, these images not only associate female adornment with versification, but help us to understand that it is the girls themselves who have added the new layer to the visual palimpsest. In the final images of Photograph, Coleman shows many girls and a few boys grouped together in a large auditorium in the shape of a partial circle. The children do not stand side by side, holding hands, as one would expect. Rather, each one is positioned behind another, like the signifiers leading back to the mother. But this daisy chain of signifiers also represents the path of displacement away from her and the infinity of directions in which it can move. The symbolic order has ceased to be the domain of the law, and has become, instead, the domain of love.37 As should be evident by now, Coleman uses Photograph to expose the lower stratum not only of female subjectivity, but also of his own textual palimpsest. Girl love provides, indeed, another name for his aesthetic practice. The reverberations of countless earlier speakers can be heard at every moment in Photograph, as in many of his other works, animating not only language and the dead, but also the world itself. One voice, however, can always be heard clearly above all the others: the voice of the mother. It is saying, “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.”38

37. Krauss also sees the dance in Photograph as a metaphor for the symbolic order, but she interprets it more pessimistically than I do. See “First Lines,” pp. 14–15. 38. 2 Corinthians 3: 6, The New Oxford Annotated Bible, p. 252.