Fractured Mirrors



"The negation of the several matters, which is insisted on in the thing no less than their independent existence, occurs in Physics as "porosity". [...] Pores are not empirical facts; they are figments of the understand ing, which uses them to represent the element of negation in independent matters." (Hegel, Logic, trans. Wallace.)

I am reading Jocelyne Doray and Julian Samuel, The Raft of the Medusa, and Aruna Handa and John Kipphoff, Into the European Mirror, A Work by Julian Samuel. The central video image of the latter contains the words "surgery" "frontiers" "expulsions". While the mirror fractures and bounces, opens imaginary spaces, surgery operates on interiors, organs passing through frontiers; products/productions are erected as representations of Other. Other is assimilated, expelled with debris-signifiers, exhausted and abjected signs. They love our technology which we send them, video and Internet. Everything confuses, but violence dominates as planetary intensifications, overcrowdings, confusions. Read Euclid and it's all there, the abstraction of the world always already parceled and axiomatized. The story is back there, the story so far.

Enter Samuel's works which have no easy answers, range and gun for all sides, verbal violence, hardly cathartic, against theory and colony and domination. I never get the sense of an "opening" elsewhere, but only the inordinate complexity of the world, peoples, problematic of the nation-state. And it's here that Samuel is incredibly valuable; the "but only" subsumes the radical problematic of truth, information, representation, in the face of an overburdened planet. I love him for it, this "churning"of discourses and destinies.

Listen, JK asks (Mirror, Kipphoff), meanders: "Has it become impossible, at the supposed end of history, or in the supposed absence of any ideology which could pose a viable challenge to liberal capitalism, to create counter- histories? You seem to say that you have to be content with raising methodological questions about the construction of histories and encouraging a generalized form of sceptical thinking."

JS replies: "There is no end to history. That's just the postmodern/cultural studies 'theoreticians' and other self-promoting psychos say to get attention. Everyone knows they are as stupid as the universe is large, even with their nickel and dime doctorates."

Continues: "A very learned friend, Michael Neumann, has suggested to me that Asian nations are just as autocentric about their historiography as anybody else. Massive cultures impose their values on weaker ones. Has Japan made much intellectual room to get itself raked over the coals? Ask others in the region. I'm not dead certain that the West has the perfect monopoly on autocentrism."

Now, I'm one of those "theoreticians" JS rails against; I'm hardly a self- promoting psycho and I'm not stupid. JS creates the same sort of imperialist violence he rails against; it's everywhere, stuffing space. It can be sensed or senseless; I don't know any pomo/cs theoreticians talking about the "end of history" - if anything this seems to be post-Bell anti-ideological talk, or maybe Baudrillard who's rather conservative. So the attack is wide of the mark, but as I've said filling; this then goes into statement about "massivity" that's closer (re: Chomsky's statement about dialects), and from there to autocentrism. It's all over. If I didn't know better, or maybe because I do, I see the discomfort of reading JS connected with that of Lacan - to read the latter is to _participate_ in the very therapeutic he constructs. Reading JS, one is forced into positions of violence, oppression (I feel oppressed reading him), imperialism; the reading is not a reading of the political, but a political reading, reading forced into the discomforting phenomenology and employment of power.

Who is the "we" sending which "technology" to which "them" are questions that disseminate indefinitely while transnationals, tns, take over the business of mining the planet. It's here that postmodernism is useful, looking at radiations, information orders, disseminations, part-objects, geographies, demarcating what dissolves: ownerships which are no longer traceable, capital which disappears, wars-without-corpses but mourning of hundreds of thousands dead. The diffusion is there in Samuel as well, and for this reason I'd call his attack on postmodernism a kind of suicide; his fragmentations/deconstructions of narrative play into central themes of pomo research. The full title of Raft is The Raft of the Medusa, Five Voices on Colonies, Nations, and Histories - giving fifteen subjects/ objects, and as Charles Acland says in his essay, "The interviews in The Raft display a serious engagement with the problems of writing from a mobile site." I'd argue that all sites are mobile, that homelands are as much cyberspatial or tn as "real earth," and this mobility is precisely the problem; what is returned to is often scorched earth, desert, or a bombing run - not to mention local dictatorial rule.

Acland goes on to state - and note again the churning: "Cultural and post-colonial critique is complicated, and somewhat enabled, by the fact of writing from a home away from home: Maalouf, from Lebanon, now in Paris, commenting upon Iran; M. Nourbese Philip, from the Caribbean, now in Toronto, reconfiguring the travels of Dr. Livingstone; Thierry Hentsch, from Switzerland, now in Montreal, writing of the construction of L'Orient imaginaire; Sara Suleri, from Pakistan, now in New Haven, Connecticut, providing critical analyses of British India; and Ackbar Abbas, discerning imperial tensions in architecture in Hong Kong, a colonial space where, as he comments, 'there has never been "a before".'" These "critiques of entwining colonial discourses" are of course entwined, as is Samuel's thinking from Montreal's heart of empire; everyone is implicated, including the authority/authorship of the word of Black Rose Books. While Samuel tends to identify with Marx, I find his critique less monolithic, more dealing with representation and superstructure - a viewpoint I can only agree with, for images kill as well.

Back to JK, for I do not know what a "counter-history" is. I know historiography's concerns; local histories; the (Lyotard's) dismemberment of grand narratives, but in order for there to be a _counter_ there must be a site or position which is monadic, and this has always dissolved in the leaky/porous West, itself in need of detotalization. I'd say that Samuel, like a good postmodernist, refuses totality, fights guerilla tactics, involves himself even in the Fanonian self-hatred of the colonized or displaced (myself as well, perhaps becoming a universal indictment), and in the process of this churning (again, a stirring, viscous fluid and "sticky"), exposes the bones breaking through the flesh, the wounds which refuse to heal, the bodies of "Desert Storm" (a title right out of representative sememes, entertainments).

Quoting from Rana Kabbani in Mirror: "The expulsions of 1492 set a pattern - a Western pattern - that is set and that we have not varied from at all, in Europe's relations with others, in its relations with colonies, and in its relations with Muslims n particular."

"I do not see a difference after Bosnia, I do not see a difference between being a Muslim in fifteenth-century Europe and being a Muslim in twentieth-century Europe."

Samuels asks: "So it is ultimately very connectable?" and Kabbani replies: "Totally connectable: the idea of the 'other', the stranger, the Muslim, the Arab, the Saracen, the Moor, the Jew, the Blackamoor - you do not like them, you're afraid of them, you despise them, you throw them out, or you burn them at the stake. There is no other solution: the European mind has still not come up with any philosophical solution. That is why we have a holocaust every few decades."

And in Raft, Amin Maalouf: "The centre is man. You, me, we are all meeting places. I have the right to be, at the same time, Christian, Moslem, Jewish, Buddhist. I have the right to borrow from all religions, from all ideologies, from all the books that I read, from all my personal experience. And I don't need a label that refers me back to a religion, to a variant of a religion. That is my profound conviction."

"I am not trying to proselytize with this. I am not trying to say this is the path that everyone has to take. But for me, it is certainly my path. I refuse to belong to a nation, even if this is something which makes you smile, because this is a period when people are uncertain of where they belong. People today want to say: I belong to this religion, I belong to that nation, I belong to that culture, and I reject this. I understand it, but I don't have much sympathy for this evolution. I find it extremely retrograde. I have a lot of respect for people who say, I claim many nationalities, many cultures. For me this is the future, even though we may pass through a period of regression today."

Of course I am "writing_" this on the Internet, in the midst of broken national boundaries, what I'd call borderliners, drawing/redrawing lines, inscribing lines, which fissure, crack open, tear. And somewhere there are ghosts in the background, massive cultures, ruptured, viral movement within them. Julian doesn't so much document all of this as create discoursing, what elsewhere I'd call shape-riding the real. Representation and peoples intermingle; holocausts destroy base and superstructure like giant storms crackling the planet.

Chris Giannou, Mirror: "The diversity of human experience is such that sometimes in my life I have felt as though my body were an allegory for what was happening in the world around me. When I first arrived in the West African nation of Mali, in 1968, I fell ill. There was an epidemic of cerebro-spinal meningitis. I was teaching at the time and one of my students fell ill and died of meningitis. I had malaria and then hepatitis, and in the middle of all of this there was a coup d'etat and a radical nationalist regime was overthrown. Several months later, there was an attempt at a counter-coup d'etat and the swirl of events seemed to take up my body, and those of the people around me in many cases, and it was almost as if the pathology of the individual were mirrored in the pathology of the society."

Thierry Hentsch, Mirror: "I think that every frontier is both real and imaginary and the Alhambra here in Granada is just such a place - a frontier that has undergone historical changes which have left both very tangible traces, like the site on which we are standing, as well as traces that exist only in the realm of the imagination."

In Emmanuel Levinas' "Meaning and Sense," there is this: "The beyond from which the face comes signifies as a trace." And "In the presence of the Other (Autrui), do we not respond to an 'order' in which the signifying- ness remains an irremissible disturbance, an utterly bygone past? Such is the signifyingness of a trace." The face is always already a process, representation (David Marr, Vision); the disconnected Other returns vastly interpenetrated, convoluted, porous, in Samuel's works. They should be required reading for their questioning/problematic, as well as viewing; the two books are based on a videotape trilogy: The Raft of the Medusa, Into the European Mirror, and City of the Dead and the World Exhibitions, produced 1993-95. I'd also recommend Samuel's Passage to Lahore, more or less a novel, relevant as well to a necessarily political reading/being of the Other.


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