Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond 9781503626669

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INTERSUBJEC TIVITIES AND POPULAR CULTURE

Cultural Memory

m the Present

Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

INTERSUBJECTIVITIES AND POPULAR CULTURE Bakhtin and Beyond

Esther Peeren

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 2008

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

© 2008 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior wrirten permission of Stanford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Peeren, Esther. Intersubjectivities and popular culture : Bakhtin and beyond I Esther Peeren. p. cm.-( Cultural memory in the present) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-o-8047-5669-3 (cloth : alk. paper) r. Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhailovich), 1895-1975-Criticism and interpretation

2. Popular culture-History-2oth century.

pictures-United States-History. History.

3· Motion

4· Television programs-United States-

5· Carnival-England-London-History.

I. Title.

PG2947.B3P44 2007 8o1'.95-dc22 Typeset by Westchester Book Group in n!J3.5 Garamond

Contents

Acknowledgments

I.

2. 3· 4· 5· 6.

7· 8.

IX

lntersubjectivities and Popular Culture: An Introduction Chronotopic Identities Chronotopic Belonging The lntersubjective Eye: The Look Versus the Gaze The lntersubjective Voice: Dialogism and the Cultural Addressee Resignifications: Accents and Speech Genres Identities in Translation Territories of Identity Versioning Identities Mterword

148 172 201 229

Notes

235

Works Cited

255

Index

271

I

32 53 73 99 126

Acknowledgments

In the spirit of my research, this book represents a truly intersubjective effort. Over the course of its numerous drafts, it was versioned into its current shape by my interactions with many people, of whom I can name only a few. Without the constant encouragement, intellectual guidance, and kind friendship of Mieke Bal I would not have been able to start this project, let alone finish it. As my dissertation supervisor, she taught me much about writing and even more about teaching. It is impossible to mention Mieke without bringing up her Theory Seminar at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), which repeatedly inspired me to take my work in new directions. Every year the seminar draws together a wonderful group of young scholars from a variety of disciplines. I specifically want to mention the following people, who enriched my work and life with stimulating ideas, theoretical insights, and that untranslatable Dutch quality of gezelligheid: Marie-Aude Baronian, Stephan Besser, Laura Copier, Sudeep Dasgupta, Cornelia Grabner, Anette Hoffmann, Silke Horstkotte, Yolande Jansen, Jaap Kooijman, and Saskia Lourens. ASCA also provided generous financial support and the unfailing efficiency and cheer of its managerial team, Eloe Kingma and Jantine van Gogh. I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committeeErnst van Alphen, Murat Aydemir, Peter Hitchcock, Patricia Pisters, Mireille Rosello, and Willem Weststeijn-for their sensitive readings and constructive questions, which helped me immensely in preparing this book for publication. I am especially indebted to Peter Hitchcock for inspiring conversations, sound advice, and his continued interest in my work. David Shepherd and Craig Brandist kindly invited me to the University of Sheffield to present my research and to work with the invaluable resources

x

Acknowledgments

of the Bakhtin Centre. Their thoughtful comments on my project greatly enhanced my grasp of Bakhtin's concepts. This book also owes much to Carolyn Ayers, who first ignited my passion for Bakhtin in her classes at the University of Groningen. At Stanford University Press, I would like to thank Norris Pope and Emily Smith for the patient and professional manner in which they guided me through the publishing process. Anthony Wall not only wrote a tremendously encouraging report on the original manuscript that inspired me to many improvements, but was also exceptionally generous in offering me the benefit of his expert editorial eye. Any remaining faults are, of course, entirely my own responsibility. Finally, writing this book would have been much harder without the encouragement of my parents, my friends, and most important, my husband, Naj, who deserves more credit than anyone else for providing a quiet place to work, for enduring my absences and for all the other small, everyday acts of support that mean the most.

INTERSUBJECTIVITIES AND POPULAR CULTURE

lntersubjectivities and Popular Culture: An Introduction

Bakhtin and Beyond What does it mean to move into the beyond of a thinker like Mikhail Bakhtin, whose ideas might be seen as already overextended? What particular move does the beyond indicate in an age so preoccupied with the temporality of the post and the after that every day seems to see the announcement of yet another death? 1 My aim in invoking a beyond to Bakhtin is less to declare his work obsolete than to enable it to live on, to make it speak to us anew. In other words, I seek to provide it with an afterlife, a term that itself paradoxically denotes not a leaving behind of life, but its continuation in a different but still recognizable form. The beyond thus signifies a taking of the past into the future. Hence, I have chosen the formulation "Bakhtin and Beyond" in preference to "Beyond Bakhtin": The coordinating conjunction joins together two terms of equal status, establishing a reciprocal relation. Although in this particular case, the relation clearly contains some element of progression or succession, it does not allow the second term to completely erase the first. Both terms are left standing, made to work together. I challenge Bakhtin to move into his beyond by staging a confrontation between his ideas and a selection of contemporary popular cultural artifacts that bring his ideas into the present and test their continuing relevance in relation to pressing social, cultural, and theoretical questions concerning intersubjectivity, our living with the other. The selected objects

2

An Introduction

lie squarely outside Bakhtin's own sphere of interest-they include film and television, on which he never wrote-and may appear somewhat eclectic even to the present reader: two recent, highly popular television series obsessed with sexuality (Sex and the City, Queer as Folk); two rather mediocre and by now largely forgotten films about characters looking for a voice (Nell, Flawless); and a street festival that seems to have outgrown its controversial origins (London's Notting Hill Carnival). Each of these objects, however, acts as a provocation to one or more of Bakhtin's concepts, exposing where they need to be rethought-taken into their own beyond. Each object makes a crucial theoretical point bearing on the threefold focus of this book: Bakhtin and what lies beyond his thought, intersubjectivities, and popular culture. In this introduction, I deal with each of these aspects in turn, setting out my motivations and strategies for bringing them together in a single volume. First, however, I want to note that all three elements join in my approach, which is that of cultural analysis. Cultural analysis, as a distinct analytical approach for studying cultural objects, is most closely associated with the work of Mieke Bal and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, within which this work is situated. 2 Jonathan Culler has outlined its difference from the more familiar discipline of cultural studies, arguing that whereas cultural studies focuses almost exclusively on present popular culture and is characterized by its alignment with theory (in particular Foucauldian structuralism), cultural analysis brings together past and present, popular and high culture, and defines itself in terms of its method, as a "particular kind of theoretical engagement" (1999: 345). In her introduction to The Practice of Cultural Analysis, Bal defines cultural analysis as an interdisciplinary, self-reflexive practice that "seeks to understand the past as part of the present" (1999a: I). Cultural analysis takes cultural objects and theories from the past, not excluding however very recent ones, and it examines their function in the present as part of the contemporary cultural memory of which the cultural analyst partakes. This means that the cultural analyst is personally implicated in her work: her situatedness in a specific present is actively acknowledged within the analysis. The move from the past to the present, moreover, takes the objects and theories that form the subject of cultural analysis beyond themselves and introduces them to change. Thus, if my aim is to examine, through cultural analysis, the interplay between the work of Bakhtin and

An Introduction

3

a series of cultural objects with regard to the problem of intersubjective identity construction, both the theory and the objects need to be present-ed (blending presentation and being made present) in an active gesture that propels them into their beyond, thus causing them to exceed their previous contexts. The beyond of my title, therefore, is symptomatic of the present-ing effect of cultural analysis as a methodology. In relation to its objects, cultural analysis adopts the technique of close reading-not in the New Critical sense, which "claimed some sort of 'purity' from the subject of analysis" (Bal 1999b: 137), but rather as an active interaction or confrontation with the cultural object where this object is understood as open to question and as questioning in turn the theories the cultural analyst brings to bear on it. The close readings performed by the cultural analyst do not stay inside the text; as indicated above, they transport the text to a present context, taking the interplay between the text and this new context as a serious theoretical moment. At the same time, cultural analysis retains close reading's attention to detail, focusing particularly on textual or visual details that resist a comfortable fit with the analysis in progress. Such details not only prompt a novel interpretation of the object, but also elicit a rereading of the theoretical framework in which the analysis places itself. In preference to having theory speak about the object, cultural analysis has the object speaking back to theory. Bal terms such interaction the "empowerment of the object" (2002: 10). It is the move by which the object "from subject matter becomes subject, participating in the construction of theoretical views" (Bal 1999a: 13). In this way, the practice of cultural analysis turns the cultural object into a theoretical object, an object that does theory. Theory and object involve each other in a productive relationship of reciprocal intersubjectivity. The cultural analyst, in turn, takes up an intersubjective stance in relation to this interaction, inserting herself into the exchange as an interlocutor. The model of interaction cultural analysis establishes is akin to the privileged form of intersubjective communication Bakhtin theorizes as dialogism, which I discuss in Chapter 4· This affinity renders the association of Bakhtin' s work with the practice of cultural analysis particularly auspicious. Cultural analysis is also salient for my present investigation because it amounts to a "concept-based methodology" (Bal 2002: 5). Given that I propose to examine the vigor of a number of Bakhtin's theoretical concepts in relation to the popular cultural construction of intersubjective

4

An Introduction

identities, a concept-based approach is expedient. I elaborate on my approach to Bakhtin's concepts below. Here, it suffices to say that in dealing with each of these concepts I will heed Bal's maxim that "no concept is meaningful for cultural analysis unless it helps us to understand the object better on its-the object's-own terms" (2002: 8). Conversely, the object should enlighten the concept, establishing, again, an intersubjective movement of dialogic interaction. I construe my concepts as dynamic and flexible in their encounters with different objects, in their function across the work of different theorists, and in their elaboration by Bakhtin himself. But I shall also be careful to delineate their specificity. Concepts travel, to borrow Bal's central metaphor, but these travels need to be scrupulously signposted in order to prevent concepts from becoming hazy and indistinct. Consequently, the Bakhtinian concepts I draw into my cultural analysis, although already well-traveled, journey here in a more accountable or, to use a term employed by both Bakhtin and Bal, more answerable manner. 3 This is because the key to a conscientious practice of cultural analysis lies in an awareness that concepts, in each of their makeshift accommodations, are situated and specific. Having alluded now to several of the elements in my title, I wish to elaborate on each of them in a more systematic manner, beginning with Bakhtin. Although the present version of this book finds Bakhtin in the subtitle (which itself signifies a kind of beyond), here I mark both his temporal primacy and the way such primacy never signals a true origin but rather something that is retroactively constituted in the present. Thus: In the beginning, there is the work of Bakhtin. Well, maybe not exactly in the beginning. I originally planned to write a book on performative identities that would summon Bakhtin only in certain parts, but I soon found myself unable to escape the provocations of his concepts, the way they kept speaking to my objects and to questions of identity construction. And so this book developed in a new direction, still concerned with identities and performativity, but now conceiving of these through the lens of Bakhtin' s concepts, bringing out most clearly their fundamental intersubjectivity and chronotopic situatedness. To me, this shift made perfect sense. Nevertheless, over the course of this project, I was repeatedly asked the same question, which deserves a considered answer: why Bakhtin and why now? From the 1980s onward, as a larger proportion of Bakhtin's work became widely available in English and other language translations, a veritable

An Introduction

5

explosion of critical texts ensued, both within the specialist field of Bakhtin studies and in the humanities generally. By now, nearly every aspect of Bakhtin-his life, his work, the authorship question, his religion, his relation to Marxism, his imerdisciplinarity, and even his prosthetic leg-has been extensively debated. 4 In addition, his work has been read comparatively in relation to a host of other philosophers, sociologists, and literary theorists. Although there is still a measure of excitement about the prospect of new-and presumably "better"-translations, of a "definitive" edition of Bakhtin' s Complete Works in Russian, and of the possibility of unearthing fresh fragments of writing from his jealously guarded archives, a certain Bakhtin-fotigue can be sensed in the air. 5 Looming above those of us who remain stimulated by his work is the question: how can we breathe new life into his thinking? The recent turn in Bakhtin criticism toward a more sustained historical investigation of Bakhtin's philosophical sources, which assigns him a less original and more embedded position in relation to his predecessors and contemporaries, is one way to respond to this question productively. 6 Taking Bakhtin's work beyond itself, as I do here, is another. Such an effort needs, however, to be clearly defined so that it does not result in a radical move away from Bakhtin or in the dilution of his thought. In the humanities, Bakhtin' s popularity has been sustained by the apparent ease with which the central concepts of his work-dialogism, carnival, chronotope-can be applied to the study of literary texts, films, and other cultural phenomena. Clive Thomson has dubbed this practice the "addBakhtin-and-stir" approach (1993: 216). What is overlooked in this practice is that skimming a single text for an isolated concept-sometimes one that is not even Bakhtin' s but a creation of his editors, as with the ubiquitous "dialogic imagination"-means to separate it not only from Bakhtin's other, often related concepts but also from the contradictory elaborations the same concept receives throughout his oeuvre. Instead of indiscriminately transposing Bakhtin' s concepts across disciplines, the motivations for and theoretical effects of such recontextualizations should be specified. I want to take Bakhtin's work beyond itself in a manner that takes into account the structure, rhetoric, and interrelations of his writings. Rather than proposing a recipe where he is selectively read for convenient scraps that serve to spice up readings of popular cultural artifacts, I make his concepts central to my project precisely in their move beyond themselves. More

6

An Introduction

than a simple mix and match, this approach requires a thoughtful, selfreflexive consideration of the disciplines and theoretical frameworks his concepts can enrich and vice versa, while it prevents me from losing sight of the specificity of Bakhtin' s concepts and their place in his work. Hence, I use the word beyond not as meaning "outside the scope, range, or understanding of," but in the sense of "more than" or "to the further side of," indicating a supplementation or enhancement of Bakhtin' s work, not its supersedure. Following the scientist Isabelle Stengers, Bal distinguishes the negative "diffusion" of concepts that travel between disciplines from their positive "endemic propagation": The propagation of a concept that emerges in one field, in another field that changes its meaning and whose meaning it, in turn, changes, constitutes the primary feature of a concept, both as asset and liability, or risk. (2002: 32) The beyond of Bakhtin I seek to delineate must be regarded as the site of such propagation. In his article "On the Borders of Bakhtin: Dialogisation, Decolonisation," Graham Pechey argues that the transdisciplinary application of Bakhtin' s concepts accords with their "constitutively migratory" nature: "To propose the 'circulation' of Bakhtinian concepts is not to propose anything that is foreign to their mode of being: movement or migration is inherent in them from the beginning; it is their normal condition" (1989: 40). For Pechey, Bakhtin's concepts are always already in translation in his own work. 7 Their removal to new contexts merely adds another layer of translation or migratory meaning. As long as this migration is motivated, its direction and politics explicated, and the implication of the critic acknowledged, it will have productive effects: the migration of Bakhtin's concepts into "our" context exposes and explains their inadequacies: this wandering and transplantation is also the condition for their self-correction. The urgent task of Bakhtin's radical readers is, then, to push his concepts still further in their journey, putting them to still more demanding tests. (57) The method Pechey proposes verges on the practice of cultural analysis. Only cultural analysis would further magnify the requirements of selfreflexivity and responsibility and insist that the migration of Bakhtin's concepts does more than just expose their flaws. Rather than emphasizing self-correction, cultural analysis would insist that such correction occurs

An Introduction

7

only through a confrontation with otherness, with new objects and different theoretical frameworks. More than a question of dogmatic improvement-which implies that one day Bakhtin's concepts will be fully "correct"-the commitment of cultural analysis is to keep concepts under discussion, so that they are always pushed to adapt to new circumstances, not for their own sake but to produce theoretically productive encounters with cultural objects. My testing of Bakhtin's concepts amounts to bringing them together with popular culture and conceiving of the two as dialogic interlocutors. This I do in order to develop an account of intersubjective identity constructions and assertions that goes beyond a strictly Bakhtinian reading while all the time holding itself accountable for this move, reflecting upon its implications at every step of the way. I share with Peter Hitchcock "a certain radical skepticism about the critical potential of Bakhtin's principles on their own terms," which motivates my move beyond Bakhtin's own explications (1997: 81). But Bakhtin's work is not left behind: I explore the original Bakhtinian context(s) of his concepts in tandem with their new context in the present-ed beyond of cultural analysis. The concepts' oscillation between their past and present constitutes the shifting space of theoretical productivity. In Hitchcock's words, the point is to explore what is sometimes only a gesture in Bakhtin's work as a means to address the impact of his contribution to levels of practical understanding that may not have formed the first circle of his inquiry. This does not "complete" Bakhtin in any monologic way ... but it questions the consequences of Bakhtin's gestures when elaborated within specific contingencies. (8r)

The idea is to take Bakhtin's concepts as deictic signs that point beyond themselves in new directions. In their interplay with the specific contingencies of intersubjective identity construction in my chosen popular cultural artifacts, Bakhtin's concepts are transformed just as they transform theory. I am interested, then, not in a static, fixed Bakhtin, but in the "Bakhtin" in quotation marks that Hitchcock employs in his editor's introduction to the special issue on Bakhtin of the South Atlantic Quarterly. With this device, Hitchcock designates "an author who is so exceeded by what defines his possibility ... that to 'authorize' him would be to negate the very author who spurred such interest" (1998a: 516). This book, consequently, is

8

An Introduction

not designed to provide yet another introduction or an exhaustive overview of Bakhtin's thought; it is not an exploration of his "influence" on popular culture, and it does not seek to "apply" Bakhtin's concepts to cultural artifacts. Rather, I propose to enquire into the specific intersections between Bakhtin' s work, a selection of popular cultural objects, and the other theoretical frameworks that these objects call upon. These intersections converge on the quandary of intersubjective identity constructions and assertions. From Bakhtin' s work I take the concepts pertaining to the intersubjective constitution of the self as a social subject. I explore, respectively, the chronotope, excess of seeing, the superaddressee, speech genres, and carnival. The point is not to reify these concepts by establishing what Bakhtin "really meant" by them or by locating their precise philosophical sources. It is rather to expose their relevance in unexpected, present-day theoretical and cultural contexts. By bouncing them off contemporary cultural objects and theoretical perspectives, I bring these concepts into the present and delineate for them a possible, new future beyond Bakhtin. Also marking the "beyond" of my title are the additional concepts of performativity, translation, territory, and versioning, which Bakhtin does not address explicitly. My consideration of these supplementary concepts is prompted by the dialogic confrontation between Bakhtin' s work and my chosen popular cultural artifacts. These artifacts, in their resistance to certain aspects of Bakhtin' s thinking, invite other theoretical perspectives and new, supplementary conceptualizations. In the course of this volume, therefore, Bakhtin's work travels beyond its own borders to encounter, among others, the performative gender theory of Judith Butler, Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of distinction, Kaja Silverman's psychoanalytic exploration of gaze and voice, and Jean Laplanche's post-Freudian theory of seduction. The objects that facilitate these encounters differ in theme, medium, scope, nationality, and even popularity. Yet each of them manifests a striking, almost overly obvious relation to the concepts I seek to explore. Sex and the City's highly specific setting in the space-time of 1990s Manhattan, together with its relentless thematization of seeing and being seen, invites analysis in terms of the chronotope, performativity, and excessive vision. The impeded speech of the main protagonists in the films Ne!! and Flawless and their respective journeys (back) to social intelligibility appear to

An Introduction

9

exemplify the workings of dialogism and the superaddressee. Queer as

Folk's intralingual remake from a British to an American television show, as well as its brazen introduction of a queer voice (queer is understood here as both an activist self-designation and the critical anti-identitarian concept it has become in queer studies) into the straight television landscape of both nations, ask to be examined in terms of speech genres and translation. Finally, the Notting Hill Carnival, as an internally and externally contested event that stages an annual battle over the streets of London, solicits a reading through the concepts of carnival, territory, and verswmng. My readings unpack these seemingly straightforward relations of applicability in order to reveal, in each case, their much more complex nature. Instead of the simple, seamless imposition of the theoretical concept onto the cultural object that these artifacts at first appear to invite, what occurs is a confrontational interaction. Far from surrendering to the concept and illustrating its theoretical validity, the object puts up a measure of resistance, exposing the concept's weaknesses and forcing its reconstruction. This process accords with Bal' s description of the aim of cultural analysis, which is to never just theorize but always to allow the object "to speak back." Making sweeping statements about objects, or citing them as examples, renders them dumb .... Even though, obviously, objects cannot speak, they can be treated with enough respect for their irreducible complexity and unyielding muteness-but not mystery-to allow them to check the thrust of an interpretation, and to divert and complicate it .... Thus, the objects we analyse enrich both interpretation and theory. This is how theory can change from a rigid master discourse into a live cultural object in its o wn right. (2002: 45)

Accordingly, rather than having the objects allegorize Bakhtin' s conceptswhich would risk deforming the objects-I perceive my cultural objects as performing an imagination of a theoretical moment that reflects upon the theory and contributes to its development. The object does not disappear under the theory, but lights up those elements of the theory that do not present a perfect fit. This is how the practice of cultural analysis turns cultural objects into theoretical ones and provokes a move into Bakhtin's beyond, a place where his thought can be renewed. Fittingly, such renewal is central to Bakhtin's theory of language itself. In "Discourse in the Novel," he distinguishes the process of linguistic

10

An Introduction

and literary reaccemuation as "unavoidable, legitimate and even productive," as long as it does not lead to radical distortions or "any vulgarization that oversimplifies re-accentuation ... and that turns a two-voiced image into one that is flat, single-voiced" (1996c: 420). The reaccentuation effected by cultural analysis consists precisely of taking concepts into their beyond without leaving their previous contexts behind and especially without ignoring complexities and contradictions. In accordance with Bakhtin 's description of literary evolution, it implies growth and renewal rather than replacement: Every age re-accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re-accentuation .... such works have proved capable of uncovering in each era and against ever new dialogizing backgrounds ever newer aspects of meaning; their semantic content literally continues to grow, to further create out of itself (421) Cultural analysis facilitates this process by overtly and self-reflexive! positing the present and the analyst herself as dialogizing backgrounds.

Intersubjectivities The second focus of this book is that of intersubjectivities. Intersubjectivities are my way of moving beyond identities without leaving the latter term or its political implications behind completely. I chart this move here, starting with a discussion of identities. I use the plural on purpose to indicate a multiplication and differentiation of the ways a subject articulates its social belonging. This multiplication and differentiation precludes the selfsameness of the subject both on the synchronic and the diachronic axis, both internally and externally. As Butler has argued, to move beyond the principle of identity as sameness, the term identities needs to signify more than a simple aggregation of identities, each of which remains discrete in and of itself: Pluralization disrupts the social ontology of the subject itself when that relationality is understood not merely as what persists among subjects, but as the internal impossibility of the subject as a discrete and unitary kind of being. Identity as effect, as site, as dynamic, as simultaneously formed and formative, is not equivalent to the notion of identity as subject and ground. Reading identities as they are

An Introduction

II

situated and formed in relation to one another means moving beyond the heuristic requirement of identity itself. (1995: 446)

The task Butler sets is one of thinking identity beyond itself in a manner that includes both difference-the difference of the subject in relation to itself and to others-and a specificity or situatedness that does not hark back to a primordial originality, authenticity, or wholeness. This entails a conceptualization of the subject that highlights "its capacity to move beyond itself, a movement that does not return to where it always was, identity as movement in the promising sense" (447, emphasis added). Once more we are encouraged to move into the beyond, this time our own. Bakhtin' s concepts and the additional ones I elaborate as their supplements provide for such a redirection in thinking identities, away from their associations with fixed and coherent essences of being. They help move toward a vision that presents identities as multiple and variable yet at the same time situated and specific constructions, grounded in the spatiotemporal and discursive contexts of their intersubjective articulations. Paul Gilroy's comments on "identity's foundational slipperiness" and the "dizzying variety of ideas condensed into the concept of identity" point to the need for definition, especially in a scholarly context, but they also caution against reifying one particular meaning of identity over all the others (2oooa: 106, 98). Identity needs to be contextualized and specified in its multiple theoretical uses, conceding the implications of these uses for our thinking of identity, its construction, and its (re)assertions. Focusing my exploration of identities on Bakhtin poses an immediate problem, given that Bakhtin appears to have little to say on the subject of identity or on the identity of a subject. He tends to speak not of subjects, but of persons, selves, others, individuals, collectives, speakers, listeners, authors, characters, or heroes. Moreover, he refers to their self-consciousnesses as subjectivities, a term that for him is not equivalent to identities. Existing as a human being with a consciousness of oneself as a feeling and thinking entity and a capacity to act is not necessarily to have a fixed identity that guarantees coherence and unity over time and across space. Subjectivity can, of course, be constructed in this manner, but this is only one possibility among many others. It is, moreover, not one Bakhtin considers desirable. Bakhtin' s association of subjectivity-as-fixed-identity with a negatively evaluated sameness comes to the fore in "Forms of Time and of the

12

An Introduction

Chronotope in the Novel." There, he discusses the Greek romance as a genre where the image of the human being is characterized by a "distinctive correspondence of an identity with a particular self" (1996b: 105). The hero of the Greek romance, after going through a series of adventures, emerges "with his identity absolutely unchanged" (105). These remarks indicate that for Bakhtin the self does not necessarily correspond to an identity: The self is particular in the sense that it is distinct from others, but from this it does not follow that it possesses a singular, constant, and fixed identity. Identity and selfhood (or subjectivity) are distinct and independent concepts. The correspondence of subjectivity to identity, durability, continuity, sameness, completeness, immobility, and unity is not absolute, as Bakhtin's discussion of the adventure novel of everyday life in the same essay demonstrates. In the adventure novel of everyday life, of which Apuleius' s The Golden Ass is the paradigmatic example, the image of the hero is characterized by a strange combination of identity and metamorphosis. This combination sees the hero develop in a temporal sequence that proceeds "spasmodically" like a "line with 'knots' in it," where the knots mark points of transformation (113). The hero does not stay the same; his subjectivity is distinguished precisely by his ability to be transformed into someone or something else (and back again). Hence, Bakhtin views subjectivity as a differentiated construction that may correspond fully to identity, that may even incorporate both identity and transformation, but that may also occur in a myriad of other forms, none of which is universal. Identity, as a possible and sometimes necessary way of configuring subjectivity, is only one way of making sense of a condition that in itself exists only as an abstraction. Thus, where Bakhtin defines a social language as "a concrete socio-linguistic belief system that defines a distinct identity for itself within the boundaries of a language that is unitary only in the abstract" (1996c: 356), I propose, analogous to this, a view of the social subject as constructing a distinctive (but not necessarily stable) identity for itself within the boundaries provided by the structures of time-space, vision and speech, which appear to the subject as unitary, natural, and necessary, but which are in fact intersubjectively established and maintained traditions or practices. Valentin Voloshinov, a fellow-member of what is now commonly known as the Bakhtin Circle, presents a view of identity similar to Bakhtin' s

An Introduction

13

when, in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, he refers to the "normative identity" of the word as that which guarantees that the word will be understood within a particular language community (r986: 53). Although a measure of identity is a requirement for understanding, when this identity becomes complete and normative it has a negative, ossifying effect: a word's normative identity excludes creativity by presenting language as "an inviolable, incontestable norm which the individual, for his part, can only accept" (53). As in Bakhtin's discussion of the Greek romance, identity here stands for immutability, for the construction of the word's meaning as a given essence that must simply be accepted. The normative identity of language assigns to the reader a passive position, whereas Voloshinov' s alternative construction of meaning as contextual ordains an active engagement: the task of understanding does not basically amount to recognizing the form used, but rather to understanding it in a particular, concrete context, to understanding its meaning in a particular utterance, i.e., it amounts to understanding its novelty and not to recognizing its identity. (68) Similarly, understanding one's own subjectivity or that of someone else cannot amount simply to recognizing a preexisting, unchangeable core identity, but has to take the form of an understanding of the forms of identity created in the particular contexts of the subject's intersubjective constitution through words, visions, and actions. Bakhtin and Voloshinov both consider identity-as-selfsameness a possible but undesirable conceptualization of subjectivity and meaning. What each thinker proposes instead, in his own way, is an active, multiple and variable construction of subjectivity as becoming, as continually renewing itself. This is a contextualized subjectivity that arises in and through the subject's everyday practices in the ongoing eventness of life, Bakhtin's "Being-as-event" (1993: 57). As Michael Gardiner writes, Bakhtin and Voloshinov aim to conceptualize human beings as neither entirely autonomous, self-directed entities nor as surface effects of a deep epistemic structure, but rather as reflexive agents embodying a range of socially determined practical capacities, a repertoire of collective skills and resources. (1992: r66) Dialogism is the concept Bakhtin most consistently opposes to identity and through which he rejects "monadism, the illusion of closedoff bodies or isolated psyches in bourgeois individualism and the

14

An Introduction

concept of a pristine, closed-off, static identity and truth wherever it may be found" (Holquist 1990: 90). Dialogism proposes a relation not of equality or even contingency, but of a simultaneity able to accommodate difference and distance as well as similarity. As I specify it in Chapter 4, dialogism appears as a particular ethics of intersubjectivity that relies on the preservation of alterity in identity. In this guise, dialogism also appears in len Ang's article, "Identity Blues," where Ang describes her attempts, as an Asian migrant in Australia, to forge conciliatory relations with other communities through a practice of everyday "social sharing," one that results in the incremental and dialogic construction of lived identities which slowly dissolve the boundaries between the past and the future, between "where we come from" and "what we might become," between being and becoming: being is enhanced by becoming, and becoming is never possible without a solid ground in being. (2000: n, emphasis added) Dialogically lived identities here emerge as paradoxical constructions that surmount binary thinking: they are both constructed and lived, both being and becoming, both historical and of the future, both self and other. Identities, however, are not chosen or shared at will and dialogism is not always achieved. It is necessary to ask how subjects emerge as reflexive agents with a repertoire of social skills and resources, as well as to inquire which social processes facilitate and adjudicate this emergence. Although identities are often felt to precede and determine the subject's acts, Butler's theory of performativity suggests that the practical capacities believed to be expressions of our identities are actually constitutive of them. 8 Our self-expression is preceded and circumscribed by power relations and performative structures of social interpellation, so that for Butler the gendered subject is "produced or brought into being as it is 'announced' in and through the stylized rituals and repetitions of everyday life" where these practices "retroactively, and over time, create a (gender) identity effect" (Campbell and Harbord 1999: 229). What makes us who we are is not a preexisting, invariable core of identity, but a series of reiterative identity effects that allow us to act in the world. The performative dimension of identity-in particular the constraint it places on personal agency-is one of the extensions that indicate my move into Bakhtin' s beyond. 9

An Tntroduction

15

I want to retain the concept of identity not as referring to a unified, autonomous, and unchanging entity, but as it has been rethought in terms of performativity and social practice. Ang, Gilroy, and other postcolonial theorists have reformulated identity as a lived category that harbors a crucial political dimension without thereby ignoring the way identitieseven appositional ones-often manifest themselves as constrictive enforcements of sameness that exclude both internal and external difference. In arguing for a "conjunctural understanding" of identities capable of taking into account the shifting political relations and specific historical and material circumstances that contextualize all identity constructions, postcolonial theory creates a new perspective on identity that acknowledges the way "identity can be a basis for connection as well as disconnection" (Clifford 2000: 106). Ang argues against relinquishing identity on the grounds that "at the level of experience and common sense identities are generally expressed (and mobilized politically) precisely because they ftel natural and essential" (2000: 2). In the same vein, Gilroy writes that, despite identity's fluidity in theory, in everyday life it is "lived as a coherent (if not always stable) experiential sense of self" (1993: 102). Taking identities seriously as lived realities that can form a basis for political action is not irreconcilable with the view that such identities are performatively constructed. As long as we realize that the subject does not precede the performative practices through which identity is established but arises in and through them, and as long as we construe this subject's agency not as directly expressive or autonomous but as simultaneously constructed and (re)constructing, the function of identity categories as rallying points for collective political action can be preserved. Gilroy appropriately speaks of "imaginative identity-work, always materially constrained and culturally specified" (2ooob: 127). Designating identity as work or labor accords with Bakhtin' s description, in "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity," of coherent subjectivity as a task always yet to be completed: "My own unity, for myself, is one that confronts me eternally as a unity-yet-to-be ... not the unity of my already-being, but the unity of my not-yet-being" (1990a: 126). Identity-as-unity is posited rather than achieved and has to be worked on, both by myself and by those around me, throughout my entire life. Such work, Gilroy insists, is imaginative: it takes the form of a creative production of a life story, the end and ultimate shape of which cannot be known. Rather than being

r6

An Introduction

merely descriptive or cognitive, identity is an active, creative assignment carried out within a social realm whose relations of domination impose material constraints upon it. These constraints circumscribe, but can never fully fix, the outcome of the subject's identity-work because of the specificity of the subject, not only in a cultural sense but also in terms of the subject's nationality, ethnicity, gender, race, class, and, on an even more basic level, in terms of this subject's spatiotemporal situatedness and actual intersubjective interactions with living others. Identity, Gilroy writes, "marks out the divisions and subsets in our social lives and helps to define the boundaries between our uneven, local attempts to make sense of the world" (20ooa: 98). Our attempts to make sense of ourselves and of the world around us are uneven and multiple, yet at the same time local and specific: each attempt is identified with a context that either situates or grounds it without implying definitive determination. Identity formation, then, is about creatively constructing a sense of belonging on various levels, about narrating ourselves in relation to our multiple intersecting and often contradictory affiliations. It is a question of acknowledging "the various frequencies of address that play upon us and constitute our always incomplete identities in an unstable field" (Gilroy 2oooa: 276). The following analyses of my chosen cultural objects specify the frequencies of address that turn identity into "a noun of process" (252) as performatively determined and governed by established chronotopes, yet at the same time subject to destabilizing processes of translation, territorialization, and versioning. Although such frequencies of address precede us, they do not remain entirely abstract: they are relayed to us on the plane of concrete intersubjective interaction where they both reiterate us and are reiterated by us. Constructing belonging is never an individual act, as the etymology of the word belonging-derived as it is from the Old English gelang "at hand, together with"-clearly indicates. Belonging is fundamentally intersubjective, involving actual other subjects and more abstract conceptions of alterity (such as the big Other of Lacanian psychoanalysis). Where Ang's definition of identity as "the way we represent and narrativize ourselves to ourselves and others" (2000: r) configures identity as selfnarrativizationforthe other, Bakhtin would argue that such narrativization can occur only through the other. I can begin to narrate myself only after others have told me about myself and, because I cannot step outside my

An Introduction

17

own life, I can never produce a finished narrative. We are not our own autonomous authors, but editors working with the stories told about us, versioning these stories into provisional images of our past, present, and future. According to Stuart Hall: Far from only coming from the still small point of truth inside us, identities actually come from outside, they are the way in which we are recognized and then come to step into the place of the recognitions which others give us. Without the others there is no self, there is no self-recognition. (1995: 5)

Ang, however, is right to point out that although we cannot compose a finished account of our past, present, and future, we nevertheless present ourselves to ourselves and to others as if we could. This as if is a crucial precondition for political agency. Consequently, identity remains useful in expressing the provisional, purposeful narrativization of (inter)subjectivity that helps subjects to claim a position-to contest a territory-in the social realm and its network of power relations. In order to fulfill this function in an effective manner, however, identities must first be reconfigured as intersubjectivities, in terms of their constraints and flexibilities. What I propose here is a move beyond identities toward identities-asintersubjectivities. I have already defined identities as multiple, ongoing efforts of creative construction. Considering their fundamental intersubjectivity, as emphasized by Bakhtin' s transformation of "personal identity into an intersubjective dynamic" (Brandist 2002: 179), identities become coproductions, processes taking place not within the self, but in between self and other. Identities oscillate between exterior and interior, as the self takes on the determinations offered up by others and fashions them into provisional self-narratives. As noted above, dialogism is the privileged figure of Bakhtinian intersubjectivity. In Hitchcock's words, it suggests a potential for intersubjectivity in which the "I" becomes "I" not by canceling or relegating its Other. Instead, it continually redefines itself and others in a dissonance that has its material expression in the struggle over signs. (1993a: 49)

Dialogic intersubjectivity marks dissonance and distance rather than harmony and closeness; it is not about recognizing the other as the same, but about respecting the other as different and taking responsibility for this difference. The other does not become an object, but is recognized as another subject. Dialogism means responding to alterity without negation or

18

An Introduction

assimilation. It is, however, only one type of intersubjectivity. Consequently, I reserve the term diaLogism for the specific form of interpersonality or interculturality that Bakhtin privileges as the most productive relationship between self and other. Not all identities are dialogic, but, I contend, they are all intersubjective. To understand how identities differ in their attitudes toward a specific other, or alterity in general, it is imperative to recognize the different forms identities-as-intersubjectivities take, particularly if we wish to avoid referring identity back to the Cartesian subject and his deliberate, transparent relations with other such subjects. In an article entitled "The Impossibly lntersubjective and the Logic of the Both," Hitchcock points to the difficulty of conceiving intersubjectivity when it is no longer predicated on an autonomous subject: "We ask that it should encompass the dealings of I and Other, however vexed, while yet removing all and everything that it connects as the tired conspiracy of centered subjectivity" (2007= 26). This paradox can only be overcome by a radical rethinking of the intersubjective, one that no longer refers it (exclusively) to personal interaction, but to the interplay of different conceptualizations of the subject: "intersubjectivity is not between subjects; it is across principles of subjectivity itself" (27). The expression identities-as-intersubjectivities denotes, then, the way identities appear as negotiations between principles of subjectivity. Such principles are, however, themselves constituted and maintained imersubjectively, enacted (performatively) between subjects, even if never mastered by them. Intersubjectivity as that which occurs between subjects does not, therefore, disappear off the map, but is now predicated on the ways these subjects, in their interactions, reiterate their subjection to particular doctrines of subjectivity. My use of the conjunction "as" in identities-as-intersubjectivities indicates how identity cannot be thought of separately from intersubjectivity, while the attempt to render intersubjectivity in the plural marks the multiplicity of their interconnections, the way the subject's intersubjectivity involves interactions with various intersecting alterities, both individual and collective. On the one hand, constructing an individual identity without reference to the collective (national, cultural, gender, and class) identities that circumscribe the subject's interactions with individual others, is simply impossible. Yet, on the other hand, such collective identities never totally determine the subject and whom it meets, so that a national identity

An Introduction

19

may be intersected not only by other collective identities but also by the highly specific, individual affiliations that derive from direct personal contact. In one subject, therefore, various principles of subjectivity and a whole range of concrete intersubjective interactions have to be negotiated, all producing their specific material effects. The intersubjective, in its very impossibility, grounds identities in interaction, where action signals a locus of agency: the intersubjective acts upon us, but we also (inter)act it. While this interaction does not make us free to do whatever we want, it emphasizes our activity in "doing" our own identities. Such activity implies, on the one hand, our complicity in and responsibility for the often constrictive and necessarily exclusionary structures that compel us as subjects (I develop these as the chronotope, performativity, the cultural gaze, and the cultural addressee). On the other hand, because of its foundation in practical interaction, this activity is always open to a redoing, which, in Chapter 8, I call versioning. It occurs through the creative manipulation of discursive genres, translations, and territories. The notion of identities-as-intersubjectivities is not exclusive to Bakhtin. Recently, intersubjective relations as negotiations between identity and alterity have become of prime interest in cultural studies, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and queer criticism. Butler's work, for one, moves in an intersubjective direction when, in Undoing Gender, she signals the need to underscore the value of being beside oneself, of being a porous boundary, given over to others, finding oneself in a trajectory of desire in which one is taken out of oneself, and resituated irreversibly in a field of others in which one is not the presumptive center. (2004: 25)

Although this statement avows the subject's dependency on others for its subjectivation, these others, for Butler, remain predominantly imaginary, capitalized Others, referring the constitution of the subject to a psychic realm of alterity, which remains largely impervious to the sphere of concrete intersubjective interaction. In psychoanalytic theory, writers as diverse as Kaja Silverman, Jean Laplanche, and Jessica Benjamin have decentered the intrapsychical "I" by arguing that the formation of subjectivity requires the active input of the other as an embodied, empirically present, outside subject. In the following chapters, I conceive of intersubjectivities both in terms

20

An Introduction

of the interaction between concrete subjects (individual and collective) and in terms of the interplay between constructions of subjectivity, maintaining that the two cannot be theorized separately. The tension between different forms of subjectivity circumscribes the kinds of subjects and the forms of interaction that can exist, but this tension is enacted on the level of intersubjective interaction as a reiterative process, which allows for difference in each new enactment. To demonstrate how these intersubjectivities impact each other in the construction and assertion of normative and appositional identities, I now turn to popular culture.

Popular Culture I chose to focus on popular culture because I believe that in this realm the paradox of recognizing identities-as-intersubjectivities as social and performative constructions, while at the same time still taking them seriously as lived and politically active realities, is played out with particular poignancy. In addition, popular culture accords with my penchant for the beyond as a site of destabilization. As Johannes Fabian argues: When we add the qualifier "popular" to culture, we do so because we believe it allows us to conceptualize certain kinds of human praxis that the concept of culture without the qualifier either ignores or makes disappear. Although the two concepts do not differ in that they constitute practices, culture tout court is usually talked about as if it existed as an entity, as if it was there to be studied; discourse on popular culture tends to be about movements or processes rather than entities. (1998: r)

Popular culture is not only about movements or processes, but is a concept that is always on the move, always pointing beyond itself. This marks it as an inherently relational category that, according to John Storey's influential Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, is "always defined, implicitly or explicitly, in contrast to other conceptual categories" (I993= I). The way that intersubjectivity inhabits the very concept of popular culture leads me to see it not as an "empty conceptual category" like Storey (I), but rather as an overpopulated one, where this overpopulation enforces a constant self-reflection that aligns it with the practice of cultural analysis. So, how does this book reflect on popular culture and its various, often conflicting definitions? Whereas most attempts to define popular

An Introduction

21

culture are based on excluding certain of its possible meanings, I aim to bring together some of the elements that are usually kept apart and present popular culture as a site of negotiation. Storey, for example, distinguishes between lived cultures and cultural texts (2). Although both of these may be popular, they are usually theorized separately. My objects, which include television programs, films, and literature, but also the Notting Hill Carnival, cross this divide. Such crossing occurs most insistently in Chapters 7 and 8, where I present a combined analysis of the Notting Hill Carnival and its textual and visual representation in Limon Kwesi Johnson's dub poem, "Forces of Victory" (1979), and Isaac Julien's experimental film, Territories (1984). The latter, I argue, actively incorporate the eventness of the lived carnival into their poetic and filmic structures. Storey lists six prominent definitions of popular culture, each of which comes into play here, but each of which is also questioned in some way by its juxtaposition with the others. Storey's first definition addresses the quantitative dimension of popular culture, where it appears as "culture which is widely favoured or well liked by many people" (1993: 7). This distinguishes popular culture from culture in general-or "high" culturenot as a purely residual category (as in Storey's second definition, where popular culture is simply not high culture), but in terms of its general popularity, measured by the size of its audience and the scope of its distribution.10 Popular culture comprises those cultural artifacts that are seen and talked about by large audiences, whose members do not always fit neatly into a social class or any other category of social differentiation. One of the most important aspects of this definition of popular culture is that it reaches across the entire social spectrum, even if not everyone interprets its products in the same manner. This notion of popular culture is intimately related to what is commonly called mass culture (Storey's third definition). Mass culture has been disparaged in much cultural criticism because of the way it is thought to turn its audiences into passive consumers of dominant cultural propaganda. 11 Both this position and its opposite, where mass culture is celebrated as inherently resistive, have now been largely invalidatedP Between these polarities a more productive approach can, however, be articulated, precisely by bringing out the element of popularity. This element shifts attention from the supply side of the culture industry to the demand side, where the consumer appears as an active force. Colin MacCabe (1986)

22

An Introduction

argues that because popular culture is produced with a view to creating an audience, this audience finds agency in the culture industry's need for the approval of its products. Audiences do not sit back indifferently as the industry puts its products before them; they exercise an important, active power of distinction by ignoring certain offerings and accepting others in a process that, notwithstanding the advances in market research, remains largely unpredictable. Witness the large numbers of television shows canceled by networks each year, sometimes after only a few episodes. No one could have predicted the extent of Sex and the City's popularity across the Western world or the creative ways of reading the series that emerged in the different viewing contexts and on the Internet. The same goes for Queer as Folk. Although many artifacts are produced as popular culture, they can only truly ascend to that moniker when they are well liked by their audiences. In this manner, the audience exerts agency within the field of popular culture, even if it does not necessarily do so in a progressive way, often preferring precisely those representations favored by the dominant order. The production side of popular culture, too, exhibits multiple forms of agency. A distinction can be drawn between, on the one hand, institutions primarily interested in the product's commercial success (television networks, publishing companies, producers, film studios) and, on the other, institutions and agents (cultural funds, editors, writers, directors, actors) who exhibit additional interests, possibly including a desire to challenge dominant cultural representations. Simon Frith refers to the "tripartite structure of communication" (1998: 575) present in contemporary cultural forms, which distinguishes creator, producer, and consumer and allows for conflicts between them, so that a single object of popular culture may harbor contradictory meanings both on the side of production and on the side of consumption. Storey's fourth definition of popular culture sees it as "culture which originates from 'the people'" (1993: 12). Its association with authenticity brings this definition close to folk culture, which is the form of popular culture we find in Bakhtin' s work. Often, it acquires a specific class dimension, as in Stuart Hall's description of popular culture as "the culture of working people, the labouring classes and the poor" (1998: 442). The latter is, however, too narrowly focused on the production side of popular culture and on class-based social distinctions. Although class continues to

An Introduction

23

function as an important nexus of social struggle, it needs to be correlated with other modes of differentiation such as gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. Popular culture exceeds working-class culture on the sides of both production and consumption and it is also not practicable to define popular culture as the culture of the oppressed, as the place where their resistance to the dominant culture is inevitably mobilized, even if it can sometimes function in this way, as my discussions of Queer as Folk and the Notting Hill Carnival bear out. An alternative definition capable of including other than class-based distinctions and of conceptualizing the forces of incorporation on the side of the dominant culture, is the one based on Gramsci' s notion of hegemony. According to this definition, popular culture functions as a "terrain of exchange ... marked by resistance and incorporation" (Storey 1993: 13). As such, it accommodates class conflict, but also the struggles surrounding race, gender, and sexual preference that my objects address. In the end, popular culture, as I regard it, is the site where the struggle between dominant culture and the cultures of marginalized social groups is most openly and indeed most democratically played out. Theorizing this site also inevitably involves thinking about where popularity, the culture industry, and "the people" fit in, so that the other definitions of popular culture are included in the struggle over the concept itself. Popular culture as a site of hegemonic struggle also prompts a rethinking of the high-low distinction in relation to the dominant-marginalized opposition, exposing the way dominant cultures include both high and low cultural forms, as do marginalized ones. This brings into play Storey's sixth and final definition of popular culture, based on the postmodernist rejection of the distinction between high and low culture. While I would not go so far as to argue that the latter distinction has completely disappeared-its continuing function as an instrument of social distinction is clear, for example, from Bourdieu' s work-1 agree that the boundary marking it has become increasingly porous. The problematic categorization of Johnson's dub poetry-which is not popular in quantitative terms, but does incorporate a popular musical form (reggae) and originate from a marginalized, appositional social position-as well as Julien' s meaningful use of a popular event in his avant-garde film testify to this. 13 My inclusion of the latter two objects in a book whose title privileges popular culture is also legitimized by the way

24

An Introduction

cultural analysis studies all forms of culture, not separately but as speaking to (and sometimes through) each other. Such a conversation occurs in both Johnson' s poetry and Julien' s film. "Forces of Victory" combines poetry with reggae, and the fact that neither is privileged over the other is clear from the way the work appeared in a volume of poetry as well as on compact disc (CD). This constitutes what I later call a versioning, one that works to implicate the realms of high and popular culture-and their respective audiences-in each other. In the case of Julien' s film, we at first appear to be dealing with a straightforward example of "high" culture rewriting popular culture. As a twenty-five-minute experimental film, Territories is clearly not popular in the sense of a broadly viewed, well-liked mass cultural object. The filmproduced by Sankofa, a film and video collective dedicated to developing an independent black film culture-does, however, partake of popular culture as a site of struggle between dominant and marginalized groups in its politically motivated presentation of a black point of view. Consequently, it presents not so much a comment on popular culture and its transformation into high culture as it does a process of contagion by which elements of the Notting Hill Carnival as a lived cultural event are integrated in a high-art film structure. This establishes a concrete, material link between, on the one hand, strategies of resistance on the streets and, on the other, avant-garde film practices (rapid montage, superimposition) and critical theory (the film cites works by Edward Brathwaite, Michelle Cliff, Paul Gilroy, and Kobena Mercer). Thus, the film actively partakes in the reflection on popular culture by presenting popular and high culture not as mutually exclusive, but as forms that can work together to develop an appositional strategy within the hegemonic struggle surrounding the meaning of race in British society. Although I touch on the production and consumption sides of popular culture, the methodology of cultural analysis prompts me to situate the hegemonic struggles engaged in by popular culture mainly at the textual level. Consequently, my approach centers on dose readings of my chosen popular cultural objects. I am interested not only in the way identity constructions and assertions are achieved through popular culture but also how they appear in popular culture, because I believe the latter represents an oftneglected step toward understanding how subjects construct their identities in relation to popular cultural representations. The content of popular

An Introduction

25

culture is not without its influence on the processes of identification and disidentification that accompany it; we do not identify with objects in general, regardless of their narrative or visual content, but rather with the specific forms of self-narrativization these objects present to us and with their particular position in the struggle between dominant and marginal cultural forms. Many artifacts of popular culture present identities as ready-made molds into which subjects can pour themselves through a simple, transparent move of identification. Such artifacts create what James Clifford aptly calls "a superficial shopping mall of identities" (2000: 101). However, the sheer number of (contradictory) identities offered up by all these artifacts together ultimately works to highlight identity's complexity and constructed quality. Popular culture presents the reader/viewer with a plethora of identity positions that appear as competing self-narrativizations, all undermining each other's claims to truth or naturalness. In addition, many popular cultural artifacts thematize the problem of identity construction at the internal level. This is the case, for instance, in the television series Sex and the City, which revolves around its central protagonist's convoluted attempts to narrate her own and her friends' sexual identities in a weekly newspaper column. This and other popular cultural representations of the struggle to "find" one's identity, particularly when the latter is not presented as essential or unitary and when its discovery is continually deferred, present their audiences with a point of identification that centers precisely around the complexity of intersubjective identity constructions, around their failure to secure the self. Approaching popular cultural artifacts through a practice of textual and visual analysis is not without its problems. Michael Schudson warns of the danger that such analysis "may inadvertently romanticize the semiotic process itself" by reading meanings into objects that are not discerned by their audiences (1998: 499). A similar concern sounds in Pierre Bourdieu' s remark, made in a conversation with Terry Eagleton: It is a form of dominant chic among intellectuals to say "Look at these cartoons," or some other cultural item, "do they not display great cultural creativity?" Such a person is saying "You don't see that, but I do, and I am the first to see it." The perception may be valid; but there is an overstatement of the capacity of these new things to change the structure of the distribution of symbolic capital. To exaggerate the extent of change is, in a sense, a form of populism. (Eagleton and Bourdieu 1994: 274)

26

An Introduction

To this I would reply that, as a cultural analyst who takes her objects seriously, I consider myself part of their audience, not separated from or standing above or before other readers/viewers. Moreover, in a world where media products cross national and cultural borders as a matter of course, audiences and interpretations are inevitably multiple. As long as cultural analysts do not present their interpretations as definitive or universally shared, there is no reason to suspect them of elitism. We should, however, heed the second part of Bourdieu' s comment and be careful not to establish a direct causal relation between textual sites of opposition and social change. If a popular cultural text or event can indeed work to mobilize an effective social opposition-as happens, for example, in the case of the Notting Hill Carnival-it does not do so in every case. Popular culture, then, is neither completely encapsulated by the dominant culture, nor is it by definition appositional; instead, it appears as "a sort of constant battlefield" where dominant and appositional forces vie with each other for territory (Hall 1998: 447). On this battlefield, nothing is stable: processes of co-aptation, expropriation, and reappropriation are constantly at work, so that even the distinction between dominant and appositional forms is blurred. "The meaning of a cultural form and its place or position in the cultural field," Hall observes, "is not inscribed inside its form. Nor is its position fixed once and for ever" (449). Significantly, at this point, Hall cites Voloshinov, enlisting his view that linguistic signs are capable of resignification through different social groups or at different moments in the history of one social group. Hall relates this resignification to the way the meaning and effect of cultural forms vary within the realm of popular culture. Popular culture is a realm of social struggle where cultural forms and traditions are creatively reformulated both in the service of the dominant culture and in the service of its subversion: "popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against the culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance" (453). Hall's perception of popular culture as at once the site of struggle and-because of the pervasiveness and profitability of its images, texts, and sounds-its prize, points to its inherently political status: popular culture is the realm where the territory of identity is contested in a particularly hot manner, and where this contestation produces concrete, material consequences. John Caughie writes that "popular culture matters" because, as "one of the sites where

An Introduction

27

forms of consciousness and identity are constituted," it bears within it a "political urgency" (1986: r62). Through my chapters, I trace the politics of the popular cultural construction and (re)assertion of identities-asintersubjectivities, on the sides of the dominant and the marginal, in terms of constraint as well as agency.

From Chronotope to Versioning My theory of identities-as-intersubjectivities proceeds from a discussion, in Chapters 1-4, of the way intersubjective processes of identity construction are differentiated, situated, and circumscribed by specific chronotopic and performative contexts, which produce particular regimes of vision and speech. In their interaction with Bakhtin' s concepts, the mass cultural objects central to these chapters-Sex and the City, Nell, and Flawless-primarily work to theorize identity construction in terms of the subject's enforced subjection to dominant cultural modes of interpellation. At the same time, each of the objects already marks certain points of weakness inherent to these modes and their performative reproduction. In Chapters 5-8, I explore how these points of weakness may be exploited to create room for the assertion of marginalized identity positions. I suggest that identity constructions, even marginalized ones, can be repositioned and reshaped in and through their intersubjective rearticulation in the popular cultural arena. My two cultural objects for Chapters 5-8Queer as Folk and the Notting Hill Carnival (as live event and in its textual and visual representations)-partake in popular culture from an overtly appositional position, aiming to reposition and empower queer and black identities respectively. I configure the rearticulations these objects achieve under the concepts of speech genres, translation, territory, and versioning. This two-part structure does not indicate a decisive schism between the first and second parts of the book. In the end, it is precisely the interplay between, on the one hand, the differentiated specificity and situatedness of dominant intersubjective identity constructions and, on the other hand, their potential for equally specific and situated recontextualizations that keeps identities in process. Our ongoing struggle to understand and gain recognition for our identities and those of others is played out in the tension between my starting point of presenting identities as grounded in

28

An Introduction

diverse configurations of time-space and my final conceptualization of identities as subject to creative versioning. In Chapter 1, my analysis of the popular novel and television series Sex and the City situates identities in distinct spatiotemporal contexts or chronotopes that each stage subjectivity and frame its experiential content in their own way. I expand Bakhtin' s chronotope from a literary concept into a social one that designates the intersubjectively established and maintained practice of constructing the spatiotemporal worlds in which we live and through which we define ourselves. Since the object resists a purely chronotopic analysis, I also investigate the interplay between the concept of chronotope, Butler's theory of gender performativity, and Bourdieu' s sociology of field and habitus. Sex and the City shows that these theories are not mutually exclusive, but complementary: the subject's identity is staged and framed in their critical interaction. I examine the intertwinement of chronotope and performativity in greater detail in Chapter 2, focusing on belonging. By analyzing a chapter from the Sex and the City novel, the television adaptation of this chapter, and Joel Schumacher's film, Flawless, I make a series of theoretical points about the relationship between conflicting chronotopes and the effect this relationship has on the identities of those who travel from one chronotope to the other or get caught in between. Together, the three objects invite us to supplement the chronotope with Bourdieu's notions of habitus and illusio, to clarify how the chronotopic situation of an individual performative act influences its effect, to shed light on the distinction between performance and performativity, and, finally, to stage a productive exchange between Bakhtin' s theory of the utterance and Jacques Derrida' s theory of iterability. Chapter 3 explores the role of vision in establishing and maintaining intersubjective identities. Its object, a Sex and the City episode entitled "The Real Me," suggests that chronotopic belonging lies largely in the eye of the beholder. By way of an intertextual reference to the myth of Narcissus, the episode invokes Bakhtin's notion of the other's "excess of seeing," defined as a separate, exterior agency of embodiment. Against models of intersubjectivity that propose an empathic merging of self and other, this conceptualization of the intersubjective look stresses the importance of outsideness, distance, and difference. Each of the four story lines of "The Real Me" offers a different perspective on excessive vision and its

An Introduction

29

relation to other theorizations of intersubjective vision, most importantly Jacques Lacan's cultural gaze. The intersubjective look is supplemented by the intersubjective address in Chapter 4, where I examine the impact on identity construction of how we address our speech. My examination of the audiovisual rendering of voice and its address in Sex and the City and the film Nell (directed by Michael Apted) suggests that our utterances orient themselves toward a potential understanding that functions as a precondition for the utterance having been spoken in the first place. The use of voice-over and voice-off in the two objects exposes how social power relations inhabit speech, investing our vocal identities with a normative regime of addressivity. I theorize this regime through Jean Laplanche's enigmatic address, Bakhtin's superaddressee, and Voloshinov's potential addressee, marking a distinction in relation to all three by introducing a new term: the cultural addressee. As an intersubjectively constituted and maintained coercive norm that determines who speaks, who remains silent, and who is heard, this cultural addressee is the vocal counterpart of the cultural gaze and determines how a particular social group deals with (absolute) alterity. With Chapter 5, I progress from discussing the constraints intersubjectivity imposes on identity construction to exploring those intersubjective strategies of subversion that exploit the element of instability produced in the reiterative structuring of identity. In other words, the chapter marks a transition from the normative identity constructions at stake in the first part of my book to the appositional identities that are the focus of its remainder. I suggest that marginalized social groups can employ practices of linguistic and visual resignification to establish, assert, and gain recognition for their identities in the dominant cultural domain-not on its terms, however, but on their own. Practices of resignification, if attuned to the chronotopic and performative specificity of the norms they seek to challenge, can refract the cultural addressee and the cultural gaze, potentially forcing them to expand their definitions of intelligibility and visibility in order to see and hear the other as other, thereby allowing different principles of subjectivity into the intersubjective. 1 explore the force and limit of resignification through an analysis of the positioning of queer identities in the British television series Queer as Folk and its American remake. This twofold object conjures up Bakhtin's concept of speech genres

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An Introduction

and Hamid Naficy's notion of accented cinema, which modulate each other. The interplay between the two versions of Queer as Folk, I contend in Chapter 6, suggests a particular, dialogic practice of translation as a strategy for effectively asserting marginalized identities in the dominant cultural realm. I present Queer as Folk as a cultural object in translation, focusing on the way the production side of the American remake appears as a site rife with subversion. The object, in this case, is not so much the form or content of the television series itself as the positioning of the remake as a cultural commodity in the American context. The remake, I argue, enhances the specificity of its representation of queer identity construction through a strategic practice of translation-as-simulation that simultaneously invokes and rebukes the traditional distinction between original and translation. Theorized by way of Bakhtin and the Queer as Folk remake, translation emerges as an ambivalent process of de- and reterritorialization whose direction can never be completely controlled. Transferred to the level of subjectivity, the subject is perceived as forever in translation, with each act of translation prompted by its inevitable encounters with alterity (other subjects and other principles of subjectivity). In Chapter 7, I argue that the specificity of chronotopic identities and their translations renders them territorial. Identities, whether dominant or marginalized, all stake a political claim to a defined metaphorical or literal time-space, one that appears not as a safe haven, but as a site of contestation also claimed by other identities. However, to argue that all identities are territorial is not the same as presenting identities as rooted in, or authentically belonging to, a fixed space. My cultural object, London's Notting Hill Carnival in the 1970s and 198os, stages a confrontation between, on the one hand, an established and dominant British identity and, on the other, an emergent black British identity. This confrontation concentrates on the struggle for control over the streets of the Notting Hill neighborhood. As represented in Linton Kwesi Johnson's poem "Forces of Victory" and Isaac Julien' s film, Territories, this struggle situates both identities on the intersection among carnival, chronotope, and performativity, positing the concept of territory as the point of their political and material coagulation. Although territory is often associated with dominant, entrenched positions, the Notting Hill Carnival prompts me to reconfigure it as a fluid concept denoting localized processes of chronotopic contention.

An Introduction

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Territory is first multiplied into territories, temporalized into de- and reterritorialization, and then made itinerant in the imaginations of particular communities. AB such, territories are no longer the exclusive domain of the dominant order, but become capable of providing a strategically shifting ground for the political assertion of appositional identities. Finally, Chapter 8 introduces the novel concept of versioning as the most appropriate term for my project, its treatment of Bakhtin, and the intersubjective processes of identity construction and (re)assertion it advances. From a discussion of Johnson's dub poetry, versioning technology in computer science, and the metaphors of the sound system and the cutting room in Territories, versioning emerges as a theoretical concept denoting transformation, variety, and difference, as well as specificity, subjectivity, and similarity. It is a figure of repetition that works according to the logic of the turn: although the direction of this turn cannot be controlled or determined in advance, it is not entirely open either, since it is invariably bound to a particular chronotopic context in which only certain moves make sense. I conclude this book by presenting identities as intersubjective processes of versioning. The subject appears as a collection of versions that can never be fully integrated, least of all by the subject itself. However, agency is preserved in the capacity to intervene intersubjectively in the performative reiteration of chronotopic identities and their corresponding regimes of seeing and speaking. Even if these regimes cannot be radically changed, they can be versioned and, by piling version upon version, more and more distance can be taken from the prescribed reiteration. Identities, then, no longer appear as static structures comprising a set of persisting characteristics, but as the dynamic interplay of intersubjectively constituted constraints and intersubjectively enacted reformulations. Between chronotope and versioning, identities appear as contextualized drafts or versions, each of which marks a specific, situated locus of simultaneous, interdependent constraint and agency. Identity remains "a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint" (Butler 2004: I) but, in their inherent, material intersubjectivity, both improvisation and constraint become radically specific and situated.

Chronotopic Identities

Staging the Subject I begin with one of Bakhtin's central concepts, the chronotope. I deploy this concept to shed light on an aspect of identity construction that, although always presupposed, has remained remarkably underexposed: its spatiotemporal specificity and situatedness. In Against Race, Gilroy redefines identity as an "ecology of belonging" (20ooa: 121), firmly anchoring intersubjective belonging in the subject's exterior environment. This removes identity construction from the internal level of subjectivity and refers it to the way subjects articulate belonging across their external relationships and spatiotemporal situation. I want to supplement the notion of identity as ecology-defined as a particular form of interaction between organisms and their "natural" physical surroundings-with Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope, which emphasizes the constructed quality of these surroundings. In our interactions, we collectively construct our environment and it, in turn, constructs us. Belonging- to a house or home, as ecology's Greek root oikos promises- requires not just any house, but a house built and ordered in a particular way. What is more, a subject does not necessarily belong to just one house, but can be at home in multiple constructions of time-space, as long as it is able to adapt its behavior to each environment. Ecology reconfigured as chronotopicity is constructive and multiple rather than descriptive and singular. Far from being objective markers of a neutral

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environment or background, space and time, in their invariable chronotopic intertwinement, produce identities. This means reformulating identities as processes grounded in time-space(s), both on the level of their sociocultural construction and on that of their subjective "experience." The notion of experience refers here not to an unmediated or transparent referentiality, but rather, after Joan W. Scott, to a historicized, discursive, collective, and political construction that proves instrumental in identity production: "It is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience" (1991: 779). Experience needs to be contextualized, situated in both a space and a time, which, like experience itself, cannot be thought of as foundational, self-evident, or transparent categories, because they need to be reconfigured as "contextual, contested, and contingent" (796). The chronotope, when taken beyond Bakhtin's own conceptualization, prompts such a reconfiguration. In "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," Bakhtin defines the chronotope as "the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature" (1996b: 84). Though he invokes the chronotope as a literary concept, Bakhtin duly notes the term's sources in mathematics, Einstein's theory of relativity, the biological model of A. A. Ukhtomskij, and Kant. 1 The chronotope presents time and space as intimately connected: time is spatial in the sense that its passage can only be perceived and given meaning in terms of space, and space is temporal in the sense that movement in space is always also movement in time. Bakhtin elevates the interconnection of time and space in the chronotope to the central ordering principle of life. Meaning itself becomes chronotopic, since all signs, in order to signify, need to beaudibly, visibly, or haptically-inscribed in(to) space and time: "every entry into the sphere of meanings is accomplished only through the gates of the chronotope" (Bakhtin 1996b: 258). 2 On the basis of this vision of the chronotope as central to all meaning, I contend that identities, as constructs that give meaning to subjects and their bodies, are governed by particular chronotopic arrangements of space and time. This contention is substantiated by my first cultural artifact, the popular American novel and television series Sex and the City, which portrays the relationships of a group of single women in Manhattan. Candace Bushnell started Sex and the City as a weekly newspaper column in the New York Observer. In 1996 a novel of the same title,

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Chronotopic Identities

composed of a selection of her columns, was published, and in r998 the first season of the television series aired on the HBO cable network. The phenomenally successful series, broadcast all over the Western world, concluded with its sixth season in 2004. During this period, Sex and the City (unofficial trademark: SatC) grew into an icon of mass culture, standing not only for the novel and the television show, but especially for a marketing empire built upon a particular, gendered notion of identity expressed in the lifestyle of its characters, all single city women in their thirties. HBO' s official SatC Web site aggressively marketed this identity as a universally attainable commodity, with tips on how to dress, furnish, and date. 3 In the novel and the television show, however, the SatC identity is tied to the highly specific, tightly circumscribed locale of Manhattan and its textually produced chronotopic interconnection of time and space. The cover of the novel's r998 Warner Books television tie-in edition (Figure 1), for example, welcomes readers "to the age of un-innocence" and invites them to "enter a world where the sometimes shocking and often hilarious mating habits of the privileged are exposed by a true insider." This promise to reveal a foreign world and a lifestyle emphatically not the reader's own identifies the novel's time-space as an exotic realm, an ethnographic curiosity. The further claim that the book "introduces us to the young and beautiful who travel in packs from parties to bars to clubs" limits the novelistic world to a particular range of settings and a stock of characters with distinct physical characteristics. The cover text inaugurates a social group with a lifestyle that can only exist in Manhattan, configured as consisting of chic restaurants, bars, and dubs. This constructed environment constitutes the group's "natural habitat," outside of which it cannot survive. As a Los Angeles Times review that is cited on the novel's front cover puts it: "Welcome to the cruel planet that is Manhattan." I take this metaphorical positioning of the novel as opening onto a planet with its distinctive life forms as a cue to probe the chronotopic dimension of identity construction. The book's cover art already suggests that space and time are not passive backdrops to identities, but constitutive categories. Sarah Jessica Parker-the actress who plays the main character/narrator Carrie in the television series-is pictured in front of the Manhattan skyline, naked (except for her shoes and a strategically placed laptop) and vulnerable. The cover thereby not only hints at the sexual content of the series and novel,

Chronotopic Identities

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FIGURE r. Front cover of Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City,© Warner Books, 1996. Reproduced by permission of Warner Books.

but also suggests that the subject is somehow born of the city, which encompasses Parker like a womb. The skyline no longer appears simply as an existing and recognizable location, but becomes a generative force. Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope clarifies this effect: it turns time and space into constitutive categories of subjectivity by challenging their transparent "reality." Reading the chronotope through Sex and the City transforms it from a literary concept into a social one, denoting the active, sociohistorically differentiated practice of staging subjectivity, its dramatic mise-en-scene. In Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, Bal expands the idea of mise-en-scene from a specialized theatrical term into a concept useful for cultural analysis. Specifically, she elaborates mise-en-scene as a theory of dreams, where it denotes how

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the artistic organization of the space in which the play is set-the dream itselfarranges a limited and delimited section of real time and space (read: time and space that belong inalienably to the subject, and to which the subject inalienably belongs) so that a differently delimited section of fictional time and space can accommodate the fictional activities of the "actors" ... performing their roles to build a plot. (2002: 131) The chronotope extends mise-en-scene into the spatiotemporal staging of the individual who has become a social actor or subject, and who builds a life (plot) by acting out identities (roles). 4 As we have seen, SatC features such a delimited world, spawning a special breed of subjects not found in any other cross-section of time-space. Bal assigns to the art director, the author of mise-en-scene, the function of projecting "dramatic and musical writing into a particular chronotopos" (2002: 97). The borrowed term "chronotopos," together with Bal's designation of mise-en-scene as an act of aesthetic authorship, connects to Bakhtin, who considers the aesthetic, authorial delineation of a time-space constellation essential to the narrative structuring of plot, character, and genre. "The chronotope," he writes, "is the place where the knots of the narrative are tied and untied" (Bakhtin 1996b: 250). Thus, much like Bal's mise-en-scene, the chronotope builds a plot through the collective, intersubjective, and public delimitation of time-space. It does this, however, in relation to both fictional and "real" worlds, acting, in Hitchcock's words, as a "bridging concept" between art and life (2003: 120). The chronotope bridges these realms by indicating that art and life alike are always already staged or subjected to a mise-en-scene through particular configurations of time-space. The chronotope, consequently, is not only where the knots of narrative are tied and untied, but also where the knots of subjectiviryof identities conceived as self-narrativizations-are made and unmade. Of course, in life no individual art director is completely in charge of this process. Instead, as I argue shortly, the subject's social mise-en-scene is established and maintained intersubjectively through the performative enactment of a chronotope. Correlated wi rh the concept of chronotope, Bal' s mise-en-scene begins to interrogate the distinction between "real" and "fictional" stagings of time and space, the idea that "real" time and space can do without staging. In denoting "real" time and space as "rime and space that belong inalienably to the subject, and to which the subject inalienably belongs," Bal

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already hints that time and space are subjective categories and, more radically, that the subject is ultimately produced by the particular time-space constellation to which she belongs (2002: 131). This constellation, the chronotope insists, is no more "real" and no less "fictional" than the time-space of any novel, artwork, or dream. The "real" world exists only as the site of multiple, heterogeneous mise-en-scenes. SatC supports this assertion: both the novel and the television series suggest that individuals only become subjects, members of a social group with a defined identity, by being inserted in a particular chronotope that is simultaneously staged and staging. The Sex and the City title establishes its spatiotemporal settings as fundamentally noninterchangeable. It is concerned not with sex in general, but with sex as it functions within an urban environment. This environment, moreover, is not just any city, but the city, immediately identifiable as New York by the skyline design on the book cover and the landmark buildings shown in the television series' opening credits. The novel's chapter titles"Love in Manhattan," "Manhattan Wedlock," "How to Marry a Man in Manhattan"-further limit its stage to the borough of Manhattan. This is, of course, Manhattan not as it is, but as it is textually produced by a particular cultural artifact. Although there is an iconic relation with the extradiegetic geographical area of Manhattan in the buildings, streets, parks, and restaurants depicted by the television show, this relation is overdetermined by a selective way of looking at the area, a "focalization" or manipulated viewpoint that works to exclude certain aspects while highlighting others. 5 No "real" Manhattan precedes its chronotopic construction in SatC. Manhattan exists only as a multitude of aesthetic and practical arrangements of its time-space, each overdetermining these categories and their interrelation in a different manner. 6 What makes SatC theoretically productive is the palpability of its focalization, the overt presentation of its time-space as anything but "natural" or "real": the novel's cover and the series' excessive attention to props, makeup, wardrobe, styling, and location intimate that the Manhattan we see and read about is much more a carefully set stage than a factual place. SatC' s staged Manhattan is geographically bound and socially exclusive. The other boroughs of New York do not exist, except in rare cases of temporary excursions invariably presented as exotic adventures. Moreover, while the spatial terrain of the series emphatically includes the sexual, it almost consistently "spaces out" issues of race and class. These elements,

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together with the less-photogenic parts of Manhattan, remain conspicuously invisible or offstage. In terms of its temporality, SatC limits itself to the present, to what it calls "the age of un-innocence," stretching from the 1990s into the new millennium. What is "timed out" is the past, both Manhattan's and the characters'. The television series' opening credits (repeated for each episode) establish the characters as products of this combined space-time-the SatC chronotope-and present identity as predicated on the chronotopic staging of the subject. First, we see an out-of-focus shot of a crowded Manhattan street with, in the lower right-hand corner, in focus, the upper part of a face belonging to Carrie Bradshaw, the show's main character and narrator. What follows are images of landmark Manhattan buildings and bridges-the Chrysler Building, the World Trade Center (after 9/n, the Empire State Building), and the Brooklyn Bridge-juxtaposed with more shots, this time full close-ups, of Carrie's face. Although her face is never at the center of the picture and she never looks directly into the camera, Carrie smiles confidently and the sequence is accompanied by upbeat music. Because of the way the shots are strung together, Carrie appears to be looking at the landmarks, capturing them in her glance and seeming in full control of her surroundings. Yet, at the same time, the buildings and bridges, all shown from a low camera angle that makes them all the more imposing, seem to gaze down upon Carrie, subjugating her from on high. The pinnacle of the Chrysler Building in particular suggests an all-seeing eye as its triangular sections reflect the sun in a blinding glare. The appearance of the gaze as an impersonal, all-seeing, spatial agency towering over Carrie's more limited and chaotic perspective (in each close-up she looks in a different direction) already insinuates that the SatC subject is externally or contextually constituted. 7 As the credits progress, we see Carrie from the middle up, walking down the sidewalk of a busy street. Still smiling, she appears to revel in the chaos that surrounds her. Following a close-up of water being splashed onto a curb by a passing vehicle, we see Carrie in full length, wearing a pink top and a white skirt that resembles a ballet tutu and carrying a small pink purse. The outfit suggests costume more than clothing and its theatricality reinforces our impression of Carrie as an actress whose stage is Manhattan. Carrie' s lack of control over this stage is exposed when she jumps out of the way to avoid the splashing water. She turns around and

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her eyes widen as she sees herself: a full-length poster of Carrie in a skimpy pink dress, arranged in a sexy pose, covers the side of a passing bus, captioned "Carrie Bradshaw knows good sex ... and isn't afraid to ask." The shock of apprehending her own image, with the full sexualizing impact of its mise-en-scene, sends Carrie into a twirl that, because of its enforced suddenness and the surprised grimace on her face, materializes as a parody of the classical ballet pirouette. Carrie' s involuntary movement indicates that she no longer acts on the stage, but is being acted upon by the stage. Her control over the Manhattan time-space is exposed as an illusion: its space captures her in its gaze and its time catches up with her in the form of the moving bus and the splashing water. Far from playing the active, authorial role of the art director, Carrie is faced with the realization that her spatiotemporal environment stages her. s The sequence ends with a frozen image of Carrie looking just beyond the camera, as if she were searching for the person who engineered this unsettling encounter with her staged self. The theoretical point made by this freeze-frame is that Manhattan, as an always already-staged chronotope, stages its subjects, prescribing how they must "act out" their identities: Manhattan thus "makes" the woman. 9 This staging exceeds Elizabeth Grosz's discernment of a "historical correlation between the ways in which space (and, to a lesser extent, time) is represented, and the ways in which subjectivity represents itself" (1995: 97). The chronotope establishes a relation between the conceptualization of time-space and the conceptualization of subjectivity that is not merely correlative, but constitutive, without privileging space over time or vice versa.

The Concept of Chronotope For Bakhtin, time and space are always intrinsically connected. Yet, how they are connected and how this connection governs meaning and subjectivity varies, mainly because the chronotope is a social, cultural, and ideological construction. Bakhtin emphatically grounds this construction in the world of events: time and space are "forms of the most immediate reality" that acquire meaning first of all in relation to human life and interaction (1996b: 85). Time and space are meaningful only as social categories that mediate subjects and their "experience"; as abstract or transcendental ideas, they are without significance. Galin Tihanov explains how

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Bakhtin "presents time and space as the products of a basic human faculty.... they are constantly being rediscovered and reproduced by humans" (woo: 235). Accordingly, there is not one universal chronotope, but a multitude of chronotopes, each distinguished by its own way of constructing, interpreting, and experiencing time-space. A chronotope may be specific to a historical period, a culture, a nation, a social class, or any other group of individuals, as long as they are united within a particular social practice of time-space organization. Consequently, chronotopes comprise differentsized communities, with the smaller ones encompassed and influenced by the larger ones, but at the same time separate from them in terms of their internal logic. 10 It is important to note that chronotopes are not necessarily limited to a single place and time. Some chronotopes are tied to limited spatial settings and limited time frames, whereas others comprise multiple, spatially dispersed settings or long periods. In SatC, for instance, the Hamptons and Aspen are geographically outside Manhattan but characterized by the same spatiotemporal organization. Conversely, the same space at the same time may be the site of various chronotopic organizations: different groups of people sharing the same country, city, or even building, may construct this time-space and their position within it in widely divergent manners. That subjects are within a chronotope-indeed, of it-implies that they are not its directors. For Bakhtin, all traditions, including those of timespace construction, originate and develop not on the level of individual or collective consciousness, but on that of cultural or social practice: Cultural and literary traditions (including the most ancient) are preserved and continue to live not in the individual subjective memory of a single individual and not in some kind of collective "psyche," but rather in the objective forms that culture itself assumes (including the forms of language and spoken speech), and in this sense they are inter-subjective and inter-individual (and consequently social). (1996b: 249, n. 17) 11

Hence, the chronotope emerges as a sociocultural practice of time-space construction that is intersubjectively constituted, maintained, and potentially transformed. 12 It exhibits itself not on the level of individual awareness, but in the collective spheres of art, literature, language, and social interaction. The chronotope can thus be said to take the form of what

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Clifford calls "articulations of tradition," defined as "generative components of peoplehood, ways of belonging to some discrete social time and place in an interconnected world" (2000: 97). The reproduction of the chronotope between subjects in their practical articulations signals the concept's association with a form of memory that is not individual, but intersubjective or cultural. Bal defines cultural memory as an act of citationality that "establishes memorial links beyond personal contiguity" and is no longer linked to intentionality (1999: 218, n. 17). As a social mise-en-scene, the chronotope has no art director but is enacted by the subjects occupying its stage, who play their roles according to a script consisting of shared acts of cultural memory. 13 Although in SatC we are dealing with a fictional chronotope, I aim to extend the chronotope from a "formally constitutive category of literature" (Bakhtin 1996b: 84) into a formally constitutive category of social reality. Bakhtin repeatedly points to the existence of extraliterary chronotopes, but his opposition of "textual" to "actual" chronotopes and his characterization of the former as "reflected and created" (84) versions of the latter is based on an obsolete reflection theory of representation and a narrow definition of the textual. 14 Hamid Naficy proposes a useful distinction between the chronotope as a "unit of textual analysis" and the chronotope as an "optic" or lens to analyze "the forces in the culture" that produce the time-space configurations represented in artistic texts (2001: 152). Barry Sandywell, for his part, suggests the term "social chronotope" for those spatiotemporal constellations that inform "the imagining systems of whole societies and civilizations" and "organize the world into space-time grammars" (1998: 206-7). Bringing the two together, I conceive of the social chronotope as the optic that enables us to "see" the way reality and subjectivity are always already subject to a mise-en-scene. In approaching the social chronotope by means of a fictional example, the functional equivalence of artistic and social chronotopes is important, not how they relate to each other in terms of form or content. As a cultural artifact, SatC does not reflect (on) the "true" or "actual" timespace of Manhattan. Rather, it demonstrates the constitutive function of any chronotope in relation to subjects and their worlds; its status as their intersubjective art director. The fictionality of SatC, then, becomes a cognitive tool. As subjects living within social chronotopes on which no objective, outside perspective is available, we are not usually aware of the

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way constructions of time-space structure our identities. With a fictional chronotope, however, there is a clear outside position at the level of author, reader, or viewer, from where its constitutive function can be apprehended. In this way, fiction gives us a perspective on certain functional aspects of subjectivity to which we are denied access in relation to ourselves. For Bakhtin, the chronotope primarily functions to combine particular types of space and time into a world where only certain subjects, narratives, practices, and, I would add, identities and memories can legitimately take (their) place. Restated in terms of Althusser's model of ideology, the chronotope may be said to function as an ideology of time-space thatwithout their cooperation and outside of their conscious knowledgeinterpellates individuals as subjects in(to) collective, public space and in(to) collective, public time through specific spatial and temporal norms. The chronotope, then, "subjects" individuals in the sense in which Butler reconceptualizes this term in The Psychic Life of Power (1997b). In SatC, the type of space constitutive of the Manhattan chronotope is the geographically circumscribed, internally compartmentalized, exclusionary island-space of Manhattan and the exclusive spaces of superficiality within it: bars, restaurants, shops, clubs, and apartments. This type of space is one of radical exteriority, where everything is played out on the surface. The accompanying time is that of the present, that is, the late 1990s. The time is also that of a city-within-a-city which, significantly, is nearly exclusively leisure time (nights, weekends, holidays, lunches). Except for Carrie's writing of her column (which she does at home), working time is almost consistently disavowed. Both the Manhattan chronotope' s spatial exteriority and its time of constant movement-of "going" somewhere rather than "being" something-are actualized by the prevalence of scenes set on the sidewalk. The sidewalk connects to what Bakhtin calls the chronotopic motif of the road: The road is a particularly good place for random encounters. On the road ("the high road"), the spatial and temporal paths of the most varied peoplerepresentatives of all social classes, estates, religions, nationalities, ages-intersect at one spatial and temporal point. (1996b: 243) In SatC, however, far from being random, the encounters that take place on the sidewalk are meetings of sameness in which no social boundaries

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are crossed. Those who are truly other-in terms of class, race, or ethnicity-are kept our of view and never actually met, not even in the street. This does not mean that such others are absent from the image, bur rather that, even when visually present, they remain unacknowledged by the characters and the camera. In theoretical terms, they remain invisible since they do not fit into the chronotope to which the show's main characters are subjected. 15 Nothing that happens in SatC escapes the imperial logic of Manhattan time-space as a chronotope that generates characters primarily (indeed, almost exclusively) defined in terms of their gender and sexual identities. The typical plot of the detached relationship, almost always unsuccessful in the long term, conforms to Manhattan's spatiotemporal logic. Manhattan time is not suited to "being" in a relationship, only for "going" from one to another, just as Manhattan space, where everything is always on the surface and evanescent, offers no place for deep commitment. Tellingly, when Miranda, one of the main characters in the television series, is finally ready to settle down with her partner and baby, she moves to Brooklyn. The characters, too, accord with Manhattan timespace: in a world where appearances are everything, what could they be but (stereo)types? Chronotopes also produce what Bakhtin calls "chronotopic values" through which they express their secondary function as axiological categories where time and space are "colored by emotions and values" (r996b: 243). In SatC, spatiotemporal binaries such as upper/lower, young/old, inside/outside, in/out, fast/slow, and then/now function as evaluative parameters structuring the way the characters live and experience their Manhattan gender identities. The "always-on-the-go" type of time constitutive of the Manhattan chronotope produces, for example, a positive evaluation of speed, acceleration, and the "now," paired with a negative evaluation of slowness and the "then." Youth is validated while age is derided if not wholly denied, particularly by and for women. The Manhattan-space of exteriority and exclusivity, in turn, places a premium on location. There is always somewhere that is "the new place to go" (Bushnell 1996: 141) and to be a true Manhattan woman, you have to be at the right place at the right time. The characters accept these chronotopic values as the "natural" and necessary rule book governing their lives. Far from being questioned,

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chronotopic values are willingly and freely adopted (so the characters think): they become "part and parcel of every perception, every awareness of a series of events" (Scholz 1998: 155) and, as such, "mediate observation, measurement and their results" (Aronowitz 1995: 126). Accepted as selfevident and lived by almost religiously, chronotopic values contribute to the "it is so!" of Althusser's theory of ideology-the subject's recognition and acceptance of the way things are (meant to be)-and, as such, may also be seen as part of what Kaja Silverman has called the "dominant fiction." The latter concept is defined as the "collective make-belief" that "mediates between the subject and the symbolic order" (Silverman 1992: 15, 2). As the "stable core around which a nation's and a period's 'reality' coheres" (42), the dominant fiction is linked to categories of space (nation) and time (period) and is thus, at least potentially, differentiated by chronotope.

Performativity and Social Field The way SatC' s characters experience their lives as subjects of the dual mantras of "go, go, go" and "location, location, location" points to the appropriateness of a chronotopic analysis. However, the object also invites analysis under a different theoretical guise. The novel's introduction of the characters in anthropological terms as a tribe with its own habitat, together with the television series' portrayal of the Manhattan lifestyle as linked to a particular economical standing, suggest that the SatC universe could also be theorized using Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the "social field"; a relatively autonomous, socially constructed group (or cluster) of positions placed in a social space, which is defined by its economic and cultural capital. Equally, the theatricality of Sate's gender roles and the television series' focus on achieving performative perfection speak to Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity. In exploring how the chronotope relates to both the social field and to performativity, my aim is to establish a dialogue among the three concepts, which present alternative but not irreconcilable accounts of identity construction. My reading of the chronotope as a configuration of time-space to which one is always already subjected and whose values have, over time, become naturalized invests Butler's account of performativity with a spatiotemporal twist. For Butler, gender is performative not because it is

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something one "naturally" is, but, as Jonathan Culler notes, because it is "a condition one enacts" (2000: 513). This enactment, performance and performativity in one, takes the form of the enforced repetition of the social conventions governing femininity and masculinity. Because all subjectivity presupposes gender-Butler argues that "the matrix of gender relations is prior to the emergence of the 'human'" (1993: 7)-its performative enactment is not chosen or conscious but socially imposed, almost like a reflex or an instinct, largely bypassing consciousness and intentionality. However, the need for repetition, for the subject's continuous reaffirmation of normative gender identity, makes performativity ambiguous and opens it up to resignification. As a repetitive action, Butler's performativity recalls Charles Sanders Peirce's concept of "habit," developed from its appearance in molecular science as a "nervous association" (1991a: 76). A habit, Peirce argues, "arises, when, having had the sensation of performing a certain act, m, on several occasions, a b c, we come to do it upon every occurrence of the general event, 1, of which ab care special cases" (76). It is a generic reaction to a particular stimulus installed through repetition. The difference between Peirce' s habit and Butler's performativity is that, whereas habit is essentially reactive, performativity is preactive, conditioning a priori the capacity to act. The habit has a subject; the performative retroactively creates a subject. Peirce contributes to the theorization of performativity through his insight that the law of habit has the characteristic of "not acting with exactitude" (1991b: 225). The way that "matter never does obey its ideal laws with absolute precision" (227) may lead to a "negative habit" (200), a form of forgetfulness that renders the subject less likely to react in the established manner. In this way, a "renewed fortuitous spontaneity" is introduced into habit (228). This possibility for renewal through repetition introduces performativity to change. In addition, Peirce identifies habit as a structure of reward: as long as the same action is rewarded by the removal of the unpleasant stimulus, the subject will repeat this action as exactly as possible. However, "when the expected removal of the stimulus fails to occur, the excitation continues and increases, and non-habitual reactions take place; and these tend to weaken the habit" (1991b: 227). This changing situation creates a space for practical agency within the reiterative model: when adherence to the norm

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is no longer in the subject's interest, she may begin to act differently. Teresa de Lauretis notes how Peirce's notion of habit "links semiotics to practical reality and signification to action" by making it clear that signs translate not just into other signs, but also into practical actions and agency (1984: 174-75). Instead of emphasizing the structure of reiteration, as Butler does, Peirce focuses on its practice, which is where agency appears. What Peirce's notion of habit lacks is an account of collective practice or agency that includes the subject, her body, and her habits in a shared semiotics that exceeds individual patterns of repetition. Butler's performativity configures such a collective materialization, creating "bodies that matter" and livable subjectivities, but she leaves its sociohistorical and material-economic context somewhat undefined. To contextualize Butler's performativity and collectivize Peirce' s habit, it is helpful to invoke Bourdieu's concept of "habitus," defined as the specific "system of durable, transposable dispositions" each social field produces in its subjects by means of a laborious process of social inculcation (1999: 53). In Gender and Agency, Lois McNay argues that Bourdieu' s habitus is not a "determining principle" but a temporalized "generative structure," an "active, interpretative process rather than a merely repetitive one" (2000: 36, 38). She invokes the habitus to resolve the lack in Butler's work of a "praxeological account of agency" (45). This move makes sense because the habitus combines the active, pragmatic dimension of Peirce's habit with the collective process of interpellation that defines Butler's performativity. 16 How do space and time, united in the chronotope, fit in here? Notwithstanding their differences, Butler's performativity, Peirce' s habit, and Bourdieu's habitus all emphasize the temporal dimension of identity construction. The chronotope would add spatiality as an equally vital facet of identity, embodiment, and social praxis. Thus, where McNay distinguishes Butler and Bourdieu on the basis of their notions of temporalityretroactive versus anticipatory-the chronotope suggests it also matters where, when, and in what type of time-space the habit, reiterative act, or durable disposition takes place. In Bourdieu, as McNay asserts, practice is the result of a habitus that is itself the incorporation of temporal structures or the regularities and tendencies of the world into the body. Embodied practice is necessarily temporal in that it both expresses and anticipates these tendencies and regularities. Practice, therefore, generates time. (2ooo: 40)

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The concept of chronotope prompts me to insert space into this formulation, so that the habitus becomes the incorporation of temporal and spatial structures into the body, and practice is seen to generate not just time but also space. The dimensions of the body, for example, are defined through the habitual incorporation of spatial regularities, so that practice generates (body) space. With regard to resignification, the introduction of a spatial dimension doubles the site of practical agency by having the subject's body not just practice time, but also space (and their interaction). The subject, then, can produce a "negative habit," not only by acting out of sync but also by acting out of place; through deferral, displacement, or both. In addition, the chronotope opens our eyes to the twofold relationship between performativity and time-space: not only is performativity necessarily embedded in time-space, but time-space is itself performative in the sense that it is not simply there, but established and maintained through repetitive social practices. Much like gender, time and space are not "things" we find "before" us-and I use "before" in its double spatial and temporal sense-but things we "do," by enacting the cultural laws of chronology, linearity, distance, and so on, time and time again. Moreover, as Bakhtin makes clear, the manners in which we "do" and "re-do" time, space, and their interconnection are subject to cultural, historical, social, and local differentiation. In this way, chronotope and performativity modulate each other. As I contend in Chapter 2, the performativity of the chronotope explains how individuals come to subject themselves to a chronotope, allowing themselves to be staged according to its terms. The chronotopicity of performativity, I want to suggest here, fulfills a grounding function, differentiating performativity by anchoring it to a specific configuration of timespace. Thus, where Butler theorizes performative gender in general terms, accounting for "a singular dominant symbolic" (Campbell and Harbord 1999: 223), the chronotope makes possible the analysis of cultural, national, or local differences in its forms. Normative identity positions differ more or less radically according to their chronotopic situation, so that instead of proposing a self-identical generative system (Butler's normative heterosexual matrix), this system has to be seen as inflected or, to anticipate Chapter 8, versioned by chronotope. The time-space of 1990s Manhattan that governs SatC is but one example of this need. Although the gender identities produced by the

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SatC chronotope are by no means independent of the heterosexual gender matrix, they are to some degree inflected in line with the specific timespace generated by the Manhattan environment. These gender identities distinguish themselves by their relative tolerance of forms of sexuality that, elsewhere, are construed as aberrant or abject: homosexuality, lesbianism, transvestism, and fetishism. What needs to be rejected in order to establish a normative gender identity within the Manhattan chronotope is not so much homosexuality or sexual perversion, but ugliness, aging, bad taste, suburbanity, and all that is other in terms of class and/or race. My point, therefore, is not that the SatC chronotope's gender norms are any less normative or exclusionary than those of other time-space configurations, but that they exhibit certain idiosyncrasies. Exposing such variations through chronotopic analysis has a twofold significance. First, such analysis opens up space for resisting hegemonic or so-called "universal" forms of gender and sexuality: if what is abjected in one time-space is acceptable (even normative) in another, then there are no "natural" genders or sexualities immune to reformulation. Second, the existence of multiple chronotopes, where both the normative and the subversive may carry different meanings, indicates that each time-space warrants a separate analysis of how gender identities are performatively produced and potentially subverted within it. Subverting gender norms in one time-space does not automatically subvert them everywhere else, and different strategies for resistance must be devised for each chronotope. Just as chronotope and performativity elucidate each other, so do chronotope and social field. Although the two systems of differentiationone spatiotemporal, the other based on the accumulation of cultural and economic capital-may run parallel, they may also diverge from one another to a greater or lesser degree. In relation to SatC, the social field draws attention to the way the Manhattan lifestyle is not only defined by a particular organization of time-space but also by a particular distribution of economic and cultural capital: such a lifestyle requires money and cultural prestige, ideally in large quantities. On the other hand, SatC' s characters occupy several of the social fields outlined by Bourdieu: journalists, writers, professionals, artists, and aristocrats all mix together. What unites them is their collective participation in the Manhattan experience. Chronotope and social field do not, therefore, always overlap: a social field may be spread across several

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chronotopes and a chronotope may comprise subjects from multiple social fields. Social fields, which Bourdieu mainly describes in isolation from one another, intersect and interact, doing so primarily on the basis of a shared time-space. Conversely, subjects from different chronotopes may share a social field, increasing the likelihood of dialogue and movement among chronotopes. McNay argues that our increasingly differentiated society requires a more sustained analysis of movement across fields as that which might attenuate the habitus's entrenching effects (2000: 52). Such movement can be approached through the chronotope, which con figures the subject's ·social situation in terms of her shifting positions in time-space(s) rather than her fixed position in a schematic matrix of objective relations. In effect, a well-formulated view of the chronotope critiques the idea that the field provides objective limits for the bodily enactment of the habitus. If the field is itself a particular staging of time-space, it can at most provide a conditionallimit. Imagining the social space as a flexible reservoir of chronotopes that overlap and interact, rather than as a matrix where each field is graphically separated from the others, enhances the dynamism of both field and habitus. 17 The chronotope also works to correct Bourdieu's oft-noted disregard for individual plurality, since it does not limit a subject to one time-space constellation either synchronically or diachronically. 18 Equally, while the social field tends to exclude the private dimension of human life, effecting a negation both of time and of the subject outside the field-"le temps hors-champ" and "l'acteur hors-champ" (Lahire 1999: 32)-the chronotope can accommodate both public and private forms of time-space organization. All spatiotemporal organizations through which the subject is staged in the course of his or her life can be analyzed either separately or in conjunction. In these ways, the chronotope concretizes and complicates Bourdieu's frequent use of spatial terms. His definition of social fields (itself a spatial term) as "milieus" or "universes" (1999: 6r) within a relational social space refers to a virtual diagram of coordinates organized along the axes of economic and cultural capital, where distance is measured in terms of capital only. Bourdieu argues that capital distance is usually matched by spatial distance, so that those separated in virtual social space will be unlikely to meet, except in "mauvais lieux" or seedy locales (1994: 26). The

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chronotope does not presuppose such separation, but points to the dual possibility that subjects hailing from different social fields could be united in and by one time-space constellation, and that singular subjects could traverse and participate in multiple chronotopes. In addition, as I show in Chapter 7, chronotopes themselves do not always remain neatly separated, but can engage each other in territorial struggles. Thus, while Bourdieu employs spatial metaphors to establish equivalence between social and spatial distance, thus delineating a rather inflexible compartmentalization of social groups, the chronotope shows that such groups may come together in and through time-space, running into each other, blurring boundaries. In this way, the chronotope indicates that what matters is not only distance in terms of economic and cultural capital but also distance and closeness in terms of concrete space, concrete time, and spatiotemporal organization. The chronotope, then, grounds Butler's and Bourdieu' s accounts of collective identity construction not by fixing them to a singular location or by ontologizing space and time, but by reconfiguring performativity and the social field as inflected by intersubjective traditions of spatiotemporal organization. The performative staging of the subject, its habitus, and its social field is circumscribed by a specific chronotope, the framing function of which needs to be acknowledged. 19

Framing and Mise-en-Scene In Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, Bal initially cites a definition of the frame as "the technical or abstract underworld, the underpinnings, the machinery that holds the mise-en-scene into place" (2002: 136-37). Staging is distinguished from framing in the sense that "[l]f miseen-scene is what we see, framing is what happens before the spectacle is presented" (137). In other words, whereas framing is anterior to the act, mise-en-scene is contemporaneous with it and, presumably, without history. This would imply that the act can have no bearing on the frame, which is displaced to an abstract, mechanical realm that is irredeemably before. Bal questions this meaning of framing by arguing that "the frame is the link between work and world, not the cut between them" (140). In her discussion of a museum exhibition, framing-as setting up and being set up-emerges as both interpretation and performance, two theatrical

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terms that bring out framing's kinship to mise-en-scene. The terms are brought together in a move I wish to make chronotopic. The chronotope challenges the idea that it is possible to separate in time framing and mise-en-scene. On the one hand, the framing of the subject through the chronotope' s interpellation from the outside and, on the other, the subject's mise-en-scene through the enactment of its chronotopic values, are two sides of the same coin without a clear chronology. The intersubjective structuring of time-space into chronotopes is something that has always already happened and at the same time continues to happen each time we act out our identities. The chronotope puts us into practice as subjects while we ourselves practice its chronotopic values. In other words, mise-en-scene only exists in a frame, and the frame only exists in the miseen-scene that keeps it in place. Instead of appearing as cause and effect, framing and mise-en-scene thus conspire to put the subject in her place and in her time. Their difference lies perhaps not so much in their temporal as in their spatial relation to the act. The frame exists on the borderline between inside and outside, functioning, in Derrida's terms, as parergon. 20 It is, however, usually visible only from the outside. Mise-en-scene is fully part of the work, perceptible from outside and inside. The actor cannot normally see the curtains framing his stage performance, but he can see the props on the stage. In life, we cannot apprehend the chronotope in its framing capacity, except when we look at chronotopes not our own. But we may see the chronotope at work in the chronotopic values and habitual actions through which we stage our surroundings and ourselves. Sometimes, a critical analysis of these values and habits, or an unexpected trick of the eye, will render the frame visible on the inside. When, in SatC' s opening credits, Carrie is confronted with her image plastered on the side of a bus, the frame appears to her as a mise-en-scene in a move that opens it up to a potential critical transformation. Carrie' s eye is drawn not to the image on the bus, but to the place of the camera filming her while seeing the bus: she apprehends the chronotopic frame through its mise-enscene. The chronotope intimates that framing and mise-en-scene are intimately related and that there is no "real" time or space before mise-enscene and no artwork, event, or subject without a frame. Significantly, although she defines it as a delimitation of space and time, Bal theorizes

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mise-en-scene mainly in terms of space and spatial categories, while framing is conceived as "having its roots in time" and as "a factor of sequence and duration" (2002: 136). I propose that both framing and mise-en-scene concern space as well as time, with the chronotope conceptualizing their inevitable interaction in the staging of the subject and her identities. In Chapter 2, I explore how an individual becomes part of a chronotope, how she enters and exits its framed mise-en-scene, and how such participation raises questions of belonging and nonbelonging, of inclusion and exclusion.

Chronotopic Belonging

Inside/Outside the Chronotope I have argued that the chronotope, as an intersubjectively constituted and maintained practice of enacting time and space, offers a useful means for differentiating performative regimes and social systems of classification. Subjects are not subjected in the same way always and everywhere. However, several important questions remain: How do individuals become part of a chronotope? How do they move between chronotopes? What happens when subjects from different chronotopes meet? These questions all pertain to the chronotope's embedding, contextual, or framing function in relation to the enactment of identity. To come to grips with this feature of the chronotope, I turn first to a chapter in Bushnell's 1996 Sex and the City novel entitled "Downtown Babes Meet Old Greenwich Gals" and its television adaptation in an episode called "The Baby Shower." My second object is the 1999 Joel Schumacher film Flawless, which tells the story of an unlikely friendship between Wait (Robert De Niro), a retired police officer, and Rusty (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a flamboyant preoperative transsexual. Living in the same apartment building, the two characters are brought together after a stroke impairs Wait's ability to speak and walk. His doctor recommends singing lessons to improve his speech, and because Wait cannot face going outside, he reluctantly turns to Rusty, who is a singer. Over the course of Wait's

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vocal rehabilitation, the two become friends. In Chapter 4, I discuss Flawless in the context of dialogism. Here, my analysis concentrates on the question of chronotopic belonging. In relation to the latter question, both objects of study are theoretically productive. "The Baby Shower" stages two performative acts whose contrasting effects provoke a chronotopic reconsideration of performativity, its relation to performance, and the broader problem of context. Flawless further complicates the oscillation of identity acts between performance and performativity. In addition, Sex and the City (SatC) and Flawless each enact an opposition between inside(r) and outside(r) that concretizes Butler's use of spatial metaphors to theorize the abject as the "constitutive outside to the domain of the subject" or "zone of uninhabitability" (1993: 3). The objects ask what happens when the abject ceases to be merely an abstract necessity, but takes the form of an encounter with actual othered or abjected subjects and their rival constructions of timespace. The SatC chapter and episode center on four Manhattan women venturing into suburbia: one depicting a bridal shower, the other a baby shower, both for a former Manhattan friend, now suburbanized. In both cases, the trip to suburbia is construed as a journey to the outside. The novel's narrator describes it as a "pilgrimage" from which "most come back to the city in an emotional state somewhere between giddy and destroyed" (Bushnell 1996: 79) and in the television episode, Carrie compares their trip with Dorothy's adventure in The Wizard of Oz. Upon her arrival in Connecticut, she exclaims: "Oh, Toto, I don't think we're in Manhattan anymore!" Through such metaphors of alienation, Manhattan's geographical outside is made to function as SatC's abject zone, as the "threatening spectre" of unlivability that needs to be repudiated over and over again (Butler 1993: 3). Consequently, it becomes imperative for the women to return "home," to their own chronotope, as soon as possible. The suburban outside is not only distant, but other in terms of its chronotope. Spatially, in direct contrast to Manhattan's unrelenting exteriority, suburbia is subject to an internalizing logic, whereby the outside is actively incorporated. This spatial regime is exemplified in "The Baby Shower" by a lawn annexed to a Connecticut house by an invisible electronic fence designed to keep the dog and (metonymically) everything else at home. Temporally, too, suburban life adheres to a different rhythm:

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throwing a party on a Saturday afternoon is in line with suburban time, but completely out of sync with Manhattan time. Suburbia is, therefore, organized into a different chronotope from Manhattan's and the two stand in a relation of mutual exclusion, each defining itself against the other, each perceiving in the other a danger of contagion that would eradicate established identities. Thus, in the television episode, the city women associate suburban life with Lyme disease and a "cult" of motherhood, while the suburban women exhort the city women to grow up and get real. Literally and metaphorically, the two chronotopes function as each other's outside. In spite of their social, cultural, and even geographical "closeness," the two groups of women are subjected to separate and competing chronotopes that impose conflicting forms of normative femininity and different ways of behaving, dressing, and speaking. In other words, each group acts out a different habitus. In line with Bourdieu' s argument that the habitus, as a system of inculcated dispositions, is not learned or adopted as law but surreptitiously and largely involuntarily acquired through the "practical learning" of the daily experience of its prescriptions and prohibitions (1999: 14), SatC portrays the acquisition of a Manhattan identity as a gradual and almost imperceptible assimilation through immersion. In Bushnell's novel, the narrator notes how "everyone knows the rules-but no one wants to talk about them" (25). Instructions are not voiced or written large as external imperatives, but inscribed on the body through the smallest everyday practices. 1 This means that rules can only be broken if they are enacted. Competence is a precondition for the creative reformulation of the habitus. In lan Burkitt's words, "the most skilled, those with the greatest mastery, are also those most capable of surprise" (1998: 167). 2 Subjects with a full grasp of the habitus can introduce change without relinquishing their chronotopic belonging, while those with a less comprehensive understanding are likely to have their improvisations dismissed as mistakes. A "negative habit," to reinvoke Peirce' s term, presupposes a positive one. Critique implies participation, a sense of the game or "sens du jeu," as Bourdieu would say (1987: 79). In SatC, however, the moment of critique remains elusive. Although both the novel and the television series are framed by their narrators as attempts to uncover the mysteries of Manhattan living, the ultimate goal is not to subvert but to participate more profitably in the game, to achieve full belonging.

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"Downtown Babes Meet Old Greenwich Gals" and "The Baby Shower" present city women caught in a state of "identity panic" (Ang 2000: 5). As a result of their excursion to the chronotopic outside, these women worry about losing their Manhattan identities, about no longer belonging. Thus, upon their return from the chronotopic outside known as suburbia, they rush to recommit to the Manhattan habitus. The novel's narrator announces how "bad things can happen to city women when they come back from visiting their newly married-with-children friends in the suburbs" (Bushnell 1996: 88). These "bad things" consist of one woman breaking her ankle Rollerblading at four in the morning, another having unprotected sex, the third dancing topless in a strip club, and the married one fighting with her husband and booking herself into a luxury hotel suite. The chapter title-"Babes Flee Land of Wives for Night of Topless Fun"-signals that these acts are not really "bad things" at all, but attempts (validated by the narrator) to reaffirm the Manhattan single lifestyle against Greenwich married suburbanity. In "The Baby Shower," the same mechanism is at work. First, the women stop in a bar on their way home for a drinking session presented as "the perfect antidote to Laney's house of humiliation." The word humiliation is used because in the suburban chronotope the big city women were the outsiders, the ones who did not belong. Then, back in Manhattan, Samantha throws an "1-don't-have-a-baby-and-I'm-fabulous" party, where all four women are seen reverting to their "normal" Manhattan behavior: drinking, flirting, and having sex. In Butler's terms, these women are compelled into the performative reiteration of normative Manhattan femininity under the threat of relegation to what they consider the unlivable zone of suburbanity. With reference to Bourdieu's habitus, these acts constitute (only partly conscious) attempts to prove that the women remain dedicated players in the Manhattan game. Their anxious desire to resubject themselves to the Manhattan chronotope reveals the mechanism of investment or, as Bourdieu would say, their illusio. Illusio is illusionary only from the outside; on the inside, it makes perfect sense. Thus, what appears within a chronotope as the "natural" arrangement of time and space appears from the outside as a contrived, artificial mise-en-scene. Bakhtin' s literary focus leaves unexplored how subjects come to feel a certain loyalty to a chronotope, to its values, rules, and practices. Illusio expresses the way the subjects of a

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chronotope share an investment in the rules and stakes that constitute both the entry requirement and the end product. Bourdieu' s habitus and illusio supplement Bakhtin's concept of chronotope by explaining how and why subjects subject themselves to their chronotopes. In the SatC television series, the role of illusio is apparent in the way Carrie, the show's narrator, formulates her questions about the Manhattan lifestyle: she asks what the rules are, not why they are as they are or how they might be changed. From the external perspective of the television viewer, Carrie's queries can fulfill a more critical function, since the viewer does not necessarily share in the chronotope's habitus and illusio. For the viewer, her questions reveal the staged character of SatC' s Manhattan, its status as part of a mise-en-scene. Consequently, the oft-noted satirical character of the series appears not so much on the internal level-where the characters mostly subject themselves to their chronotope in full seriousness-as on the level of its worldwide viewers, who are able to question, laugh or frown at the rules, values, and norms this chronotope imposes. Such viewers may go even one step further in recognizing their own chronotopes as equally staged realms that might be staged otherwise. 3 The situation is slightly different in the film Flawless, where it is the transsexual Rusty who, in Walt' s eyes, incarnates the threatening specter of unlivable abjection in relation to his own chronotope, which is constructed as a realm of unmitigated heterosexuality. The film's opening scene shows Walt walking home after playing sports with some other men on a neighborhood court. He looks confident and talks to several men on the street, which he seems to "own" in the same way that Carrie appeared to own Manhattan in the first part of Sate's opening credits. Only here there are no close-ups or towering buildings to counter this image of mastery. Walt is filmed in full shot at eye level and kept in the center of the frame, so that the scene codes the neighborhood as a male territory into which Walt fits perfectly. This fit is disturbed when Walt is confronted with Rusty and two of her transvestite friends in front of the elevator in his apartment building. Ignoring their sexually suggestive comments, Walt demonstratively takes the stairs. Refusing to engage those who do not fit in with his construction of the neighborhood time-space, he tries to consign these others to invisibility. However, because one of them lives right next door, engaging Walt in a constant, direct struggle over the meaning of the same place in time,

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this consignment is not as easily achieved as in SatC. Rusty's ambivalent state between masculinity and femininity-as a preoperative transsexual, she is recognizably male but dresses mostly like a woman-challenges the ideal of heterosexual masculinity propagated by Walt' s chronotope, which he is desperate to embody before and (especially) after his stroke. Rusty and her friends invest Walt' s chronotope with a constant internal threat of infection. The only way Walt can counter this threat is by filling his apartment-his chronotopic stronghold-with a collection of almost fetishistic objects of masculinity, such as sports trophies, photographs of himself in his police uniform, a medal, and a letter of commendation from the mayor that he has framed. Yet, even in his apartment, Rusty's singing ("Hey sister, go sister!") continues to interpellate him, calling for a wayward identification that cannot be shut out. Wait's masculinity is put into question by this voice, by what he considers Rusty's inappropriately female space with its pink curtains, shiny fabrics, costumes, and knickknacks, and by Rusty herself as she appears in her window across the courtyard wearing a black headband, gold necklace, dangly earrings and a wide silk robe. Her short, spiky hair and flat chest mark her as (also) male. It is this in-between state that jeopardizes Wait's self-identification as a heterosexual man. Flawless suggests that the unlivable outside cannot always be kept safely in another place out of sight and out of hearing, because it may make an aggressive chronotopic claim to the same place in time, posing an immediate danger of infection that can only be undone by an authoritative (re)assertion of chronotopic dominance, something Wait, unlike the city women in SatC, is unable to achieve.

Longing to Belong Their limited absence from Manhattan's time-space and their immediate reinvestment in its habitus enables the big city women in "Downtown Babes Meet Old Greenwich Gals" and "The Baby Shower" to reenter Manhattan life relatively easily. This type of return, however, turns out to be impossible for Laney, the suburbanized former Manhattan woman who acts out the television episode's two central performances. These contrasting performances, I contend, make a series of theoretical points about the complexities of chronotopic belonging and its intertwinement with performativity.

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The first performance occurs in a flashback where Carrie remembers Laney as she used to be when she still belonged in Manhattan. The scene takes place at a wild party eight years earlier. An exuberant Laney appears and is introduced by Carrie' s voice-over: "Laney Berlin. You can't really describe her. You just had to know her. Chances are, eight years ago, you probably did." Laney cannot be described, but exists in her actions, almost as a performative statement. We see Carrie, Samantha, and Miranda watch as Laney is exhorted by a man to "Show us your tits!" and, after replying that "you guys have seen enough of my tits," by a chorus of men and women screaming "Tits! Tits! Tits!" Giving in, Laney performs a seductive dance and removes her top. Her act is accompanied by shouts of encouragement, climactic music, and flashing lights, giving it a theatrical feel. Only this act is not a theatrical performance at all, but rather a performative act of belonging, confirming Laney' s status as a high -stakes player of the Manhattan game. Although Carrie, Samantha, and Miranda exchange some disparaging comments about the spectacle, which culminates in a full-frontal shot showing Laney's bare breasts, what their comments express most of all is envy and admiration of her place at the pinnacle of normative Manhattan femininity. The closing image of the scene shows the three women, captured through Laney' s bare legs, shaking their heads in sheer awe. Laney's striptease is reiterative (she has clearly done this many times before) and signifies her belonging to the Manhattan chronotope. What is "the most shocking thing of all," in the words of Carrie's voice-over, is not the act itself or Laney' s sleeping around, but her marriage to an investment banker and her subsequent move to suburbia. These are "unnatural" acts within the Manhattan chronotope. According to Carrie: "she was supposed to have sex with Sid Vicious and move to heroin." Moving to heroin would have preserved Laney's status as an insider, whereas moving to suburbia exiles her, literally and metaphorically, to the Manhattan chronotope' s outside. Once part of the outer realm, it is not easy to return. As Laney's second performance makes clear, belonging to a chronotope is not merely a question of returning to a location. This second performance constitutes an attempt on her part to cite the first striptease: it signifies her longing to belong again. As Vikki Bell notes, "the term belonging allows an affective dimension-not just be-long, but longing" (1999: 1). The performance

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occurs when Laney shows up, uninvited and heavily pregnant, for Samantha's "1-don't-have-a-baby-and-l'm-fabulous" party. Upon entering, Laney announces: "Hey, you guys, the entertainment has arrived!" Clearly, she intends to restage her striptease in order to recuperate her old self, which she feels she has lost in the process of suburbanization. However, it soon becomes clear that Laney is soliciting a habit that will not allow restaging in the present. The reactions of the other partygoers show as much: instead of being asked and encouraged, this time Laney' s offer to show her tits is met with silent, embarrassed stares and active discouragement. Nevertheless, when a drunken man says he "could stand a peek," Laney gets on a table and starts tugging at her maternity top. Unable to remove it, she looks around furtively, finally admitting: "That's weird. I don't think I can do this." At this point, she is quickly helped off the table and taken outside. There, Carrie tries to reassure her: "It's not who you are anymore-it's all right." Laney replies: "But I didn't know that was gonna happen. Nobody told me that was gonna happen. I mean, somebody should warn you, one day you're gonna wake up and you're not gonna recognize yourself." Her words indicate the lack of control the subject has over her chronotopic situation: it is not a question of choosing which chronotope you want to belong to and moving to a corresponding place, but a far more surreptitious process of performative assimilation that is not easily reversed. Although a subject can belong to more than one chronotope at one time, belonging to two chronotopes that posit each other as their respective outsides is only possible if it occurs in succession. In theoretical terms, the contrast between Laney' s successful and unsuccessful stripteases speaks to the unstable distinction between performance and performativity. Bal discusses this distinction in Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, proposing a "productive confusion" or "voluntary conceptual messiness" between the two concepts (2002: 17). She contends that although the concepts appear easily differentiable in terms of performance's basis in a preexisting script and performativity's eventness in the present, the two in fact become connected when we realize that they both involve memory: performance relies on memorization and performativity is only successful if it cites conventions that are part of cultural memory (176). Through an analysis of James Coleman's slide installation, Photograph, Bal brings to light the implications of this interconnection, which, significantly, never constitutes a complete merging. By combining the "act-aspect"

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of performativity with the "rehearsed aspect" of performance, subjectivity and theatricality are implicated in each other, so that Coleman's installation acts to undermine the Romantic notion of the autonomous authorsubject and its authoritative voice, giving voice instead to the silent children shown in the slides (197). Bal concludes that "perhaps, then, performance is a translation of performativity; it makes the latter audible, effective" (210). In view of Laney's two stripteases and the role of theatricality in Flawless, I propose that the messy distinction between performance and performativity may also cause the one to make the other ineffective. Performance can undermine performativity and vice versa on account of the values cultural memory assigns to the act-aspect and the rehearsalaspect in relation to identity and the social belonging it implies. Thus, the value of a "proper" performative act, in Butler's sense of a culturally enforced reenactment of a gender norm, stipulates that it does not require the learning of lines or moves and is executed without (or beyond) thought. Like Bourdieu' s habitus, the performative is thought to be "spontaneous" in the sense that the subject knows when and how to perform it without any conscious choices being involved and without a need for rehearsal. In addition, a performative is not expected to feature a separation between performer and audience: all participate equally and the illocutionary force of the act is produced in part by the sanction that ensues from this complete participation, from a general consensus that what is said is indeed done. If (some of) the audience is not in agreement, the performative act can be compromised and it will be harder to achieve what J. L. Austin calls "happiness" or "felicity. "4 Both of these criteria of performativity-spontaneity and unity of performer and audience-are fulfilled in the case of Laney' s first striptease: as her usual routine, her stripping appears spontaneous or "natural," and she and the other partygoers are united in the larger performative act of the Manhattan party: while she strips, the party simply takes its course, with some people watching and others indifferent. Her second, abortive striptease, on the contrary, has an enforced, studied, conscious quality. The entire party grinds to a halt and a clear separation between actor and audience is established as the partygoers distance themselves (spatially and psychologically) from Laney's act. In terms of Erving Goffman's frame analysis, the partygoers cease to be participants and become audience members or onlookers. This change turns a social event into a performance, for

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"onlooking belongs from the start to the theatrical frame" (Goffman 1974: 130) and onlooker status "becomes available whenever anyone has an accident or creates a scene" (225). Thus, the way Laney unintentionally "creates a scene" turns her act into a theatrical performance. It is, I wish to argue, when a performative is not accepted as such, when its reenactment of the norms appears overly conscious or studied, that it turns into a performance. When the illusion of "spontaneiry," which masks the "unnatural" process of the performative naturalization of the norm, is broken, performer and audience part ways and performativiry is received as performance, as a studied "act," an attempt at make-believe that has no inherent relation to the norm cited. 5 Laney' s stripping acts also elucidate performariviry' s relation to space-time and context in general. In Chapter I, I position the chronotope as the convergence of mise-en-scene and framing. Framing has been proposed by Culler and, in his footsteps, Bal, as an alternative to context. 6 Whereas context is a noun referring to a static thing or collection of data that effects a "conflation of origin, cause, and intention," framing is a verb denoting an activity or process that "produces an event" (Bal2002: 135). As such, it is a temporal action "performed by an agent who is responsible, accountable, for his or her acts" (135). What Laney's two stripteases make clear is that framing is not always determined by the actor as the author of the performative, but that it is as much in the hands-or rather the eyesof the beholder. Laney's stripping episodes are framed by the reactions of the other characters, which are determined by their chronotopic context. What tends to be left out in the theoretical discussion of framing is its spatial dimension, that is, the way framing captures the act in time, in space, and most crucially, in the nodal point of their chronotopic intertwinement. The dictionary meaning of framing stresses the element of spatial delimitation or enclosure. Bal's discussion (2002), perhaps in an attempt to redress the balance in favor of framing's undeniable temporal dimension, presents it as a temporalizing process. The chronotope brings the two dimensions together without submitting one to the other. Since neither context nor framing adequately addresses the intertwinement of space and time or the fact that space and time are never neutral but always already staged, I propose reading performativiry-and performance-as situated in a chronotopic sense. What this move entails becomes clear from a further discussion of Laney' s performative predicament.

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Performing Performativity The contrast between Laney's acts-one successful and the other unsuccessful in reiterating the norms of the Manhattan chronotope-insists that place and time factor into the success or failure of the performative utterance over and against considerations of intention. The timing of Laney' s second striptease is decidedly off, both because the time elapsed since her earlier performance cannot simply be overcome by quotation and because the second act concurs with her pregnant state that cannot be disguised. Moreover, although the placing of the second performative replicates the first-a Manhattan party-the fact that this particular party is framed as a rejection of the suburban lifestyle that is embodied by Laney' s pregnant belly also puts the placing of her performance in question. The second striptease, then, is both out of place and out of sync. Consequently, the performative's chronotopic situation deserves closer attention than, for example, Butler has allowed. Not that Butler is blind to the significance of space and time. In stating that performativity produces "an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts" (1999: 179), she posits performative gender identities as unstable precisely because of their spatiotemporal situatedness. It is when the norms of the hegemonic gender system-itself abstract and unassailable-are reiterated in time and in space that they become vulnerable to resignification. Butler also hints at the importance of a performative act's timing and placing in relation to its effect by asking, "what performance where will ... compel a radical rethinking of the psychological presuppositions of gender identity and sexuality?" (1999: 177, emphasis added). Elsewhere, in "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution," she offers a concrete example of the way the placing of a performative act influences its reception: "The sight of a transvestite onstage can compel pleasure and applause while the sight of the same transvestite on the seat next to us on the bus can compel fear, rage, even violence" (1990: 270). Interestingly enough, this example is not intended to argue for the importance of spatial situation in performativity, but to illustrate the distinction between performativity and theatrical performance. Butler's argument links to my own distinction of performativity, as a seemingly spontaneous and participative act, up against performance as a studied act

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of make-believe from which the audience is "safely" separated. A transvestite onstage would not necessarily threaten the identities of those watching, whereas a spontaneous or habitual enactment of transvestism in the everyday world, perceived as a participative performative, could potentially destabilize the identities of everyone present. However, Laney's repeated stripping modifies Butler's statement by showing that, on the one hand, performance is not restricted to the theater and, on the other, a performative may occur in a theatrical atmosphere. An act intended as a performative can be read as a performance even in the absence of theatrical conventions and, conversely, a performance can function as a performative despite the presence of theatrical lighting, music, and a makeshift stage. In the first situation, the discrepancy between the act and the chronotopic situation leads those present to read a performative as a performance. In the second scenario, the seamless convergence of act and chronotope turns a performance into a performative. These possible oscillations not only create difficulties for subjects like Laney, who long to belong, but also for subjects intent on subversion: an act intended as a critical performative reiteration is made ineffectual if onlookers dismiss it as a performance and distance themselves from the act. Thus, reactions to identity acts are dependent not only on the presence or absence of theatrical conventions, but also on their chronotopic situation: responses to theatrical performances of transvestism will differ according to whether they occur in cosmopolitan cities or in rural villages, as will reactions to transvestites on buses. Whether an act is taken as a performance or a performative, as entertainment or threat, as at home or out of place, is chronotope-specific and not determined by the act itself or the intentions behind it? The function of theatricality in Flawless bears out this observation. Although at the beginning of the film, Walt and Rusty have nothing in common except for where they live, a visual parallel is established between them by a sequence that juxtaposes images of the two characters as they prepare for an evening out. The sequence opens with a close-up of a sink with bottles of shaving cream and "Grecian formula," which Walt applies to his graying hair. The camera then cuts to an extreme close-up of nail-polished fingers carefully applying glittery eye shadow. Although Rusty's full face is not shown, the viewer surmises it is her. The scene unites Walt and Rusty in the theatricality of their attempts to improve

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their appearance. A theatricality which, in Rusty's case, is openly acknowledged: she sits in front of a theater mirror surrounded by light bulbs, her walls plastered with picrures of film divas. In Wait's case, the elements of disguise and masking are more implicit, highlighted primarily by their relation to Rusty's explicit masquerade. On their respective nights out, the camera continually cuts between the two. Wait visits a club called "Private Dancer." When he dances the tango with an attractive woman named Karen, the camera keeps him center screen as the other couples stop dancing and watch with admiration. The scene's theatrical framing and the formation of an audience suggest that Wait is putting on a performance. However, the smooth spontaneity with which the dance is executed and the way the audience members only momentarily separate themselves from the act of dancing, make it possible to read the dance as a performative as well. Wait and Karen are not just dancing; they enact the gender roles the tango reiteratively evokes. As in Laney's first striptease, performance dissolves into performative. Rusty's evening sees her performing as "Busty Rusty" on an actual . stage at the "Femmes Fatales" club in front of a paying audience. Busty Rusty is a theatrical act, featuring a man "pretending to be" a woman and, in effect, canceling out Rusty's everyday performative identity as a woman. Her identity is accepted only when presented as mere pretense, as Rusty indicates when she tells a man brought onto the stage that "guys like you beat my ass once they leave the club. You love me when I' m here and the minute I leave you beat the shit out of me." These words, combined with a later shot in the film where we see Rusty in drag on the metro with no one willing to sit next to her, once more evokes Butler's remark about transvestites in theaters and on buses. Here, theatrical conventions act as a shield, protecting the audience from the performative implications of Rusty's ambivalent status between masculinity and femininity. Rusty can be linked to Laney and her failed second striptease in a relation of contrasts that masks an underlying similarity. Whereas Laney is accepted when the audience is not separate from her, when everyone parties together, Rusty is accepted only when the audience can separate itself from her by the theatrical conventions of the club setting, that is, when she turns herself into a spectacle. But both are excluded when the acts they desperately want to be performatives turn out to be performances-acts that do not have to be taken seriously as identity constitutions by those looking on.

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Wait's situation is different. In the dub, everyone participates in the same performative of heterosexual normativity, which relies on a collective pretense according to which the dub is a place where men and women meet spontaneously, rather than an establishment where men pay women to dance with them (as the name of the dub, in an intertextual reference to Tina Turner's song "Private Dancer," reveals). 8 As long as no one disturbs this illusion, the way the club stages a performance of peiformativity remains suppressed. However, its gender relations are unmasked as deliberately staged when the film shows Walt and Karen in a hotel room, where they clearly had sex. Karen asks Walt for money to help her pay the rent and he gives her some. Hereafter she tells him "You' re the man" and he responds "You're the woman." Their mutual performative attribution of normative heterosexual gender roles is undermined by the monetary exchange and when Karen is seen counting the money right after Wait leaves. This money transforms the scene into a performance, a play-acting rather than a spontaneous enactment of normative heterosexuality. Walt and Karen are not the man and the woman-with the definite article signaling unproblematic interpellation and seamless identification-but rather client and prostitute. Wait tries to "be" the man by having Karen say he is, invoking the power of the performative. However, the context of the utterance infects it with performance and makes it infelicitous. Walt and Karen's interaction is a performance in which both parties deny that they are putting on an act. For Austin, the performative is infelicitous when it is "void, or given in bad faith" (1962: n). He writes: it is always necessary that the circumstances in which the words are uttered should be in some way, or ways, appropriate, and it is very commonly necessary that either the speaker himself or other persons should also perform certain other actions, whether "physical" or "mental" actions or even actions of uttering further words. (8) The transaction between Walt and Karen suggests that it is sometimes equally imperative for certain actions not to be performed, in this case, the handing over of money. This excessive action makes "you are the man" an infelicitous performative. By citing two contradictory conventions-in word, that of normative heterosexuality and, in gesture, that of prostitution-the performative reveals itself as the performance it always already was, an acting out of norms that were never "natural" in the first

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place. Flawless thus demonstrates how the naturalizing effect of performative reiteration can be counteracted not just from the margins, as Butler argues, but also from the center. Walt' s performance of performativity undermines the heterosexual norm as much as Rusty's performative drag performance: each appears as a "failed copy" of the norm (Butler 1999: 186). Overzealous attempts to act out performative belonging-as undertaken by both Laney and Walt-can bring out the uninhabitability of the ideal just as poignantly as deliberate practices of parody. My aim here is not to establish a precise dividing line between performance and performativity, but to show how chronotopic factors can turn each into the other in a reversible movement that exposes how performativity and performance are always already implicated in each other, how their distinction is never absolute, but dependent on context. At the same time, whether an act is perceived as one or the other has great consequences for the intersubjective process of identity construction.

Acting in Context Laney' s second, failed performance confirms the limited role of intentionality in performativity. She clearly intends to cite her earlier striptease faithfully and make it signify her renewed belonging to the Manhattan chronotope, yet she fails miserably because of factors outside her control: time, space, her body, the audience, and so on. These factors introduce what Derrida has called the problem of context. For Derrida, the context of a text, sign, or experience is never absolutely determinable and therefore not fully determinate of function and meaning. The mark is not governed by intention or presence, but by "iterability," a structural possibility for repetition or quotation, which enables it to break with "the collectivity of presences organizing the moment of its inscription" (1988: 9). This way of viewing iterability seems to disavow space and time as relevant contextual factors. However, what Derrida rejects is not so much the significance of the mark's immediate timing and placement as their complete and continuing hold on its function and meaning. Neither is his point to say that context is irrelevant, but rather that its relevance is partial and momentary, since iterability prevents both the mark and its context from achieving selfsameness. Each new context introduces the mark to

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further alterity, so that, in the end, '"there is nothing outside context"

(1988: 136). Here, Derrida unexpectedly echoes Voloshinov's assertion that "the meaning of a word is determined entirely by its context. In fact, there are as many meanings of a word as there are contexts of its usage" (Voloshinov 1986: 79). The limitlessness of context ensures the utterance's openness to incessant transformation, shifting, and reframing. For Derrida, however, context has no objective existence outside the utterance. Instead, it is part of the utterance's very constitution: "context is always, and always has been, at work within the place, and not only around it" (1988: 6r). 9 Derrida does not discount context, but reformulates it. However, as Butler points out in Excitable Speech (1997a), what remains problematic is Derrida's rigorous separation of the sign's successive contexts, which does not allow for a consideration of the way the history of a sign's usage-its accumulated contexts-can cause a particular meaning to become sedimented in the sign, restricting its breaking force. Indeed, Derrida leaves aside the inevitable presence of past contexts in each performative, a presence actualized in "The Baby Shower" by its replaying of Laney's first striptease, which is essential for giving meaning to its subsequent quotation. Although it may be true to say that each mark "is and should be capable of being reiterated as though it were the first time, in the absence of the first time" (Derrida 1988: so), in practice many acts, including Laney's, are apprehended by cultural and personal memory precisely as repetitions, inextricably linked to a first time (or many first times). As Voloshinov aptly writes, "contexts do not stand side by side in a row, as if unaware of one another, but are in a state of constant tension, or incessant interaction and conflict" (1986: 8o); or, in Sandywell's words, "the 'past' can be likened to a palimpsest of contexts providing the setting for contemporary speech acts" (1998: 199). Either way, past contexts invariably interfere with the present. Against this view, Derrida argues that past contexts never reappear exactly as they were. Their reconstitution is never complete: "the simple recalling of a context is never a gesture that is neutral, innocent, transparent, disinterested" (1988: 131). Rather, the recalling of a previous context is itself "a performative operation" (132), which turns convention into a thing not of the past, but of the present. Laney's first striptease, then, is replayed in "The Baby Shower" not as it happened eight years earlier, but as it operates in the present. For Butler, however, this present operation is not separate

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from the past as it bears the past within it, so that each performative act presents (in its double meaning) its entire history. What would bring these two views together is a theorization of context as the place and moment not of presence but of contemporaneity, where the act's past and possible future meet and are mediated. Bakhtin's theory of the utterance, which shares intellectual sources with speech act theory, points in this direction. 10 It accommodates both conventionality and the singularity of the performative act as a once-occurring event, without equating context to (self-)presence and without reinstating intentionality. 11 Juliet Flower MacCannell notes how, for both Bakhtin and Derrida, "the overvaluation of 'the present' is demystified by a re-evaluation of the contemporary" (1985: 970). Such a contemporary does not forget the past and the values the past has cumulatively imposed on the utterance, but remembers them. For Bakhtin, context-as-contemporaneity is the site of a specific reevaluating correlation of historicity, actuality, and futurity: What Bakhtin had called the "immediate context of the utterance" necessary for understanding it, e.g., the "unified social purview" or living basis of communication, is completely distinguished from any form of identification with the "presentness of the present." ... Such a "context" is neither external to nor prior to the utterance; it is only contemporary to it. That is, it is not a presence inside nor outside of the utterance; it is represented by the utterance and the utterance is supported, tacitly, even unconsciously, by it. (Flower MacCannell 1985: 985)

Utterance and context relate to each other much like subject and chronotope: no definite chronology separates the terms and each depends on the other for its persistence. The utterance and its accumulated, represented contexts are contemporaneous: past and present come together to share one time, and this is where the meaning of their relation is performed. Once again, I wish to include the spatial dimension. Utterance and context not only bring together times, but also places-hence, finally, chronotopes. We are therefore dealing not only with the temporality of the past inside the present but also with the spatiality of the there in the here: here and elsewhere collocated, placed together. Utterance and context are not separable, but exist in a collocation of times, spaces, and chronotopes. Bakhtin insists that while language as a system is inherently quotable or repeatable, each individual utterance constitutes a unique event with a unique meaning that is a product of each utterance's eventness as an irreproducible instance of space-time. The utterance does not rely on presence

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or intention, but on a specificity capable of encompassing the utterance's past and future. 12 The utterance is not self-identical, but anticipates new contexts while at the same time recollecting and resurrecting old ones in order to establish, in the here and now, a unique new meaning. Restated in the terms of performativity and iterability, the utterance's future-oriented component contains the inalienable possibility of breakage, on whose scope and likelihood its past may place a certain constraint, but whose actual occurrence (or nonoccurence) is finally determined in the contemporaneity of the act. For Bakhtin, each utterance is always both "a new, unrepeatable event in the life of the text" and "a new link in the historical chain of speech communication" (r986c: ro6). This description answers Derrida' s requirement that iterability "entails the necessity of thinking at once both the rule and the event, concept and singularity" (1988: n9). 13 Laney' s contrasting performatives suggest that later iterations are always in some way predicated on earlier ones. A large part of why her second stripping act is unsuccessful has to do with a double discord, first of all, with her own first striptease, because of changed circumstances and her changed body. By literally exceeding the image she seeks to project, her pregnant body betrays her intentions. The second discord is with stripping in general, since the cumulative cultural meaning of "striptease" does not (yet) accommodate the sign of "pregnancy." Memory plays a crucial role here: both the individual memory of the spectators who vividly recall Laney' s earlier striptease and the collective cultural memory of stripping acts generally. The fact that these memories are not transposed or forgotten in the moment of the second striptease, but are evoked and included in the process of giving it meaning bears out Bal's insight that performativity is indissolubly tied to memory and that timeand, I would add, space-is "sticky" (2002: 193). The sticking point of Laney' s second performance is not only the memory of her former body and its temporal distance, but also the discordant space of the suburban chronotope within which the first part of "The Baby Shower" resolutely situates her pregnant body. I should stress that, while Laney' s stripping fails to be normative, the subversive potential it harbors is not galvanized. The horror her second performance evokes in its audience is the horror that arises when someone so visibly belonging to the outside attempts to participate in the inside. Far from questioning normative Manhattan femininity, the failure of Laney's

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act reaffirms it and reemphasizes its exclusivity. As an insider become outsider, Laney is no longer able or authorized to perform Manhattan subjectivity in a normative manner. The fact that she is no longer considered "one of us" in the Manhattan chronotope turns her performance into what Bourdieu has called a gaffi or blunder (1982: 19). For Bourdieu, the production of such blunders is primarily linked to a lack (or loss) of social authority. It can also result from several other types of mistakes: errors of agent, place, moment, tempo, comportment, language, clothing, and instrument (1982: 104). As we have seen, Laney combines several of these: she is the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong posture and the wrong clothes. Together, these errors produce a loss of social legitimacy in the particular chronotopic situation of Samantha's party, which was motivated by the desire to keep at bay precisely that outside realm that Laney exemplifies. Her error, therefore, is ultimately chronotopic and illustrates how tricky it is to have success in reiterating the norms of a chronotope under which one no longer has a place. 14 We have seen that performative identities are contingent upon the subject's constant participation in a particular chronotope, whose norms and values cannot be forgotten at will. Travel between chronotopes is possible, but chronotopes do not admit casual tourists and a return ticket is never guaranteed. In relation to individual performative acts, the act's chronotopic situation, rather than its content or the intentions of its agent, exerts a decisive influence on its meaning and effect, whether it turns out to be a success or a failure, a confirmation or subversion of the cited norm, a belonging or a nonbelonging to the chronotope. The same performative does not always act in the same way, just as the relation between performance and performativity is not always stable. In both cases, the chronotopic situation needs to be taken into account. A final issue raised by Laney' s contrasting stripping acts is the role of (in)visibility in chronotopic belonging. It is the undeniable visibility of Laney' s pregnancy that, in her second striptease, makes her unable to "pass" as anything other than a suburban mother-to-beY' The chronotope imposes a regime of visibility/invisibility based on its particular set of chronotopic values, whose undervalued terms-slowness, age, fat, and so on-are banished from the visible. Pregnancy, proudly displayed in the suburban chronotope in the form of a nude photograph of pregnant

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Laney on show in her bathroom, is not supposed to be seen in the Manhattan time-space. I take up the issue of (in)visibility, of what can and cannot be seen between the subjects of a chronotope, in Chapter 3, where I focus on the role of the intersubjective eye in the construction of chronotopic identities.

The Intersubjective Eye: The Look Versus the Gaze

Excessive Eyes or How to Cure Narcissus My analysis of Laney's performative predicament in Chapter 2 demonstrates how the chronotope works to circumscribe intersubjectivity, preventing certain subjects from enacting their chronotopic (be)longing. At the same time, the chronotope is itself constituted and maintained through the intersubjective enactment of its norms and values. The chronotope is an inherently intersubjective realm, shared with others who actively participate in the staging of the subject as an embodied agent. On the level of the chronotope and its relation to other chronotopes, intersubjectivity is configured as a struggle between various principles of subjectivity. Within the chronotope, however, intersubjectivity appears as the interaction between self and other through which the subject is staged. For Bakhtin, the latter form of intersubjectivity is fundamental to subjectivity: T he determination of the subject (of personality) in intersubjective relations: concreteness (name) , integrity, answerability, and so forth; inexhaustibility, openendedness, openness. (r986d: 139)

He puts intersubjectivity at the roots of everything that marks out the individual as a discrete subject: body, appellation, unity, and morality. Paradoxically, it is only by interacting with others that the self can distinguish itself

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from them. Such distinction does not, however, grant the subject integrity in the sense of completeness, because for Bakhtin, intersubjectivity is also what renders the subject discrete from itself, what opens it up to continuous renegotiation. The subject emerges wrapped in the other's consciousness, named and delineated only through the other's voice and vision, but because of the ongoing nature of intersubjective relations, there is no solidification into an enduring state of selfsameness. The Bakhtinian subject never fully corresponds to itself: "the form of my life-from-within is conditioned by my rightful folly or insanity of not coinciding-of not coinciding in principle-with me myself as a given" (Bakhtin 1990a: 127). Identity as completeness is forever postponed. Subjectivity is a task yet to be completed, with the subject posited as a futurity, always still becoming in a necessarily intersubjective mode. Thus, intersubjective relations work both to circumscribe the self and to keep it open-ended, both toward identity and toward alterity. For Bakhtin, intersubjectivity works primarily through vision and voice, through what is seen and spoken between subjects. In this chapter, I focus on the constitutive role of the intersubjective eye or, as Bakhtin articulates it, the other's "excess of seeing" in the process of embodiment and the subject's attainment of a coherent self-image (1990a: 25). The chronotope not only produces values about the space-time we live in, but also about the way our bodies are seen as constituted and functioning within that space-time: consider, for example, how important it is not to take up too much or too little space. The intersubjective eye functions on two distinct levels: first, it operates on the level of the embodied, situated look that passes between subjects. This look, which I call the intersubjective look, emanates directly from the physical eye. The second level concerns that of the gaze, which designates a form of vision that looks at us not out of a determinate pair of eyes, but from a more abstract, comprehensive point of view that resembles an all-seeing eye. For Lacan, the gaze marks the point where the eye loses its specificity and becomes a metaphor: "The eye is only the metaphor of something that I would prefer to call the seer's 'shoot' [pousse]something prior to his eye. What we have to circumscribe ... is the pre-existence of the gaze" (1979: 72). The eye no longer stands for the seer's subjective vision, but for an offshoot (something branching out from it) which, paradoxically, comes before. Before we can see, we are always

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already "given-to-be-seen" by the impersonal "spectacle of the world" (74, 75). This spectacle captures the subject in its field of vision, which can only be traced to a "point of light" (85), an artificial eye that never allows us to look back at it. Whereas Lacan installs a fundamental split between the look and the gaze, I configure their relationship in a different manner by way of Bakhtin and Sex and the City (SatC). Bakhtin focuses on the intersubjective look. His notion of excessive vision is all about the way concrete subjects can see more of each other than they can see of themselves. As such, it helpfully highlights the fundamental intersubjectivity of our bodily becoming. A more problematic aspect, however, is Bakhtin's configuration of the intersubjective look in terms of recognition. For Bakhtin, bodily matter is simply "there" in spacetime, objectively present and immediately identifiable. Butler has challenged this view of matter by arguing that the body and its boundaries are artificial constructs, which give the illusion of being "there" only because of naturalized constructions of seeing. Matter exists "not as a site or surface, but as a process of naturalization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface that we call matter" (1993: 9). References to the body, consequently, are not cognitive but constitutive in a performative sense: "there is no reference to the body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body" (w). Thus, rather than recognizing a preexisting body, the intersubjective look and Bakhtin' s elaboration of it in terms of excessive vision actively participate in its materialization. This materialization, I maintain, has to be seen as specific in chronotopic terms. l examine the complexities of this materialization through an analysis of "The Real Me," an episode from the fourth season of SatC that has vision as its central concern. Not surprisingly, within a chronotope founded on a time of fleeting trends and a space of surfaces, how the SatC characters are seen and see themselves is fundamental to their identities. The show consistently brings into play both the intersubjective look (the way the characters are seen by each other) and the gaze (the way the characters are given-to-be-seen by the larger eye of their chronotope). Seeing, being seen, and achieving the right "look" (in the sense of complying with a distinct style or fashion) are of crucial importance in the Manhattan chronotope. For Lacan, incidentally, women are exemplary subjects to the gaze: "At the very level of the phenomenal experience of contemplation, this all-seeing aspect is to be

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found in the satisfaction of a woman who knows that she is being looked at, on condition that one does not show her that one knows that she knows" (Lacan 1979: 75). While the Manhattan women in SatC do appear to pose for an eye that exceeds the individual looks of the other characters, these looks enter the picture as well and their relationship to the gaze is frequently thematized. In "The Real Me," the four plot lines-one for each of the show's main characters-revolve around the "dialectic of the eye and the gaze" (Lacan 1979: 102) and how this dialectic affects the bodily dimension of identity: Carrie participates in a fashion show, Samantha has nude photographs taken of herself, a man views Miranda as "sexy," and Charlotte learns to look at her vagina. Framing the episode is the following question, posed by Carrie's votce-over: I got to thinking about Narcissus, a man so consumed with his own image he

drowned in it. Did he have no friends to mirror back a healthier view of himself? And why is it that we see our friends perfectly, but when it comes to ourselves, no matter how hard we look, do we ever see ourselves clearly? This question can be broken into two parts. The first concerns the content-value of the image: is it deadly or healthy? The second addresses the accuracy of vision itself, with particular reference to intersubjectivity: can we see perfectly clearly in relation to ourselves and to others? The point Carrie makes about Narcissus is not that the image he sees of himself is false, but that it is so enthralling that he becomes part of it. 1 It is not so much the image's lack of body that is considered fatal as is its utter seductiveness, which makes distance impossible and forces viewer and image into a suffocating unity. It seems Carrie reads Narcissus's story as "a homage to the power of representation to take the senses over, to absorb the viewer body and soul into the world of representation" (Bryson 2001: 31). However, by asking whether Narcissus had no friends who could mirror back a healthier image of himself, Carrie proposes the idea that the fatal consequences of his infatuation with his own reflection are due not only to its nature as a representation, but to its being a representation attained in isolation. She implies that the seductiveness of the image could have been cured by other subjects, by friends who are asked to stand in for the reflective surface, to become mirrors and

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supply an alternative image, which would be exterior and other, but still a representation. In this way, Carrie institutes a normative distinction between the mirror as object and the mirror-function, a verb instead of a noun, which emanates from the external other. She associates the impersonal mirror image with the trope of the mirror as a fatal instrument of vanity, but assigns a medicinal function to the anthropomorphized, intersubjective mirroring of the other.Z These contrasting evaluations stem from a perceived difference in the accuracy of vision itself. Carrie asserts that we can see others perfectly, with unimpaired vision, but can never see ourselves as clearly. The idea that we can never see ourselves clearly evokes Bakhtin' s theory of intersubjective vision as presented in his early philosophical text "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity" (1990a). There, he argues that the self has a fundamental need for the other's external vision, which he theorizes using the conceptual metaphor of "excess of seeing." While solitary self-reflection can only ever engender "a spurious and disjected subjectivity" (1990a: 101), true self-consciousness presupposes the input of the other as "another subiectum, a subiectum of empathizing, a subiectum situated outside the bounds of that life" (Bakhtin 1993: 5). Mirrors or photographs cannot give us a direct perspective on ourselves, since they involve no more than a presumed third party or implicit other." Whenever we try to contemplate our own exterior by ourselves, we end up producing an "optical forgery" or a "soul without a place of its own," which provides access not to our true face, but to our "mask-face" only (Bakhtin r990a: 32). Like Carrie, Bakhrin privileges subject-images over object-images, stipulating that the subject doing the mirroring needs to be fully independent. 4 For Bakhtin, outsideness or exotopy makes the intersubjective look aesthetically productive. His basic tenet is that every subject, at each moment in time, occupies a unique place in the world that cannot at the same time be occupied by someone else. In terms of these unique spatiotemporal coordinates-which are, of course, chronotopic-our visual relationship with ourselves differs fundamentally from that with others. We see others in their full three-dimensionality,from the outside and at a distance, but we can never see ourselves in the same way. This is the conundrum Carrie invokes in her framing question. For a "clear" image of ourselves as subjects in time and space, we are dependent on the other's capacity to see behind and beyond us. 5

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However, for the other's look to take on this capacity, self and other need to stay separate: The productiveness of the event of a life does not consist in the merging of all into one. On the contrary, it consists in the intensification of one's own outsideness with respect to others, one's own distinctness from others: it consists in fully exploiting the privilege of one's unique place outside other human beings. "Impoverishing" theories assume cultural creation to be founded on the renunciation of one's own unique place, ... on participation in one unitary consciousness, on solidarity or even complete merging. (Bakhtin 199oa: 88) What should arise in the space between self and other is a particular form of empathy. Brian Poole has outlined Bakhtin's debt to Max Scheler, who, in The Essence and Forms of Sympathy, denounces empathy understood as a mere duplication or copying (Nachahmen) of the other's feelings. True empathy or "sympathetic feeling" is an active, ethical stance that preserves the distinction between one's own feelings and those of another (Poole 2001: I13). Scheler identifies two negative extremes of empathy as Einsfuhlung: idiopathic and heteropathic identification. The former occurs when the self incorporates the other into itself. The latter is found when the self is carried away by the other, becoming the other in an act of extreme projection. 6 Scheler considers both behaviors pathological, since neither maintains the difference between self and other. Bakhtin conceptualizes this difference in terms of exotopy and presents productive empathy as a tripartite movement of putting oneself in the other's place, then returning into oneself, and finally consummating the other from this outside perspective (Poole 2001: II7): I must empathize or project myself into this other human being, see his world axiologically from within him as he sees this world; I must put myself in his place and then, after returning to my own place, "fill in" his horizon through that excess of seeing which opens out from this, my own, place outside him. (Bakhtin 1990a: 25) The return into the self is essential to avoid a merging of perspectives that would remove the creative, ethical dimension from the intersubjective look. As a vital independent force of subjectification, the other has recently surfaced, in different guises, in the psychoanalytical theories of Jessica Benjamin and Jean Laplanche.l Most relevant for the present

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discussion, however, is Kaja Silverman's elaboration of "identity-ata-distance" in The Threshold of the Visible World (1996). Silverman cites Scheler (in addition to Henri Wallon and Paul Schilder) as an important source, taking up his distinction between idiopathic and heteropathic identification. She considers idiopathic identification central to Freud's and Lacan's accounts of the development of the ego and the establishment of the "principle of the self-same body": otherness is first devoured and then everything that is other and cannot be swallowed is consistently repudiated (24). Heteropathic identification, on the contrary, is seen as excorporating: it "enables the psyche to take up residence within a different bodily terrain" and implies that "one lives, suffers, and experiences pleasure through the other" (Silverman 1992: 259, 205). Heteropathic identification makes identity-at -a-distance possible and counteracts the incorporative logic of ego formulation by enabling the subject to take on another body. Silverman develops the concept through an account of cinematic identification, where the spectator is alienated, abducted, or estranged "from his or her habitual bodily parameters" and "no longer looks with his or her own eyes, but with those of the other" (1996: 90, 89). There is no return to the self, because for Silverman this would imply a renewed interiorization of the other. Consequently, truly political cinema is, in the heteropathic mode, defined as "a vehicle for taking the spectator somewhere he or she has never been before, and which discourages the return journey" (102, emphasis added). The return journey is discouraged because identity-at-a-distance is identification not so much at a distance from the other, but "at a distance from the self" (Silverman 1996: 98). It is not fully intersubjective in the Bakhtinian sense, since it does not engage the other as other, but only as a possible alternative model of identification for the self. In Scheler's terms, it lacks the truly sympathetic character of an act on the other's behalf, a "fremddienliche Handlung' (1974: 40). For Silverman, heteropathic identification works to change the self by distancing it from the principle of the selfsame body. It does not, however, act on or for the other, creatively or ethically. In taking the other's place, the self becomes the other, obliterating difference in a manner both Scheler and Bakhtin would consider unproductive. Silverman's positive evaluation of heteropathic identification as "political ecstasy" (1996: 92) jars with Scheler' s conviction that "the many ecstatic, mystic, or pathological types of abandonment in unitary feeling

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are characteristic of a disposition of lacking a distinction between 'I' and 'you'" (Poole 2om: ns). As Bal points out in Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, an ecstatic or decentering surrender to the other is not necessarily productive; it has to take on a form lying somewhere between, on the one hand, total decomposition or dissolution of the self, and on the other hand, radical othering: The loss of self, as has been argued in different contexts, has great benefits, provided, that is, that the subject can distinguish between ego and consciousness, so that "ego-ism," or self-centred selfishness, yields to awareness of the subject's place in culture: performing-relationally. (2002: 95) Like Bakhtin's exotopy, Bal's "ecstatic aesthetic" (89) underscores the need to keep the border between self and other intact. To be ecstatic is to literally "stand outside" myself for a moment, but then to return to my own coordinate in time-space in order to take responsibility for my relation to the other from this exterior position. Whereas the term ecstasy draws out the potentially overwhelming emotion of the first stage, Bakhtin's exotopy emphasizes the contemplative aesthetic of the return to the self, where the feeling of rapture makes way for responsibility, one taken for difference as well as for similarity. In Ovid's account of the myth, Narcissus's demise is due precisely to a lack of distinction between self and other. Contrary to Carrie's reading, Narcissus is not alone by the pool, but observed by Echo, the nymph whose love he has rejected. She is incapable of mirroring back a healthier image to him not just because she can only repeat his words but also because her vision of Narcissus is no different from the one he sees in the water. As Ovid writes (in A. D. Melville' s translation), "all he admires [is] that all admire in him" (1986: 63). Narcissus's true predicament is that he sees himself as clearly and as perfectly (in both senses of the word) as others see him. In this situation, no remedy can be found by replacing the selfimage with the mirrorings of others. Narcissus is caught in idiopathic identification with his own image, which he desperately wants to incorporate but which, ultimately, incorporates him instead. Echo, for her part, is bound to Narcissus by an extreme heteropathic identification, which makes her incapable of seeing or speaking differently from him. Which is why, in Ovid, the bodies of both Narcissus and Echo end up wasting away, perishing from a pathological lack of distance and outsideness.

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Where can a cure be found when the image others see of us is as artificial and fatal as the one we see in the mirror, when there is no true outside perspective? In "Echo," Gayatri Spivak suggests that the nymph could have represented an opportunity for Narcissus's rescue if her words had been allowed to mark differance, Derrida' s term for the systematic play of differences in signification. 8 Spivak argues that the unintentional exploitation of the risk of response could have transformed the interrogative fugis ("why do you fly from me?") into the imperative fugi ("fly from me!"), potentially dispelling Narcissus from the pool and turning Echo into "an unintentional vehicle of a possible cure" (1996: 185). Like Carrie, Spivak locates the cure with the other. However, in calling the myth "a tale of the aporia between self-knowledge and knowledge for others" (178, emphasis added), she privileges, contrary to Silverman, knowledge not of the other or from the other's perspective, but knowledge oriented toward the other, which puts itself in the other's service instead of acting for the self. Spivak's separation of this other-oriented knowledge from the subject's intention or will signals that the other, even when friendly or loving, is not necessarily able to see or speak with diffirance at will. The cure for the "mortiferous autoerotic model of self-knowledge" (1996: r82) resides not in good intentions, but in the way external words or visions may contain seeds of difference in spite of their owners. Echo's response can be misheard and as such contains, in excess of her will, the potential for a different outcome. Y Privileging the external other as the unintentional site of the cure contradicts that most modern of myths about the mirror, Lacan's mirrorstage, which has the child overcome the support of the mother to (mis)recognize itself in a self-image that is narcissistic, fictional, orthopedic, and inherently aggressive toward the other (197T r-6). 10 This selfimage is not generated by an outside other or by the self alone, but by the Symbolic: the realm of language, the law of the father, and, most insistently, the gaze. This gaze, as the cultural optic or eye that represents the ultimate position of exotopy, complicates both Carrie's framing question and Bakhtin's scenario of excessive vision. Before I go into this further, I should note that although its function is always present, the gaze is not a universal structure. Lacan says of the paintings in the great hall of the Doge's Palace in Venice that "there are always lots of gazes behind" (1979: n3). When looking at these paintings, we see and are ourselves seen by all

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their previous audiences, so that the gaze is historically and culturally differentiated. This is why Silverman insists on speaking of the cultural gaze. How do the look and the cultural gaze relate to one another? Do they always see eye to eye? "The Real Me" provides four possible answers in the form of its four story lines aligned with the four main characters of the series.11 Each of these answers deals with visual intersubjectivity and embodiment, itself "embodying," as it were, the theoretical question in the manner of a literalizing metaphor. The story lines effect a concretization of the conceptual metaphors of embodiment, look, and cultural gaze. Borrowing a term introduced by Nanna Verhoeff, each story line forms a "character-plot knot" (2006: 321) that gives a specific narrative form to the relation between visual alterity and embodiment, with each such narrativization highlighting a particular aspect of their complicated connection. It is as though a chronotope is created around each character in order to mark how the character ties and unties Bakhtin' s "knots of narrative" in her own way (1996b: 25o).U In this way, "The Real Me" constructs four logics of the intersubjective look and the cultural gaze.

Looking from a Distance When Samantha tells her friends she is having nude photographs taken of herself, she adds: "this is not about a man's approval. This photo is just for me, so when I'm old and my tits are in my shoes, I can look at it and think: 'Damn, I was hot!' " Carrie characterizes Samantha as someone who "saw herself a little too clearly," someone who, like Narcissus, is in danger of being consumed by her own image. Indeed, in claiming the photographic image for herself and confidently posing naked for the camera, Samantha does not appear to require an outside perspective or intermediary. She appeals to what Roland Barthes identifies as the photograph's "evidentiary force" or "power of authentication"-the photograph's statement that what it depicts actually existed (20oo: 89). However, the evidentiary force of the photograph attests only to the past. For it to be able to say something about the present, it requires a secondary authentication, a statement not that "it has indeed been," but that "it still is." Such a statement can only come from the other. In Samantha's case, the photograph's visual autonomy is disproved when she takes it to be framed. Now, the image is no longer directed at her future self, but at the

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present, male other, whose recognition Samantha is seeking, especially recognition of the image as part of "current" reality. Carrie's voice-over notes how "even though Samantha had done the photo just for her, she still wanted to be seen a certain way by men." In the shop, Samantha presses the shop assistant for a confirmation of the photograph as an accurate representation of her body. She guides his eyes over the image, the whole time emphasizing that the image indeed fits her since it is of her: "The mat should stop about an inch away from my breast. Right here. See my breast? And then stop right around here near my ass. See that? Right near my ass?" The shop assistant's businesslike response, betraying neither recognition nor appreciation, leaves Samantha furious. Barthes sees the photograph's continuing evidentiary role in the present and future as necessarily hallucinatory, since the photograph is always "false on the level of perception" (woo: n5). Samantha's actions suggest that this falseness can only be counteracted by the other's acknowledgment of a continuing relation of equivalence between image and person. At the end of "The Real Me," this acknowledgment is granted when a fast-food deliveryman compliments the way Samantha's ass looks in the photograph, now on prominent display in her apartment. Although Samantha welcomes his validation, no real interaction with the other takes place. Once Samantha's self-image has been confirmed, the other becomes dispensable and is sent off with a generous tip. In much the same way that Lacan' s child requires the mother to prop him up in front of the mirror and ro confirm the identity of the reflection, while at the same time disavowing the mother's support, Samantha too needs the male other to guarantee that she is the "hot" woman in a photographic image, which she wants to keep for herself only. Thus, although she solicits the other's perspective, Samantha evades the difference and distance that, for Bakhtin, would make this other's excessive vision productive. By accepting the other's vision only insofar as it merges with her own, Samantha turns it into a crutch for constructing a self-image essentially attained in isolation. Subjectivity and outsideness are removed from the mirror function and the other, whose vision is emphatically not independent or self-sufficient, becomes an incarnated version of Bakhtin's "optical forgery," one that acts on behalf of Samantha's own eye, on behalf of the photographic myth and, through these, on behalf of normative cultural representations of femininity, to which Samantha uncritically panders.

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Under Spivak's provisions, all Samantha desires is an accurate echo of her own vision. Although the shop assistant's refusal to objectify Samantha by reducing her to her naked breasts and ass contains a potential moment of difftrance, Samantha remains stubbornly insensitive to it, taking his reaction as an insult. This illustrates how even when the other marks difftrance, there is no guarantee that he will be heard or heeded. Samantha' s character-plot knot also indicates that different others may provide for different excessive visions, necessitating a choice between them. The contradictory visions of the shop assistant and the deliveryman suggest that although we cannot control the way the other sees us, we can disregard certain visions, accepting only those in line with our established self-image, those in line with powerful normative representations, or even, in a more positive move, those that challenge normative representations. Against Bakhtin' s directive that "the hero will not take any active interest in the gift which the author makes of him and to him" (Jefferson 1989: 157), the self, then, cannot remain entirely passive in relation to the other's excessive visions. In addition, the lack of difference between the deliveryman's vision of Samantha and her own-captured in her provocative photographic pose-belies Bakhtin' s assumption that the other provides access to our "real" face, as opposed to the "mask-face" staring back at us from a mirror or a photograph. Slavoj Zizek has argued that there are only mask-faces, that nobody ever sees him or herself, or anyone else, without the interference of cultural representations: "There is more truth in the mask we wear, in the game we play, in the 'fiction' we obey and follow, than in what is concealed beneath the mask" (1999b: 153). If the mask is our "true" self and if there is nothing more to see behind or beyond it, do we still have to accept other people's external visions of us as necessarily more insightful than our own, or can we decide which mask to wear and then press others to authenticate it because it makes us feel good, as Samantha does? What remains is that, regardless of the self-image or body image with which we choose to identify, whether it is normative or not, "real" or "false," it needs to be fitted on us by another subject. This other subject is not always just anybody, but may be particularized by gender or otherwise. In Silverman's reinterpretation of Lacan's mirror-stage, it is the mother who, through look and voice, fulfills the active function of "defining and interpreting the reflected image, and 'fitting' it to the child" (Silverman

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1988: 100). Such "fitting" is precisely what Samantha requires of the male other in relation to the nude photograph. Thus, there is a clear irony in the fact that the picture framer-the one who will literally fit her image in a frame-is the one who refuses to fit it on her symbolically. Fitting the subject on an image is not just an act of individual others, but most prominently of the cultural gaze, which Silverman metaphorizes in terms of a camera: subjectivity is installed not only through an identification with external images, but through the "click" of an imaginary camera.... What seems most intimate and private is in fact structured by the representational constraints of the "photo session." (1988: 161) Samantha's character-plot knot makes this metaphor literal by staging an actual photo session. Samantha seeks out the mortifying and memorializing effect of the camera for fear that her aging body will not be able to live up to its demands for much longer. Far from manipulating the apparatus, she willingly subjects herself to it. 13 Although the moment when Samantha triumphantly offers her body to the camera's eye could also be read as an enabling instance of selfcreation, the normative image cited by Samantha' s pose immediately constrains her agency. As Silverman argues in The Threshold of the Visible

World, remaining at a productive distance from the mirror is almost impossible when one simultaneously offers oneself to the camera/gaze in the guise of an ideal image, and has that self-identification "photographically" ratified. (1996: 206) Again, Silverman conceptualizes distance in psychic terms in relation to the self and its identifications, and not as an actual spatiotemporal separation between self and other. However, elsewhere, the two conceptions of distance come together when she writes, following Waiter Benjamin: To bring an image "closer" is also to "liquidate" its specificity, to standardize it, to strip it of its particularity ... the homogenization of heterogeneity-the triumph of normative representation and the self over diversity.... Distance, by contrast, would seem to necessitate a foregrounding of the frame separating the image from the world of objects, and the marking of it as a representation ... to mark the otherness or alterity of the image with respect not only to normative representation, but also to the viewer, and to thwart the drive toward possession .... The viewer apprehends the image very precisely in the guise of the "not me." (Silverman 1996: 99)

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Although there is now an actual distance between the self and what it sees, Silverman remains focused on the effect this distancing look has on the self. Seeing the image as "not me" is productive only in relation to the viewer's self-image, not to the image or the other. AB with the deliveryman in Samantha's character-plot knot, the (image of the) other is put in service of the self, so that there is no true intersubjectivity. In Samantha' s character-specific narrativization of the intersubjective look, the drive to bring the image closer, to liquidate its particularity as a representation of Samamha' s appearance at a particular moment in time, reigns supreme. The contextualization implied in the literal act of framing is negated by Samantha' s insistence that the image is of her: my breasts, my ass. She aims to draw the other in as close as possible, prompting him to confirm the image as "real" instead of representational, "same" instead of other, present instead of past, alive instead of dead. There is no recognition of the image's inherent alterity. Only the shop assistant and, on a different level, the television viewers, can see otherwise-not when they put themselves in Samantha's place in an ecstatic act of heteropathic identification, but when they keep their distance.

Looking to Complete: The Active Gift of Love Charlotte is horrified when her gynecologist tells her that her vagina Is depressed. At lunch with her friends, she admits that she has never looked "down there," because she believes her vagina to be ugly. Her friends encourage her to take a peek, and at the end of the episode, Charlotte faces the dreaded organ via a handheld mirror, alone in her apartment. As we see her facial expression change from disgust to delight, Carrie' s voice-over remarks: "Charlotte faced her fear of seeing herself. And just like Narcissus before her, Charlotte became so mesmerized by what she saw that ... " At this point, we hear a loud thump as Charlotte falls over. Notwithstanding Carrie's reference to Narcissus, Charlotte's act of seeing herself is not construed as fatal. Rather, her initial refusal to see, let alone name, her vagina is linked to illness and depression. Charlotte's epiphany can be read as a belated restaging of the Lacanian mirror stage, evoking its orthopedic function in particular. In her initial rejection of the sexual organ as part of her own body and her subsequent triumphant

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acceptance of its beauty and belonging, we may discern the movement "from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality," which Lacan considers essential to the process of embodiment (1977: 4). Moreover, his description of the child's "jubilant assumption" of the mirror imago is echoed by Charlotte's mesmerized expression (2). There is even a hint of its disconcerting nature as a necessary misrecognition (meconnaissance) in Charlotte's abrupt fall to the ground. Charlotte, however, is not exactly the Lacanian child. Her characterplot knot stages the mirror stage not as the infant's original and definitive identification with a nonfragmented imago or Gestalt but, in Silverman' s words, as "the temporary integration of the visual imago with the sensational ego" (1996: 20). The visual imago is the representation in which we recognize ourselves at any one point of our lives, while the sensational or proprioceptive ego consists of our psychic and corporeal feeling of "ownness," our "non-visual mapping of [our] body's form" (16). In Charlotte's case, although she senses her vagina to be part of her body proprioceptively, she has refused to recognize it as part of her visual imago because she considered it incompatible with ideality. Only when her friends assure her there is nothing to be ashamed of, is she finally able to achieve, at least for a moment, an integrated body image, "that mode of 'altogetherness' generally synonymous with 'presence'" (Silverman 1996: 17). Charlotte's visual and verbal disavowal of part of her body can also be described in terms of agnosia, defined by Grosz as "the nonrecognition of a body part that should occupy a position within the body image," associated with "a forgetfulness, a refusal, a negative judgment" (1994: 89). Charlotte is missing part of her bodily map: in the place of her vagina, she feels only a psychic hole that eventually produces physical symptoms. Both Grosz and Silverman contend that a body part that is physically therewhose presence is clearly felt-may nevertheless be excluded from the subject's visual imago, from the process of embodiment. For Grosz, "the imaginary anatomy ... is an individual and collective fantasy of the body's forms and modes of action" (1994: 39). She distinguishes three contributors to the internalized body map: the self, the fleshand-blood others around the self, and the abstract symbolic or cultural order (holder of the gaze). Grosz considers the latter the most influential: the cultural order tends to assign women a "mutilated body image" (6o), encoding the vagina and the other sexual organs as lacking or "missing"

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(7r). The way the look and the cultural gaze are linked together by Charlotte's character-plot knot, however, suggests that the symbolic order may be circumvented when a pact to map the body differently is established between the self and a trusted group of others. The confidence with which Charlotte's friends redefine the vagina as something beautiful and worthy of being seen, reconfigures the cultural mapping of the female body. In a literal sense, Charlotte's narrativization of the intersubjective look corroborates Bakhtin's belief in the power of the other's external vision to consummate or "complete" the self. Although Charlotte overcomes the negative image in isolation, her solitary vision is prompted by that of her friends. The other's "excess of seeing" is shown to be especially potent in cases where the self-image has to overcome negative images, optical forgeries, or blind spots created not by the self, a mirror, or a photograph, but by culture as a whole. The self does not come to see through the other's eyes, but is made to look differently through her own eyes by those others who surround her. This process can be conceptualized in terms of the "active gift of love" derived from Lacan's work and defined by Silverman as an active, deliberate, knowing, productive, and ethical relation to the other: To give someone the active gift of love implies assuming a productive relation to him or her. It means not only to "crystallize" the other ... but to do so knowingly, and without forgetting for a moment that he or she is also a subject marked by lack. The active gift of love consequently implies both idealizing beyond the parameters of the "self" and doing so with a full understanding of one's own creative participation with regard to the end result. It means to confer ideality, not to find it. ... Such a relationship involves generosity, but not subordination. (1996: 78) In contrast to Silverman' s heteropathic identification, the active gift of love signifies a relation between self and other that orients itself toward the other. The self gives form to the other in an outwardly directed activity that involves responsibility. Bakhtin's excess of seeing and Silverman's active gift of love both define intersubjective responsibility as the recognition that the other is not I and I am not the other. We are separate subjects with a reciprocal formative duty toward each other, which we have to fulfill to the best of our ability and from our respective places in the world. Merging self and other into one removes responsibility and turns intersubjectivity into a passive, purely emotional act, not at all an active, ethical one.

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The return to the self is implicit in the active gift of love, which proceeds according to the logic of Nachtraglichkeit or deferred action: "we can only retroactively make our gift of love an active one by arriving at a conscious perception of our unconscious idealizing activities" (Silverman 1996: 103). My unconscious idealizing activities can take the form of a projection into the other, but their conscious perception presupposes a return to myself, for it is only here, in my present place, that "the idealizing spectator [can] move from a position of prostation to one of active generosity" (ro4). The position taken by Charlotte's friends vis-a-vis her "disgusting" vagina is productive because it takes the form not of incorporation or ecstasy, but of an active, knowing, ethical intervention on the part of concrete other subjects who remain in a position of sustained outsideness and who act on behalf of the self.

Circumventing the Gaze Carrie's character-plot knot initially appears to present a flawless staging of Bakhtinian excess of seeing. When her gay friend, Stanford, doubts his attractiveness and complains, "I know what I look like," Carrie replies: "Then you can't see what I sec." An exact reversal of this scene occurs later in the episode. When Carrie argues that she is not a model, Stanford answers: "Then you can't see what I see." These two exchanges suggest a reciprocal, responsible consummation between two friends generously striving to frame each other into positive images. SatC presents friendship as fundamental to a healthy subjectivity: the four main characters form each other's primary support network and compose, as it were, a new-style family. Lorraine Code, in What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge, hails friendship as the most empowering mode of our fundamental intersubjectivity or "second-personhood" (1991: 83). As an epistemological model opposed to a maternal one, friendship is not gender-specific or necessarily compounded by power differences. In its ideal form, it is characterized by an active, chosen reciprocity, a nondomineering knowledge of the other open to ever-further development. However, Code rightly warns that it should not be imagined "as a pure, unmediated relationship that escapes psychosocial structuring" (95). In "The Real Me," both Carrie and Stanford take the other's affirmation with a grain of salt, aware that their respective visions are colored

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by the duties of friendship. SatC' s overall narrative exposes how even the friendliest looks may consummate the other in the context of oppressive cultural representations. In spite of their questioning of Manhattan's sexual norms and values, the four main characters mostly encourage each other to comply. The elaboration of a collectively resistive look in Charlotte's character-plot knot is a rare exception. By exposing friendship as a power relation open to abuse, SatC questions Bakhtin's presumption of sympathy between self and other. He acknowledges relations of oppression and objectification only to dismiss them as aesthetically unproductive. For Gardiner, the paradox of Bakhtin's excess of vision lies in the fact that "whilst we need the other to be a complete social being, this other also has the capacity to circumscribe our thoughts and words, to exercise power over us" (1992: 97); or, in Deborah Haynes's formulation, "the power to enframe is dangerously close to the power to imprison" (1995: 92). Silverman effects a crucial reversal of Bakhtin' s assumption that sympathy precedes the consummating look by stressing, first, that sympathy and love proceed from (follow on) the active, exterior look and, second, that they do so only after enormous effort and always after the fact. The task of learning to see against the grain, in excess of the representations of cultural normativity, reveals itself as a continuous struggle against our impulses to swallow the other and fall back into negating idealizations. Sympathy is not a universal condition of intersubjective relations, as Bakhtin apparently believes, but an ethical stance taken in retrospect, after the move toward the other and upon one's return to the self. 14 It is a responsibility often abdicated or abused in self-interest or in the interest of historical power relations. Bakhtin' s excess of seeing is easily abstracted from power relations because of its reliance on a concept of vision as unmediated transparency, knowledge, and truth. Tihanov speaks of a "utopian interpretation of seeing" that "proves to be endowed with the gift of uncovering, or even generating, the true human meaning of the object" (2000: 237). The same problem underlies Carrie's assertion that the other's outside eye sees "perfectly." Bakhtin fails to explore the nature of the intersubjective look as a culturally mediated representation and interpretation as opposed to a purely individual act of creative recognition. To see something or someone is always at the same time to interpret, to see not directly but through a

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veil-or, as Lacan would say, a screen-of cultural or chronotopic prejudices, expectations, and norms. This screen is established through the cultural gaze. Embodied subjectivity is not just a question of being seen, but of being given-to-be-seen in the world as a whole. We are caught in a scopic field that comprises and directs all individual eyes. While Lacan's basic premise-"! see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides" (1979: 72)accords with Bakhtin' s idea about the fundamental difference between the way we see ourselves and the way others see us, the Lacanian subject is not looked at by individuals, but by the entire world through which these individuals also look. In Chapter I, I announce the presence of the cultural gaze in Sex and the City's opening credit sequence. The juxtaposed shots of Carrie's face and several Manhattan landmarks create the impression not only that Carrie is looking at the buildings but also that the buildings are somehow looking down on her. Zizek calls this effect "the dialectic of view and gaze," with the gaze producing (as in Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho) "the uneasy feeling that [the object] itself is somehow already gazing at her, from a point which escapes her view and so renders her utterly helpless" (1999a: 15). In the opening credits, this effect is compounded by the fact that Carrie is not actually looking directly at any of the landmarks shown: while she is looking only at a particular Manhattan street with its people and cars, the whole of Manhattan gazes back at her, capturing her unawares in its scopic field. Although Zizek, like Lacan, sees the view and the gaze as "constitutively dissymmetrical" (r5), the split between them is not necessarily irrevocable, nor does it render the look completely powerless. As Silverman points out, the gaze is always to some extent dependent on the look for perpetuating its reign over the scopic field, since the look acts as the visible functionary of the gaze: "although this scopic transaction [of the given-tobe-seen] is in every sense much 'bigger' than the look, the look nonetheless plays a key role in bringing it about" (1996: 222). This means not only that the agency of the look is circumscribed by the gaze, but also that both the gaze and the screen of normative cultural representations through which the gaze "photographs" the subject are potentially transformable: the look, in particular the collective one, can make the gaze and the screen see more, can make them include those subjects that they routinely render invisible.

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In World Spectators, Silverman argues that it is only through "affective affirmation" that we can bring others and the world into sight: "the world does not simply give itself to be seen; it gives itself to be loved" (2000: 133). Only when we care and take responsibility for this affect, admitting that it is I who loves, can we make the cultural gaze shine differently on others: "it is only by embracing other people and things that we can free them to be themselves-only by enfolding them within our psychic enclosure that we can create the space where they can emerge from concealment" (55). This is how the intersubjective look was organized by Charlotte's characterplot knot. Significantly, Silverman assigns a reterritorializing power to the look in stressing its physicality, which contrasts with the unlocatable character of the gaze: "precisely because the look is located within desire, temporality and the body, it can reanimate and open to change what the camera/gaze would both mortify and memorialize" (1996: 160). The same opposition appears in Bal' s contention that "the abstraction from the spatia-temporal position of the onlooker that is implied in the gaze is precisely what makes it voyeuristic" (2001: 115). The look can see differently from the gaze because it originates in a subject with a defined bodily presence in time-space. The specificity and materiality of the look's location in time-space-its unique coordinate, to speak with Bakhtin-enables it to escape the compelling normative representations of the gaze by nestling in its gaps and fissures. Thus, the power of an intersubjective look in relation to the gaze lies not in its ability to see more, but to see less from a more defined place. While the gaze operates by broad, sweeping views, it is by focusing on small details, by zooming in closely on parts of the picture from a highly defined focal point that these views lose some of their power. Because the gaze circumscribes our looks, we cannot see more than it does in any quantitative sense. We can, however, see with a different quality when we resist the gaze's imperative to take everything in at once, to aim for wholeness. Thus, by capturing only her vagina in the hand mirror, Charlotte is able to see it differently, to make it part of herself, more readily than when she tried to look at her body as a whole. The detailed look is able to challenge the overarching gaze when it takes the form of an excessive vision that is, somewhat paradoxically, characterized as focused, defined, localized, and situated.

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Carrie's character-plot knot charts her attempt to scale the heights of Manhattan's representational hierarchy by becoming a model and participating in a fashion show. At first, Carrie does not seek to destabilize the established dichotomy between models and so-called "real people," but to confirm it by becoming the ideal image. She displays what Silverman calls "a blind aspiration to approximate an image which represents a cultural ideal, without any thought as to what that ideal implies" (1996: 205). In Bourdieu' s terms, she attempts to close the gap the overarching gaze installs between the "corps reel," the real body as it is actually experienced, and the "corps ideal," the ideal body as the female body's legitimate form prescribed by the social or chronotopic order (1998: 72). At the fashion show, as Carrie walks down the runway, she merges completely with the ideal image for one moment, as everything-her outfit, the light, the stage, the audience, and the clicking cameras-conspires to compose the ideal image and fit her onto it. Carrie is captured and captivated by the gaze, fitting with a perfect transparency onto the screen of normative representations. But then she trips. Where Narcissus is said to have drowned in his ideal image, Carrie literally falls out of hers. For a few moments, she lies helpless on the floor, but then she manages to get up. In voice-over, she comments: I had a choice. I could slink off the runway and let my inner model die of shame. Or I could pick myself up, flaws and all, and finish. And that's just what I did. Because when real people fall down they get right back up and keep on walking.

Paradoxically, the moment Carrie recategorizes herself as a real person she finally becomes a model. Not in the normative sense, but on her own terms. It is when she no longer takes the model ideal seriously that she manages to transform it. Her fall from the ideal image, in an instant of acute physicality, brings into play what Silverman conceptualizes as the "good enough." The good enough, taken from D. W. Winnicott, is opposed to the oppressive binaries of sufficiency/insufficiency and ideal/failure and entails a way of looking at the other that is capable of forgiving or overlooking flaws in relation to the cultural screen composed of dominant representations. After we learn to look at others in this manner, Silverman conjectures, we might finally come to look at ourselves in a more forgiving and "healthier" way. The good enough thus "represents a crucial device for putting

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us at a productive distance from the screen, and for teaching us how to 'play' with it" (1996: 226). Like the active gift of love, the good enough is primarily oriented toward the other, in an ethical relation of forgiveness. It only pertains to the self in a secondary move. There is no merging of self and other, but a threefold distance: between self and other, between other and screen, and finally, between self and screen. Silverman further distinguishes the truly good enough, where an ideal is actively replaced by an imperfect image, from instances where we simply fail to attain the ideal: Merely by converting our aspiration to embody a particular form of corporeal ideality into a more improvisatory and approximate rendition of some of its elements, we do not circumvent the imperative to be "photographed" by the camera/gaze. To peiform an ideal in the "good enough" mode, it must also be apprehended as such, and nor simply as a failed attempt to approximate what our corporeal and environmental coordinates render impossible. (1996: 227, emphasis added) In Carrie' s case, her initial attempt to become a model in the normative manner constitutes the failed attempt; it fails at the moment of her fall. Only when she picks herself up again is the good enough activated. Carrie resumes her walk down the stage, despite having lost a shoe. At the end of the stage, she poses, throwing her hair back in what has now become a parody of conventional modeling. Carrie is no longer trying to play up to the ideal, but rather plays with it. She now walks the stage like a real woman, an identification confirmed by the repeated "It's got to be real" refrain (from a Cheryl Lynn song) that is played over the image. Carrie's apprehension by the audience as both model and real woman is signaled by the thundering applause and the continued clicking of cameras; the division between the two categories is diluted. Later, we see Carrie strutting through her apartment in her underwear, no longer in a studied approximation of the model ideal, but as a joyful play on it. Of course, the reason why Carrie is able to attain the mode of the "good enough" is because she so dramatically and so physically falls from the ideal image. Had her run been without incident, no reconsideration of the model ideal would have taken place. Here, the reframing of the subject is initiated not by the self or the other, but by the accidental dijfirance introduced by a physical fall, by the variation in repetition that is a latent possibility in all performative reiterations of normative identity positions.

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However, as with Echo's reply to Narcissus, this dijferance has to be taken up-both by Carrie and by the audience-before it can have an effect. It is the new perspective Carrie sees reflected back in a photographer's camera-the one that keeps taking her picture as she lies on the floorthat incites her to look at herself differently. Seeing her own image from an emphatically different angle and in extreme close-up, reterritorializes the gaze, which was represented by the preceding high-angle, long shots of Carrie strutting down the runway. The new, situated perspective enables Carrie to sideline the gaze, to reject its "optical forgeries" and to effect a temporary disavowal of its power over her self-representations. Carrie's character-plot knot shows that success in overcoming the gaze does not guarantee that an utterance will be able to prevent mishearing or misperception; the element of differance has to be taken up by the self before Carrie can get back onto the catwalk or before Narcissus can be rescued from the pool. Furthermore, as Silverman indicates, a productive way of differing from the screen has to be both apprehended and accepted by those looking on. Carrie's new vision of herself, prompted by the accidental appearance of differance, is productive only insofar as it is supported by the fashion show audience, that is, by the external other. This necessary support is expressed most enthusiastically by her friends, who loudly clap and cheer her on. Without their backing, her resumed catwalk run would have been merely ridiculous, as unsuccessful as Laney' s second, aborted striptease in "The Baby Shower." The specific way that the relation between embodied look and abstract gaze is plotted around Carrie' s character indicates the likelihood of complicity between these two agencies, but it also points to the intersubjective look's potential to circumvent the cultural gaze. The character-plot knot locates this subversive potential in the spatiotemporal locatedness of the embodied look, in its unavoidable chronotopicity.

Complicity and Ambivalence When an attractive man tells Miranda that he finds her sexy in her sweaty gym outfit, she is skeptical, since this qualification is not part of her present self-image: "I just can't believe that a guy would think I was sexy. Sexy is the thing I try to get them to see me as after I win them over with my personality." At first, Miranda feels she cannot comply with the

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conventional image of sexiness propagated by Manhattan's cultural gaze, but after a while she begins to believe the man. Perversely, however, she internalizes his outside vision not as "you are sexy as you are," but as "you can approximate the ideal image of sexiness." Thus, on their next date, Miranda assumes all the trappings of normative sexiness: excessive makeup, a skimpy dress, and a confident demeanor. To her surprise, her date loses all interest. When Miranda demands an explanation, he tells her: "you seemed a little full of yourself." Engrossed in an image more of her own making than of the other before her, Miranda loses her chance to resignify the normative notion of sexiness in the mode of the good enough. Much like Carrie, who dismisses a photographer's comments about the greater beauty of "real women" compared to that of models, Miranda resists the other who tries to see her differently, siding instead with the cultural gaze. Miranda's character-plot knot demonstrates the discrepancy between the other's outside vision and a version of this view as internalized by the self. The other's view of the self is not necessarily adopted in full without resistance or modification. This partial resistance was already apparent in Samantha's character-plot knot, where the shop assistant's view becomes irrelevant when it is replaced with the deliveryman's. Miranda's narrativization of the relation between look and gaze represents another negative or even perverse instance of this same principle, as she too ends up reaffirming the norm. Where an appeal to the external look helped Charlotte escape the gaze, Miranda allows the gaze to blind the look. In situations where look and gaze conflict, how does the subject choose which one to follow? "The Real Me" shows that it is neither a case of the other's look being all-powerful or of the gaze necessarily winning out. Bakhtin has argued that in order to be accepted as the author of the self, the other needs to present a vision that is "inwardly intelligible": What renders the other an authoritative and inwardly intelligible author of my life is the fact that this other is not fobricated by me for self-serving purposes, but represents an axiological force which I confirm in reality and which actually determines my life (like the axiological force of my mother that determines me in childhood). (1990a: 153) In other words, the other needs to be a verifiable outside presence in my life with a demonstrable role to play in it: she needs to be a person who I feel

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is interested in me and who has an interest in authoring me in an ethically responsible manner. This does not mean that the visions of strangers have no power over me, but that visions of those close to me will be more effective in making me see myself differently. Carrie' s point that our friends can see us more clearly than we can see ourselves may not be entirely true, but it makes sense that the views of the most trusted others around us are most potent in relation to our self-image. When such outside views are offered up by others we do not know, we are more likely to fall back into complicity with the cultural gaze. I should note another possible interpretation of Miranda's characterplot knot that concerns not visual but discursive control. On their first date, Miranda is still so stunned that a man should find her sexy that she lets him do almost all the talking, quietly accepting his compliments. On the second date, however, Miranda takes the initiative, talking confidently: "I like my life, I love my job, I love my friends, and I love meeting new people like you." When she leans over for a kiss, she is roughly rebuked. This behavior could easily be construed as sexist: everything was fine when the man was the dominant discursive partner and when Miranda seemed to need his validation, but now he is unable to deal with her when she comes to believe that she is sexy on her own. When we take this alternative interpretation into account, Miranda' s character-plot knot illustrates how it is often difficult to tell whether the other's views are healthier than our own, whether they are better than those validated by the cultural gaze. It may be that the ambivalence of the other's excess of seeing opens up room within us for negotiation with the images it makes possible. The embodied look's inherent ambivalence makes it potentially destabilizing in relation to the unequivocal images projected by the cultural gaze. The look, moreover, is more easily located than the gaze and thus more easily challenged. With the gaze, we are never sure where exactly its voyeuristic representations originate, which makes it hard to argue with it. With the embodied look, on the other hand, we can take its unique spatiotemporal situation into account when deciding whether its perspective is inwardly intelligible or not, whether it should displace our own vision of ourselves, the visions of others, or the representations imposed by the gaze. The four stories that comprise "The Real Me" configure the relation between look and gaze in different manners, elucidating the complexities

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of their interaction. Carrie's and Charlotte's character-plot knots stage the hard (but ultimately rewarding) road to the ability of seeing differently through the productive visual modes of the "active gift of love" and the "good enough," which both rely on elements fundamental to Bakhtin's excess of seeing: outsideness, distance, responsibility, and a return to self. Samantha' s and Miranda' s character-plot knots, on the other hand, underscore how look and gaze are often drawn into complicity, how even the friendliest look may consummate in line with oppressive representations and act, as it were, to push Narcissus into the pool. From this we may conclude that visual embodiment is materialized in the continuous, dynamic, and indeterminate interface between the situated look and the abstract gaze. 1" Excess of seeing, the "active gift of love," and the "good enough" endow the intersubjective look with power in the face of the gaze, a power that derives from a sustained distance between self and other, in terms of their actual spatiotemporal coordinates, their chronotopic situation, and the deferred temporality of psychic identifications. The intersubjective look functions, then, as a creative act circumscribed by a chronotopic environment, which differentiates the cultural gaze in the same way that it differentiates performativity. Like performative interpellations, the gaze, with its screen of normative representations, is never universal: valued and abjccted images will differ for each chronotope-in "The Real Me," they vary even between character chronotopes. Consequently, productive ways of seeing will also have to take on chronotope-specific forms. The chronotope thus remains at the center of identities-as-intersubjectivities, as an instrument of differentiation, the arbiter of belonging and nonbelonging. Such is also the case in Chapter 4, where I supplement the intersubjective eye with the intersubjective voice in order to examine the impact of vocal alterity on intersubjective identity construction.

The Intersubjective Voice: Dialogism and the Cultural Addressee

Voice-Over: Questioning the Addressee Complementary to, and intertwined with the intersubjective look, the intersubjective address-the speaking other and the other of speech-also contributes to chronotopic and performative processes of identity formation. For successful chronotopic belonging, fitting a verbal image is as important as fitting a visual one. Moreover, how we address our speech is vital to whether we will be heard. This lesson is substantiated both by the way Carrie' s episode-framing questions function within Sex and the City and by the way the voice of the other addresses itself and is received in Michael Apted's 1994 film Ne!!, the second cultural object that I study in this chapter. Nell features Jodie Foster in the title role as a so-called "wild woman" who is discovered near a small American town and speaks an "unknown" language. Nell has spent her entire life in the woods with her mother and her twin sister (who died as a child). Her mother left the town after being raped and suffered a stroke that caused her speech to become slurred. After her mother's death, Nell is discovered by the town doctor, Dr. Jerry Lovell (Liam Neeson), who, together with a psychiatrist, Dr. Paula Olsen (Natasha Richardson), sets out to decipher her strange language. This language eventually turns out to be a mangled form of English that mimics the mother's speech defect and models

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itself on the Bible. At the end of the film, during a court case that is to decide her future, Nell delivers a speech that is effortlessly translated into "proper" English by Jerry. By ameliorating her radical linguistic alterity, this speech qualifies Nell as a subject and allows her acceptance by the community. The story of Nell's enforced assimilation into the town community and its linguistic norms signals how social power relations traverse a subject's speech, intervening not only when utterances meet, but also a priori to determine which utterances actually qualify as utterances. The way Nell's story configures linguistic alterity as something that is actively disqualified and then appropriated suggests that alterity is sometimes stifled before it can enter into a dynamic relationship with the collective identity of a particular community. As such, the film speaks to-and in some ways against-Bakhtin's concept of dialogism. I have already indicated how Bakhtin distinguishes dialogism as a privileged form of intersubjectivity, one that institutes a productive exotopic relation with alterity. As a concept, dialogism refers first to the structural, involuntary relations of responsiveness among utterances, voices, and subjects. It points to the way every object of language "has already been articulated, disputed, elucidated and evaluated in various ways" (Bakhtin 1986b: 93). In this guise, dialogism was taken up by Julia Kristeva and developed into intertextuality. 1 Second, dialogism appears as a strategy for establishing productive intersubjective relations among individuals, social groups, and cultures. The aim of dialogism in this sense is to produce what Bakhtin variously calls "sympathetic understanding" (1990a: 103), "creative understanding" (1986a: 7), and "active responsive understanding" (1986b: 69), all founded not so much on a coming together of self and other as on their sustained difference and exteriority to one another. 2 Exceeding dialogue proper (as a back-and-forth discussion between two or more speakers) and in juxtaposition with dialectics (as a teleological move toward synthesis), dialogism denotes an active social strategy for interacting with alterity that implies neither negation nor assimilation. Less a figure of harmonious agreement than one of sustained difference, dialogism functions, in the words of Paul de Man, as "a principle of radical otherness" whose aim it is to "sustain and think through the radical exteriority and heterogeneity of one voice with regard to any other" (1989:

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109). Dialogism marks the acknowledgment and preservation of this vocal alterity, implying an attitude of ethical responsibility or an "ethics of alterity" that cannot be taken for granted (Sandywell 1998: 196). In Gender Trouble, Butler critiques liberal coalition or dialogue feminists by pointing to the cultural and historical specificity of the notion of dialogue and by arguing that "the power relations that condition and limit dialogic possibilities need first to be interrogated" in order not to relapse into a Habermasian model that assumes equality and shared presuppositions and goals (1999: 20). In this chapter, therefore, I theorize not so much dialogism itself as its preconditions: the power relations that condition and limit its occurrence by excluding certain speakers from subjectivity altogether. I do this by combining Bakhtin's concept of the superaddressee and Voloshinov's related notion of the potential addressee into an agency that I conceptualize as the cultural addressee. This agency relates the voice and ear of the individual speaker/listener to the collective voice and ear of a particular chronotopic community, circumscribing its attitude toward radical alterity. Tied to the voice or tongue (tongue-tied, as it were), the cultural addressee signifies the utterance's orientation toward a potential understanding that functions as a precondition for its being spoken and for its being heard. I approach the cultural addressee through an examination of the audiovisual rendering of vocal alterity in both Sex and the City (SatC) and Nell. Both objects, in their respective use of voice-over and voice-off, prompt a splitting of the voice's addressivity into, first, the embodied ear of the actual listener and, second, a much less substantive auditive agency. In SatC, the cultural addressee is metaphorically represented through the operation of Carrie's voice-over and its episode-framing questions within the series' narrative, auditory, and visual structure. When Carrie formulates these questions, she is usually alone in her apartment, writing on her laptop computer. No direct, personal addressee is available. Of course, the narrative frame of Carrie' s job as a columnist would cast her readers in the role of personal addressees. We could even imagine the questions breaking out of the diegesis altogether to address SatC' s viewers the world over. But the visual and auditory structure of the scenes suggests another possibility. Posing the questions in voice-over instantly detaches the wordsspatially and temporally-from Carrie's enunciating presence. The sound

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is there and so is the body, but her lips do not move. The split between image and sound intimates that Carrie's words do not emanate from her, but pronounce themselves upon her, exceeding the situation of utterance and the visual frame. In addition to this spatial distancing, the voiceover introduces a temporal disjunction or, to borrow Silverman's term, a "temporal regression" (1988: 52) between speaker and utterance: "I got to

thinking ... " Carrie' s voice-over cannot be straightforwardly categorized in filmtheoretical terms. In "The Voice in the Cinema," Mary-Ann Doane distinguishes the intradiegetic subjectivity of interior monologue-"the privileged mark of interiority, turning the body inside-out" (1980: 41)from the interpretative detachment of commentary voice-over, which features a "radical otherness with respect to the diegesis" (42). Carrie' s voiceover, unquestionably interpretative but at the same time closely linked to her body and thoughts, appears as both at once, destabilizing the distinction between intradiegetic and extradiegetic filmic space. In The Acoustic Mirror, Silverman associates the "embodied voiceover" with an autobiographical self-revelation that transforms private into public, where "no distance separates teller from tale" (1988: 53). Although Carrie's voice-over is largely autobiographical, linked to a newspaper column that makes her private thoughts public, her role as a journalist creates a certain distance between her thoughts and her stories. Moreover, unlike Silverman's embodied voice-over, which is overheard without its speaker's consent and situated at the heart of the diegesis, Carrie' s voice-over speaks voluntarily, wants to be heard, and occupies a privileged position of enunciation at the edge of the diegesis. Carrie' s voice-over also undermines the device's traditional gendering. Silverman argues that classical cinema works to confine the female voice to the diegesis, depriving it of the anonymous authority bestowed upon the nonsynchronized, nonembodied male voice-over. One way to achieve this is by relegating the female voice to an "inner textual space," a text within a text, so that it is "doubly diegeticized," overheard both internally and externally (1988: 57). In SatC, Carrie's column functions as a text within a text, but her relation of authorship to this text and the text's dominant position in the diegesis-each episode appears as a visualization of one of Carrie's columns, so that the column is both inside and above the narrative-repositions the female voice-over as a point of enunciation

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that can be diegeticized, embodied, and can itself contain aspects of discursive authority. SatC, however, does not leave the equating of authorship with authority unscathed. The precarious-and essentially impossibledistribution of Carrie' s voice-over across different levels of enunciation emphasizes how even an authoritative voice-over can only ever pose as the point of discursive origin, one aligned with the apparatus, but never fully equal to it. 3 The voice-over, Silverman writes, "can never be more than a fictional inscription of a productive activity which is itself situated outside the film, and dispersed over a wide range of technological and human agencies" (1988: 51). Carrie's voice-over, which is at the same time contained and containing, enunciated and enunciating, destabilizes the device's claim to diegetic authority by enacting at once the fantasy of discursive control and the inevitable alterity of the utterance in relation to its speaker. Carrie' s words will not remain linked to her lips, but will travel on their own, both in the concrete form of her column and in other more elusive ways. Carrie's unsettling encounter with her words and image plastered on the side of a bus in SatC' s opening credits is a case in point. While the point about the speaker's lack of discursive control may seem rather obvious, SatC adds another theoretical layer by extending this loss of authority to the question's addressee. In several episodes, after the voice-over poses the question, the camera pans out of Carrie' s apartment window, moving upward as it zooms out, as if taking the question to a higher level. The same effect occurs when Carrie is shown through the window from the outside, typing a question on her laptop so that the window inserts itself as a literal barrier between the moment of utterance and its eventual receptions. In this way, the visual and auditory levels combine to diffuse the question's source as well as its direction. Dislodged from mouth and ear, the question is displaced; it addresses itself to some other place-but where? Laplanche has suggested that every intersubjective message is ultimately "provoked by the 'nameless public,' 'scattered into the future,' who will receive (or not) this message in a bottle" (1999: m). In the first-season SatC episode called "The Drought," Carrie asks: "How often is normal?" first addressing herself, then her girlfriends, then the whole of New York. Over a shot of a crowded street-a powerful visualization of Laplanche's

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nameless public or enigmatic addressee-we hear Carrie's voice-over citing some (fairly questionable) statistics: There arc 1.3 million single men in New York. 1.8 million single women. And of these more than 3 million people, about 12 think they're having enough sex. How often is normal? Here, the personal addressees are neatly separated in different shots from the enigmatic addressee, as though one comes after the other, moving from specific to general. Laplanche, however, points to their inherent simultaneity: the intersubjective message addresses the nameless crowd at the same time. In fact, the individual addressee functions almost as an excuse for addressing the enigmatic addressee, an alibi for releasing a message in a bottle or, to invoke another of Laplanche' s metaphors, for leaving a sign in the desert. Read this way, Carrie's original query as to whether she is having enough sex with her boyfriend already questions the crowd and its shared normativity. Asking what is "normal" within her particular community, the question refers to chronotopic belonging. Significantly, the crowd here is not abstract, nameless, or placed in an undefined futurity, but concrete, situated, and contemporary, invoking less the metaphor of a message in a bottle than that of an advertising billboard or, as the episode suggests, a computer screen. At the words "How often is normal?" the camera cuts to an extreme close-up of Carrie's computer screen, where we see the question appear letter by letter. The question's materialization on the shot-filling blue screen dissociates it from both author and concrete addressees. As a form of writing, it evokes Derrida's notion of iterability as a structural potential for repetition with difference, which enables the letter to break with "the collectivity of presences organizing the moment of its inscription" (1988: 9). As digital or virtual writing, it recalls the acceleration of iterability Derrida associates with the new technomedia, where the time of the present is divided from itself, place is freed from territorial rootedness, and the singular logic of the event becomes evermore immediately intertwined with the repetitive logic of the machine (2002: 210). 4 In other words, virtuality signals the accelerated, enhanced interference of alterity in identity. The digital word's lack of presence is symbolized by the immediate and infinite possibility for cutting, copying, and deleting that the computer

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screen permits. As Jay David Bolter has argued, "the natural inclination of computer writing is to change, to grow, and finally to disappear" (1991: 31), hence, our obsession with "saving" our files. The ephemeral, rewritable nature of digital text also installs a distance between text and author. The writer is displaced from the center to the text's margins and becomes "a point in a sequence of a continuously transformed matrix of signification" (Poster 2001: 91). As such, digital text actualizes Bakhtin' s chain of utterances into which each utterance takes its place regardless of the speaker's intentions. The transformation from chain to matrix is significant: the computer and the hypertextual universe of the Internet turn the chain from something chronological into a simultaneous system, where it is no longer clear what came before or after. Digital text appears not as original but, according to George Landow, in a prescient evocation of two terms that are central to my later chapters, as an "easily copiable and modifiable version" or "simulacrum" (1992: 19). The close-up of the computer screen, with its unstable pixels, exiles Carrie' s authorship to the offscreen space, suggesting that control over the text is lost the moment her fingers touch the keyboard. 5 The question exists in the semimaterial virtuality that is seen but cannot be touched. Digital text lacks the specificity of handwriting and the intervention of keyboard and screen removes any immediate physical link to the author. It would seem as if it were not Carrie who is writing, but a more enigmatic author, visualized by the provocatively blinking cursor, which always appears on the brink of writing (or erasing) on its own accord. 6 The same applies to the addressee. Reproducing digital text is more straightforward than reproducing handwriting or typewriting. This means that digital text can address itself again and again. As such, digital text makes us feel our lack of control over what we write and whom it addresses.? As digital writing, Carrie' s query transforms the temporality of Laplanche's enigmatic addressee. The computer, with its propensity for immediate but distant communications like e-mail and instant messaging, is an appropriate metaphor for the way our words are addressed not so much to a nameless future public, but to a nameless crowd that intervenes at the moment of enunciation. The implicit addressee is no longer deferred into an unknown and uncertain future, but appears as an immediate alterity that invades the utterance before it reaches the individual addressee.

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Thus, whereas Laplanche conceptualizes the concrete addressee as an alibi for the enigmatic one, who stands behind the former in another, future time and place, "The Drought" suggests a reversal: Carrie can only address the individual addressee (her boyfriend, whom she does not dare ask whether they are having enough sex) through the implicit addressees of crowd and screen. The enigmatic address becomes the condition for the intersubjective address; it has to sanction the question before it can reach the other. As in Derrida's spectral hauntology, the absolute alterity of the specter has to be addressed before we can address concrete others: "such an address is not only already possible, but ... it will have at all times conditioned, as such, address in general" (1994: n). The spectral address precedes the intersubjective address. Yet, Derrida's spectral addressee, as an ascetically messianic and featureless "alterity that cannot be anticipated," an "awaiting without horizon of the wait," cannot be relied upon for answers: it is someone or something "from whom or from which one will not ask anything in return" (1994: 65). As with Laplanche's enigmatic addressee, the speaker is passive in the face of it; given over to "a necessarily indeterminate, abstract, desert-like experience that is confided, exposed, given up to its waiting for the other and for the event" (Derrida 1994: 90). Their shared desert metaphor binds Derrida and Laplanche to an abstract addressee who tends toward the transcendental. Neither theorist, then, is able to account for the active urgency of Carrie' s questions, which expect to be heard and answered in the present. Far from leaving a sign in the desert or attending to an undefined entity with no guarantee of reply, her acute questioning of crowd and screen summons a more responsive and socially defined agency. All of Carrie' s questions ask the same thing: What is normal or, more accurately, normative in my environment? This question addresses itself to the system of norms and values produced by her chronotope so that her questions not only appear on the screen, but also ask something of the screen, read as a metaphor for Lacan's screen of normative representations through which the cultural gaze photographs its subjects. I suggest that the visual regime of the cultural gaze is paralleled by a vocal regime, a screen of normative linguistic representations through which what I call the cultural addressee speaks and writes its subjects, imposing limits on their vocal selfconstructions. I develop the concept of the cultural addressee, whose form

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is, again, not universal but specific to each chronotope, through a combinatory reading of Bakhtin' s superaddressee and Voloshinov' s potential addressee. 8

From Superaddressee to Cultural Addressee In "The Problem of the Text" (r986c), Bakhtin describes the superaddressee as follows: 9 But apart from this addressee (the "second") the author of the utterance more or less consciously supposes a higher "superaddressee" (the "third"), whose absolutely just responsive understanding is supposed either at a metaphysical distance or in distant historical time. 10 The superaddressee bears an active relationship with the word, imparting an exotopic validation to the subject's speech in which distance is once again crucial. Bakhtin' s qualification of this distance as metaphysical and historical implies a greater remove than that operative in excessive vision. However, the speaker's active orientation toward the superaddressee and his confidence that he will be understood differentiates this address-ata-distance from the spectral and the enigmatic address. The presence of an active presumption of responsive understanding belies Derrida' s uncertain waiting without horizon as well as the disinterested, passive parenthesis of "(or not)" in Laplanche's remark that the artwork is "provoked by the 'nameless public,' 'scattered into the future,' who will receive (or not) this message in a bottle" (1999: m). Although with Laplanche the desire is always for someone to understand the message and explain its meaning, it is uncertain whether anyone will ever find the message, let alone decipher it, since it is ultimately addressed to the unconscious. 11 Moreover, where Laplanche places the enigmatic addressee behind the individual addressee, Bakhtin elevates the superaddressee to a level above both speaker and addressee: Every dialogue occurs as it were against the background of the responsive understanding of an invisibly present "third," standing above all participants of a dialogue (partners). (Trans. in Brandist 2002: 169) The superaddressee, then, is the metalevel construct to which both speaker and listener look in order to learn what can and cannot be said, what will

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and will not be understood. It defines intelligibility and, as such, is both before and after speech, enveloping it in all directions as both its precondition and aspiration. It could be said that the superaddressee appears as the mise-en-scene of speech: less a neutral background than the place where it is actively staged or framed. Bakhtin' s superaddressee is distant in the sense that its responsive understanding is linked not to individual others, but to a more complex cultural other, a higher faculty located above concrete interaction and thus in a position to condition and even guarantee it. If subjects did not feel that their utterances were intelligible at this level, they might not speak at all. Their certainty that somewhere and sometime they will be understood leads them to take the risk of being misunderstood by others close at hand. My interpretation of Bakhtin's superaddressee differs from that of other critics, who have argued that it signifies an ideal, abstract, or even transcendental instance of eternally deferred understanding that never receives concrete form. Brandist views the superaddressee as a godlike instance, an "eternally deferred supreme judge who views the social world from without" (2002: 171). Hirschkop, too, emphasizes its all-seeing, allpowerful dimension, defining the superaddressee as "a disinterested, suprahuman perspective" (1998: 583), as an ideal interlocutor who "somehow, beyond our fate in actual history, redeems our words by understanding them correctly" (2004: 397), and as a judge "with tools more reliable than the ones endlessly improvised and improved upon by humanity itself" (1999: 295). While these readings are supported by Bakhtin's undeniable religiosity and his placing of the superaddressee at a metaphysical and historical distance, they underplay the active orientation and expectation Bakhtin ascribes to the speaker and thus bar the superaddressee from functioning as the addressee of Carrie's acute questionings of the distinct present of Manhattan. Bakhtin's sparse remarks on the subject suggest a different interpretation. For one, the superaddressee is not directly addressed, but appears as background to our interaction with concrete interlocutors. Rather than circumventing the actual other, the superaddressee is the condition for, and product of, the intersubjective address, outside of which it has no function or existence. Furthermore, the superaddressee is not abstract, nameless, or faceless, but takes on different names in different eras and cultures:

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I09

In different epochs and according to different understandings of the world this superaddressee and its absolutely correct responsive understanding acquired various ideological expressions (God, absolute truth, the court of dispassionate human conscience, the people, the court of history etc.). (Trans. in Brandist 2002: 169) This changes the superaddressee from a universal ideal into a socially, historically, and ideologically variable construct, located in the social world rather than beyond it. The superaddressee, in outlining an epoch's or a community's specific norms of intelligibility, provides the utterance with a defined direction and, although this direction may at times be expressed as God, it is not a divine entity in itself. 12 The superaddressee is not given the same form by all people, nor can each speaker shape it at will. Like the chronotope, it is an intersubjectively constituted and maintained tradition of expression that comes to govern the subjects that speak (to) it. It receives a shape before the individual addresses it and requires the intelligible utterance to be shaped in accordance with its particular expression at that time and place. Despite Bakhtin's reference to an "absolutely correct responsive understanding," neither this understanding nor its correctness is universal. The superaddressee assumes "various ideological expressions" in various sociohistorical contexts and is true only to the particular form it is given in these contexts. 13 It is even possible for the superaddressee to receive an expression that removes its guarantee of understanding. This happens in "the Fascist torture-chamber or 'Hell' in Thomas Mann," which stands, according to Bakhtin, for "the absolute 'unheardness'" or "the absolute absence of a 'third'" (trans. in Brandist 2002: r69). Both the presence and the absence of an absolute understanding depend, therefore, on particular social organizations. The superaddressee, whatever shape it receives, is never truly that shape. In essence, it remains "a constitutive aspect of the whole utterance," a structural expression of "the nature of the word, which always wants to be heard, always seeks responsive understanding, and does not stop at immediate understanding but presses on further and further (indefinitely)" (Bakhtin r986c: 126-27, emphasis in the original). The superaddressee thus marks a position that can be filled in many ways, but is always there. Unlike Laplanche's enigmatic addressee or Derrida's specter, however, it does not remain indefinite, but is required to be filled by a specific ideological expression before the subject can speak with the confidence that she

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will be heard. This is not simply whatever the speaker wants to imagine but what the speaker needs to imagine if she is to speak intelligibly. 14 Carrie's acute questioning of both the contemporary crowd and the computer screen invokes an active force of linguistic regulation rooted in her own community. Such a force is recognizable in a reading of Bakhtin that goes beyond his view of language as expression and representation while reconceptualizing the superaddressee as the chronotope-specific and performatively shaped horizon or bouncing wall of speech. This active regulatory force is perhaps more immediately perceptible in Voloshinov's work than in Bakhtin's. In "Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art," Voloshinov delineates two social aspects of the utterance's addressivity: the third participant and choral support. The third participant is defined as the personified object of the utterance, characterized as "nameless" and "verging on apostrophe." When taken to its extreme, this third participant "becomes the source of a mythological image, the incantation, the prayer, as was the case in the earliest stages of culture" (1976b: 103). Here, we encounter once more the featureless, messianic agency of address. However, the second social aspect of the utterance's addressivity ties the third participant to a concrete community and its specific notion of intelligibility. Voloshinov uses the term choral support to denote the utterance's relation to "the assumed community of values belonging to the social milieu wherein the discourse figures." If choral support is lacking, "the voice falters" and the utterance becomes unintelligible (103). Choral support, then, refers the utterance's addressivity to the discursive norms of a specific, situated community. Voloshinov elaborates on this idea in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, where he argues that each utterance is destined for a presupposed or potential addressee, who takes the form of "a normal representative of the social group to which the speaker belongs" (1986: 85). This addressee is emphatically not abstract or universal, because, according to Voloshinov, "even though we sometimes have pretensions to experiencing and saying things urbi et orbi, actually, of course, we envision this 'world at large' through the prism of the concrete social milieu surrounding us" (85). Each person therefore has a more or less stable social audience that limits the scope of the potential addressee: "specific class and specific era are limits that the ideal of addressee cannot go beyond" (86).

The Intersubjective Voice

III

There is no ambiguity here: Voloshinov' s notions of the potential addressee and choral support do not stand above the speech community, but constitute it, cementing it together. Members of a speech community do not imagine themselves understood by a transcendental entity, but by those around them: "I give myself verbal shape from another's point of view, ultimately, from the point of view of the community to which I belong" (1986: 86). Accordingly, Carrie strives to shape her utterances to the norms of the Manhattan crowd in order to be understood by its individual members. Voloshinov, earlier and more unequivocally than Bakhtin, outlines the function of what I call the cultural addressee, defined as the conditional limit of meaningful speech, as that which exposes us to being spoken and allows us to speak in our specific chronotopic contexts. Michael Holquist moves toward the cultural addressee when he defines the superaddressee as "the particular image in which [speakers] model the belief that they will be understood, a belief that is the a priori of all speech" (1986: xviii). Although Holquist, too, detects a "God concept" (xviii) in Bakhtin' s superaddressee, his reference to the speaker's modeling activity indicates how the superaddressee appears in the form not of a general but of a particular (that is, socially and historically specific) image that imposes itself on the speaker. Moreover, Holquist hints that if speech is not modeled on this image, it becomes meaningless "babble" (xviii). The cultural addressee is an a priori category that, in particular chronotopic contexts, takes on specific ideological shapes that must be taken into account if I want to make sense. To be intelligible, I need to understand-consciously or unconsciously-the expression that the cultural addressee is given in order to find the correct way to address it, or, as Althusser might say, to subject myself to it. This is because the cultural addressee fulfills a function similar to Althusser's "Absolute Subject" in whose mirror-image ideology compels the subject to subject itself: the Absolute Subject occupies the unique place of the Centre, and interpellates around it the infinity of individuals into subjects in a double mirror-connexion such that it subjects the subjects to the Subject, while giving them in the Subject in which each subject can contemplate its own image (present and future) the guarantee that this really concerns them and Him, and that since everything takes place in the Family ... "God will recognize his own in it," i.e., those who have recognized God, and have recognized themselves in Him, will be saved. (1971: r8o)

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Ideologies offer a guarantee of understanding and recognition on the condition that the subject models itself to an understandable and recognizable image. The guarantee is therefore conditional and conditioned. Both the Absolute Subject and the cultural addressee appear as structural positions receiving specific ideological expression, of which religion is but the most obvious form. The reason for invoking Althusser is that he, more directly than Bakhtin or Voloshinov, foregrounds the coercive nature of the process of interpellation (of being hailed by and addressing oneself to the reigning ideology): one is saved only if one complies, and wayward answers to the interpellation will simply not be acknowledged. The cultural addressee marks an internal understanding similarly predicated on exclusion and compulsion. Nell exposes this coercive dimension of the cultural addressee. Through its use of voice-off, the film suggests that the realization of dialogism and success in taking responsibility for radical alterity depend not just on a basic ability or willingness to speak and listen, but on the particular shape in which the cultural addressee appears, a shape that circumscribes ability and willingness and, consequently, may close both mouth and ear to alterity.

Voice-Off: Between Sound and Word In The Voice in Cinema, Michel Chion theorizes sound without a visible on-screen source, using the term acousmetre. Voice-off relates specifically to the human voice divorced from a visibly speaking mouth. In contrast to the voice-over, it speaks not over the image, but from its intradiegetic margins. The acousmetre "must, even if only slightly, have one foot in the image, in the space of the film; he [sic] must haunt the borderlands that are neither the interior of the filmic stage nor the prosceniuma place that has no name, but which the camera forever brings into play" (1999: 24). Chion associates the voice-off with (masculine) authority, panopticism, and omniscience. Silverman, for her part, invests it with a "threat of absence" (r988: 48). Although the source of the voice-off is usually locatable, there is always a chance it will remain in hiding. Voice-off more closely than voice-over approximates Derrida' s specter as a present-absent trace of marginality and paradoxical incorporation. Like the voice-off, which we cannot answer because of its lack of origin, the specter is an all-seeing agency that does not allow us to look into

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its eyes: "it is someone who watches me or concerns me without any possible reciprocity" (Derrida and Stiegler 2002: 121). However, whereas Derrida considers the voice the one graspable element of the specter-"we must fall back on its voice. The one who says 'I am thy Father's spirit' can only be taken at his word" (1994: 7)-voice-off makes the voice itself seem spectral, something to be heard but not touched, sensuous and nevertheless nonsensuous. Significantly, Derrida's specter makes use of the visor effect-the ability to see without being seen-and of an accompanying ability to speak and hear voices, to become a "spectral rumor" whose resonance invades everything (1994: 135). In Nell, voice-off appears as just such a spectral rumor, an auditory (dis)incarnation or dissonance whose embodiment paradoxically weakens its authority, like the specter that "disappears in its very embodiment" (Derrida 1994: 6). Both voice-off and specter announce a dangerous proliferation of meaning, creating a desire to pin down the errant voice/image onto a living or even dead body (matter). As Derrida argues, the specter compels knowledge: "to know is to know who and where, to know whose body it really is and what place it occupies-for it must stay in its place. In a safe place" (9). My reading of the way the voice-off is configured in the plot established around the film's heroine will show that this desire to know and, by knowing, to keep the other from haunting us, drives Nell' s narrative. Nell opens with a wide, high-angle tracking shot of a forest, over which we hear a mumbling or singing sound that may or may not be human. For Chion, this type of acousmetre enhances the "corporeal implication" by which the viewer comes to identify with the source of the sound: The extreme case of corporeal implication occurs when there is no dialogue or words, but only closely present breathing or groans or sighs. We often have as much difficulty distancing ourselves from this to the degree that the sex, age, and identity of the one who thus breathes, groans, and suffers aren't marked in the voice. It could be me, you, he, she. (1999: 53)

Here, however, corporeal identification is hampered by the fact that we cannot be sure we are indeed dealing with a human voice. The allcomprising angle of the shot folds the sound into the film's diegetic space and codes it as something otherworldly, as potentially nonhuman. We see no sign of human presence and the only other audible sounds come from

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equally invisible birds. As the first step toward the film's later definition of Nell as a "wild woman," the opening scene corroborates Doane's identification of the voice-off as "asynchronous or wild sound" (1980: 35). Later, the process of embodying the acousmetre is initiated through a series of extreme close-ups showing young female hands and fingers grooming an old woman, eventually putting flowers on a pair of closed eyes. Over the close-ups, we hear the exact same sounds as before, now associated with fingers and hands. This preliminary association of the voice to a body turns the disembodied sound into a voice-off, manifestly human and female. However, the full anchoring of voice in a body is withheld, as it only occurs when we see the speaking mouth. The hands and fingers are as disembodied as the bodiless voice, which remains spectral in its "paradoxical phenomenality" (Derrida 1994: 7). The full embodiment of the voice-off is seen when the town sheriff takes the town doctor, Jerry Lovell, to a wood cabin where an old woman has been found dead. When Jerry explores the cabin, he catches a glimpse of a young woman in a mirror and turns to see her crouched high up between several wooden beams. Sensing she has been seen, she starts moaning and, at this precise moment, the viewer recognizes her as the source of the voice-off. Although fully identified within our field of vision, Nell' s animal-like posture, frightened look, dirty face, and faded dress immediately suggest that the fact of having found her body might not be enough to guarantee human responsibility, meaning, and presence for her utterances. The embodiment of the stray voice-off in an equally "wild" and wayward body does not suffice to "reconstitute an integrated body, voice, and name, an acousmetre that could henceforth be circumscribed, understood, mastered" (Chion 1999: 35). Flesh and blood cannot exorcise Nell's radical alterity nor assuage the threat of absence it represents. The town community fears the indeterminacy of Nell' s voice and body and seeks to control it by making Nell' s voice all body, all form without content, invoking what Silverman, in The Acoustic Mirror, describes as classical cinema's "identification of the female voice with an intractable materiality, and its consequent alienation from meaning" (1988: 61). Silverman distinguishes three methods by which cinema achieves the materialization of the female voice: folding the female voice into an inner textual space (as discussed in relation to Carrie's voice-over); confining the female voice to the fantasmatic interiority of involuntary utterance (the "talking

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cure"); or having the body inundate the female voice, emphasizing its physicality through accent, impediment, grain, or timbre. Nell appears as an extreme case of the latter, as a "vocal corporalization" that features the "submersion of the female voice in the female body, and results in linguistic incapacity and a general vulnerability" (61). Conceiving Nell's speech as a purely physical, instinctual expression of her body reduces voice to matter and restricts the "migratory potential" expressed by the voice-off (84). In Voloshinov's terms (1986: 68), Nell's utterances are perceived not as signs (social, ideological, and appealing to understanding), but as signals (singular, nonreferential, appealing to recognition) or even stimuli (physiological reflexes associated with animals). What is more, the first full image of Nell, which shows her framed by wooden beams, positions her body as visually "captured" within the diegesis. Her narrative interiority is further accentuated when Jerry and Paula proceed to observe and monitor her with tape recorders, video cameras, and binoculars. The way they scrutinize Nell' s often naked body, eavesdrop on her, and compel her to speak brings together all three strategies for materializing the female voice described by Silverman. Nell's words are involuntary (she does not speak spontaneously but is made to speak) and incessantly submitted to analysis, they bear the ultimate bodily accent of an "unknown language," and, after being recorded, they become a text within a text, to be interpreted and commented upon by the other characters. Thus, Nell's voice and body are seen, heard, and spoken by the other in a manner that puts her subjectivity under complete diegetic control: unlike Carrie, she does not tell, but is told. With or without a body, Nell' s words lack authority and authorship. This lack returns us to Spivak's reading of Echo. For Spivak, Echo represents a move from body to voice that metaphorizes the origin-obliterating functioning of Derrida' s trace or remainder: "at first there is nothing but voice and desiccated body. Finally, there is nothing but voice" (Spivak 1996: 185). The physical nature of language is overcome as the trace removes itself from the originating place, time, and body. Nell moves in the opposite direction: her disembodied voice-off becomes a voice sutured to a metonymical series of body parts and finally to a simultaneously inadequate and overwhelming body. 15 Materiality is added rather than subtracted; yet there is no restoration of the mark to full meaning, presence, or discursive authority.

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Whereas Echo comes to stand for the Derridean trace only after losing her body, Nell stands for the trace in voice and in body, indicating how the trace does not come after the material mark, but inheres in the mark's very materiality. The materiality of language is a product of its cumulative materializations; there is therefore no hope of ever recovering the original mark as the mark that truly matters, the one that will restore language to a stable signification. Nell's voice-off, which threatens absence even after its embodiment, suggests that a recovered body does not always tame a wild voice, nor transform materiality into matter, nor exorcize the specter. If the voice remains incongruous even in its body, any move toward an original stability is foreclosed. The metaphor of the voice as having "body" is lost to the arbitrary contiguity of metonymy: the voice is linked to the body, but the two do not fully explain one another. The containment of Nell' s voice also signals the dependency of vocal alterity on the other's recognition of the utterance as bearing the right address. Whereas Spivak argues that Echo's loss of body points to the "risk of response" that is "obliged to be imperfectly and interceptively responsive to another's desire, if only for the self-separation of speech" (1996: 185), Nell's disavowed speech suggests that this risk is not confined to the response, but inheres in language's address. Nell's speech is not interceptive (active), but intercepted (passive). It is denied presence, body, meaning, and identity not only by the self-separation of speech but also by the socially authoritative other. As the product of a rape committed in the community, Nell marks a haunting alterity within the community's identity. But as long as her words are not received as signs, they will effectively mean nothing, just as Echo's marking of dijfirance remains without effect as long as it is not recognized by Narcissus. Nell's voice may be anchored in her own body, but it is not anchored in the communal body. In Voloshinov' s terms, it lacks choral support. To keep the communal body safe and to neutralize Nell's vocal alterity, her utterances either have to be made to conform to the community's understanding of intelligibility, its cultural addressee, or be decoded as meaningless. Thus, while the community on the one hand seeks to translate Nell' s utterances into "proper" English, on the other hand, it interprets her speechand her deliberate silence when incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital-as sound/quietude instead of word/silence. The distinction is Bakhtin's:

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Quietude and silence (the absence of the word) .... The disturbance of quietude by sound is mechanical and physiological (as a condition of perception); the disturbance of silence by the word is personalistic and intelligible: it is an entirely different world. In quietude nothing makes a sound (or something does not make a sound); in silence nobody speaks (or somebody does not speak). Silence is possible only in the human world (and only for a person). Of course, both quietude and silence are always relative. (r986d: 133)

The voice-off in Nelf' s opening scene places itself on the dividing line between sound and word, making it uncertain whether what is broken is quietude or silence, whether it involves a person or a nonperson. This ambiguity is maintained throughout most of the film, until we learn that Nell does not speak an "unknown" language after all, but a broken form of English taken mostly from the Bible, using the Lord as a perfectly respectable addressee. Nell' s oscillation between word and sound shows the relativity of the distinction (noted by Bakhtin) and identifies the border between quietude/ silence and sound/word as a socioideological construct, collectively established and patrolled. This constructed border may compromise the political weight of silence. As Hitchcock notes, "there is no single strategy for positioning oneself with respect to silence, partly because that place is beyond voluntarism and volition (formed therefore by more than this or that individual consciousness or praxis)" (2003: 97). Meaningful silence is not simply the act of someone who does not speak, but of someone who is recognized by others as withholding words rather than sounds. By defining Nell's utterances as sounds rather than words, the community disavows her as a subject and alleviates the dangerous implications of a form of speech that straddles both categories. This is why the embodiment of Nell's voice-off strengthens the threat of absence: coming from nowhere, the voice-off could be dismissed as mere sound. With the voiceoff linked to Nell's lips, however, it now becomes a word: an unintelligible word that is far more threatening than an unintelligible sound. This threat prompts the community's desire to assimilate Nell and to subject her to its shared cultural addressee, which intervenes not so much after words have been spoken, but before anyone can even speak, before sound becomes word and "it" becomes "1." The cultural addressee determines who can speak as well as who can be silent.

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The Intersubjective Voice Dialogism as Disagreement

Before Nell can address herself to the community's cultural addressee, she has to acknowledge its interpellation and subject herself to its rule. This subjection occurs in the court scene, which marks a shift from external judgment (by Jerry and Paula) to internal self-judgment. Nell's voluntary, intelligible address to the court, and the fact that the judge's verdict is never shown, confirm this utterance as self-judgment. Mter Nell acts out her inner subjection to the community's cultural addressee by speaking in a way that "makes sense," even if it still requires translation, the external verdict becomes redundant. I want to theorize this moment by way of Bakhtin' s concept of the "supraperson" or "supra-I." Whereas the superaddressee is an exterior construct that precedes and exceeds individual subjects, the supra-I, appropriately metaphorized as witness and judge, relates to "man's self-awareness" (1986d: 137). Derived from the external other, it is an internalized agency that judges the self from the inside as if it were other in relation to it: the supraperson, the supra-!, that is, the witness and the judge of the whole human being, of the whole I, and consequently someone who is no longer the person, no longer the I, but the other. The reflection of the self in the empirical other through whom one must pass in order to reach !-for-myself. (1986d: 137) 16

Nell's problem is not that she was ever without a supra-I, but that this witness and judge represented a cultural addressee shared only with her mother and sister, both of whom are not only dead but, more important, repudiated by the community's fantasy of Nell as a presubjective "wild child." Not recognized as members of Nell's first speech community, they appear as nonvoices, nonspecters, forever inaudible and visible only in the materially consistent (nonparadoxical) form of death: as corpse and skeleton, respectively. With neither mother nor sister, Nell's cultural addressee loses its intersubjective dimension and can no longer guarantee subjectivity or any understanding for her voice. In Voloshinov's terms, Nell is reduced to a pure !-experience, signifying "the inability of the consciousness to strike social roots" and tending toward "extermination" and "the physiological reaction of the animal" (1986: 88). At the opposite end of the spectrum, Voloshinov situates the we-experience, which indicates not a "nebulous

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herd experience" but a differentiated social system that "allows of different degrees and different types of ideological structuring" (88). In Nell's case, in order to make sense of her new social surroundings, she has to remodel both herself and her voice on the image of the town's cultural addressee, which appears as a we-experience with a low level of ideological differentiation. Because of this, it does not welcome Nell's voice as a potential enrichment, but aims to assimilate it completely. A final moment of resistance to assimilation occurs, however, in the ostensibly harmonious closing scene of the film, set five years after the main story. During a community picnic, Nell takes Jerry and Paula's young daughter to the lake and begins playing with her the idiosyncratic game she used to play with her twin sister, teaching the girl all her words and gestures. When they finish, Nell instructs her: "Remember this." She preserves her previous voice, body, and self by sharing them with the little girl, countering the process of enforced abandonment that filled most of the film. The creation of a discursively and bodily shared memory lays the foundations not only for the recovery of the we-experience that Nell shared with her mother and sister but also for the renewed differentiation of the town's we-experience. Such differentiation, according to Voloshinov, provides the subject with a "more vivid and complex" inner world (1986: 88), enabling it to address itself to a more inclusive cultural addressee. In its entirety, Nell' s story bears out how the cultural addressee expresses the norms of discursive intelligibility in a particular chronotope, fulfilling a function in relation to intersubjective speech which is similar to that of the cultural gaze in relation to intersubjective vision. Together, cultural gaze and cultural addressee establish a regime of seeing and speaking in whose image we have to live and speak in order to be seen and heard. We are both given-to-be-seen and given-to-be-heard by our chronotope. The role assumed by the voice-off in relation to Nell' s character underscores the normative nature of the cultural addressee; the way it can preclude any dialogic interaction with the radically other, the way it can act both to unite and to separate subjects. For dialogism to occur-between subjects or between cultures-each party needs to accept and understand the other party's cultural addressee, without attempting to engulf it within its own. As Butler notes in Undoing Gender, we need to "encounter the difference that calls our grids of intelligibility into question without trying to foreclose the challenge that the difference delivers" (2004: 35). Dialogism is

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possible only under a cultural addressee that values difference over sameness, understanding over recognition, and transformation over assimilation. In Derrida's words, "respect for the alterity of the other dictates respect for the ghost" (Derrida and Stiegler 2002: 123). We have to respect and take responsibility for (our definition of) absolute alterity before we can respect and take responsibility for specific others. This brings me back to the question of dialogism and its preconditions. In "The Ideology of Dialogism," Tom Cohen presents Bakhtin's dialogism as a performative process that is narcissistic, hostile, and potentially destructive to both speaker and listener. The second person "is not even addressed, but seems to merely overhear a closed address to a third participant, one that is not necessarily human" (1996: 65-66). In the face of this third participant-the cultural addressee-the second person becomes a witness rather than an interlocutor. If the listener does speak, it usurps the position of the first person to address the third, so that "the specular scenario of 'dialogue' in this model appears almost self-canceling as a mobile system, erasing and supplanting as it proceeds" (66). While Cohen' s point that dialogism, as a configuration sustaining radical difference, is a process fraught with the danger of appropriation and negation is well taken, my analysis of Ne// leads me to locate its potential oppressiveness in a different aspect. For Cohen, dialogism is democratic displacement: it produces an equal loss of authority in and over speech for all speakers. Each speaker is supplanted in an endless merry-goround of substitution that affects everyone equally. The influence of social power relations is in effect negated. Against this scenario, Nell shows how the intervention of the cultural addressee marks differences in social power. Because of the power relations that surround Nell' s speech-her precarious position as a potential ward of the state, Jerry' s and Paula' s status as doctors, and the presence of other authoritative figures such as the sheriff and the judge-the first person is indeed erased as soon as she speaks. Her erasure is not the result, however, of the inner mechanisms of dialogism but stems from the fact that Nell is a woman (who is, moreover, the product of rape), furthermore a woman who does not speak "properly," and whose voice and body represent the threat of absence in relation to the community's chronotope and its regimes of seeing and speaking. The system never rotates to displace Jerry and Paula in the same way, because they are aligned with the cultural

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addressee, which assigns and withholds subject and speech positions. The oppression of the dialogic system, therefore, is far from democratic. Dialogism may resemble a "threshing machine in which I's are routinely harvested" (Cohen 1996: 67), but some I's do not even make it into the machine in the first place because they are not acknowledged as subjects. To enter into a dialogic relationship with the other means accepting the alterity of her cultural addressee without assuming that it can be seamlessly translated into our own. Dialogism, therefore, presupposes a particular attitude toward language and a conceptualization of translation not as a process of one-to-one decoding-as Jerry and Paula approach it in Nellbut as an inevitable transformation. The contrasting attitudes toward language displayed in Nell and in Flawless address the (im)possibility of dialogism. Nell, as I have argued, presents language as a homogeneous unity perpetuated through practices of surveillance: language is caught on tape, subjected to scientific and legal examination, and perceived as producing absolute distinctions between human/nonhuman, adult/child, and male/female. To assuage the threat of unintelligibility that Nell poses, the community pins her words to her body and to fixed signifiers. The difference contained in the linguistic sign is denied while the "true" meaning of Nell's utterances is uncovered elsewhere, that is, where it can be explicated and agreed upon. The film's conceptualization of language as a system of sameness is exemplified by its repeated evocation of mimicry. Mimicry is closely associated with imitation, repetition, and parody, which are all able to function as practices of resignification. Bakhtin believes that a "parodic travestying mimicry," undertaken from a position of exteriority, is capable of dissolving any established control over words: any and every straightforward genre, any and every direct discourse-epic, tragic, lyric, philosophical-may and indeed must itself become the object of representation, the object of a parodic travestying "mimicry." It is as if such mimicry rips the word away from its object, disunifies the two, shows that a given straightforward generic word-epic or tragic-is one-sided, bounded, incapable of exhausting the object; the process of parodying forces us to experience those sides of the object that are not otherwise included in a given genre or a given style. (1996a: 55)

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In Nell, one quickly notices, mimicry does not rip the word away from its object, but acts to cement the two together. Jerry's main strategy for establishing contact with Nell is to mimic her. He secretly tapes and memorizes her words, offering them back to her in an identical intonation, but without comprehension, thus emptying them of meaning. Later on, Nell is in turn encouraged to mimic Jerry's speech and Paula's appearance in order to learn "proper" English and civilize her "wild" body. For Nell, mimicry is not at all a parodic strategy of resignification, but a tool for survival. To escape institutionalization, she has to mimic the community's notion of normality as accurately as possible. Her actions resemble those of certain animals that take on the colors and patterns of their surroundings in order to avoid being seen and then swallowed. In this sense, mimicry marks a compulsion toward similarity that is deadly serious. Drawing, in the wake of Lacan, on the work of Roger Caillois, Grosz links the protective mimicry displayed by insects to the psychotic behavior of humans, arguing that each survival strategy signifies a surrender to the powers of the other: Both the psychotic and the insect renounce their point, abandoning themselves to being spatially macy of one's own perspective is replaced by the subject is merely a point in space and not a focal 1994: 47)

rights to occupy a perspectival located by/as others. The prigaze of another, for whom the point organizing space. (Grosz

In Bakhtinian terms, this form of mimicry amounts to the erasure of the self in its unique coordinates in space-time, a harmful surrender of exatopy. It is no coincidence that Grosz refers to the psychotic and the insect as subjected to another's gaze rather than to another's look. As I have made clear, the gaze does not allow us to look back at it and substitutes its point of view for our own. In Nell' s case, her only defense against being designated psychotic is to adopt the psychotic's self-effacement as a survival strategy. Either way, she loses herself. Throughout the film, therefore, mimicry appears as an imitation without difference that, instead of showing more, erases both the word and its object. Nell' s situation at the end of the film invokes Homi Bhabha's notion of colonial mimicry: "the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a dijfirence that is almost the same, but not quite" (2004: 122). Nell has been normalized so that she can appear as a viable subject, but she will always remain to some extent

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other or "wild." The fact that this is not disturbing but rather reassuring to the community can be traced to Bhabha' s point about the ambivalence of colonial mimicry, which has to be flawed in order to succeed in keeping the colonial and the colonized subject distinct. Although, as "the sign of the inappropriate" (123), mimicry can potentially turn itself against the colonial order and become mockery, in Nell this possibility is not activated. Flawless, on the other hand, invokes Bakhtin's "parodic travestying mimicry" (1996a, 55). This we see in Rusty's drag and in Wait's attempts to be "the" man. Here, alterity does not prompt assimilation, but resignification. Walt' s and Rusty's singing lessons not only lead the former to see his masculinity in a new light, but give Rusty the confidence he needs to become a woman. The complete exteriority of their positions vis-a-vis one another causes both characters to discover something new about themselves and their relative positions in the dominant gender matrix, recalling Bakhtin's remark that "only in communion, in the interaction of one person with another, can the 'man in man' be revealed, for others as well as for oneself" (1985: 252). Only in Flawless, it is precisely the discourse of the "man in man," of normative heterosexual masculinity that is undermined by the dialogic interaction engaged in by Walt and Rusty. The most poignant expression of dialogism occurs in the film's closing scene. A drug dealer has just shot Walt and an ambulance arrives. Having saved Walt' s life, Rusty wants to ride with him in the ambulance but is told by the paramedic that only relatives are allowed. Rusty then asserts: "''m his sister." Having lost her wig and torn her dress in the shooting, Rusty is easily recognizable as (still) male. The paramedic looks confused until Walt confirms Rusty's identification: "He's my sister." As opposed to the beginning of the film, where Walt refuses to recognize himself as the addressee of Rusty's call "Hey sister, go sister" (see Chapter 2), he is now ready to at least accept a form of kinship (although it is still Rusty who fills the female position). The oxymoron "He's my sister" marks Wait's acknowledgment of, and respect for, Rusty's self-definition as a woman, while simultaneously expressing his continued conviction that Rusty "really" is a man, a "he." Walt' s remark stands out against an earlier scene where he answers one of Rusty's transvestite friends, who asks "have you seen Miss Rusty?" with a disparaging "No, I didn't see him," resolutely dismissing Rusty's self-identification as a woman. In contrast, "He's my sister" marks a dialogic disagreement, where the other's discourse invades

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and changes that of the self without, however, completely usurping or displacing it. The theoretical point made by Flawless is that dialogism is predicated on the preservation of difference and distance. Triggered by Wait's stroke, a force outside his control, the friendship between Wait and Rusty intimates how dialogism features neither a seamless convergence of voices nor their mimicking, but rather their necessary independence. Sympathetic understanding, as Bakhtin expresses it, is characterized by an active and frequently antagonistic responsiveness: Active agreement/disagreement (if it is not dogmatically predetermined) stimulates and deepens understanding, makes the other's word more resilient and true to itself, and precludes mutual dissolution and confusion. The clear demarcation of two consciousnesses, their counterposition and their interrelations .... The exclusive orientation toward recognizing, searching only for the familiar (that which has already been), does not allow the new to reveal itself (i.e., the fundamental, unrepeatable totality). (Bakhtin 1986d: 142)

As a figure capable of including disagreement, dialogism is linked to what Jodi Dean, in Solidarity of Strangers, terms "reflective solidarity," defined as "that openness to difference which lets our disagreements provide the basis for connection" (1996: 17). Solidarity combined with reflectivity means acknowledging the legitimacy of the other's interests, feelings, actions, and sympathies, without necessarily sharing them fully. It is an attitude of outward ethical responsibility more than an internal feeling or emotion. Dean opposes reflective solidarity to conventional solidarity, which is based on the criterion of membership and "extend[s] the range of our intersubjective ties at the cost of the 'concrete other,' setting limits on what she can do and how she can be seen" (22). Whereas Nell illustrates the perilous erasure of difference produced by conventional solidarity, Flawless offers an example of reflective solidarity. To make an impression-on the dominant language and its cultural addressee-discourse needs to display collective contrariness. In Sex and the City, Carrie aims to address the cultural addressee as normatively as possible, so that the latter can forever remain exactly the same. In Nell, the wild voice of its tide character is solitary and therefore unable to resignify the town's cultural addressee; Nell can only make herself heard on its terms. In Flawless, finally, even though Wait and Rusty expand the scope of their respective cultural addressees by hearing each other as other, their

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interaction has a resignifying effect only in the limited environment of their neighborhood. In Chapter 5, I ask what happens when a marginalized community tries to make itself heard on the larger stage provided by national media chronotopes. How does such a community assert its identity, see and voice itself, within chronotopes whose cultural addressee and cultural gaze are conditioned neither to hear nor to see this community except in terms of abjection?

Resignifications: Accents and Speech Genres

Queer Orbits, Queer Chronotopes The cultural addressee constricts our vocal self-expression by binding it to a shared chronotopic understanding of intelligibility, which may or may not accommodate radical alterity. My analysis of Nell reveals how the cultural addressee can keep an individual other from subjectivity, speech, and meaningful silence. But what happens when we are dealing with subordinated social groups rather than individuals? Whereas an individual is easily forced into assimilation, social groups-even those most marginalized- are united in a we-experience that allows them to exercise some degree of collective control over their speech, actions, and identities. Such groups are capable of engaging in practices of discursive resignification that potentially affect the dominant tongue, forcing its cultural addressee to expand its definition of intelligibility in order to listen better and to accept hitherto unacknowledged constructions of subjectivity into its intersubjective understanding. This chapter marks a transition from a focus on the constraints imposed on identity construction by intersubjectively established and maintained structures of interpellation (the chronotope, the cultural gaze, and the cultural addressee) to an examination of how the elements of instability produced in the reiteration of these structures can be exploited on the level of intersubjectivity as interaction, so that subjects can articulate

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themselves differently. I examine both the possibilities and limitations of resignification as a collective practice of self-assertion by introducing a new twofold cultural object: the British television drama series Queer as Folk, which focuses on the lives of a group of gay men in Manchester, and the U.S. remake of the same title, which transposes the action to Pittsburgh. In 1999, the British Queer as Folk was broadcast in eight thirtyminute episodes on Channel 4, with a two-part sequel following in 2000. Although Channel 4 is a public television channel with a reputation for "radical, experimental, minority television" (Munt 2000: 531), the series had to be programmed late at night because of its explicit sexual content. The U.S. remake of Queer as Folk first appeared in December 2000 on Showtime, a subscription cable channel known for its progressive programming. It finished in 2005 after eighty-three episodes. Both series were extensively reviewed and discussed in the British and American media and in both cases there were negative reactions. 1 I contend that, through its transnational but intralingual transplantation, Queer as Folk demonstrates the strength and constraints of resignification, both in relation to dominant heterosexual identities and in terms of queer identity's own difference across cultures, nations, and chronotopes. In its configuration of resignification across its two appearances, Queer as Folk calls up Bakhtin' s concepts of stratification and speech genres, as well as Hamid Naficy' s notion of accented cinema, prodding us to believe that the two theorists must be read through each other. Between them, the British series and its U.S. remake employ various practices of linguistic resignification to challenge the dominant politics of representation and the dominant principles of (inter)subjectivity active in their respective national contexts. Already in its title, Queer as Folk positions itself as the bearer of a discourse that is at once marginal and contrary. Originally, the old Yorkshire proverb "there's nought as queer as folk" referred to the strangeness of people in general. Using it as the title for a series that celebrates homosexual life and sexuality invests it with a supplementary meaning that changes not only the sense of the proverb, but at the same time recuperates the word "queer" from its common derogatory usage. The title then comes to signify something like: homosexuals are people in general, they are no longer incontrovertibly other but are ordinary folk. This, of course, is not the end of the possible resignifications. The linking term "as" works two ways: it can indicate that queer is like folk

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and/or that folk is like queer. The latter reading, supported by the original meaning of the proverb, would entail a blending of people in general-a generality implicitly understood as straight-with queer, rather than the other way around. In its ambiguities, the title achieves a blurring between the categories of self and other so that it is no longer immediately clear to whom these terms refer: in the relation between queer and folk, who is the self and who is the other? Who is strange and who is ordinary? The title of the series dialogizes both signifiers (queer and folk) and refigures their interrelationship; it constitutes an instance of what Bakhtin calls stratification. This term indicates how a language is never one with itself: Actual social life and historical becoming create within an abstractly unitary national language a multitude of concrete worlds, a multitude of bounded verbalideological and social belief systems; within these various systems (identical in the abstract) are elements of language filled with various semantic and axiological content and each with its own different sound. (Bakhtin 1996c: 288) Social life brings into being different worlds or chronotopes that are capable of investing the abstract words of a national language with a particular evaluation or worldview. Stratification is achieved through genres of speech and writing, professional jargons, and, as in the case of Queer as Folk, social stratification. The latter term refers to the capacity that social groups have of making the national language "sound" different. Queer as Folk, in both of its incarnations, effects a stratification of the English language by, in its very title, making an existing proverb part of a different "denotative and expressive dimension" (Bakhtin 1996c: 289), namely that of the queer community. For Bakhtin, the word as a purely linguistic object has no meaning. It is through being associated with a particular social group's purview and value system that a word acquires living meaning, a type of meaning that is not fixed or eternal, but always open to restratification or reaccentuation by other social groups: Various tendencies ... are all capable of stratifying language, in proportion to their social significance; they are capable of attracting its words and forms into their orbit by means of their own characteristic intentions and accents .... Every socially significant verbal performance has the ability-sometimes for a long

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period of time, and for a wide circle of persons-to infect with its own intention certain aspects of language that had been affected by its semantic and expressive impulse, imposing on them specific semantic nuances and specific axiological overtones; thus, it can create slogan-words, curse-words, praise-words and so forth. (Bakhtin 1996c: 290) In the tide of Queer as Folk, the word queer travels through three such stratifications: in the old proverb, it simply meant strange; later, it became a derogatory term for homosexuals; and now, in the tide of the television series (as in queer theory and queer activism), it is once more reaccented as a positive term. In Bakhtin's terms, the word is alienated from its earlier meaning as a curse word and turned into a praise or pride word by being made part of a different worldview. Queer joins Bakhtin' s examples of "Peace!" and "Freedom!" to illustrate the way in which "words that acquire special weight under particular conditions of sociopolitical life become expressive exclamatory utterances" (1986b: 85). The problem, of course, is that queer expresses two diametrically opposed sociopolitical impulses: homophobia and gay pride. Significantly, in the tide of the television series, the homophobic taunt is transformed into a praise word by way of its previous proverbial and nonpolitical meaning of general strangeness (which remains the primary dictionary meaning of the word). This retrospective move exploits what Butler, in a discussion of queer politics, calls "the temporality of the term" (1993: 223). It is by uniting the generality of the original noninjurious meaning of queer with the specificity of the group now designated by its derogatory use that a resignification occurs; the word queer is pulled into another orbit, where it no longer signifies the incontrovertible other, and becomes that which is other or different in all of us. While this otherness is overtly figured as homosexuality, it is a homosexuality celebrated rather than abjected, construed as ordinary rather than problematic, and, although different, ultimately no stranger than so-called "normal" sexualities. Both Queer as Folk series present a specifically queer worldview that expresses itself through a reaccentuation that affects not just spoken language, bur also bodily language in the form of gestures, postures, sexual positions, and appearances that are seen to express or, rather, constitute (in a performative way) a queer identity. Such (collective) self-constitution is complicated by Bakhtin' s assertion that only socially significant groups are

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capable of effectively pulling words into their own orbit. 2 What Queer as Folk seeks to achieve, by means of its tide, content, and positioning within the British and U.S. television landscapes, is a publicly recognized queer chronotope that actively contests the dominant, straight one replete with its heterosexual identity constructions. The first episode of the British series begins with a voice-over monologue spoken by Vince, the series' main protagonist. He is shown in a medium close-up against a yellow background, evoking the mode of documentary realism traditionally used to provide insight into radical alterity: the criminal, the insane, the racial, or the sexual other. Documentaries often feature representative others who are framed in a context of confession and asked to explain or comment on their life and its difference from the norm. As Sally Munt argues, it is customary for "televisual gayness" to be "qualified by the presence of explanatory or justificatory frames" (2000: 534). These frames are not absent here, as she asserts, but are explicitly brought into view, only to be undermined by the unapologetic stance of the speaker. Vince does not present his homosexuality as a problem to be explained and justified, but as a simple fact: Sometimes you get a good Thursday. Sometimes you get a bog-standard Thursday. This Thursday was mental. Thursday nights at Babylon used to be seventies' night, but they changed it. Thursday night is nineties' night, which makes you feel ancient. Thank you very much. I spent all night chasing after some bloke who turned out to be mad. A little later, after some exterior shots of the Babylon nightclub and a brief conversation between Vince and one of his friends, the voice-over continues: Now sometimes you're halfway through a shag and you just get bored with it. So you wank him off in the doorway and move straight on. 'Cause you keep on looking. That's why you keep going out. There's always some new bloke, some better bloke, just waiting around the corner. The viewer is not simply asked to observe Vince's sexuality from the outside through the voyeuristic perspective usually provided by documentaries, but is seduced into his queer universe. The beginning of the monologue does not identify Vince as homosexual and, because of its inclusive use of "you" instead of "1," draws the viewer in by offering a broad opportunity for identification. Only when he switches to 'T' and tells how he has been

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chasing a bloke does the nature of Vince' s difference from the norm become clear. The attempt to draw all viewers (whether homo- or heterosexual) into the queer sphere of activity that surrounds the Babylon club continues, however, with the renewed use of the pronoun "you" in the second part of the monologue. As deictic terms, ''I'' and "you" are empty outside the situation of utterance; using the ambivalent "you"-the secondperson position, which here also covers the first and tends to the third ("you" in the sense of "[every]one")-instead of the defined "I" (strictly identified with the speaking subject on show) draws the viewer into a form of complicity. As the implied "you" of the utterance, the viewer is asked to identify and thus to confirm Vince, in his overt homosexuality, as a viable subject. At the same time, because Vince can also be seen as himself occupying the "you," he reserves the right to define himself. In fact, his address queers the viewer, because by the end of the monologue, the "you" who desires men as a man is the only subject position on offer. In the pilot episode of the American remake, the visual reference to the documentary mode is absent. Nevertheless, the monologue, spoken in voice-off to images of the inside of a gay club also called Babylon by Vince' s equivalent, Michael (who only enters the visual frame later in the scene), is again addressed directly to the television viewer: The thing you need to know is: it's all about sex. It's true. In fact, they say men think about sex every twenty-eight seconds. Of course, that's straight men. With gay men it's every nine. You can be at the supermarket or the Laundromat or buying a fabulous shirt when suddenly you find yourself checking out some hot guy. Hotter than the one you saw last weekend or went home with the night before. Which explains why we' re all at Babylon at one in the morning instead of at home in bed. But who wants to be at home in bed? Especially alone, when you can be here, knowing that at any moment you might see HIM, the most beautiful man who ever lived. That is, until tomorrow night.

This statement sets out what the viewer needs to know in order to enter the queer universe of the series. The transition from men in general to straight men and then to gay men simultaneously establishes a parallel and a distance between the latter two groups. They may all be men who think about sex a lot, but gay men have a different story to tell about it. Although gay men are thus firmly placed in a position of otherness, the viewer, whatever their sexuality, is still invited to share this position. Such a move is once again achieved through the strategic use of pronouns.

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In the first sentence, the "you" is clearly someone other than Michael, the speaker. Here, Michael addresses the other as other, as not (necessarily) queer. The second "you," however, includes both first and second persons. Michael is speaking about his experience, but rather than using a limiting "1," which would enable viewers to separate themselves from him, or a conspiring "we," which would aim the show at a homosexual audience only, he employs a general "you" (tending toward "one" or "everyone") that includes both himself and the viewer, merging the positions of speaker and addressee. Michael now addresses the other as a potentially queer subject. Even when he briefly shifts to "we" to refer specifically to himself and his friends in the club, the collectivity of this pronoun still signals the possible inclusion of the viewer. The "I" only enters Michael's speech later, when the camera stops on an attractive bare-chested man standing at the bar: By the way, that's me. Six-one. Forty-six inch chest. Sixteen-inch biceps. Twentyeight inch waist. A veritable god. I wish! OK. That's me. Michael Novotny. The semi-cute boy-next-door type. Twenty-nine. Five-ten. One forty. Nine-and-a-half cut. All right, so I exaggerate. But, like, who's told the truth since they invented cybersex? By doubling and delaying the exclusive identification of the speaker, the monologue maximally exploits the nature of pronouns as "endlessly reversible signifiers" that move between speakers (Silverman 1983: 196). Michael's false self-identification and exaggerated measurements enact Benveniste' s notion that "the signifier T is activated not through its reference to an actual speaker, but through its alignment with the ideal image in which that speaker sees him or herself" (Silverman 1983: 198). In oscillating between 'T' and "you"-between positioning queer as a limited self-identification and portraying it as an inclusive experienceboth opening monologues fulfill the promise of the television series' title's double meaning. The queer experience is at once universalized since it relates to the experience of all those looking for a hot man or woman, and particularized since the monologue makes it unmistakably clear that this is a man speaking about the sexual desire for other men. The viewer's sense of being pulled into another orbit is strengthened by the way both series link the constructed queer lifestyle with a particular chronotope. In the British original, this is Manchester's Canal Street; in

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the U.S. adaptation, it is Pittsburgh's Liberty Avenue. As with the Manhattan portrayed in Sex and the City (SatC), these locations feature a specific organization of space-time that generates a particular identity. 3 They also have a clearly defined "outside" taking the form of the straight world, which has the same alienating function as suburbia in SatC. This contrast between inside and outside is illustrated when, in the British Queer as Folk, Vince visits a straight pub along with some colleagues from work. He experiences the pub as a foreign world and feels compelled to report its "wonders," by mobile phone, to his gay friend, Smart: Oh my God. I'm here .... Straight pub. I can't stop. I'm going in .... It's all true. Everything we've ever been told. Oh my God. Everything but plaid wallpaper. Ah, and the people! There are people talking in sentences that have no punch lines and they don't even care. Can you believe it? They've got toilets in which no one has ever had sex!

In reaction, Stuart jokingly presents Vince as lost forever to the queer chronotope, evoking the queer practices of mourning prevalent since the advent of the AIDS era: "We'll have a candlelight vigil in your memory. I'll put a patch on the quilt." This joking remark illustrates Queer as Folk's irreverence not just in relation to straight discourse about homosexuality but to queer discourse itself, which is also pulled into new orbits, away from its tendency to appear as an issue-based discourse. Vince' s excursion into the straight world of the pub is primarily presented as amusing; however, invasions from the outside world into the gay universe-as when Vince encounters a straight female work colleague on Canal Street-are perceived as threatening, particularly because several characters hide their sexuality from this outside realm, passing there for straight. At the same time, both Queer as Folk series feature the queering of straight spaces as important motifs, through scenes that place queer conversations, sex, and pornography in the workplace and at school. Like the reappropriation of the word queer, these practices resignify such spaces, presumed to be straight, and turn them into potential parts of the queer chronotope. Consequently, the queer chronotope can no longer be seen as strictly and safely separated from the straight world, but has to be seen as intermingled with it, as crossing and blurring its borders. As the eowriter and eo-producer of the American Queer as Folk, Daniel Lipman, comments:

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Lots of shows have gay characters and that helps get people used to the fact that this is part of the tapestry of the world. But when you see a show like this in which all the characters are gay-there are very few straight characters, and they all live in a gay world-that is very important. (quoted in Ledger 2001) Lipman's reference to a "gay world" not only signals the status of the series' queer universe as a chronotope but it also indicates how, on the extradiegetic level, the series seeks to achieve a queer stratification of the television landscape by creating a space for queer representations within the traditionally straight spectrum of television. But how exactly does the series negotiate between positing queer as a separate world-allowing the articulation of queer identities without immediately threatening the straight chronotope-and mounting a chronotopic challenge which demands queer inclusion?

Undermining the Standard Within its narrative, Queer as Folk presents the gay world as the inside or standard chronotope, but on the metalevel of television programming and cultural dialogue, homosexuality still functions as the abject outside to the straight norm and, as such, is firmly placed on the level of an abrogated accent. In An Accented Cinema (2001), Hamid Naficy develops accent as a theoretical concept that tracks both social marginalization and the mobilization of the marginal. Following Naficy's exploration of accented cinema, I describe Queer as Folk and its American remake as accented television, whose accentuation manifests itself on such multiple levels that it exceeds the purely linguistic. 4 First, both series are accented on the intradiegetic level of the characters' speech, where the accent refers both to a localized pronunciation (regional accent) and to differences in style and vocabulary (queer accent, class accent, professional jargons). Second, the series are accented on the level of narrative structure, where an accent indicates constructed and perceived social differentiations. Presenting homosexuals and lesbians as protagonists is in itself nonstandard. Few such characters appear on mainstream television and, if they do, they tend to be stereotyped or desexualized as they are presented from a straight perspective. Queer as Folk challenges this pattern by presenting queer characters as regular people, by

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explicitly showing queer sexuality, and by consistently presenting the narrative through queer eyes. 5 Finally, Queer as Folk exhibits accented modes of production, distribution, and reception. The writers of both series, as well as the producers of the American show, arc themselves gay men and both versions were marketed mainly-though not exclusivelywith a gay audience in mind. However, where Naficy sees accented cinema as characterized by its "collective reception" (2001: 63) on the part of a homogeneous diasporic or exile audience, both Queer as Folk series also proved popular with (female) heterosexual audiences. What is more, the reception of Queer as Folk within the gay community was not unequivocally positive, as some criticized the series' failure to represent the full spectrum of the gay community, particularly with respect to racc. 6 To consider the different reactions accented television provokes both within and without the represented community, it is essential to explore not only how accented media are accented, in Naficy's manner, but also the effects of such accentuation. Unlike the exilic accent, the queer one does not originate outside a national language, but within it. It is, to use Butler's language, an abjected accent. As the mark of a constitutive outside that is nevertheless within, it designates that unlivable place, either in the margin or on the border, that enables the dominant language to declare itself neutral, unaccented. However, because the standard can define itself only against the nonstandard, the accent, far from being unilaterally defined by the standard, also defines the norm. Thus, the accent is potentially capable of redefining the standard, of reaccenting it by restoring it to its prenaturalized status of one accent among others. In line with Dcrrida' s metaphorical fantasy on translation, all languages can be seen as variants of the mythical pre-Babelian (preconfusion) tongue.? Hence, from the very start, every so-called standard is confused, riddled as it is with contradictions and ambiguities. Bakhtin uses the same metaphor when he speaks of the "Tower-of-Babe! mixing of languages" (1996c: 278) to refer to the multiple discourses looking to colonize the sign and fix its meaning. There is always more than one language articulating the world, and none of these languages can claim to be the standard. Furthermore, Bakhtin argues that far from being able to speak a language, we are always dealing with languages, with the individual language as itself an inherently multiple construct composed of many tongues (heteroglossia). Each language is "teeming with future and former languages ... which are

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all more or less successful, depending on the degree of social scope and the ideological area in which they are employed" (1996c: 357). For Bakhtin, there is no standard in the sense of an achieved condition of authoritativeness, only a dynamic system of competing stratifying accentuations. Some of these accentuations may achieve a degree of standardization, but they always remain susceptible to future reaccentuations. Queer as Folk comes some way in achieving a reconfusion or destandardization of the language of mainstream television and a simultaneous deaccenting of queerness. It does so not by rigidly separating itself from the norm but by inserting itself into the heteroglottic media space as one language among others, existing on the same level as the exclusionary heterosexual language it seeks to challenge. From this position at the center of the struggle over signification it becomes possible to question both the presumed naturalness of dominant television and the abjection of the queer accent. Separating the accent from the standard, as Naficy does, ignores the way standard and accent are embroiled in a process of constant renegotiation and reaffirms their hierarchical relationship. On the other hand, exploring their mutual dependency raises questions about the standard itself: How did it come to represent itself as the standard? What power relations are involved in its continuous naturalization and perpetuation of itself as the sole standard? And what is at stake in its effort to marginalize all other accents? By focusing on the relation between accent and standard, we can open the way for an accent to challenge its own marginalized status. Appropriating aspects of the mainstream, the accent is no longer incontrovertibly opposed to the standard: the terms of the opposition become infectious and blurred rather than mutually exclusive. Of course, this type of appropriation works both ways and there is always a danger that the mainstream will attempt to incorporate the accent so as to render it harmless. 8 Herman Gray, writing about the television representation of black characters, distinguishes three ways minority accents can enter into standard representations: assimilation (where blackness is made invisible, a nonissue), pluralism (where black culture is separate from white culture, but equal to it), and multiculturalism (where there is diversity and difference). Queer as Folk offers a productive combination of pluralism and multiculturalism. On the one hand, its world is almost exclusively gay, and one clearly hears the message that gays are in many ways regular "folks."

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On the other hand, gay relationships and gay sex are emphatically represented as being different from heterosexual ones. Together, these two aspects preempt both the resistive "they're just freaks" response and the neutralizing "queers are really just like heterosexuals." Mainstream acceptance inevitably requires certain concessions to the so-called standard, and Queer as Folk is not accented through and through. Both the British and the American version "frame" the queer accent in a familiar television format. In Britain, the frame is that of the comedydrama about a group of friends and their relationships, in the mode of the successful BBC series This Life. In America, it is the (melo)dramatic continuing serial with ensemble cast, which Jane Feuer describes as one of the dominant forms of narrative in American television (1986: 111). The filmic styles of both series are also unaccented: in Britain, Queer as Folk is filmed in the highly realistic "gritty" manner common in British television dramas, while in the United States, it has a glossy, polished look known as the "advertising aesthetic" (Grindstaff 2001: 150). These familiar modes of framing and filming facilitate Queer as Folk's resignification of the dominant television language. 9 Most immediately, the "queering" of the gritty drama and (melo)dramatic serial genres undermines the prevalent pathologization (and medicalization) of televised homosexuality, where "coming out" is represented as a psychological crisis and homosexuality reduced to the story of AIDS (Gross 2001a: 412). The two Queer as Folk series undermine this association in different ways and to different degrees. Both versions sexualize the representation of queer life, without presenting sex as a problem. The American version retains the AIDS thematic, bur relegates it to minor characters and story lines, while the British version almost completely banishes the disease (as well as safe sex and gay activism) from its purview. Moreover, as earlier noted, the British version invokes the mode of documentary realism that is commonly used to explore the "problem" of homosexuality, only to parody it. When Stuart relates his first homosexual experience (at the age of twelve) directly into the camera, we hear not the usual story of a hesitant approach haunted with conflicting feelings, but a triumphant story of mutual seduction and pleasure. These internal departures from the common television portrayal of homosexuality require the support of a familiar frame. Thus, whereas the accent Naficy employs appears opposed to (and separated from) the

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standard, Queer as Folk suggests a more flexible relation between the two terms, one that is perhaps better theorized by supplementing Bakhtin' s notion of stratification with the related concept of speech genres. Speech genres are forms of language use specific to the "diverse areas of human activity" (Bakhtin 1986b: 6o). 10 Exhibiting their own "thematic content, style, and compositional structure," such genres are relatively stable and, because of the infinite variety of human activity, their number is "boundless" (6o). What characterizes speech genres is their status as "specific types of utterances distinct from other types, but sharing with them a common verbal (language) nature" (61). Because I see speech genres as comprising not only speech but also other discursive and bodily acts, I prefer to conceptualize them not as sharing a verbal nature but as having a common status as signs. The queer community of Queer as Folk represents a distinct area of human (sexual) activity that produces its own standardized style(s) of speaking and behaving, out of the shared sign system. These queer speech genres appear both as sociopolitical genres (public battle cries) and as subtypes of what Bakhtin calls "familiar and intimate genres," the first of which is associated with "a special unofficial, volitional approach to reality" and the second with an "atmosphere of deep trust" where "the speaker reveals his internal depths" (1986b: 97). So what is the relation of the speech genre to the notion of a standard? According to Bakhtin, "a speaker is given not only mandatory forms of the national language (lexical composition and grammatical structure), but also forms of utterances that are mandatory, that is, speech genres" (So). The national language here is not a standard in the sense of a model to which each speaker must conform, but an instrumental system that allows the speaker to activate the infinite number of speech genres it comprises. Moreover, each speech genre creates its own standard, so that a standard inheres even in the most marginalized accent. This forces us to acknowledge that accents are not automatically less rigid than the so-called standard language. Bakhtin' s speech genres comprise all stylistically distinct forms of the utterance, without imposing an a priori or stable hierarchization between them. It is the speaker who chooses which genres to use and within such genres-no matter how standardized-there is always room for improvisation. Bakhtin notes that "speech genres in general submit fairly easily to re-accentuation" (1986b: 87) and points to the strategies of "parodic-ironic

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re-accentuation" and the deliberate mixing of genres (So). The British Queer as Folk's use of the documentary mode provides an example of the first, while the second frequently appears in the characters' conversations, which bring sex into everyday discussions of food or work through double entendres. Although certain genres are more stable than others, no genre can successfully position itself as the standard because there will always be new forms of human activity. Combined, the coexistence of a multiplicity of speech genres within a single (national) language and the stratification of this language into languages exposes the inherent semantic and pragmatic plurality of language forms and signs in general, a plurality that is disavowed (but never overcome) when a dominant social group attempts to establish itself as the standard by imposing a cultural gaze and cultural addressee that refuse to see or hear the other. Whereas the accent is a term always already laden with pejorative connotations, implying the existence of an unaccented or neutral dominant language to which the accent should aspire, speech genres and stratifications become hierarchical only through their inevitable entanglement with social power relations. At the same time, every such hierarchy is provisional, since a dominant genre can become marginalized and a marginalized one dominant. The standard, accordingly, is not accent-free or neutral, but a discursive construct naturalized to the point of appearing to be without inflection: the standard is homogenizing, centralizing, and interested. It seeks to perpetuate its dominance by confining all other forms to the inferior status of accent. This does not mean I want to discard the notion of accent completely. Both Bakhtin and Naficy see the accenting of discourse as productive practices of self-assertion. It is, however, often also an instrument of suppression and subordination employed by those in power. As Butler points out, one does not choose to embody the abject, but is forcibly and repetitively constituted as the abject. The value of the accent lies in the way it conveys the constructed, perceived, and experienced marginality or inferiority of certain stratifications or speech genres within the sociocultural context. This marginality may be a construct, bur it nevertheless has real, material effects. The lack of queer television representation is one such marginality, but so is the way the queer accent tends to privilege male homosexuality over lesbianism. This is particularly apparent in the British

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Queer as Folk, where the lesbian characters have no story lines of their own and where "the radical position and political struggles of the lesbian are completely lost" (Skeggs et al. 2004: 1853). Even in the American series, where the lesbian characters are much more prominent, they are still "routinely situated as the converse of queer and are subjected to a great deal of misogynist and lesbiphobic dialogue" (Beirne 2006: 54). The accent, then, is a manifestation of a constructed hierarchy that may not be absolute, but that nevertheless governs relations between and within social groups with real effects. In comparison, Bakhtin's notions of stratification and speech genres seem overly generalized and neutral. While it is important to realize that any standard form is constructed and therefore potentially subject to reaccentuation, it is equally important to acknowledge that not all accents have the same clout: some are clearly audible, some are indistinct, and others are actively silenced. Using the same terms for anything ranging from a professional jargon or a family style to the discourse of ethnic or sexual minorities obliterates the distinction between a chosen, partial inflection that can be put on at will, and the enforced, nonrelinquishable accent of an actively abjected minority. As Butler notes, there is no "I" before "queer" (1993: 225). We are always already marked by certain identity categories and these marks cannot simply be wiped away. Most of the time, therefore, we have to work with the terms that already occupy our orbit. Bakhtin attempts to incorporate a power dimension into his theory of linguistic stratification through his distinction between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses. He defines authoritative discourse as the monologic "word of the fathers," which "enters our verbal consciousness a compact and indivisible mass; one must either totally affirm it, or totally reject it" (1996c: 342-43). Internally persuasive discourse is more flexible, appearing as "half-ours and half-someone else's" and entering into a continuous, open dialogue with other assimilated discourses (345). Because neither of these forms is bound to any particular speech genre or stratification, they at first appear to create a dynamic model for describing the way power relations become inscribed in language use. But authoritative and internally persuasive discourse are not as easily distinguishable, or mutually exclusive, as Bakhtin makes out: the effects of hegemony and enforced performative reenactment tend to make authoritative speech also internally persuasive, causing it to appear open to challenges when it actually forecloses all

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dialogue. To avoid both the leveling generality of Bakhtin's categories and Naficy's overly rigid opposition of standard and accent, I want to inflect the two terms through each other and distinguish between the accented and standardized speech genres that result from the general process of stratification. This transforms accent and standard from fixed categories into dynamic (and thus potentially reversible) processes and exploits the way genres are thought of as existing and competing with each other on the same plane. I contend that accented and standardized genres differ fundamentally from each other in terms of their susceptibility to resignification.

Repainting Queer: The Limits of Resignification The complexities of resignifying a word, of drawing it into a new orbit, particularly into the orbit of an accented speech genre, are articulated by a scene in Queer as Folk that centers on the term queer. This term is difficult to resignify because, as part of a standardized speech genre that holds great authority, it is burdened with a history of negative associations and insult that is present in every enunciation. As Butler puts it, "it is always an imaginative chorus that taunts 'queer'!" (1993: 226). A word like queer functions as a test for what Bourdieu calls "semantic elasticity" (1987: 212). Like an elastic band, the meaning of a word can be stretched to a point, after which it might snap back and return to its old abusive meaning. The scene I want to analyze occurs in the opening episode of both the British and the American Queer as Folk. Both versions begin identically. Vince/Michael is woken by a car alarm, goes outside, and catches some children vandalizing the car he has on loan from his friend, Stuart/Brian. Vince/Michael chases the children away and is shocked when he looks at the side of the car (which remains invisible to the viewer). Later, we learn that the word "QUEERS" has been sprayed in red paint all over one side of the car. In the American version, significantly, the word is "FAGGOT" and the color is a more symbolic pink, matching the pink shirt with the gay nightclub logo that Michael wears in the scene. This difference already indicates the contextual specificity of the queer speech genre or orbit of stratification. 11

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In both episodes, Vince/Michael then takes the car to the apartment of Stuart/Brian, who has just spent the night having sex with a young schoolboy (Nathan/Justin, aged fifteen in the British version, seventeen in the American one). Stuart/Brian looks at the car and decides to take the boy to school in it. In the British series, Vince insists they should drop Nathan off far away from the school ("they'll see the car"), but Stuart is adamant and speeds up the driveway, honking. As he pulls up in front of the steps leading to the school, the writing on the car is displayed to all (including, for the first time, to the viewer). The other pupils point, laugh, and make kissing sounds in the car's direction. One boy comments: "come on, boys, give us a kiss!" Stuart replies, threateningly, "''ll give you a good fuck, you tight little virgin. You won't be laughing then!" Then, Stuart and Vince drive off, leaving Nathan to deal with the continuing taunts: more whistling, more kissing sounds, and a hostile "ya poof!" When the car reappears in the next episode, Stuart has had it repainted. Although a degree of resignification takes place in this scene, predominantly through the sheer brazenness with which Stuart presents the car and through his humiliation of the taunting boy, the reappropriation of the term queer is limited spatially and temporally. It remains confined to the school grounds (Nathan' s space) and ends the moment the car drives away. Lacking Stuart's cockiness, confidence, and age, Nathan is subjected to further abuse for which he has no reply. Although he does not deny the appropriateness of the label (privately, he prides himself on his successful initiation into gay sexuality), Nathan is not able to achieve sustained control over its usage. In Bakhtin's terms, Nathan lacks the social significance to sustain Stuart' s defiant reappropriation of the insult; instead, the word is drawn back into the orbit of his taunting schoolmates. In this particular scene, and throughout the first eight episodes of the British series, the resignification of queer is neither lasting nor authoritative. On Manchester's Canal Street, it may indeed function as an unequivocal term for gay pride, but outside that space it reappears as a term of violence not as easily painted over as Stuart's car. The American remake features a more sustained reaccenting of the term foggot. The school scene remains virtually identical, but instead of staying with the schoolboy, the camera tracks Brian' s car as it drives off, holding the word "FAGGOT" center-screen. People on the sidewalk turn

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their heads and point at the car. When the camera moves in closer, we hear the following discussion: BRIAN:

I'll drop you by the store.

The hell you will. You'd better get this thing repainted before you go into the office. MICHAEL:

BRIAN:

I'm not having it repainted.

MICHAEL: BRIAN:

What?

I like it this way.

MICHAEL:

Are you crazy?

BRIAN: No, they are. Well, I say, fuck them! They can write it in neon across the sky.

(Shouting): FAGGOT!!!

They both laugh and the episode ends with a long shot of them driving into the city, triumphantly honking the car's horn. In the next episode, however, Brian has had the car repainted after all. Again, it appears that the defiant reappropriation of the injurious term cannot be sustained, not even by a character as openly and provocatively "out" as Brian. The sequence of events-the insult, the queering of the insult, and the final erasure of both-signals the difficulty of resignification, particularly if resignification is to occur not just within a limited space or chronotope but in the world at large. As Bakhtin notes: not all words for just anyone submit equally easily to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them .... Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populatedoverpopulated-with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process. (1996c: 294)

The car scene unites two discursive realms that assign contradictory meanings to the word faggot, making them come head to head. On the level of the narrative, there is no resolution, as the word moves among vandalizing children, queer characters, schoolchildren, and people watching the car drive by. Each group pulls the term into its orbit, but rather than belonging completely to any single group, the term oscillates among

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them, sometimes edging this way and then another. What Queer as Folk shows in relation to Bakhtin's theory of stratification is that it is not enough to make a word into one's "private property": only when the resignification of the word is publicly accepted and ratified does it enter a different orbit in a politically meaningful manner. The sequel to the British series, Queer as Folk 2: Same Men. New Tricks, tries to move beyond this problem by portraying a radical queer strategy that counters homophobia not with words of defiance but with a strategy of intimidation and violence that is partly a tongue-in-cheek revenge fantasy and partly a comment on the limits of discursive strategies of subversion. The strategy first appears when Stuart accompanies his friend, Alexander, to visit his critically ill father in the hospital. There, Alexander's homophobic mother asks him to sign away his rights to his father's inheritance. Upon leaving, Stuart threatens the mother by making the sign of a gun against her head and telling her: "Maybe next time." Mter Alexander tries to commit suicide, Stuart goes to his mother's house, tells her that he has "a message from your son" and blows up her (empty) car. When Vince tells Stuart he went too far and that he should have just told her to "fuck off," Stuart replies that this is "not enough anymore." The sequel ends with Stuart and Vince leaving Manchester in order to start a new life. As their car speeds away through Canal Street, the scene shifts and we see the car on a deserted American road leading to Phoenix. When the car pulls up at a gas station, Vince and Stuart get out and walk hand in hand. A passing man calls them "faggots," upon which Vince asks him (twice): "What did you say?" The man reiterates his insult until Vince asks Stuart: "What do you think?" Stuart coolly replies: "Blood," and takes out a revolver, which he points at the frightened man. Vince asks him again what he said and, this time, the man answers: "Nothing," and apologizes. Stuart lowers his gun and Vince comments: "Maybe next time." Stuart closes the scene by saying: "Puck off." Munt argues that although the scene is intended to be read as "delightfully heroic," it is problematic not only because it advocates violence but because it stereotypically puts this violence in Irish hands (Stuart is Irish), links it to sexual excitement (through the "blood" reference), and portrays homophobia as a lower-class phenomenon. In her view, this undermines the solidarity between marginalities and plays into the way "dominant discourse has long conflated non-normative subjectivities with

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criminality and threat" (2ooo: 540). Against this, I would argue that Queer as Folk does not limit homophobia to the lower classes (Alexander's parents, for example, are clearly well-off), that homosexuals are not commonly associated with gun crime, and, most important, that we are clearly dealing with a revengefontasy (if the situation were "realistic," the violence would surely be directed at Vince and Stuart). In conjunction with the scenes involving Alexander's mother, I read this fantasy sequence as a comment on the limits of discursive resignification, of "fuck off." While Queer as Folk 2 appears to advocate violence as a queer strategy of resistance, this violence is largely symbolic: the sign of a gun, blowing up an empty car as a "message," pointing but not firing a gun. Even the final scene is mostly about what is being said: the dispute is settled by a change in words and Stuart' s final "Fuck off" not only dismisses the option of actual violence proposed by Vince's "Maybe next time" (quoting Stuart's threat to Alexander's mother) but also revokes his earlier dismissal of discursive resistance. Maybe "Fuck off" is enough after all. In the end, both Queer as Folk series repeatedly put forward discursive resignification as a strategy for the effective assertion of queer identities, without ever denying its complexities, shortcomings, and dangers, particularly when such resignification occurs in straight spaces. Thus, when Justin takes Brian to his high school prom in the final episode of the first season of the American Queer as Folk, an overly optimistic view of resignification as a public political practice is abruptly preempted when Justin is violently attacked and almost killed by a fellow student. Resignification is not only an issue on the diegetic level of Queer as Folk, but also for the series as a whole as it is positioned within the straight television landscape. The series is itself designed to resignify media representations of queer sexuality, both in Britain and in the United States. Thus, when Brian shouts "FAGGOT!" into the air, this shout is also aimed at the extradiegetic audience, at the television world at large, at the entire cultural system of representation, at what I call the cultural addressee. Far from making itself newly invisible-in the manner of the repainted car-the series claims to cross the television landscape just as the car crosses Pittsburgh: loud, proud, and uncompromising. Even on the extradiegetic level, however, this claim is not wholly upheld, especially with regard to the American series. As mentioned earlier, there were hostile reactions in the American media, problems attracting

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advertisers, and the series could not be broadcast on a public television channel. On the level of the remake's production, moreover, the mechanism of self-censorship adopted by its writers/producers in relation to the sex scenes reinstates heterosexuality as the standard by which homosexuality is measured. When deciding what was acceptable to show and what was not, the writers/producers would ask themselves: "what if this were a sex scene between a man and a woman?" 12 If it was acceptable sexual behavior for heterosexuals, it was deemed acceptable for homosexuals and stayed in; if it was not, it was cut. Against the writers/producers' avowed desire to present homosexuality in its difference from heterosexuality, this strategy effectively confirms heterosexuality as the norm and homosexuality as deviance. Although the intention is to claim equal representational status for homosexual sexuality, what ensues is the repositioning of heterosexual sex as the original and the relegation of gay sex to the status of a copy that can replicate that original, but is never allowed to exceed it. The American series' writers/producers also note, in a commentary included in the DVD collection of the first season, that it was a great problem finding actors willing to play gay characters. Whereas the British Queer as Folk features actors previously and later seen on other mainstream television shows, the cast of the American remake is almost fully comprised of unknown actors. More troubling is the fact that several of these actors were originally advised against participating on the grounds that playing a gay character could be career damaging. As a consequence of this stereotyping, some of the actors felt compelled to assert their real-life heterosexuality in an aggressive manner, often using disturbingly bigoted terms. The following comment by Hal Sparks (Michael) on having to engage in male-to-male kissing is indicative: I get a lot of crap for saying this, but it's a little bit like kissing a dog, because you don't have any emotional, internal stuff that you would have when you actually want to be with someone. So, as an actor, it's a unique challenge because you've got to bring it from some place, make it convincing. And I think if I've done that, then that's invaluable. (quoted in Ausiello 2000)

The appearance of this comment in an article entitled "Sparks: Straight as Folk" constitutes a reverse resignification of the Queer as Folk title: once more, being ordinary ("normal") is linked to being straight and homosexuality becomes an aberration, something that one has to work at to make

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it convincing. For Sparks, the "invaluable" achievement appears to lie in making it believable that two men might actually want to be with each other and that between them there might be "emotional, internal stuff." 13 What we encounter on the intra- and extradiegetic levels of Queer as Folk is the limit of resignification, when such resignification concerns not just any speech genre, but one that is construed as accented in a particular national or chronotopic context. This does not mean that resignification is necessarily doomed to failure, but it does mean that it is never a straightforward practice. In Chapter 6, which looks more closely at the process of remaking Queer as Folk, I explore how developing a strategic and responsible practice of translation-as-simulation can optimize the potential for resignification.

Identities in Translation

Remaking Translation Identities, particularly marginalized ones, cannot be seen as private properties. They have to be communicable across nations, cultures, chronotopes, and even individual subjects if they are to assert themselves, to be seen and be heard. In this communication, identities do not stay the same but necessarily undergo a process of translation that entails their transformation by introducing them to alterity. In "The Sugar You Stir," Paul Gilroy notes that, in relation to identity constructions, a "concern with the mechanisms of cultural transmission and translation must become a priority" (20oob: 133). Translation introduces flexibility into a single identity over time and provides a way for different identities to interact with one another across time and space. In addition, translation underscores identity's fundamental intersubjectivity, its status as an ongoing negotiation with otherness. Spivak identifies this intimate connection between translation and intersubjectivity when she writes: Making sense of ourselves is what produces identity. If one feels that the production of identity as self-meaning, not just meaning, is as pluralized as a drop of water under a microscope, one is not always satisfied, outside of the ethico-political arena as such, with "generating" thoughts on one's own .... One of the ways to get around the confines of one's "identity" as one produces expository prose is to work at someone else's title, as one works with a language that belongs to many

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others. This, after all, is one of the seductions of translating. It is a simple miming of the responsibility to the trace of the other in the self. (2000: 397)

Just as Bakhtin maintains that we cannot see ourselves by ourselves in our full three-dimensionality, Spivak argues that we cannot write or narrate ourselves, in all our complexity, in isolation, and further that we cannot produce our multifaceted identities without going through the other. Only by approaching self-narrativization as a labor of translation that owes a debt to the other's words and the otherness of language in general, can we acknowledge and take responsibility for the way our identities are always in the first place alterities. This avowal requires a reconceptualization of translation that takes it beyond its traditional ideal of what Andrew Benjamin calls the "Reign of the Same" with its prescription of "absolute commensurability" (1992: 25). Nell exposes the danger of this ideal: by maintaining that Nell' s language can be objectively translated by matching each of her utterances with its equivalent in "proper" English, Jerry and Paula mask their appropriation of Nell's speech, which causes Nell's voice and identity to become quite literally lost in translation. Jerry and Paula engage in a practice of "bad translation" that relies on a "principle of logocentrism, where meaning is the endpoint of interpretation-centripetal, transhistorically stable, and transmedial" (Bal 2002: 69). Bad translation purports that the enigma of the other's message can be fully overcome, that it is transparently translatable. It works under what Hitchcock calls "the operative logic of translation as control" (1993a: 188). If Nell illustrates how bad translation obscures and naturalizes the power relations that inhere between subjects and languages, then how do we define "good" translation? How might a practice of "good" or responsible translation facilitate the politically effective public assertion of marginalized identities? Translation is a notoriously fuzzy concept. It comes in many forms of which interlanguage transposition is only the most obvious. Queer as Folk, between its British and American incarnations, appears as a cultural object in translation, where translation takes the form of a remake in the same medium and the same language, what Roman Jakobson would classify as an "intralingual translation" or "rewording" (1987: 429). Between the two series, the process of remaking functions to consolidate two distinct forms of queer identity, suggesting that identities are not only lost in translation but can also be found there.

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Lawrence Venuti excludes adaptations, and presumably also remakes, from the realm of translation, arguing that they "exceed" its genre (2000: 470). I wish to suggest here that the Queer as Folk remake, as an intralingual rewording, highlights the transformative aspect of all translation, precisely because the need for such a remake indicates that translation is not so much about communicating a meaning as about a dialogic process of reinscription and reframing. As Waiter Benjamin writes in "The Task of the Translator," "any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations" (1999a: 70). Adaptations and remakes exceed translation not in the sense that they stand outside it, but in the sense that they immediately take us beyond translation's accepted meaning of equivalent transmission. As such, the intralingual and intrasemiotic remake says more about translation than translation "proper" because it can achieve what, according to Derrida, no interlingual translation or intersemiotic adaptation can, namely "mark this linguistic difference inscribed in the language, this difference of language systems inscribed in a single tongue" (r985b: roo). The differences between the two Queer as Folk series and the queer identities they construct expose how a single language is never truly singular and how no speech genre or social stratification is identical across time and space. The remaking of Queer as Folk fits with the image of the United States as a culture of recycling that obsessively returns to what is already there. "Remakes appear to occupy a place in American consumer culture much like that of Barbie dolls or Beanie Babies," as Laura Grindstaff writes: "if it worked once, do it again. Why mess with a good thing?" (2001: 134). Michael Brashinsky invests this culture of the remake with a psychoanalytical motivation: "the remake has become the most explicit gesture of a culture that finds its psyche in the Other and cannot express itself through anything but a quote" (1998: 163). These views connect the practice of remaking to the serial structure of the simulacrum, which produces, in the words of Baudrillard, "perfect remakes" corresponding only to themselves without reference to anything outside or truly other (1994: 45). Simulation is a practice of self-plagiarism where images or words circulate "in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference" (6). The Queer as Folk remake, however, is precisely neither a quote nor a simulacrum of the British series. The relationship between the two

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cultural objects never becomes fully circular because what manifests itself most pervasively between them is a difference stemming from their respective relations to the surrounding culture. The excessive difference marked by the British series in its new context, not least in its accented form of spoken English, meant that it could not simply stay the same: "thick accents and arcane local references would make it hard for American audiences to follow" (Shales 2000). In addition to the adjustment of pronunciation and the removal of local allusions, the remaking of Queer as Folk demanded a shift in chronotope and a reaccentuation of the queer speech genre. As Philip E. Lewis argues, "translation, when it occurs, has to move whatever meanings it captures from the original into a framework that tends to impose a different set of discursive relations and a different construction of reality" (1985: 36). Queer is not the same in Manchester as it is in Pittsburgh. Thus, despite the fact that there is a degree of equivalence between the settings of the two series-Manchester and Pittsburgh are both industrial centers away from the capital, burdened with a history of economic decline-and that large parts of the British script are taken up word for word in the American remake, the two series construct different chronotopes and feature two distinct queer-accented speech genres that differ in tone, content, measure, and evaluation. Instead of the "liquidation of all referentials" that characterizes simulation (Baudrillard 1994: 2), the two Queer as Folk series manifest a high degree of referentiality: each series persistently gestures at its situatedness in a specific chronotope that stages queer identity in its own manner. The specificity of each Queer as Folk signals a move away from the conventional understanding of translation as the equivalent transmission of meaning, as well as from the simulation model of translation that produces indistinguishable copies. What this particular remake draws attention to is translation's endless potential for repetition with difference. Remakes can always be remade again and translations retranslated: the definitive translation is an oxymoron. In this potential for repetition lies the political promise of translation in relation to identities. Identities position and reposition themselves by exploiting their openness to remakes, to becoming other than themselves in specific, situated ways. Translation, then, is itself remade to produce a form of agency situated between identity and alterity, self and other, transparency and opacity, domestic and foreign, authentic and false, original and copy. Because this agency is located primarily in the

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practice of remaking itself, my analysis here focuses less on the differences between the two Queer as Folk series in terms of narrative content and characterization than on the interplay between them as it is figured and refigured in the positioning of the American remake by its writers/producers. Before I proceed to analyze this positioning, I first want to examine Bakhtin's possible contribution to a remake of translation.

Dialogic Translation: Situating the Remainder In relation to Bakhtin, my focus on translation marks a move beyond his concepts, but not a move away from his work altogether. Although Bakhtin rarely mentions or theorizes translation explicitly, it is constantly presupposed in his theories of language and subjectivity. It is, for instance, clearly implied in Bakhtin's definition of the humanities as a discipline: "In the humanities, as distinct from the natural and mathematical sciences, there arises the specific task of establishing, transmitting and interpreting the words of others" (1996c: 357). The same task defines the human subject, since for Bakhtin all intersubjectivity relies on the processing of the other's exotopic words, visions, and actions. This processing does not proceed according to the logic of the same, but entails an inevitable transformation. Already in "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity," Bakhtin presents translation as the creative appropriation of the other's words by the self: we are constantly and intently on the watch for reflections of our own life on the plane of other people's consciousness .... But all these moments or constituents of our life that we recognize and anticipate through the other are rendered completely immanent to our own consciousness, are translated, as it were, into its language. (1990a: 16, emphasis added) The other's evaluations do not enter the self's consciousness as they are, but in a translation that makes them our own, that domesticates them to some extent so that they "do not disrupt the unity of our life-a life that is directed ahead of itself toward the event yet-to-come" (Bakhtin 1990a: 16). If the other's words or visions were incorporated whole, as permanently foreign bodies, they would disrupt the continuous forward flow of our life and "begin to act as 'dead points,' as obstructions of any accomplishment" (r6).

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Bad translation, for Bakhtin, means letting yourself be engulfed by the foreign text without referring it back to your own language, as in the act of heteropathic identification. In "The Task of the Translator," Waiter Benjamin identifies a similar danger in his discussion of Holderlin. When the foreign tongue invades your own too deeply, he writes, meaning disappears and "the gates of a language thus expanded and modified may slam shut and enclose the translator with silence" (1999a: 82). Benjamin's shut gates are equivalent to Bakhtin's dead points of understanding, where the other's determinations begin to act as obstructions lying in the path of the self's continuous development. What should be avoided at all times is the merging of self and other, of original and translation. Bakhtin' s insistence that the other's word has to be translated into the language of the self is balanced by his contention that this translation is never completely successful, that the foreign word never completely becomes our own: One cannot understand understanding as a translation from the other's language into one's own language .... Understanding cannot be separated from evaluation: they are simultaneous and constitute a unified integral act. The person who understands approaches the work with his own already formed world view, from his own viewpoint, from his own position. These positions determine his evaluation to a certain degree, but they themselves do not always stay the same. They are influenced by the artwork, which always introduces something new. Only when the position is dogmatically inert is there nothing new revealed in the work .... The person who understands must not reject the possibility of changing or even abandoning his already prepared viewpoints and positions. In the act of understanding, a struggle occurs that results in mutual change and enrichment. (r986d: 141-42)

Although in this passage Bakhtin initially denies translation as a useful metaphor for the workings of understanding, what he rejects is only the traditional sense of translation as faithful, identical reproduction. His notion of understanding as a creative process of renewal and reevaluation remakes translation as a bidirectional reframing that produces not an original and a translation, but two translations. Translation becomes dialogic, featuring an ongoing, contextualized struggle between the other's word and the self's understanding of this word, where neither remains the same and any notion of originality or faithfulness is undermined. In Dialogics of the

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Oppressed, Hitchcock examines the political potential of a dialogic practice of translation, where dialogism indicates an aspect of infidelity, a contextual or situational positioning of the act of translation, and a coauthoring that destabilizes notions of authenticity and authority (1993a: 17o-201). I add to these aspects the idea that translation rethought in terms of dialogism undermines the notion of the original as the location of an invariant meaning. Instead, it evokes what Andrew Benjamin, in his article "Translating Origins: Psychoanalysis and Philosophy," calls the "anoriginal." As opposed to the unchanging source posited by translation conceived under the reign of the same, the anoriginal appears as a "differential ontology" or "original irreducibility" that denies "an already given semantic and interpretive finitude, if not singularity, to the source text" (1992: 23-24). The anoriginal prompts a rethinking of the temporality of translation as Nachtriiglichkeit, which denotes "the movement from the present to the past yielding a re-presentation" (31). Nachtriiglichkeit changes the past in light of the present and the present in light of the past and, as such, is the temporality not only of Freudian psychoanalysis and of Silverman's active gift of love, but also of cultural analysis as a methodology. As a cultural analyst, I do not consider my objects as bearers of an original or authentic meaning, but rather as objects alternately lost and found in translation. My own "present-ing" of the cultural objects in this book constitutes only one event in their perpetual remaking. The translation of anoriginals proceeds, in Andrew Benjamin's words, according to "the logic of the again and the anew" where each event of translation marks the "eo-presence of sameness and difference" (31). Such eo-presence is reminiscent of contemporaneity and the collocation of repetition and singularity in Bakhtin' s theory of the utterance. Dialogic translation, as an active response that makes the other's words mine without completely obliterating their foreignness, brings us to Venuti's view of translation as producing an inevitable excess or "remainder." The notion of the remainder is derived from the work of JeanJacques Lecercle and defined as those linguistic effects triggered by the variety of forms which the user employs selectively to communicate, but which, because of their circulation in social groups and institutions, always carry a collective force that outstrips any individual's control and complicates intended meanings. (Venuti 1996: 25)

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Here, Venuti identifies the remainder as exactly that Tower-of-Babel mixing of meanings or social intonations that Bakhtin sees as always already surrounding and confusing the word. Although for Lecercle every utterance contains a remainder, Venuti focuses on its role in interlingual translation and distinguishes two forms: a domestic remainder, which denotes the "domestic intelligibilities and interests" inscribed into the foreign text to make it appealing and understandable to the domestic audience belonging to its new context; and a foreign remainder, which refers to the foreign elements retained in the translation that mark it as a translation owing a debt to an original (2000: 468). Together, these remainders turn translation into a "cultural political practice" (1992: 9), an ideologically invested labor of transformation. The foreign remainder may appear to reinvoke the traditional view of translation as standing in the service of the original, but in fact it denotes an excessive marking of this original as other. In this way, the foreign remainder separates the translation from the original, identifying it as a comment on the original rather than as its equivalent reproduction. The domestic remainder highlights the specificity of each translation, the way each translation departs from the original in a particular manner that bears a political or ideological meaning. In the play between domestic and foreign remainders lies the political agency of translation, as the remaking of Queer as Folk makes clear. In the American Queer as Folk, the show's title constitutes a foreign remainder, since the proverb it derives from is unknown in the American context, where queer almost exclusively refers to homosexuality and lacks the polysemic status it has in British English. 1 The domestic remainder appears, for example, in the different mode of distribution. In Britain, Queer as Folk was broadcast on a public television station, but in the United States, it could appear only on the segregated system of pay cable television because of its explicit sexual content. 2 Another domestic remainder is the remake's much greater emphasis on the lesbian story lines and the insertion of lesbian sex scenes. The presence of remainders highlights the chronotopic specificity of queer identity. Since there is no space for a full account of domestic and foreign remainders in the two series, I concentrate on the opening credit sequences of the two series. Opening credits are designed to convey the identity of a television program and, as such, may be considered as program signatures. In this case, the contrast between the sequences underwrites the

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position each Queer as Folk series takes on in relation to queer identity and its positioning within the dominant cultural domain. The British sequence opens with a red screen on which yellow lights are flashing and dancing around, suggesting nighttime. Over this, we hear a voice singing in an elegiac tone. The singing is suggestive of a wake, in a possible reference to the common representational association of homosexuality with AIDS and death. fu the title of the series appears on the screen, however, this association is severed by an unmistakably happy instrumental tune that suddenly cuts in, interspersed with exuberant yells. This rupture indicates the series' determination to portray the vitality of the gay community: gay life instead of gay death. The British Queer as Folk works to disconnect the queer-accented speech genre from its traditional modes of representation (documentary, depression, deviance, death) by presenting it in a form that is at once more positive and more mainstream: a television drama with elements of comedy. Its opening sequence contains no indication of the series' explicit sexual content and only the tide refers to homosexuality. The American opening credits differ most significantly from the British one in their persistent visualization of the series' homosexual subject matter. Loud dance music (a piece by Greek Buck suggestively titled "Spunk") counts us into the sequence: "four, five, six, sink it dude!" An attractive, muscular, bare-chested man jumps into the frame and dances seductively against a brightly colored, pulsating background from which the letter Q emerges. The sequence continues by pairing differently colored psychedelic backgrounds with dancing and swimming men, all scantily clad and overtly sexualized. The men point to the homosexual content of the series by invoking the stereotype of the body-obsessed gay man (the presence of lesbians is not indicated). Between the shots of the men, the word queer is spelled out by letters that fly at the viewer, announcing the series' in-your-face treatment of homosexuality. This no-holds-barred quality is further emphasized when one of the dancers suggests he is about to remove his briefs, and by the way another forms a gun with his fingers and points it directly at the camera. The colors themselves constitute a first reference to the rainbow symbol, which the American series employs throughout as an emblem of queer pride and activism. The sequence ends with an image of the series' tide in white letters against a black background, accompanied by the rainbow.

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Whereas the British opening credits and the series as a whole removes queer-accented speech from the political sphere to present it as a familiar or intimate genre, the American remake presents queer as inherently political. Its episodes feature a number of story lines dealing with queer "issues" or "problems" such as gay bashing, police entrapment, lesbian parenthood, gay and lesbian groups in schools, AIDS, and safe sex. Although the British series touches on some of these issues as well, they remain in the background. The American series' recoding of homosexuality as a political issue-at one point, the series features a senator trying to capitalize on the queer vote-could be categorized as what John Johnston terms a "reterritorializing translation." This is a translation that brings the translated text closer to the standard than the deterritorializing original, recoding it "through the (re)imposition of cultural and religious (or spiritual) values and meanings" (1992: 53). The American Queer as Folk, then, through its domestic remainder, would be seen to reinforce the dominant culture's problem- and politics-oriented representation of queer identity, thereby detracting from the British series' subversion of this same representation. However, the different chronotopic contexts of the two seriesboth in terms of the queer chronotopes they construct in their narrative and in terms of the media and cultural chronotopes the series themselves occupy-complicate such a categorization. What constitutes a reterritorialization in one context does not necessarily have the same meaning in another. In Britain, it may be subversive to present queer identities as nonpolitical, whereas in the United States the explicit politicization and sexualization of queer identities can be equally empowering to the queer community. In the American context, presenting queer identity as a political issue may therefore constitute a deterritorializing act. The displacement of translation not only shifts Queer as Folk's representational politics but also their meaning and effect. Foreign and domestic remainders mark the points where the situatedness of the source and the target text are inscribed and where the two texts work on each other dialogically. It is, after all, only in the light of the other that the specificity of the self becomes visible. Dialogic translation removes translation from both originality and self-referentiality: the play of remainders across the two Queer as Folk series shows, on the one hand, that queer does not have an original, fixed

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meaning. On the other hand, it indicates that queer also does not appear as a serial sign that endlessly replicates itself without regard for its chronotopic context. Paradoxically, the specificity or singularity of queer becomes most apparent in its translational repetition. As Derrida and Stiegler note in "Echographies of Television": One must invent an experience of translation which makes crossing possible without leveling and effacing the singularity of idiom. It is necessary to make, in translation, another experience of language, another experience of the other. (2002: 8r) As a form of crossing that should never amount to a crossing out, translation requires a marking of alterity and exteriority, an experience of the other as other. This is particularly important with regard to a dominant culture's translations of texts written by marginal subjects, but it is also significant for translations of marginalities by marginalities, as in Queer as Folk. For Bakhtin as for Oerrida, a "good" translation is one that introduces difference into both translation and original, deterritorializing both, not only in relation to each other but also in relation to the respective contexts of their iteration.

Strategic Simulations: Between Original and Copy The simulacrum, as an indistinguishable, interchangeable copy that displaces the original, signals the failure of dialogic translation. Since the simulacrum internalizes its own repetition, there is no outward movement or position of exotopy. Baudrillard writes: That discourse "circulates" is to be taken literally: that is, it no longer goes from one point to another, but it traverses a cycle that without distinction includes the positions of transmitter and receiver, now unlocatable as such. (1994: 41, n. 7) The simulacrum, in this understanding, implies a lack of distance and difference, a canceling out of alterity. There exists, however, a different interpretation of the simulacrum that accords with a dialogic theory of translation. In Phantom Communities: The Simulacrum and the Limits of Postmodernism, Scott Durham outlines the simulacrum in its "daemonic sense," where it comes to signify "the positive expression of metamorphic and creative 'powers of the false'" (1998: 8). In this sense, which can be traced back to Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault, the simulacrum hails the

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return of difference: it is associated with appropriation, transformation, the asynchronous, and with a self capable of becoming other than itself. The daemonic simulacrum acts strategically by exploiting the appearance of sameness (the again) in order to introduce difference (the anew). In Durham's words, it produces the "experience of the repetition of the simulacrum as the masked return of difference" (12). The remaking of Queer as Folk and, more specifically, the way the American series was positioned by its writers/producers, Daniel Lipman and Ron Cowen, demonstrates how such a strategic simulation, exploiting the ambivalent space between original and copy, can work stealthily to introduce a more controversial representation of a marginalized identity into the dominant cultural realm. In an Internet chat session organized by the Showtime network shortly after the launch of the U.S. series, Ron Cowen wrote: We think of [our characters) as the American cousins of the British original. We tried to give them American sensibilities and personalities, and an American voice. 3 Cowen alleges that a kinship relation joins remake and original in a way that is nonhierarchical and nonchronological: cousins are more equal than father and son because they belong to the same generation and, unlike two siblings, their respective ages do not bear any consequences in terms of their inheritance. Within the family structure, cousins occupy virtually interchangeable positions. On the other hand, since their family tie is a loose one, cousins are not necessarily expected to look alike or even to share the same nationality or culture. The cousin metaphor signals Cowen's desire to place the American Queer as Folk on the same level as the British original in terms of its importance and quality, but at the same time to insist on a difference between the two in terms of their content and voice. The two series are presented as related, but not the same. Most important, Cowen's remarks seek to ensure that the two objects will not be ranked as original and copy, as first and second. By means of the cousin metaphor, he places the remake beside the original rather than after it. The original is not granted a position of automatic superiority or precedence; yet at the same time, the two objects are not presented as fully equivalent either. 4 Instead, Cowen identifies the remake as a creative reworking or supplementation of the British series, which, despite Cowen' s use of the term

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original, functions more as an anoriginal, as a text already lacking in and of itself, a site where "there is no unity to be recovered" and to which the remake is therefore not reducible (A. Benjamin 1992: 24). This "creative" relationship becomes explicit in the closing credits of the American Queer as Folk, where the viewer is informed (r) that the series was "written by: Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman," (2) that it was "based on the British series created by: Russell T. Davies," and (3) that it was "developed for American television by: Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman." These consecutive attributions sandwich the creator of the British series between the remakers, who are doubly credited with writing and developing, creation and supplementation. The order of the attributions confounds the accepted chronology of the remake, which moves from original to copy. Here, (re)writing precedes creating, and Davies' original British Queer as Folk is immediately qualified by Cowen and Lip man's American effort of developing, which suggests that the initial Queer as Folk was already in some sense lacking. In this manner, the credits themselves enact the temporality of Nachtraglichkeit that turns the original into an anoriginal. Cowen' s comments, along with the end credits, effect a "decanonization" of the original, according to Paul de Man, an unveiling of the way the original itself was incomplete: [Translations] disarticulate, they undo the original, they reveal that the original was always already disarticulated. They reveal that their failure, which seems to be due to the fact that they are secondary in relation to the original, reveals an essential failure, an essential disarticulation that was already there in the original. They kill the original, by discovering that the original was already dead. (1986: 84)

The original is undone-or, at least, its primacy and assumed unity undermined-by presenting it as something that already invited, even required, supplementation and extension. The Queer as Folk remake exploits the way originality "has the double meaning of both unprecedented and basic" (Braudy 1998: 329). The British Queer as Folk may have been first, but its originality-which implies more than merely coming first-is denied and to some extent usurped by the remake, which places itself both before and after it, using it as a model and replacing it as the model for itself. The translation no longer descends from the original in a direct line of filiation, but through an indirect connection that is nonhierarchical and

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nonchronological, so that the translation can no longer be said to be indebted to the original for its life. Contrary to the traditional conception of translation, which prescribes the invisibility of the translator, the remakers of Queer as Folk consistently present translation as a visible mediation. According to Hitchcock, this foregrounding of the translator works to emphasize "that there can be no transparent or neat equivalence between source and target languages, and that the promulgation of smooth correspondence is ideologically and politically suspect" (1993a: r8r). However, in practically overwriting the name of the original author with their own, Cowen and Lipman appear less interested in questioning the transparency of translation than in establishing the moment of translation as another moment of authenticity, originality, and authority. Rather than denying the possibility of the original, they claim it for themselves, obfuscating the hierarchical relations of translation in another way. Thus, in the same Internet chat, Daniel Lipman comments: The show began as a British series-there are people out there who don't know that it started in Britain. And Showtime asked us to adapt it for American television. Not many British shows can translate, but when we saw this show we both felt that it could be adapted, that it very much had our voice that we write in. Although Lipman acknowledges the British series as a template, he remains ambivalent about the precise relation between original and remake. The American Queer as Folk is indeed an adaptation and translation of the British show, but at the same time, it is presented as somehow already having been present in the British show, in the form of "our voice." This implies that Lipman and Cowen merely took back what was already theirs. Later, still referring to Queer as Folk, Cowen asserts: "We like to do original ideas that have not been done before." Lipman joins him in underplaying the influence of the British series on the remake: We were basically in uncharted territory from the second episode of the entire series because once again, there were a lot of people who had never seen the show who said, "they used everything from the British." We barely used anything from the British.... We used a few odd elements here and there from the British show, but this was never the sort of situation where we used everything and then went off on our own. It was pretty much our show from the beginning.

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The remake now appears as a re-creation, where creation is emphasized at the expense of the "re-" that marks the American show's status as a reiteration. This completes Lipman's and Cowen's appropriation of originality and their reversal of the temporality of the remake: it no longer matters that the series started in Britain, its novelty in the American context-which they stress repeatedly-suffices to make the remake an original, an act of initiation rather than imitation. However, instead of reestablishing the primacy of the original for the remake, as Lipman and Cowen intend, their way of describing the relation between the two series only confuses the categories further. From an absolute category, the original becomes a relative term, an ascription determined by knowledge (for people who did not know about the existence of the British series, the American Queer as Folk was already the original) and chronotopic context. Contrary to Lipman's and Cowen's refutations, most reviews considered the American series heavily indebted to the British one. The initial episodes, in particular, were seen to replicate their British equivalents quite closely. Andrew Patner (2000) sees the American show "tracking the British version sometimes line-for-line and shot-for-shot," and Russell T. Davies, creator of the British script, lauds the American adaptors for being "remarkably faithful" to his version (quoted in Weintraub 2000). In what paradoxically appears as an act of simulation-"to feign to have what one doesn't have" (Baudrillard 1994: 3)-Lipman and Cowen reject their role as simulators of the British show, substituting claims of originality for originality itself. In proclaiming the American show true to the British in intention and integrity, bur not in content and characterization, Lipman and Cowen enact the "dance of evocation and denial," which Thomas Leitch identifies as the paradoxical rhetoric of the true remake (1990: 146). Although their remake in fact follows the original quite closely, they disavow this similarity by covering it over with simulations of difference and distance. I want to explore how the tension between affirming and denying the original is strategically played out with a view to repositioning queer representation in the straight television landscape of the United States. This strategy-which is traceable in the marked contrast between, on the one hand, Cowen' s and Lip man's remarks on the remake as a whole and, on the other, their comments on the series' depiction of gay sexualityturns the remake into a site of political agency.

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With regard to the visual representation of gay sex, Lipman and Cowen assert the equivalence of both Queer as Folk series rather than emphasizing their creative supplementation. Rob Owen (woo) cites their assurance that "the nudity, language, and sexuality of the original will be retained" and quotes Cowen as saying that "it will be every bit as bold." Barry Weintraub (woo) records how Showtime's director of programming assured him that the American Queer as Folk would be "as explicit in the United States as it was in Britain" and that "the network promised to stay as close to the British series as possible, especially in matters of candor." Thus, with regard to its sexual candor, the two series are no longer distant cousins, but more like brothers or even twins: identical instead of merely similar. From the realm of the simulacrum, characterized by "a serial and reversible movement of similitude between 'copy' and 'copy'" or cousin and cousin, we have returned to traditional translation with its "old hierarchy of resemblance, according to which a copy was said more or less faithfully to resemble its model" (Durham 1998: 29). In relation to sexual candor, the remake does not seek to precede the British original, but embraces it as a model to be reproduced faithfully. However, the depiction of sex is, in fact, not equivalent between the two Queer as Folk series. Not only does the American remake include lesbian sex (which is absent from the British series), it also lengthens several of the male-on-male sex scenes, increases their number, and makes them more visually explicit by using more revealing camera angles, a greater number of close-ups of naked body parts-with the genitalia remaining conspicuously out of sight, as in the British series-and by exhibiting a greater focus on the sexual climax, indexically represented by shots of hands clutching sheets, feet curling up, and faces contorting with pleasure. The producers implicitly present this unacknowledged amplification as a remnant of the British original, as a foreign remainder that marks the remake's status as a translation. Here, however, this marking is excessive: the foreign element is not simply incorporated, but exaggerated and expanded. What we are dealing with here is a domestic remainder masking as a foreign remainder, a dissimulation-"to pretend not to have what one has" (Baudrillard 1994: 3)-of difference that, paradoxically, works by simulating the traditional relation of equivalence between original and translation.

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The aim of this dissimulation is to establish a deterritorializing translation, one that "accomplish[es] something different by maintaining the target language in such a way that it can't be recoded and recuperated by appeal to established cultural and spiritual meanings" Qohnston 1992: 54). By invoking the cultural norm of translation as equivalent reproduction, the Queer as Folk remake ensures that the sexual scenes in the target language cannot be recoded by appealing to the cultural norms of sexual representation in the United States. The representational constraints of American television with regard to the depiction of queer sex are eluded by (falsely) invoking the authenticity of translation. The foreign remainder, then, becomes a strategic tool, part of a subversive strategy to radicalize the British series' sexual content. 5 The British original comes to serve as an alibi for the remake's amplification of those aspects most likely to incur rejection in the American context. Controversial content is more likely to be accepted in a translationespecially one that emphasizes its "second-order status" (Venuti 1996: 30)-than in an original product, where it would appear as a transgressive novelty. With the British original so commercially successful and critically acclaimed, it would be difficult for the American censors and audiences to reject a product presumed to be an accurate reproduction of this original. 6 Paradoxically, the remake's status as belonging to the reign of the Same is invoked to produce something new, albeit clandestinely. Although purporting to copy its original faithfully, the remake actually works "within the structure of the supplement, ... adding to, rather than subtracting from, the play of differences" (Wills 1998: 150). We are now dealing with an act of simulation in Durham's sense, that of a productive assumption and feigning of sameness that strategically works to activate "the masked return of difference" and the "potential for metamorphosis" (Durham 1998: 12, 9). In the American remake of Queer as Folk, translation appears under the mask of originality and originality under the mask of translation. Between its two incarnations, Queer as Folk reconfigures the original as a concept that coincides neither with its translation nor with itself. The translation can, of course, always only simulate originality, yet at the same time it is through the American remake that the British series emerges as an original. Originality is dependent both on the existence of a copy (or a remake) and on the public's awareness that these are indeed copies (or

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remakes). Walter Benjamin intimated as much when he argued that the original text survives thanks to its translation or afterlife (1999a: 73), while Paul de Man similarly argued that "we are to understand the original from the perspective of the translation" (1986: 83). The ambiguous relation between the two Queer as Folk series reveals original and remake as unstable terms that can never be definitively assigned. This impossibility derives not only from the challenges of plagiarism and authentication, but also from the way our reading of the object varies according to the status we (rightly or wrongly) assign to it. As Brashinsky writes, "Like one of those tricky airport billboards that read 'Welcome' or 'Have a Good Flight' depending on the passenger's direction, the remake says one thing when read as an original work and another when seen in retrospect, through the lens of its source" (1998: 165). American viewers unaware of the British Queer as Folk might well construct the American show as an original series, particularly when Lipman and Cowen insistently market it as such. Moreover, the chronology of the two versions may become confused when the two series air simultaneously or in the "wrong" order. As Russell T. Davies has remarked: The funny thing is, the Americans who have seen that and then watch the UK version don't really like it that much ... because they've got their own version. So it seems to be that whichever one you see first, you like best. (quoted in Weintraub 2000)

Here, the evaluation of the two series is no longer dependent on their actual status as original or translation-their actual chronology-but on their temporal primacy in the eyes of the viewer. Originality no longer inheres in the text, but becomes an unstable factor of its reception. Translations that function in the mold of the daemonic simulacrum do not produce an original and a copy but a collection of more or less equivalent versions, all existing on the same level. I have until now deliberately avoided speaking of the two Queer as Folk series as versions, because in Chapter 8, I transform the status of the word from that of a commonplace term, as Davies uses it, into that of a theoretical concept: versioning. In the remaking of Queer as Folk, translation emerges not as an obligating debt regulated by a contract. Translation owes no more to the original than the original owes to the translation. It finds itself between original and copy, thus lending itself to strategic political exploitation, to

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a "politics of simulation" (Durham 1998: 191). Translation as simulation undermines the hierarchy of copy and original and circumvents the logic of first and second, of father and son, and of cause and effect implied in Derrida's description of translation as a "scene of inheritance" related to "the genealogy of proper names, of the family, the law, indebtedness" (1985b: 104). By strategically playing one meaning of the simulacrum against the other-its meaning as a copy of a copy without a primary original (appealed to by Cowen's cousin metaphor), and its meaning as a disturbing alterity-in-and-through-similarity (activated in relation to the remake's depiction of queer sex)-Queer as Folk exemplifies a form of translation that actualizes a sense of never-quite-the-same, of a necessary alterity-in-identity that Bakhtin considers inherent to all language, all communication, and all subjectivity.

The Subject as Semitranslator As noted earlier in this chapter, Bakhtin conceptualizes the subject as a translator: in its internal dialogization of the determinations it receives from various others, the self produces domestic and foreign remainders: to a degree, it domesticates the other's evaluations, but at the same time it retains elements of their otherness. The latter preclude the self from ever coinciding with itself and ensure the subject's status as a task to-beaccomplished rather than as a given. Bakhtin's subject-as-translator continually remakes itself by way of the other, coinciding neither with the other nor with itself as an original, but translating and retranslating itself until death, always with a difference, and always in relation to the intersubjective, since the exotopic other forms the catalyst for each retranslation. The Bakhtinian subject as continuously lost and found in translation speaks to Durham's daemonic simulacrum "which, having no Being of its own, passes from role to role, always becoming other than itself" (Durham 1998: 21). The daemonic simulacrum functions as a force of infinite metamorphosis that never congeals into a definitive image, never catches up with itself: The simulacrum ... is at once removed from and infinitely proximate to its point of origin; as such, it is essentially displaced, elsewhere than itself. But, as the ambiguous "return" of a model that it at once renders visible and withholds, it is

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also fundamentally untimely: nonsynchronous with and becoming other than itself. (Durham 1998: q) For Durham, this model of simulation figures the subject as acteur en soi (Pierre Klossowski) or spontane simulateur (Jean Genet), acting out a multiple subjectivity that is "infinitely folded back upon itself" (1998: 107). This multiple subjectivity remains, however, largely self-contained, acting out, in itself and for itself, what is already its own, whether in reality or in fantasy. The collective appears only as a utopian fantasy deferred onto the future and the act of simulation allows for no outside perspective, no true otherness. Thus, in Klossowski, the acteur en soi is exemplified by the tableau vivant as an internalizing repetition where the performance of different identities is irreconcilable with their external observation and analysis: "one cannot at the same time master the tableau from the outside and perform within it" (Durham 1998: 83). While this offers a way to undermine authority by turning the judge into another actor, it also implies a denial of external difference as a potentially productive force. Repetition operates like "a variation on a theme" where "the number of possible themes is limited by the past" (108). There is freedom in simulation, but this freedom is emphatically "indifferentiated" (108): it differs in itself but never truly departs from itself. In Un captif, Genet points to the way the spontaneous simulator can only work with what was there from the beginning: "I realized that my life-I mean the events of my life, spread out flat in front of me-was nothing but a blank sheet of paper which I'd managed to fold into something different" (quoted in Durham 1998: 173). Because both the acteur en soi and the spontane simulateur remain caught in the selfreferential logic of the simulacrum, there is no true otherness, no real distance from the self. Bakhtin's subject also remakes itself, but always by way of the external other, who introduces new elements that open up the process of selftranslation to more or less radical reworkings. Moreover, for Bakhtin and the other members of the Bakhtin Circle, translation is inherently responsive. Voloshinov argues that "any act of understanding is a response, i.e., it translates what is being understood into a new context from which a response can be made" (1986: 69, n. 2). Translation, therefore, does not end in the self, but is returned to the other in a dialogic process of interaction that continues throughout the subject's life.

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Bakhtin also does not conceive of the subject as formed once and for all by the other's address. The first address only creates a first posture, a preliminary shape over which the self will gain more and more control as she develops her own discourse out of the other's words: One's own discourse and one's own voice, although born of another or dynamically stimulated by another, will sooner or later begin to liberate themselves from the authority of the other's discourse. (1996c: 348) The subject really only emerges when it learns to speak its own independent language: "An independent, responsible and active discourse is the fundamental indicator of an ethical, legal and political human being" (Bakhtin 1996c: 349-50). Such independence, however, is never absolute. The monologization of consciousness-the consolidation of many voices into the self's own voice-is only a provisional translation, only momentarily satisfactory. It is a stopping point that enables the self to act, but it is never definitive and may at any moment be triggered into a renewed dialogism by a fresh encounter with another voice: "this monologized consciousness enters as one single whole into a new dialogue (with the new external voices of others)" (Bakhtin 1986e: 163). It is therefore only in a continuous effort of dialogic translation that the subject exists and has a future. This effort proceeds by way of the empirical, external other and impacts on the latter through the essential responsiveness of translation, the way translation always returns to the original and changes it. As Derrida notes, "it is never the same text, never an echo, that comes back to you" (1985b: 158). And if the self does not reply to the other, it must at least pose questions to the other, to which the other is then obliged to respond. The subject is never closed off, but remains in process, and in this process, it is invariably introduced to change by its encounters withalterity. Our inability to translate the other fully keeps our need for the external other alive, yet our ability to domesticate the other's words at least in part ensures that our efforts of translation are not totally in vain. In this manner, Bakhtin introduces an element of reciprocity into translation, substituting openness for closure and interaction for onesidedness. Translation is not a one-way street, but a series of intersections, where original crosses paths with translation. The original does not simply disappear after it has been translated, but continues to pose questions of the translation, questions that solicit answers and beg new questions. This

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process, which bears on the past as well as the future, continues until death, as does the subject's becoming-other-than-itself. Characteristically for Bakhtin, the most productive word is not the self's or the other's, but a mix of the two: a word half ours and half someone else's. A semitranslation, if you will. The American remake of Queer as Folk appears as just such a semitranslation. Neither copy nor original, it places itself on the borderline between the two, invalidating their binary opposition and exploiting their intertwinement to further the cause of queer representation. By (mis)translating the British series, the place of queer representation in American television and culture is exposed and partially displaced. The American remake may not be a "faithful" translation of the British original, but it represents a "good" or "responsible" translation in Bakhtin's sense, meaning a translation that never becomes definitive, that is fundamentally reciprocal, and that preserves an alterity-in-identity. Of course, the task of establishing a responsible practice of translation is not easy. Whereas Bakhtin presumes that the self can simply choose which of the other's words to translate and which to leave intact, other theorists have pointed to the coercive, hierarchical dimensions of translation. Laplanche' s psychoanalytic model, for example, introduces the enigma as the point of the necessary failure of translation. Because the other's message contains elements that are of themselves resistant to any translation and therefore not digested by the other, these elements cannot be digested by the self either. They create a remainder forming the basis of the self's unconscious as the has-not-been-translated. For Laplanche, "dead points" cannot be avoided; they are inherent to messages sent between subjects who do not possess a full translation of themselves.7 From a different perspective, cultural communications theorist Kevin Robins argues that translation may signal the appropriation of subordinate identities rather than their dialogic understanding: The responsibility of Translation means learning to listen to "others" and learning to speak to, rather than for or about, "others." That is easily said, of course, but not so easy to accomplish. Hierarchical orders of identity will not quickly disappear. Indeed, the very celebration and recognition of "difference" and "otherness" may itself conceal more subtle and insidious relations of power. (1999= 22)

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Translations may pretend to take difference seriously-simulating its acceptance-while actually reinforcing relations of domination, as happens in Nell. And just as strategic simulations can be liberating, they can also be adopted by the powers that be as a countertactic. Because of the inherent instability of its meaning and effects, translation can never fully be identified with a particular type of politics. Ethical, aesthetic, or moral distinctions between good and bad translations remain necessary; as does our acknowledgment that no translation is ever complete. In "The Politics of Translation," Spivak defines a responsible translation as one that emphasizes rhetoric (figuration, dissemination, frayage, contingency) over logic (codification, connection, centering) and as one that presupposes a "tough sense of the specific terrain of the original" on the part of the translator (2000: 405). The translator must be on intimate terms with the source language and should "surrender to the text" (400) in an erotic move that does not denote unity or sameness. For Spivak, as for Bakhtin, the recognition of difference and its marking is essential for a responsible translation: "the good-willing attitude 'she is just like me' is not very helpful" (400). Again, intimacy does not indicate ecstatic oneness, but rather a keen awareness of where the other differs from the self in terms of its history and terrain. The elements that Spivak presents as essential for responsible translation-an intimacy without sameness, a preservation of the other's difference, and a practical rather than a grammatical understanding of the other's language-are inherent to dialogism. Dialogism, however, emphasizes that translation is not only obliged to mark the specificity of the original, but also that of the translation. Thus, where Spivak suggests that responsible translation should keep the demands of the target audience at bay, Bakhtin would argue that both sets of demands should be brought into communication with each other if a productive intersubjective interaction is to take place. In her turn, Spivak supplements Bakhtin through her emphasis on the power relations involved in translation. She argues, for instance, that the rhetoricity of women is often "doubly obscured" (2000: 408) in translations as a result of patriarchal domination. Queer as Folk emerges from my analysis as a responsible translation (although not necessarily deliberately so) that is sensitive to the different politics of queer in its various chronotopic contexts. The remake avoids what Emily Apter, following Spivak, calls "a generic, depoliticised translationese"

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(2oor: 7). Instead of aspiring toward a monolinguistic, global language of queer that would entail a loss of the specific terrain of British queer identity, the remaking of Queer as Folk, oscillating between its British and American incarnations, finds two queer identities: each situated in a specific cultural context and each with its own strategies for making itself seen and heard in that context. In Against Race, Gilroy points to the aim of marginal identity assertions as guaranteeing "that we can speak with confidence from somewhere in particular and develop not only our translation skills but the difficult language of comparative (not homogenizing) judgment" (2oooa: 254). Translation is never neutral, but appears as a moment of political agency at work between the shifting places of particular identities. This moment inevitably entails judgment and thus appeals to an ethics of alterity that, if utilized in an answerable manner, establishes a comparative or dialogic interaction between the translated and the translating identity. Both these identities have to be situated in a specific context, Gilroy's "somewhere in particular" and Spivak's "specific terrain." In Chapter 7, I develop a conception of the situated specificity of identities and their intersubjective translations in terms of territory.

Territories of Identity

The Notting Hill Carnival and Popular Culture The vital challenge for my project has been to take Bakhtin beyond himself into our contemporary cultural realm. The Bakhtinian concept for which such a beyond is the most imperative is also the one that is so often and so uncritically attached to his name: the carnival. The carnival is inextricably linked to popular culture and exemplifies popular culture as a performative act or event that takes place in the public sphere. Carnival has been seen as a transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon: it can be traced back to preclassical times (as Bakhtin's work shows) and it occurs in widely divergent cultures, ranging from my hometown of Bergen op Zoom in the Catholic south of the Netherlands to New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, the Caribbean, and, in the case I deal with here, in London. However, to say that the carnival is transhistorical and transcultural is not to say that it is ahistorical or that it remains exactly the same across all its different cultural manifestations. What is lacking in many applications of Bakhtin's notion of the carnival (and the carnivalesque), including his own elaboration of the concept in Rabelais and His World (1984), is its sociohistorical differentiation and specification. The method of cultural analysis compels a reading of carnival that examines a particular exemplar of this cultural phenomenon to see what this exemplar, precisely in its sociopolitical situatedness and specificity, has to say about

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carnival as a concept and its relation to other concepts such as the chronotope and territory. If identities-as-intersubjectivities are situated and specific, both in terms of their constraints and their proclivity for resignification and translation, then it makes sense to say that they lay claim to a particular social territory, where territory designates the materially concrete and politically astute position from where the subject can speak and make herself heard. In Chapter 6, I argue, with regard to the remaking of Queer as Folk, that processes of deand reterritorialization cannot be generalized. What appears as a deterritorialization in one context functions as a reterritorialization in another, and vice versa. Moreover, as Deleuze and Guattari note in A Thousand Plateaus, the two processes are always implicated in each other: "How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of reterritorialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one another?" (2004: n) The two cannot be separated and what connects them, what remains the ante of both processes, is territory itself, defined as a location in the social realm that is not simply there but has to be conquered, contested, and most important, recognized as being capable, at least partly and temporarily, of guaranteeing one's identity. Below, I examine the concept of territory, which represents a further move into Bakhtin' s beyond, not only as a metaphor for the discursive struggle that surrounds all words and identities, but also in terms of the performative battles communities wage over actual spaces and times in their attempts to establish, maintain, or assert their chronotopic identities. In relation to the chronotope, then, the concept of territory brings out its status as political contestation, a structuring of time-space that challenges and seeks to displace others. My cultural object for this chapter is the Notting Hill Carnival, a Caribbean-inspired popular festival that takes place in central London every Bank Holiday (public holiday) Sunday and Monday in August. Today, this carnival is a large, commercial event attracting not just a black following, but many white British spectators and tourists as well. Its established status in British society was confirmed in 2002, when the carnival was included in the Queen's Golden Jubilee procession. Notting Hill, formerly a predominantly immigrant neighborhood, has itself undergone a process of gentrification, which intensified after the area was featured in the successful 1999 film Notting Hill, starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. In its early years, however, the Notting Hill Carnival was a controversial event, deeply

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intertwined with British racial politics and the development of a black British identity. 1 As a cultural object, the Notting Hill Carnival differs significantly from the objects I discuss in earlier chapters. It embodies popular culture as practice rather than representation, as participative rather than spectatorial, as productive rather than consumptive, and as taking place on a local, spatiotemporally and sociohistorically specific material terrain rather than in the virtuality of the transnational mass media. Borrowing Johannes Fabian's anthropological definition in Moments of Freedom, the Notting Hill Carnival encapsulates popular culture as a "negation or antonym of culture," which, through a contextualized material praxis, produces a form of affirmative knowledge that "contests integrative and normative conceptions" and "asserts the existence of spaces of freedom and creativity in situations of oppression" (1998: 2). As opposed to the filmic and televisual objects of the previous chapters, which are most commonly watched by individual viewers in a location spatiotemporally distinct from that of production, the Notting Hill Carnival is a collective, live event that joins participants and audience together in the time and place of its staging. The Notting Hill Carnival, moreover, actively uses this live collectivity to political effect in its (re)positioning of black identity within British culture. In Fabian's terms, it fulfills "the most significant achievement of popular culture," which is "to create collective freedom precisely in situations where individual freedom is denied or limited" (r9). Specifically, the Notting Hill Carnival intervenes in the power relations of British society to assert a collective appositional identity that emerges not as a fixed essence, but as a nodal point in an evolving network of dialogic relations. The Notting Hill Carnival both recalls and reforms Bakhtin' s concept of carnival, which is where his problematic view of popular culture appears most insistently. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin rigidly opposes popular folk culture to official culture: incarnated in the carnival, popular culture is perceived as separate from official culture, as free from dogmatism, and as characterized by a suspension of hierarchy and a logic of inversion. It establishes, as Bakhtin writes, a "utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance" (1984: 9). The carnival, consequently, is considered liberatory only in its departure from official culture, never in relation to it. In Bakhtin' s view, it has no political effect outside its own spatiotemporal

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boundaries. Thus, notwithstanding Gardiner's charge that Bakhtin "overestimate[s] the liberatory potential of popular culture" by giving over to an "unfettered utopianism" and romanticization of carnival (1992: 8), Bakhtin in fact conceives of popular culture as a limited subversive force, particularly within the social realm, where carnivals are usually sanctioned by the religious or political order. He is more optimistic about carnival as a decentralizing force in literature, but his aestheticization of the carnival into the carnivalesque separates it from its historical, social, and institutional coordinates. Bakhtin writes about the subjects of popular culture only in the most anonymous and undifferentiated of terms such as "the people" or "the folk," linking them to a rather nostalgic, yet at the same time utopian, conception of a world without hierarchies, dogmas, and power structures. This world is so completely divorced from actual events and experiences, Hirschkop argues, that popular culture is transformed into an almost transcendental category: The "great experience" of humanity embodied in the symbolic forms of popular culture is not really a form of experience at all. It is the transcendence of experience, the means by which humanity achieves a wholly disinterested view of the "ultimate whole." ... [T]he very anonymity of popular culture is what, in Bakhtin's view, allows it to function as an equivalent for the transcendent, ahistorical view of the philosopher. (2001: 21) Bakhtin' s notion of popular culture, then, is not especially useful for discussing a concrete, situated festival like the Notting Hill Carnival. Indeed, I read this particular Carnival as a deterritorializing translation of Bakhtin' s folk culture, one that renders carnival not as a second world, but as a divided, contested territory. Situating carnival in the distinct spatiotemporal context of London's Notting Hill neighborhood with the accompanying political coordinates of 1970s and 1980s British race relations radically alters its meaning. 2 To trace how the metaphorical territory of race is both concretized and politicized in and through the contested space-time of Notting Hill, I analyze a selection of representations of the Carnival that foreground the territoriality of the event: Limon Kwesi Johnson' s dub poem, "Forces of Victory"; Isaac Julien's experimental film, Territories; the (auto)biographical London writings of Mike Phillips; Henri Martin's documentary film, Grove Music; and the ITV (Independent Television) documentary Carnival of Tears. All

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these artifacts to some extent aestheticize the Notting Hill Carnival, but they do so without losing sight of its status as a popular cultural event situated in a concrete, dynamic network of historical, social, and political relations. But first a little history: The earliest Caribbean-style carnival in London took place in St. Pancras Town Hall in 1959 and was designed to bring the black and white communities of Notting Hill together after the race riots of 1958, which were sparked by the racist attack by a gang of white youths on a Swedish woman married to a Jamaican man (Younge 2002). In 1965, the Carnival moved out onto the streets of Notting Hill in an attempt to further improve the area's reputation. According to its organizer, Rhaune Laslett, the Carnival sought "to prove that from our ghetto there was a wealth of culture waiting to express itself, that we weren't rubbish people" (quoted in Younge). Her designation of Notting Hill as a "ghetto," which implies a particular construction of spatial jurisdiction, points to the Carnival's primordial relation to issues of space and territory: a ghetto is an area occupied by a minority group not in a positive gesture of appropriation, but in a passive mode of resignation and enforced segregation. Ghettos are territories defined and controlled by the dominant order, not by their inhabitants. Against this, Laslett indicates a desire to use the Carnival as an active tool to redefine both the neighborhood and its people by removing the negative, disenfranchizing characterizations imposed by the authorities and replacing them-in an empowering move of reterritorialization that occupies the neighborhood in another's name-by positive, enabling ones: culture instead of rubbish, wealth instead of poverty, community instead of minority, black-defined instead of whitecontrolled. From 1973 onward the Carnival appeared as a distinctly West Indian or black festival modeled on the Trinidad Carnival and featuring specifically black forms of music, such as steel bands, mas (masquerade) bands, and reggae sound systems. As a result, the Carnival claimed an ever-larger part of the neighborhood and attracted more and more, mainly black visitors: 200 in 1972, 30,ooo in 1974, and 200,000 in 1975 (Younge). The surging numbers led some white Notting Hill residents to circulate a petition to stop the Carnival. The 1976 event, characterized by a large police presence and official restrictions, culminated in riots, marking what Gilroy calls a "watershed in the history of conflict between blacks and the

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police and in the growth of the authoritarian forms of state planning and intervention during the 1970s" (2002: 117). These authoritarian forms represent the reterritorialization spurred by the deterritorialization effected by the Notting Hill Carnival through its performative constitution of a black British territory and collective identity. Until the 1990s, the Notting Hill Carnival remained a site of social, cultural, and racial contention, a flash point for the convergence and collision of official-Bakhtin would say authoritative-racist discourses and emerging-or internally persuasive-discourses of black identity. The struggle between these discourses exceeded the scope of the Carnival, so that the event has to be placed in a larger context. At the same time, however, the Carnival occupied a unique position because of its size, its annual recurrence, and its status as an overtly territorial dispute, quite literally a battle over the streets of Notting Hill. Its openly conflictual and political character clearly distinguishes it from the Bakhtinian carnival. In the following, I move beyond Bakhtin once more by situating the Notting Hill Carnival on the intersection between carnival, chronotope, and performativity, invoking the concept of territory as the point of coagulation, as that which informs the politics of all three.

Territory as Contestation Territory is a loaded term often negatively associated with essentialism, domination, and the suppression of difference. 3 Bhabha calls it "etymologically unsettled," because it can be traced back to both terra (earth) and terrere (to frighten), so that territorium becomes "a place from which people are frightened off" (2004: 142). Territory is a concept that actively repels and excludes otherness. This leads Derrida to associate it with a logic of presence, identity, and sameness and to link territory to the selfsame body, the proper name, and the nation. In Specters of Marx, he writes: by on topology we mean an axiomatics linking indissociably the ontological value of present-being [on] to its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general. (1994: 82)

However, Derrida sees this ontopology as an intrinsically selfundermining structure because of the forces of dislocation that are

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presupposed by the very notions of stability and presence. Territory is predicated on dislocation, so that dislocation is as essential to it as location: all stability in a place being but a stabilization or a sedcntarization, it will have been necessary that the local differance, the spacing of a displacement, gives the movement its start. (1994: 83) Time and space, history and territory are always already out of joint. By deconstructing the traditional identification of territory with origins, stable boundaries, exclusion, and sovereignty, Derrida points to a new understanding of the concept that takes territory as a process incorporating stabilizations and destabilizations. In such a process, territory would not mark a fixed or stable domain of domination or primordial entitlement but an unstable, continuous movement toward becoming, embodiment, spacing, and temporalization. This is no simple transformation. It entails more than pluralizing territory into territories or replacing a static noun by an active verb, with the prefixes "de" and "re" indicating its different political directions. What is required is the resignification of territory itself, so that it is no longer considered a "dirty word." Deleuze and Guattari represent a move in this direction. Although in A Thousand Plateaus they associate territory with negative terms like slowness, viscosity, and closure-where deterritorialization signifies acceleration, rupture, change, and connection-they do not see deterritorialization as the overcoming of territory, but as inextricably intertwined with it. Their privileged rhizomatic model-an overtly chronotopic structure, just like its opposite, arborescence-comprises territory, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization, all functioning together to keep everything in motion. The moment of territory, even if it never lasts, is considered indispensable: "we will always find ourselves reterritorialized again" (2004: 209). Conversely, the moment of territory is always already inhabited by the moment of de- or reterritorialization: "A territory is always en route to an at least potential deterritorialization, even though the new assemblage may operate a reterritorialization (something that 'has-the-value-of-home')" (360). Deleuze and Guattari are careful to point out that the territory that has-the-value-of-home is not same as the one that used to be home: "reterritorialization must not be confused with a return to a primitive or older territoriality" (193). Reterritorialization, then,

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is not a return to the territory that was once before, to a primordial homeland, but rather a move toward a new territory that bears within it the traces of its previous de- and reterritorializations. Thus, rather than defining home, territory explodes the very concept of home as something that is always there to return to or as that which consistently grounds our identities. Territory comes to signify a provisional, conflicted, and multiple belonging, no longer forever fixed to a patch of land perceived as unchangeable, but appearing as a differentiated (by chronotope) mapping that expresses multiple, shifting identity claims. This process is fundamentally future-oriented and dynamic, even at its points of stasis, which are always only provisional. Deleuze and Guattari discuss territory in relation to animals, which provide, on the one hand, examples of territoriality-where they "mark territory against their own species" (2004: 348)-and, on the other, instances of deterritorialization and the line of flight. In "The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses," Baudrillard similarly argues that animals are images of metamorphosis, nomadism, and errancy, which at the same time exemplify territorialism. He extols a territorialism that is not seen exclusively as a sign of domination, appropriation, and exclusion, but simultaneously appears as an "open and circumscribed" space of subjectless exchange or simulation, a space of "total reversibility" and "insurmountable reciprocity" (1994: 139-40). The latter aspect allows it to oppose itself to the repressed, topographically subdivided realm of the unconscious. The mode of being that Baudrillard has territory produce is one of "an indefinite cycling and reversion over a finite space" (140). This space is defined and circumscribed, but its meanings-its territorializations-remain in circulation. Territory, then, is not a figure of private property that allows the animal (or subject) to remain the same and to separate itself from others, but one that incites the creature to become different from itself, to make connections and build community. Territory comes to signify an intersubjective, relational situatedness instead of an individual, separating rootedness. As a construction that exists only in interaction, territory is fundamentally intersubjective and always already contested. Both these elements are emphasized in Bakhtin' s and Voloshinov' s frequent metaphorical use of the term. In 'The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art," Bakhtin employs territory in the sense of an undisputed interior realm,

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only to mark the image as an inaccurate representation of a domain of culture: a domain of culture should not be thought of as some kind of spatial whole, possessing not only boundaries but an inner territory. A cultural domain has no inner territory. It is located entirely upon boundaries, boundaries intersect it everywhere, passing through each of its constituent features. (1990b: 274, emphases added) Territory here stands for an autonomous, nonrelational spatial whole, which the domain of culture is not. In "Discourse in the Novel," however, the metaphorical function of territory shifts from indicating an autonomous domain to signifying a space of contestation; an active, ongoing relationality. Of the internal dialogism of the word, Bakhtin writes: "The speaker breaks through the alien conceptual horizon of the listener, constructs his own utterance on alien territory, against his, the listener's apperceptive background" (1996c: 282). The territory of the listener's conceptual horizon is invaded and potentially changed by the speaker's utterance, which does not fully take over (this would mean making the listener's territory one's own) but is now contested between two voices. The image is designed to convey how the other cannot simply be kept outside or made part of the self, but must be engaged as an other on the inside. Voloshinov' s use of the territory metaphor in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language specifically reinterprets it in terms of intersubjectivity: A word is a bridge thrown between myself and another. If one end of the bridge depends on me, then the other depends on my addressee. A word is territory shared by both addresser and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor. (1986: 86, emphases added) Voloshinov' s initial bridge metaphor infects the subsequent territory metaphor, turning it into a figure of connection or conduit rather than one of control or unity. Moreover, Voloshinov's use of the verb "shared" explicitly identifies territory as an intersubjective, dialogic space. Territory is no longer the antonym of the boundary but itself becomes a "border zone" whose ownership is necessarily shared with the other. Earlier in the same text, Voloshinov writes: Signs can arise only on interindividual territory. It is territory that cannot be called "natural" in the direct sense of the word: signs do not arise between any two members of the species Homo sapiens. It is essential that the two individuals be

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organized socially, that they compose a group (a social unit); only then can the medium of signs take shape between them. (r986: 12)

Here, territory is immediately rendered intersubjective by the adjective "interindividual." It is emphatically not natural, authentic, or ontological, but signifies an intersubjective process of negotiation that presupposes a form of social organization. Once again we find ourselves far from the lone animal marking off territory against its conspecifics. Instead, we are faced with territory as a space of coexistence, struggle, and reevaluation where ownership-over word, sign, or street-is never definitively established. For Voloshinov as for Bakhtin, words, utterances, cultures, subjects, and chronotopes are endlessly disputed territories, but territories nonetheless, since they all aim for some form of jurisdiction over human expression or, at the very least, for a public recognition of their point of view. Fittingly, the definition of territory in the Concise Oxford Dictionary refers to jurisdiction, organization, and defense, but not to control or domination. One of the meanings it assigns is "an organized division of a country, esp. one not yet admitted to the full rights of a state." Thus, rather than being equivalent to state or nation, territory is also used to refer to that which is not yet, or no longer, a definite part of these. In terms of subjectivity, the subject's bodily and psychic territory is not fully its own, but always already (or still) other. In this way, the territory differs from the domain, which, according to the same dictionary, designates an uncontested sphere of control, "an area under one rule." From its inception, the Notting Hill Carnival appeared as a territorial dispute. By claiming a space for the racial other not in a separate world but in the existing public space, it redefined the British domain as a contested territory. The streets of Notting Hill were doubly determined, inscribed with competing juridical claims that clashed most visibly during the Carnival. Monica Rector has suggested, with respect to the Brazilian Carnival's occupation of the central avenue, that "even when the space is already marked, another space is created within it" (1984: 135). In this manner, the same space is made to contain two worlds that include each other, superimposed in the manner of a palimpsest, so that what is underneath remains visible: the everyday meaning of the avenue shines through during the carnival, while its carnival meaning is felt even outside the festivities. In the Notting Hill Carnival, everyday life continues alongside and within the carnival space, so that the two worlds collide and form a single

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contested territory. Far from creating a zone of universality where "a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age" (Bakhtin 1984: 10), the Notting Hill Carnival established a territorial struggle that highlighted the racial tension between black and white. In Notting Hill in the Sixties, which combines photographs, memoir, newspaper clippings, and anonymous oral testimonies into a vibrant social history of the Notting Hill neighborhood, Mike Phillips writes that "the Notting Hill Carnival, whatever else happens, has to be the major achievement thrown up by the place and the time" (Phillips and Phillips 1991: 105). Notting Hill produced the Carnival, but I suggest that the Carnival in turn reproduced Notting Hill, actively reconstructing its space and time into a different chronotope that transformed the area from a whitecontrolled ghetto into a black-contested territory. This new chronotope, grounded in the socioeconomic realities of black immigrant living obfuscated by the official ideologies of race and class, directly contradicted and challenged Notting Hill's official spatiotemporal construction. The Notting Hill Carnival reveals the territorial nature of the chronotope. Chronotopes do not stand to each other in a neutral relationship, but contest each other's territories. Thus, from 1975, when the black community's reterritorialization of the Notting Hill streets could no longer be ignored, the British authorities began their campaign to reterritorialize the neighborhood once more as their domain. By attempting to control, displace, or even ban the Carnival, they effectively sought to destroy its chronotope. In this regard, it is no coincidence that the measures taken by the Metropolitan Police before the 1976 Carnival were specifically designed to control its spatial and temporal boundaries: We've got the area divided into six sectors. And in these sectors each band will be seen roughly every hour. So that each of these six bands or groups of bands will start off at predetermined sites, go to one of the six sectors and then progress from one to the other roughly at hourly intervals. They'll be conducted by police, and we will have communication with each band and we'll pass them through each area so that each area will see each band. (Police Commander Charles Jackaman, quoted in Carnival of Tears 1976) This statement identifies the Carnival as a territorial battle centering on the chronotopic organization of the time and space of Notting Hill. 4 For the Carnival organization, these restrictions and other plans to move

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the Carnival to an enclosed park or sports stadium (White City) went directly against the fundaments of carnival: Carnival is not something which is contained in an area like White City. I mean, if you find that happening, the whole spirit of carnival would be killed. The thing of communication would disappear and there would be no ambiance, no atmosphere at all. ... Carnival essentially is a street thing. (Selwyn Baptiste, quoted in Carnival of Tears 1976) Baptiste defines the Carnival chronotope by a lack of containment and time limits, free communication, and free movement through the streets. If spatial and temporal limits are imposed, the carnival chronotope is lost and so is the territory of identity to which it lays claim. Gilroy has pointed to "the relationship between territory and identity in the urban context" (2002: 330). Not merely space or time is involved here, but territory, indicating an active intention to appropriate a particular time-space and a public assertion of jurisdiction, responsibility, and knowledge as requirements for the establishment of a viable identity. Refracting the chronotope through the concept of territory exposes the proprietorial, exclusionary move that inheres in chronotopic constructions of time-space. 5 Establishing a rival chronotope constitutes an active political intervention, since it automatically enters into a territorial battle with the existing chronotopic constructions functioning in the shared social realm. Limon Kwesi Johnson's poem, "Forces of Victory," bears this claim out, with specific reference to the Notting Hill Carnival.

"Forces of Victory": The Battlefield of Carnival wi mek a lickle date fi nineteen-seventy-eight an' we fite an' wi fite an' defeat di State den all a wi jus' forwud up to Not'n' Hill Gate den all a wi jus' forwud up to Not'n' Hill Gate Johnson's 1978 dub poem, published in lnglan Is a Bitch (1980: 22-23) and included on the CD Forces of Victory, was written to celebrate

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the defeat of the authorities' attempts to ban the Notting Hill Carnival after the 1976 riots. 6 It stages a carnivalesque mock battle over the streets of Notting Hill, performatively reenacting its de- and reterritorialization by the black community. The first stanza, cited above, announces the triumphant march forward of the black community, out to vanquish "di poor opposition" in agesture that is overtly chronotopic. Over and against official attempts to remove the Carnival from the streets of Notting Hill, the poem reclaims the neighborhood, symbolized by its entrance point, the Notting Hill Gate Underground station, at a specific time: 1978. This date is presented not as objective fact, but as a performative, chronotopic act of "meking" or staging on the part of the poem's collective speaker: "wi mek a lickle date." The poem thus establishes an alternative chronotope, another site of interpellation. The forces of victory in the poem's tide are its own accented words that, in their deliberately and defiantly "improper" pronunciation and spelling, have a performative effect. Johnson' s poem is less a retroactive statement of victory than an act of victory itself. The poem's words bring into being the time, place, and most important, the "wi" of the black community, a "we-experience" whose specificity is signaled by the Caribbean inflection of the pronoun, which prevents the white authorities and white readers and listeners from colonizing this space of self-expression. The "wi" signals a collective black identity, a communal black agency capable of challenging the singularity of "di State." The "wi" not so much enunciates the poem as is enunciated by it, created in its performance. During the 1978 Carnival, "Forces of Victory" was performed by one of the mas bands, which physically carried out the march on Notting Hill Gate it evokes. Thus, Carnival is the poem's action. "Forces of Victory" is not a political statement about Carnival, but a performative staging of its chronotopic and territorial politics? The poem situates the Carnival on the porous border between aesthetics and politics. The fourth stanza presents the "wi" dressed in colorful outfits, which not only provides a visual spectacle, but also conveys the defiant black identity, as it is performatively constituted by the poem's public performance: wi dressed in red an' wi feelin' dread wi dressed in green

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an' wi feelin' mean wi dressed in purple an' wi dressed in yellow wi dressed in blue an' wi comin' rite through This incantational enumeration draws attention to the issue of color, in particular to the unspoken noncolors white and black, implicitly associated with the state and the accented "wi." The summing up of Carnival colors translates into a political statement about the centrality of color in the everyday lives of immigrants: costume color becomes skin color and the freedom to be colorful during Carnival becomes the freedom to be of color in British society in general. In this particular context, putting on colorful dress constitutes a reverse masquerade, a move from invisibility to visibility. Instead of disguising racial identity, the colorful, flamboyant, and oftentimes revealing Carnival costumes work to accentuate the participants' dark skin, making race visible in the public sphere, flaunting it, as it were. Trevor Carter, one of the Carnival's original organizers, remarked how "we disrobed ourselves of our urban, cosmopolitan, adopted English ways and robed ourselves in our own visible cultural mantle" (quoted in Younge 2002), one that included skin as well as dress. In Johnson's poem, the Carnival colors do not cover blackness, but highlight it. Moreover, the text enacts a reverse linguistic masquerade by emphasizing black culture in its use of language, pronunciation, and spelling: the black tongue, too, is no longer hidden, but openly celebrated as a sign of a positive, shared black identity. The stanza further identifies "dread" as the feeling that unites the black "wi." In his article, "'It Dread Iona Inglan': Limon Kwesi Johnson, Dread, and Dub Identity," Hitchcock explores dread as a multiple sign for black Britain. Simultaneously denoting community, crisis, danger, fear, defiance, and the materiality of dreadlocks, dread establishes a politics of identity that combines these contradictions in a provocative statement of destabilizing ambiguity. Dread, for Hitchcock, "emerges in the difference between the 'England' of the dominant public sphere and the 'Inglan' of a historically specific English community" (1993c: par. 17). "Inglan" interpellates a black "wi" by publicly de- and reterritorializing England through a renaming that establishes not a separate realm or chronotope, but a rival one that lays claim to exactly the same space-time. Dread emerges in the

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difference between competing designations, between two or more public declarations of territorial control, precisely where there is no diffirence between the spaces and communities performatively and chronotopicly constituted by these designations. The Notting Hill Carnival is a prime location of dread as it connects to practices of naming and as it circulates between the black and the white community. The dread produced by competing territorializing names is brought out in Henri Martin's r98r documentary Grove Music, which chronicles Notting Hill's reggae scene. In the opening scene, the camera pans over Notting Hill as a voice-over with a West Indian accent makes the following comment: some call it Notting Hill Gate, some call it North Kensington. We know it as Ladbroke Grove, you know, we who live here. And Grove music is just our music, you know, the music in the Grove.

This statement invokes three different names for the same area and signals how the musicians' power to assign their own name constitutes a territorial move: refusing to be interpellated by the area's official labels, they place their own designation alongside it, establishing an identity for themselves and their music in accordance with this unofficial name or alias. Renaming an area constitutes an act of reiterative defiance that turns time and space into territory and marks agency in performativity. AB Butler notes, "the name, as part of a social pact and, indeed, a social system of signs, overrides the tenuousness of imaginary identification and confers on it a social durability and legitimacy" (1993: 152). This overriding mechanism applies to official and unofficial names, as long as they are shared. Although "Ladbroke Grove" is an unofficial name confined to the local, it binds the reggae musicians together as a legitimate community. The social durability of this community is guaranteed by Martin's incorporation of the name in his documentary, which publicizes its territorial claim in the broader cultural context. In the face of such unofficial renamings, authorities will often reassert their own official name. Thus, with regard to Notting Hill, London city officials persistently referred to the area as "North Kensington," emphasizing its status as part of the bigger (whiter) Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. This onomastic reassertion refuses Notting Hill the status of a separate territory with its own (racial) identity. Over the years, however, it

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became more and more difficult to sustain the official name in the face of the renamings "Notting Hill" (definitively canonized by Roger Michell's film of the same name) and "Ladbroke Grove," which function as incorrect or catachrestic usages marking a deterritorializing "disloyalty against identity" (Butler 1993: 220). This effect and the "official" fear it inspired are expressed in a statement by Alderman Peter Methuen in Carnival of Tears (1976): I think it is fair, certainly fair, to say that the council takes the view that the streets of North Kensington are not a suitable venue for a thing of this size. North Kensington is not Trinidad or Kingston, Jamaica and there is a sizeable part of the population who'd prefer to have a quiet Bank Holiday weekend and they are of course mostly the indigenous existing population, if I might call it the native population in North Kensington.

Methuen contrasts two chronotopic constructions of the same time-space. First, there is North Kensington, coded as a white, traditionally British neighborhood where the Notting Hill Carnival seeks illegitimately to displace the Bank Holiday. Second, there are the parts of the Caribbean where the Carnival as a foreign, nonindigenous holiday is properly placed. Methuen indicts the Carnival as a site that threatens to mix these two chronotopes and their respective territories by turning North Kensington into another Trinidad or Kingston. The fraught coexistence of official and unofficial names for the same spatiotemporallocation highlights what Zizek, in The Sublime Object of Ideology, calls the "radical contingency of naming" (1989: 92). This contingency stems from the tautology that "a name refers to an object because this object is called that' (93). For Zizek, the act of calling is undertaken by the Symbolic order or Lacan' s big Other, which only ever assigns a single name, point de capiton or rigid designator. If an object or subject comes to be known by more than one name, therefore, this ambiguous situation calls for an active intervention in the Symbolic on the level of the intersubjective: that is, a recall. Because naming works retroactively, constituting its referent after the fact, the unofficial name, if it is spoken often enough, can come to seem as appropriate as the official one. Thus, the contingency of naming, which refers the power of a name to its social usage, undermines the rigidity and singularity of the point de capiton. Instead of a single point de capiton that exhaustively unifies the subject, a number of possible points de capiton compete to stitch together a subject's identity, which consequently appears as a contested territory rather than a sovereign domain.

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Methuen's statement indicates how black renamings inspire fear in the white community, a fear that manifests itself as dread. Johnson's "wi feelin' dread" is then read as the black community sensing the apprehension experienced by the state, the police, and the white residents of Notring Hill as they watch the Carnival revelers march through "their" streets. The element of fear that inheres in the term dread is thus displaced from the "wi" onto the other, so that the back community can lay claim to its more positive connotations. Johnson' s poem performatively creates a black community that no longer lives in fear, but takes control of its neighborhood, culture, and language. The Notting Hill Carnival, as the site of this performative, emerges as the dread(ed) version of the Bank Holiday, inspiring defiance in the black community and fear in the white authorities. Carnival's threat to the authorities becomes explicit in the sixth stanza of "Forces of Victory," where the colorful Carnival revelers morph into an army, set to defeat "Babylan," which stands for the oppressive political and economic structures of white imperialism: wi comin' wid wi army soh dont y'u get balmy wi comin' wid wi plane it gonna drive y'u insane wi comin' wid wi guns an' wi mekin wi roun's wi comin' wid wi tank an' Babylan get vank For the first time, the poem addresses itself to the other, a "y'u" composed of the state, the police, and the white residents who tried to ban Carnival. The "wi" is associated with strength and activity, while the "y'u" is banished to the abject realm of madness. Power is displaced onto the black marchers, whose "roun's" refer, in a performative sense, to their progress through the streets, to their aggressive annexation of Notting Hill territory. Bringing together the Carnival and the military parade effects a double blurring: the Carnival context undermines the seriousness of the military parade (on CD, the poem becomes an upbeat, festive, and immediately catchy song), yet at the same time the threatening quality of the military march defines the Carnival as not merely an aesthetic but also a political event. In the recorded version, the threat of military violence is conveyed by the single drums that constitute the song's opening

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(reminiscent of the drums leading into a military attack) and by the way in which the line "an' Babylan get vank" is extended by a series of repetitions of the word vank, not in Johnson's voice but as a mechanical sound that deforms the word so that it conveys a hint of guns or cannons going off. The military images and sounds in "Forces of Victory" indicate that Carnival is not all play, that the positions adopted within it are not mere roles to be surrendered as soon as the festival ends. The identities and communities performed by Carnival claim a territory in everyday British society as well. 8 As a whole, Johnson's poem presents the Notting Hill Carnival as a reiterative event that, by means of a territorial politics, performatively constructs a collective, appositional racial identity. This identity is not fixed, but materializes as an embattled position taken in (and for) the moment, in (and for) the space of Notting Hill, as a specific, situated locus of political agency. In Notting Hill in the Sixties, Mike Phillips writes: In Carnival people claim and celebrate whatever self they choose, and no one can stop them. And the self extends into the space, the ground, which becomes free floating capable of being taken and moulded at the moment, for the moment, and so forever. (Phillips and Phillips 1991: 105)

The Carnival frees the ground of Notting Hill, stripping it of its existing chronotopic determinations and enabling the Carnival revelers to de- and reterritorialize it into a vehicle of positive self-expression and identity. Phillips's reference to the ground of Notting Hill as "capable of being taken and molded at the moment, for the moment, and so forever" indicates the continuing eventness of the area and the black identity it performs. The grounds of Notting Hill and the selves it produces are free-floating not because they are undefined, but because they are shaped into various territories, positive and negative, dominant and subaltern, at the various instances of their performative and chronotopic reiteration in (and as) the intersubjective. Territories are never completely fixed, but liable to occupation, annexation, attack and defense, division and redivision. And identities are territories with constantly shifting grounds, but never without ground completely since they are inevitably anchored in the specific intersubjective event-contexts of their chronotopic and performative articulation.

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The contested territories of black British identity and the Notting Hill Carnival are also central to lsaac Julien' s experimental twenty-fiveminute film, Territories (1984), the relation of which to popular culture I discuss in my introduction. The film opens with the word "TERRITORIES" blazoned across the screen in capital letters against a black background. The letters are transparent, opening onto a moving image that becomes clearer as the letters come forward: first we see a brick wall with a window, then a Victorian house. This identifies the film's territory first of all as the home. That this is not a dream home is communicated by the following shot of an overturned supermarket trolley and a pile of rubbish in front of the house, which is itself dilapidated. Whose territory is this? A possible answer is provided when the camera pans upward and comes to rest on a young black man crouched on a wall adjacent to the house. He does not look directly into the camera, speak, or move, but his presence is a first indicator that the territories of the film are black. The precariousness of black territory is signaled by the run-down state of the house and by the way the man is not inside or in front of it, but on the wall that marks its boundary: We cannot be sure he belongs to the house or the house to him. The black man occupies a borderline space in relation to the house and, by extension, in relation to British society, where he is unable to claim a territory for himself. Over the image, we hear a male voice, which could be the man's. However, since his lips do not move, the voice cannot be definitively sutured to the mouth and functions as a voice-off. While the voice speaks, the camera leaves the black man to show other houses in the same street, further removing the voice-off from his mouth. However, the import of the words and the way they are visually associated with the young man's body strongly implies we are dealing with a black speaker. What is withheld is not so much an identification of the voice-off as black, but its identification with a singular black body. Later in the film, we see two black women while hearing two female voices. Because the women sit with their backs to us, we cannot see their mouths. Again, the source of the voice cannot be definitively located, as if neither one nor two bodies can fully embody what we hear, as if the voice-offs include the black bodies in the image without being limited to them-as if the bodies take responsibility for what is said without claiming authority over it.

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Significantly, whereas the black bodies offer themselves up for potential identification with the voices speaking over their image, such identification is withheld for white bodies because of a marked dissonance in terms of gender. Both times we see a white body-first a male police officer and later a young man standing on a rooftop-we hear a female voice. Whereas black bodies are tentatively given a voice, white bodies are spoken by the other in a performative reversal of the social hierarchy outside the film. The voices in Territories are never completely embodied, but at the same time they do not wholly exceed the racially and gender-specific bodies on show. By not leaving the voices hanging in the air completely, Julien avoids the authoritative and omniscient implications of Chion' s "complete acousmetre" (1999: 24). Moreover, with the voices explicitly stating their personal stake in the film's images by speaking as "I" and "we," they cannot be identified either with a commentator-acousmetre "who has no personal stake in the image" (Chion 1999: 21). The voices' multiplicity further undermines their authority. There is no "all-seeing voice" whose "word is like the word of God" (24), only a number of partially sighted voices. The black voice is not merely collective (as in Johnson's "wi"), but multiple. This multiplicity is not just sequential-voices speaking after each other-but also simultaneous. At various points in the film, two voices speak concurrently, one over the other. In the opening scene, for example, superimposed on and slightly trailing the male voice associated with the black man on the wall, we hear a woman, doubling the voice not only in number, but also in gender. Territories thus presents an aggregate of voices, some speaking by themselves, others over each other, some male, some female, some loud, some almost inaudible, some speaking as "I," others as "we." 9 Through this vocal cacophony, Julien makes the black voice heard without homogenizing it or fully identifying it with a particular body. Such a move would tie the black voice to origin, intentionality, and authority as tightly as the univocal history it seeks to challenge. All the voices in Territories speak somewhere between individuality and communality, so that the black subject and its communal identity appears as internally differentiated. In "The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference," Iris Marion Young exposes the ideal of community propagated in liberal (feminist)

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theory as reliant on a logic of identity, authenticity, and presence that both "denies difference within and between subjects" and presumes the possibility of a transparent understanding of both self and other (1986: 5). This ideal of community presupposes a reciprocal understanding that produces an "ecstatic sense of oneness" (ro) where subjectivities merge together without differentiation. A5 an alternative, Young proposes the "unoppressive city" (20), which brings together strangers who relate to each other externally, experiencing each other not as same but as other. The city, with its many public spaces, offers "an experience of aesthetic inexhaustibility" that enables a politics of difference defined by an "openness to unassimilated otherness" (20, 22). Young's unoppressive city produces an exotopic, differentiated community much like the one voiced by Julien's film. In this regard, the film's setting and references are telling. The film is set in an urban landscape and the voice-off's references are to the city as a place of cohabitation that features not singular spaces but "contradictory" ones. The multiple territorializing voices of Julien's film put into question all vocal authority, black or white, except for the provisional control that inheres in a proliferated communal voice that knows no fixed hierarchy. In the opening scene's doubled male-female voice-off, the woman initially echoes the man with a small delay, but their hierarchy remains ambivalent, since the female voice is louder. Later, the order of their voices changes, so that she ends up speaking before him. Both voices recite the same text or what, at first hearing, sounds like the same text. A more careful listening reveals subtle differences, not only in intonation and tempo but also in the actual words spoken. Because the double-voiced sequence is central to Territories both in form and content-it is repeated three times-I quote it in its entirety, splitting the voices to expose their structure of iteration. The doubly enunciated utterance exhibits how no utterance can be repeated in an identical manner, not even when it is spoken at the same time in the same place. Bakhtin has argued that, while "[t]wo or more sentences can be absolutely identical (when they are superimposed on one another, like two geometrical figures, they coincide)," two utterances never fully correspond (r986c: ro8). The spoken text evokes the theme of territory, not only by referring to the concrete spatial struggle over the streets of Notting Hill but also by implicitly relating the deterritorialization of the voice (and its relation to presence and authority) to the deterritorialization of territory (and its relation to domination and sovereignty). In the same way that Julien' s film

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aggregates, multiplies, and superimposes voices, its narration turns territory into territories that are never neatly separated, but overlap and contest each other in the complex geography of the city. Male Voice A new context The political struggle Of the disseminated mass Of unwanted labor Is provided by the streets Of civil society. The contradictory Spaces Which are the geographical Expressions Of a city.

Female Voice 10 [delay] A new context The political struggle Of the disseminated mass Of unwanted labor Is provided by the streets Its territories The contradictory Spaces Which are the geographical Expression Of a city.

The territories of class Lab or Race Sex Relations Territory.

The territories of class Lab or Race Sex Relations Territory.

The holding of one class's privileges In a declining system In crisis

The holding of one class's privileges In a declining system Of crisis Territories of desire The control of one space Carnival Territories of resistance Sound systems Territories of surveillance

Territory The control of one space Carnival Territories of resistance Sound systems Territories of surveillance

of the mind Territories of the body Conflicting with dominant demands

Territories of sexual oppression The contradictory spaces

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The contradictory spaces The geographical expressions That cohabit a city The territory of the look Territories of the body Conflicting with dominant demands Behind each conflict There is a history A herstory We are struggling to tell a story A herstory, a history Of cultural forms specific to black peoples

The geographical expressions Cohabit a city The territory of the look Territories of the body Conflicting with dominant demands Behind each conflict There is a history A herstory We are struggling to tell a story A herstory, a history Of cultural forms specific to black peoples

Neither voice is given clear priority, and as a result, neither appears authoritative. Moreover, the use of "we" links the voices together in a relation of supplementation that points to a wider community, another "we-experience." The words spoken corroborate the speakers' refusal to claim omniscience and singularity: "We are struggling to tell a story, a herstory, a history, of cultural forms specific to black peoples." All the terms of this sentence are multiplied: spoken by a doubled "we," it proposes a story rather than the story, multiplies this story into a herstory and a history, and speaks of cultural forms and black peoples in the plural. Describing their story as a struggle, moreover, destroys the illusion of narrative authority and origin that inheres, to a greater or lesser degree, in all forms of the cinematic voice. By having the speakers oscillate between voice, voice-over, and voice-off, Julien not only exposes the voice's inherent instability, but also that of history, identity, and territory. In the double-voiced text, territory first appears in its traditional meaning, as a sovereign domain. In its singular form, it is defined as "the control of one space." This control, however, is interrupted by the word "Carnival," which functions as a hinge between the untenable position of complete dominance over a singularly signified space and the multiplication of territories as sites of resistance under the influence of social, linguistic, and chronotopical stratification. Territories become sites of resistance

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when an event like the Notting Hill Carnival establishes a counterterritory that unites a marginalized community in its resistance to the dominant territorialization of their space. The "sound systems" of the next line are elements of the carnival and form another point of transition. For, even in its plural form, territory is still linked to domination through the instrument of surveillance, indicating that to overcome the dominant system it does not suffice merely to multiply territories. Throughout the recitation, territory's meaning oscillates between the traditional sense of oppression and domination on the one hand, and the more dialogic meaning of territory as a site of contestation and even resistance on the other. What Julien' s film indicates most strongly is that elements of the traditional sense infect territory's function as a site of resistance. The film suggests that territory can never completely escape the elements of domination and oppression, although a certain flexibility can be achieved by recognizing this: territory's link to oppression must be acknowledged and radically historicized so that the new territories that emerge from the struggle to overcome (post)colonial oppression do not replicate the same exclusionary mechanisms. As long as territories are established only as provisional, performative sites that give a particular community a voicewithout claiming that this voice is the only possible or "authentic" onethey constitute valuable sites of agency; an agency, however, that does not imply full intentional control and that is founded upon its own exclusions or oppressiOns. The voices broaden and multiply the territory of the film from a single house to the city and its race relations, perceived as bound up with labor, class, and sex, and manifested as surveillance over the bodies, minds, and histories of the black community. This surveillance is mostly shared but also gendered, since only the woman speaks of territories of desire and sexual oppression. Significantly, the enumerated territories are locations of oppression and resistance. Like the voices that speak the text, these territories are multiple, dialogic sites of cohabitation, contradiction, conflict, and crisis. From territory to territories, the streets become "contradictory spaces," the setting of a clash between white surveillance and black self-assertion. The "crisis" referred to, I have already suggested, is chronotopic. The "new context" points to another chronotopic construction of the existing time-space of London in accordance with the contemporary politics of labor, race, sex, and class. Context, therefore, is not something that is, but

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something that is performatively made and remade into contesting territories by the different communities inhabiting the city. As Phillips indicates in London Crossings, central London in the 196os appeared as an "arena of competing claims" (20or: r8), constructed in a particular manner by black immigrants: Our geography of London was the opposite of the clutch of institutions and landmarks which housed the engines of power. We met and struggled, instead, over a space which was physical and material and in which we could be ourselves, whatever we thought that was. (28) As the black community became more and more assertive in its attempts to construct its own stories of the London space, the racial other could no longer be "spaced out" or made invisible. Cohabitation prompted an active chronotopic struggle where each community tried publicly to impose its own stories onto the space of the city, performatively claiming not merely places but territories.

Carnival as Performative Memory Johnson's poem andJulien's film posit the Notting Hill Carnival as a performative event that produces a communal black identity through a chronotopic struggle over actual, narrative, and identity territories. The performative dimension returns in Phillips's description of Notting Hill during Carnival as "our theatre," as the stage for a "drama of confrontation" that enabled the black community to be seen and to see itself as having an identity distinct not only from that of white Londoners, but from that of black communities in the Caribbean and the United States (2001: 6r). Performativity, moreover, is central to the Carnival organizers' objections against police attempts to enforce a strict separation between audience and performers, which they claim destroys the participatory nature of the event. "Police Carnival" I989 lists their complaint that "the police attempted to turn our traditional festivity in which the crowd always participated into a parade, where the crowds only spectate" (Association for a People's Carnival 1989: 3). For his part, Bakhtin views the lack of boundaries between actors and spectators as a key characteristic of the medieval carnival: Carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators. Footlights would destroy a carnival, as

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the absence of footlights would destroy a theatrical performance. Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. (1984: 7) In Chapter 2, I argue that the tension between performativity and performance is played out not so much in the intentions of the performer, or in the act itself, as in the position taken by the audience toward the act: whether it is identified as performance or performative. In this regard, Bakhtin' s link between footlights and theatrical performances is significant, as is his view of the carnival as an event that unites spectator and performer into a unity that I would call performative. The carnival is a performative event enacting a particular chronotopic construction of timespace and a specific communal identity. The political agency of the Notting Hill Carnival lies precisely in this enactment, whose annual repetition clearly marks it as a reiterative performative rather than a one-off performance. Their reiteration allows the articulated identity constructions to outlive the restricted period of the Carnival and opens them up to possible renegotiations over time. Moreover, if performativity is indeed undermined by a separate, independent audience that regards the act not as an expression of spontaneous belonging, but as a studied spectacle, then the authorities' attempts to break the unity between the Carnival participants and its onlookers appears as a political countermove. To impair the performative reiteration of a precarious, emergent identity means threatening that identity's validity and viability. The effects of the Carnival's performativity are linked to its particular spatiotemporal context and cannot be fully controlled either by the carnival crowd or by the authorities. Its meaning and effect change over the years, but its reiterative character ensures that the Carnival's communitybuilding and identity-asserting force is never completely lost. Even if it is displaced by other chronotopic interpellations of the same groundNetting Hill's gentrified reincarnation in the film Notting Hill comes to mind here-its previous interpellations remain part of cultural memory. Performativity has a memory, and this memory inheres in each of its reiterations. This, at least, is what one of the anonymous voices suggests in Notting Hill in the Sixties (Phillips and Phillips 1991). Mter charting the changes wrought in the neighborhood during the 1980s by forced buyouts and slum clearance regulations, which saw the black population forced out

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of the area and replaced by a white middle class, the speaker asserts that the Carnival, on an annual basis, reasserts the black community's historical control over the Notting Hill streets, forcing its current inhabitants to acknowledge this history: what they've got now is Carnival on their doorstep and they can't do anything about it. So after blacks get thrown out you've now got them coming back every year by their millions and the Home Office is totally agreeing with it. It's like the ghost of people coming back. The ghosts of the people you've moved out, you've taken their homes but they've come back to remind you they were there once. A lot of people lost some property there. (1991: 108-9) Even today, therefore, the Notting Hill Carnival retains a dimension of deterritorialization as it continues to introduce heterogeneity and multiplicity through its haunting presence, overlaying present-day Notting Hill with another mapping that disturbs the official tracing of its outlines and social substance. According to Deleuze and Guattari, "The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation" (2004: 13). Such a reworking takes place each year in Notting Hill as the reiterative dimension of the Carnival's performativity invokes a conflicted history of racism and disappropriation and turns the neighborhood into a site of memory where its former black inhabitants appear like ghosts to claim a lasting proprietorship despite having lost their physical properties. The ghost is invoked here as an ambiguous, performative figure of agency that is difficult to oppose or exorcise precisely because of its ephemeral quality and its tendency to keep returning. Thus, the anonymous speaker in Notting Hill in the Sixties says: "How do I feel as a ghost? It's quite nice actually. Especially at Carnival time .... We have made a statement, we have come forward and did things" (Phillips and Phillips 1991: 107). In this way, the Carnival functions as an act of cultural memory. Or, as Anthony Wall and Clive Thomson put it in "Cleaning Up Bakhtin' s Carnival Act," carnival appears as "a cultural event of memory" (1993: 59). They argue that too much emphasis has been placed on the temporal dimension of Bakhtin' s chronotope, but that in carnival it is predominantly its spatial aspect-its actual taking place in space-that invests it with a function as cultural memory. Bakhtin specifically links carnival to the space of the market square and in Notting Hill, as I have shown, the

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Carnival annually reiterates a concrete spatial conflict, a territorial struggle for the streets. For Wall and Thomson, this spatial primacy makes carnival the location for a form of memory that is collective, embodied, and "timeand-space-bound" (6o). I suggest that this link between carnival and cultural memory is not so much predicated on its concrete, fixed location as on an unacknowledged notion of performativity. Space can only produce memory in a performative sense by enacting itself in a particular chronotopic organization. What is remembered in each edition of the Notting Hill Carnival is the event's de- and reterritorialization of the space and time of Notting Hill into a specific black chronotope, which, in its performative declaration of "wi" time, "wi" space, "wi" history and herstory, produced a collective identity. Today, as it shifts more and more toward a theatrical performance with footlights, the Carnival retains an element of chronotopic reterritorialization only through the reiterative insistence of this lingering performativity. Carnival produces cultural memory because its operation is performative. This performativity turns it into a reiterative memorializing site where ghosts can appear over and over to reclaim their old haunts. The closing scene of Territories returns us to images of the Notting Hill neighborhood. As the double-voiced text from the beginning of the film is reiterated a final time, we see a series of images projected in an extremely rapid montage: a green covered in rubbish, soldiers' boots, a garbage truck, Carnival sound systems, a white female soldier, a black man's eye, a policeman, and finally cymbals. A single heavy drumbeat marks the moment when the screen goes black and the closing credits appear. The image of the soldier adds a final layer of meaning by linking the territory of Notting Hill to the foreign territories still occupied by the British military, Northern Ireland in particular. These occupied territories are linked together by a colonial domination which, I have argued, is resignified by Julien's deployment of multiple doubled voices. In their intersubjective agency, these voices lay a rival, black claim to the territories of Britain and undermine the idea of fixed, authoritative, present histories and identities. The voices' self-avowed struggle to tell a story presents an occasion of what Silverman calls "remembering imperfectly": To remember perfectly would be forever to inhabit the same cultural order. However, to remember imperfectly is to bring images from the past into an ever new

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and dynamic relation to those through which we experience the present, and in the process ceaselessly to shift the contours and significance not only of the past, but also of the present. (1996: 189)

Remembering imperfectly, as I argue in Chapter 8, implies a practice of versioning, where memories are mobilized not to recall a fixed image or sound but to strip and rebuild images and sounds from the past in the service of the present and the future.

Versioning Identities

Versions of Carnival The Notting Hill Carnival, much like the territories of space, race, class, and identity over which it plays itself out, is not singular but reiterative and, consequently, translational. One of the anonymous speakers in Notting Hill in the Sixties characterizes the Carnival as an event that took what was already there and made it into another version: At Carnival at least we have now taken an art form that they've already had which ended up as some kind of English provincial arc. What we have done through that is sort of bring out what is theirs, we've taken it now, regurgitated it and handed it back to them, and they've now got to discipline themselves around it because the Home Office can't stop it, the police have to learn from it, and the blacks just go out there and do what they want. (Phillips and Phillips 1991: 107)

The Notting Hill Carnival took the English carnival, inflected it through the Caribbean carnival, and offered it back to the British. Etymologically, to regurgitate is to put something through a whirlpool (Latin: gurges), identifying it, in Bakhtin's terms, as a centrifugal or decentralizing practice. The radical translation of the English provincial carnival performatively asserts a specific black British identity tied not only to its Caribbean history but also to the socioeconomic circumstances of 1970s inner-city London. In this way, the Notting Hill Carnival establishes its own version of the English carnival and of black identity.

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This transformation marks it as what I call a versioning event, where versioning captures the capacity of events and subjects actively to intervene in the performative reiteration of chronotopic identities and their regimes of seeing and speaking in order to keep identities in process and articulate them differently. These interventions are located on the plane of intersubjectivity as interaction and express themselves as territorial and translational. Unlike Bakhtin's dialogism, the politics of which are presented as invariably progressive, the direction a versioning can take is not fixed: it can be radical or reactionary. I conceptualize versioning, in terms of its practice and politics, through further readings of the history and politics of the Notting Hill Carnival; Johnson's poem, "Forces of Victory"; and Julien's film, Territories. With regard to the Notting Hill Carnival, versioning appears in the way the event was heterogeneously positioned between art and politics. Two competing views exist of the politics of carnival: the safety-valve theory, which considers it a means of social control, and the opposition theory, which propagates its revolutionary capacity. As a proponent of the first view, Umberto Eco perceives no subversive force in carnival forms. For him, "popular cultures are always determined by cultivated cultures" (1984: 7). Even Bakhtin, who is often characterized as an adherent of the opposition theory, states that it would "be a mistake to presume that popular distrust of seriousness and popular love of laughter, as of another truth, could always reach full awareness, expressing a critical and clearly defined opposition" (1984: 95). Nevertheless, unlike Eco, he does not believe that the dominant order can ever fully control the meanings and effects of carnival, because carnival, as an inherently ambivalent event, simultaneously affirms and denies authority, always confounding it to some extent. In keeping with this ambivalence, Simon Dentith proposes a pluralist approach to carnival that perceives it as a "malleable space, in which activities and symbols can be inflected in different directions" (quoted in Humphrey 2001: 34). This multidirectionality, I suggest, is where versioning appears: whereas pluralism indicates the coexistence of separate entities, versioning refers to the same entity appearing in different guises and from different viewpoints. Thus, in The Politics of Carnival, Chris Humphrey argues that neither carnival nor its politics can be generalized and that even a single carnival does not necessarily have the same meaning and effect time after time (47). Carnival, therefore, is versioned not just between the

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various social and historical forms it takes, but also between a single carnival's repeated occurrences, as the four decades of the Notting Hill Carnival demonstrate. My analysis of the doubled narrative voices in Territories reveals how the meaning of carnival depends on who speaks the event, on whose version we hear. Only in the interplay of its versions does a carnival truly take place. The Notting Hill Carnival was versioned not just between the perspective of its organizers and that of the authorities, as I argue in Chapter 7, but also within its own organization. The 1976 riots caused a split within the carnival movement between those who wanted to preserve the carnival as a cultural festival and those intent on turning it into a political rally. A segment about the Carnival broadcast as part of the London Programme in July 1977 charts how two rival organizing committees emerged: the Carnival Development Committee (CDC) and the Carnival and Arts Committee (CAC). The CDC wanted to continue the Carnival as before, as "a cultural event open to anyone," characterized by spontaneity, audience participation, and freedom of expression. As such, the CDC takes up Bakhtin' s view that the carnival needs to remain extrapolitical not because it does not seek to challenge the dominant order-it is not apolitical-but because overt politics would amount to bringing official culture into carnival. The CDC did not want the carnival chronotope-with its distinctive, non-British organization of time and space-to be corrupted by bringing it in line with the official time-space of an organized political rally. As Selwyn Baptiste commented on the London Programme: Carnival is not a political event. Carnival is a cultural event. It is something which supersedes political ideologies. Carnival is something that's big enough to accommodate all forms of thought, all sorts of themes. Politics is part of it, but it is not an exclusively political event.

Politics can be brought into carnival, but only by incorporating it into the festivities in the form of carnival, under the terms of its chronotope. Thus, politics can be introduced as a mas band theme in the manner of Johnson's "Forces of Victory." That way, political content adjoins itself to the carnival chronotope without compromising its atmosphere of freedom and spontaneity. Against this, the CAC believed the Carnival should provide a platform for black politics and opportunities for employment through the

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establishment of carnival industries. To do this, the structure of carnival would need to change. On the London Programme, for example, CAC spokesman Louis Chase propagated a "need for some formality" in the planning and execution of the Carnival. Significantly, the CAC received support from the British authorities, while the CDC had a large following among Carnival participants. To the authorities, the most threatening form of the Notting Hill Carnival was not an ordered and openly political rally easily incorporated and controlled by the disciplinary system, but the ambivalent disorder of ·a feast without a clear distinction between participants and spectators, art and politics. In the context of 1970s race relations, the most dread(ed) element of the Carnival was the way its internal multiplicity or versioning made it a territory extremely hard to define and police. 1 It is no coincidence that Bakhtin sees ambivalence as a central element of carnival or that Roland Barthes, in "The Third Meaning," associates carnival with the third or obtuse meaning of the sign, which "belongs to the family of pun, buffoonery, useless expenditure. Indifferent to moral or aesthetic categories (the trivial, the futile, the false, the pastiche), it is on the side of carnival" (1977: 55). For Barthes, the first meaning of the sign is the informational meaning associated with the function of communication, second is the symbolic meaning linked with the function of signification, and third is the obtuse meaning found in the function of interrogation. He describes the latter as "the 'one too many,' the supplement that my intellection cannot succeed in absorbing, at once persistent and fleeting, smooth and elusive" (54). It causes "my reading to slip" (55). As such, the third meaning brings about a versioning of the sign, where the sign becomes more than itself, multiplying its meanings. Significantly, Barthes associates the third meaning with "dialogism" (57), "disguise" (58), and the "accent" (62). The third meaning employs these aspects, which I identify as strategies of resignification in previous chapters, to outplay meaning and disturb the process of signification. What ensues is a "multilayering of meanings which always lets the previous meaning continue, as in a geological formation, saying the opposite without giving up the contrary" (58). These layers of meaning, multiple yet individually readable, suggest that the different meanings of the sign exist as versions that can be read conjunctively without losing their specificity and without ever reaching full integration.

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Barthes also relates the third meaning to the third sense of listening, which bears within it several metaphors of sonic proliferation: orchestration, counterpoint, and stereophony. These metaphors identify the practices of combination, conjunction, and multiplied distribution that are central to versioning as it is enacted by Julien and Johnson. Territories, to which I return later in this chapter, combines manifold doubled voices and images into an asynchronous anti-narration. "Forces of Victory," for its part, mixes British English with Caribbean English and multiplies dread by circulating it between the black community and the white authorities.

From Dubbing to Versioning "Forces of Victory" is a dub poem, which means it incorporates a reggae rhythm in its voice, effecting the way the poem is spoken and heard, whether it is actually accompanied by music or not. A dub poem, therefore, is by definition stereophonic and productive of a third meaning. Of course, dubbing has a more traditional meaning in the field of film and television theory, where it refers to the imposition of the soundtrack, either spoken by the original actors or by different actors in another language, onto the image track after it has been edited. This type of dubbing insists on the synchronization of voice to mouth. In Silverman' s words, "the aim is usually the complete illusion of 'perfect unity'" (1988: 47). Even when dubbing in another language, the illusion of vocal authenticity is often privileged over that of authenticity of meaning. Neither illusion, however, is kept fully intact in the dubbing process. Chion argues that "dubbing produces a palimpsest beneath which there runs a ghost-text. It is a centrifugal process, tending toward rupture and dispersion" (1999:153). This image of the palimpsest that never completely covers-or rubs smooth, as its etymology promises-the underlying disorder (or, in other words, that can never stop the ghost from reappearing), is appropriate to dubbing in general. Notwithstanding its intended aim of a seamless imposition of sound onto image, dubbing in film and television has the same disjunctive effect as dub poetry: by bringing together disparate elements and superimposing one over the other in an always inadequate cover-up, it destabilizes their unity. Johnson' s poem dubs reggae music, but it also dubs-in the palimpsestic sense-the English language. As Hitchcock notes, "dub sharpens the defiance by writing over the OED

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[Oxford English Dictionary], by spelling the sounds of actual English usage in the Anglophone African/Caribbean community" (1993c: par. 12). By refusing to uphold the illusion of synchronicity, of the African/Caribbean community as speaking the same language as the British, dubbing renders visible the stereophonic relation between official language and its immigrant revoicing. "Forces of Victory" creates an excessive signification by bringing together, in word and sound, dissonant elements: Notting Hill is connected to Jamaica, the military parade becomes a musical spectacle, and dread splits into black defiance and white fear. This underscores the meaning of dub as an abbreviation of "to double" or to increase. Dubbing has the additional, lesser-known meanings of knighting someone and giving someone a name, nickname, or title (from the Old French adober, to equip with armor). Hence, dubbing not only doubles sounds and meanings but also the subject, by endowing it with a supplementary identity. Etymologically, this supplementation has a shielding function, providing a defense against bodily attacks. Dubbing as renaming thus constitutes a political, territorializing move that can be both official (knighting) and unofficial (nicknaming), but that inevitably works to multiply or, better, to version the subject's identity. Such versioning renders the subject unstable, yet at the same time improves its ability to withstand oppressive appropriations. Dub also works to undermine the speaker's claim to originality. In dub reggae, the voice as a sign of authenticity and presence is replaced by mechanical, reproducible sounds, 2 and in dub poetry, the voice is adapted to a preexisting beat so that it no longer speaks the individual but vocalizes a communal musical tradition. In this sense, dubbing is dispossession: it removes individual vocal authority. Dubbing as renaming similarly undermines the authority of the name by doubling it. Yet, paradoxically, in the very move of dispossession, dubbing restores agency by allowing the dub artist, or the one who renames, to introduce something new, to transform and exceed through improvisation what was there before. In "Forces of Victory," the dub identity asserted by its "wi" does not mark a fixed origin or authentic essence but a provisional product achieved in the performative event of the poem's recitation. As a product of dub, identity is always open to redubbing. Dub does not assign jurisdiction over a sovereign or original territory-music, voice, nation, identity-but produces a decentered space of creativity and contestation. Its erosion of the

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original's primacy is accomplished by its circumvention of copyright: dubbing creates neither a copy nor a cover, but a novelty product, in such a way that no rights are due to the producer of the dubbed materials. According to Hitchcock, dub's disenfranchising of authority and originality makes it "paramount to repetition as sedition" (1993c: par. 13). 3 Dub is repetition, but not a subservient one; its political promise lies in its ability to maximize difference, for what dub strips away is not restored but replaced. Dub, then, appears not as a mode of copying or remixingimplying an underlying logic of the same-but as a mode of versioning that introduces difference not just in the order or arrangement of elements, but in the very elements themselves. Dubbing relates to versioning in the fact that, in Jamaica, the instrumental sides of reggae records produced for the purpose of being dubbed are called "versions." Hitchcock, moreover, relates dub identity to the doubled identity of diaspora and "its versions" (r993c: par. 2). Clifford does the same when he argues that "diaspora cultures work to maintain community, selectively preserving and recovering traditions, 'customizing' and 'versioning' them in novel, hybrid, and often antagonistic situations" (1994: 317). Finally, Kobena Mercer explicitly relates the "jump-cut montage principle" of Territories to a "destructive aesthetic of dub-versioning" (1988a: 54). Although the two are clearly connected, for my theoretical purposes, I prefer "versioning" to "dubbing." The reason for this preference is fourfold. First, dubbing is only one possible form of versioning. In There Ain 't No Black in the Union jack, Gilroy lists dubbing as a "deconstructive, radical [form] of signification" alongside "scratching, breakdancing, and the 'visual pollution' of graffiti" (2002: 297). Since all these practices appear as modes of versioning, I reserve dubbing for its technical meanings in music, film, and television. Second, with dubbing, the element that needs to be retained in the dub version is fixed-the base/drum track in dub reggae and the visual track in film postsynchronization-and thus remains unchanged. In dubbing, therefore, there lingers a notion of an essence, core, or base that cannot be touched. A truly radical dubbing would version the parameters of dubbing itself: thus, Marguerite Duras' s use of the soundtrack for India Song for a different film almost without modification, displaces the operation of dubbing from the soundtrack onto the image track, versioning dub itself (Ropars-Wuilleumier 1980: 251). Third, dubbing, as

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derived from doubling, remains within a logic of two, whereas versioning can accommodate an unlimited number of multiplications. The double is both this and that, both here and there, both self and other. But the version, as a figure of excess, is both this and that and then some, allowing endless supplementation. Finally, dubbing is typically associated with sound, whereas versioning has a broader application. This becomes clear from my following discussion of vocal and visual versioning in Julien's Territories, as figured through the metaphors of the sound system and the cutting room. Before returning to Territories, however, I want to specify the concept of versioning.

The Concept ofVersioning Versioning is the "ing" form of the noun "version" that, through its Latin root vertere (to turn), denotes transformation. The "ing" form includes the gerund or verbal noun, which indicates a verb's being used in a nounlike way. Versioning is a result; it is that-which-has-been-versioned. But the "ing" form also includes the present participle as the nonfinite form of the verb, signifying the continuing activity of creating versions. The latter is particularly relevant to my theorization of versioning as a form of agency that keeps identity in motion. The element of continued transformation is strengthened by version's affiliation with variant and varying, derived from varius, "changing or diverse." The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines a version as "an account of a matter from a particular person's point of view," "a book or work etc. in a particular edition or translation," or "a form or variant of a thing as performed, adapted, etc." Versions, then, are first and foremost subjective accounts, developed by a particular person from a particular spatiotemporal coordinate. As such, versions mark agency without claiming truth or totality. Because other points of view are always possible, versions are by definition partial. They can be challenged by other people's versions or even by the same person's changed perspective. This makes versioning, defined as the continued creation of versions, a provisional activity that nevertheless bears within it a territorial or political agency. The dictionary lists several objects that commonly appear in a version-accounts, books, plays, and histories. These objects are multiplied and modified by the concrete actions of subjects, not just through

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abstract processes of linguistic play. Versioning maximizes the differential space created by the reiteration inherent in performativity and translation. It exploits this space, but does not create it. This limitation prevents versioning from being read as an expression of subjective autonomy or pure intentionality. As a process that is itself repeatable-we can make versions of versions-versioning amplifies the differential space, inciting a progression further and further away from the initial object (which, as should be clear, is never posited as an original). Each version, whether sequential or simultaneous, differs from the initial object in a different manner, adding new elements or reinvoking those left out in previous versions. With versioning, there is no invariable essence that persists in each variant. Since a version can base itself on any element present in the initial object or preceding version, however marginal, the notion of essence is itself eroded. Versioning is more directly (and actively) confrontational than other theoretical concepts of multiplicity, such as the much-hyped notion of hybridity. One problem with hybridity is that it indicates the passive designation of a result instead of an active practice that produces results. Moreover, as Mercer notes (following Jean Fisher), hybridity's suggestion that "two discrete entities combine to produce a third which is capable of resolving its 'parents'' contradictions" implies a dialectical mechanism that aspires to resolution and remains stuck in binary logic (2000: 240). Hybridity does not necessarily entail transformation or the introduction of something new. Versioning, on the contrary, is limited neither in number nor in its ability to supplement. Rather than presupposing a fusion, versioning stipulates only a partial sharing of elements. As the two Queer as Folk series made clear, versions, regardless of their actual order of appearance, stand beside each other rather than after one another in a hierarchical manner. There is no authentic or original version, since the term implies a transformation that has always already taken place. Conversely, no version can ever pretend to be definitive, because another version may still turn up. Versioning, I contend, does away with the lingering logic of the same in copying, of the original in translation, and of the two in hybridity, in order to install the logic of the turn: an active, subjective move whose outcome is indefinite and beyond our control-we cannot immediately know whether we just took a right or a wrong turn. Versioning, as a continuing activity or process,

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can always take another turn, turning away, over, or back. It is always possible to create another version of our history, our territory, or ourselves. Hence, versioning' s ultimate direction cannot be determined in advance and may be progressive or regressive. As a "feast of becoming, change and renewal" that is "hostile to all that was immortalized and completed," Bakhtin's carnival appears as aversioning event (1984: 10). The logic of the turn surfaces in Bakhtin's description of the carnival's "peculiar logic of the 'inside out' (a l'envers), of the 'turnabout,' of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear" (n). However, the inversion Bakhtin associates with carnival's privileging of the lower bodily stratum is limited by the medieval world's disregard for horizontal movement in time. The medieval carnival inverts exclusively along the vertical axis of spatiality: Down, inside out, vice versa, upside down, such is the direction of all these movements. All of them thrust down, turn over, push headfirst, transfer top to bottom, and bottom to top, both in the literal sense of space, and in the metaphorical meaning of the image. (Bakhtin 1984: 370) Versioning exceeds inversion in its ability to turn in all directions: horizontal and vertical, forward and backward, in time and in space. It implies not so much a rearrangement of already present elements as a supplementing alteration or radical editing. Significantly, the version as a theoretical concept first appeared in literary studies in relation to the production of "authoritative" editions of literary works. In "A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary Texts" from 1975, Hans Zeller uses the German term Fassung to refer to the various incarnations of the same text across its history of composition and publication. Fassung is derived from the verb fossen, which means to grasp, apprehend, or comprehend something. As such, it conveys the elements of subjectivity and agency inherent in the process of versioning more directly than the English term version. Moreover, the relation of versioning to seeing something from a defined perspective is underscored by Fassungs alternative meaning as a frame for eyeglasses. The central problem that Zeller addresses-how to establish an authoritative edition of a text-may seem outdated in its positing of the author as the final arbitrator of what the definitive text should look like and in the way it distinguishes versions exclusively on the basis of "authorial variation" (237).

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What is pertinent, however, is his insistence to keep the version free from contamination: If one imagines the textual history in the shape of a 3-dimensional cylinder standing upright, then the different versions are horizontal planes perpendicular to the axis of the cylinder. The purpose of the historical-critical edition ... is to create an appropriate reproduction of this cylinder, that is to say, of the complete textual history, while the purpose of a critical edition is to reproduce a particular plane, that is to say, an individual version. Contamination would mean the projection of one plane onto another. (Zeller 1975: 245). Zeller condemns the contaminated or eclectic text, which combines variants from different versions, because such a text is "in danger of becoming a construction alien to the author" (257). Except in cases of clear textual mistakes, the synchronic or horizontal level of textual history (the level of the version) should never be crossed by the vertical or diachronic one. Much like the critical edition itself, each individual version is declared sacrosanct. This precludes versioning in my sense, which would encourage interaction between versions and rule out any notion of a definitive edition. In a more recent discussion of versioning in the context of the critical edition and its transformation by the possibilities of hypertext, Tim William Machan reiterates Zeller' s criticism of eclectic editing, but with a different motivation. He seeks to preserve the integrity of individual versions not out of a belief in the primacy of authorial intention, but in order to provide readers with the freedom to compose their own versions of the text, their own eclectic readings: By recognizing and representing the integrity of different states of a work, versioning resists hermeneutic foreclosure and empowers, if not compels, readers to compare texts in order to formulate their own sense of the work's historical constitution(s). (1994: 303) Whereas in eclectic editing control lies with the editor, who renders the existing versions invisible in the final text, here versions remain able to infect each other on the plane of the reader, who can select elements from each to compose a preferred version that may change each time the text is read. Machan sees versioning as a practice particularly suited to the electronic environment of hypertext, which replaces authorial authority with "a conception of authority as the function of cultural practice" (309) by

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presenting different variants of a text as versions whose status is determined not a priori, but by how they are used. Machan is not alone in linking versioning, as a radical form of editing that emphasizes contamination over purity and alteration over correction, to the new media. Versioning has become a common term in computer science for the simultaneous production and representation of multiple variants of text documents or other files, a process geared not only at users (readers), but also at producers (authors). 4 In their presentation of a software program called the "Versioning Machine," Susan Schreibman, Amit Kumar, andJarom McDonald describe the tool's aim as the "encoding of multiple witnesses without declaring a base text, while still allowing for the full reconstruction of each separate witness in the set" (2003: 102). Their use of the term "witness"-a common term in literary editing also evoked by Zeller-to refer to the different variants of a computer text (and additional material such as annotations and commentaries) connects versioning to subjectivity and testimony. It conjures up a juridical situation where various witnesses recount their perspective on an event and where all these accounts are heard and evaluated, both separately and through each other, without any one witness being granted absolute primacy. The Versioning Machine allows the user to "explore the text that emerges both in and berween the variants" (102), a textual multiplicity that recalls the interacting layers of signification in Barthes' s third meaning. Julien' s film, Territories, can be seen, then, as a versioning machine that confronts the viewer with an aggregate of voices relaying the story of the Notting Hill Carnival without any of these voices being assigned an authoritative position and without the separate voices becoming fully integrated. Both the computer tool and the film represent versioning as an infinite operation that invests the viewer with a continuing task of adjudication, since the versions can be read together in many ways and each additional version launches another appeal. The Versioning Machine not only multiplies the text, but also disperses the agency of writing and reading by creating: a display environment in which multiple witnesses can easily and seamlessly be evoked in an environment without any noise, in which editors have some control over display (whether, for example, to display deletions in a color or through a strikethrough), and end users control a variety of functions (such as parallel scrolling, turning notes on or off, etc.). (Schreibman et al. 2003: 104)

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Each party-writer, editor, end user-fulfills an active role, but none achieves full authority or control. Versioning, moreover, is intersubjective between the parties as well as within them: each party is already multiple, so that individual control over signification is denied. The end user of the Versioning Machine can create her own preferred witness out of the ones provided, but she can never completely overwrite the separate witnesses, which remain recognizable and recoverable within the program. The phrase "without any noise," therefore, refers less to an environment that is "clean" in the sense of being univocal or without contamination, than to one in which no single voice can outshout the others. The recoverability of the separate witnesses indicates the Versioning Machine's incorporation of an archival function: versioning simultaneously supplements and preserves. Derrida' s Archive Fever outlines how the traditional archive relies on an ontonomological principle of commencement and commandment, origin and authority. Versioning could then be seen as a "new archival machine" that departs from the systematic archival order of "a single corpus," "a system of synchronicity" and a "gathering together" (1998: 15, 3). Versioning materializes as a heterogeneous, living archive that is always still growing, an archive in motion where no document is assigned a fixed place or is considered absolutely prior and original. In addition, versioning distributes the archive's consigning function over multiple subjects (writers, editors, end users), so that no singular agency possesses the power of authoritative interpretation. Versioning as a simultaneous supplementation and archivization also appears in Jose Pino's article, "A Visual Approach to Versioning for Text Co-Authoring" (1996), which presents a computer program called "StickOn" that is designed to present alternative versions of a multiauthored document. The program works according to the familiar principle of the Post-it note: digital patches are placed over a piece of text to propose a change, but these patches can also be removed again-temporarily or permanently-to reveal the previous version. The Stick-Ons create textual layers, transforming the text and making it dynamic without obliterating what was there before. As with the sedimented archives that Derrida detects in Freud's writing, but in a more concrete sense, "each layer here seems to gape slightly, as the lips of a wound, permitting glimpses of the abyssal possibility of another depth destined for archaeological exploration" (Derrida 1998: 20). In the Stick-On program, the underlying layers

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are readily available; rather than being buried, they remain active in the development of the text. Thus, versioning presents building and digging, writing and archiving, remembering and re-membering, not as opposites but as processes inextricably caught up in each other. The archive is no longer relegated to the arkheion as "a place of relative exteriority," but is integrated in the text itself (Derrida 1998: 45). Neither an exteriority nor a spontaneous internal memory, the archival technique of the Versioning Machine and the Stick-On program resembles what Derrida calls a "prosthesis of the inside," an internal supplementation that foregrounds the excessive signification of both writing and archiving (1998: 19). The archive no longer contains and determines the (finished) text. Instead, the text contains its own archive, rendering both text and archive forever incomplete, forever in flux. The Stick-On program enables multiple versions of a text to coexist until consensus is reached on the points of overwriting. Even then, however, what results is not a single corpus but an inherently multiple text where any concept of authorial authority or textual authenticity has disappeared behind the removable layers of Stick-Ons that over- and underwrite the text. There is no longer an original, only version upon version, and there is no single author, only a group of versioning agents whose contributions can theoretically be separated-Stick-Ons can be identified with a particular coauthor through color-coding-but are in practice predicated upon each other to such an extent that assigning individual authorship is no longer meaningful. Both the Stick-On program and the Versioning Machine conceive of versioning as a multiple, fluid form of editing/archiving that does away with the traditional implication of control, unification, and finality inherent in these terms. A version is always only one among many and even a "final" version is never really final, whole, or unitary. I propose to use versioning as a theoretical concept that applies not only to texts but also to subjects and their identities. As a generalized procedure, versioning can be brought to bear on chronotopes, performative regimes, the cultural gaze, and the cultural addressee. It opens up a space for the revisioning and revoicing of identity constructions and the principles of intersubjectivity across which these are articulated. Versioning in this sense appears in Marie Nathalie LeBlanc's "Versioning Womanhood and Muslimhood" (2ooo), which presents an

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anthropological study of the way Ivory Coast women of various religious backgrounds and from various age groups express themselves as women and as Muslims. What is versioned here is the subject who, over the course of her life, changes her ways of dressing, behaving, and practicing religion in response to cultural, religious, and sociopolitical pressures. LeBlanc' s nominal use of the term "versioning" is deliberate and specific: I purposely use the term "versioning" rather than "version" to emphasize the pro-

cedural dimension of the phenomenon described: "versioning" implies that it is a process, whereas "version" refers to a final product. (zooo: 474, n. 1) Not only does "versioning" indicate continuity, it also indicates agency, which appears as a strategy on the part of a subject situated within a network of social, cultural, and religious constrictions, enabling her to position and reposition herself within this network in various ways, both progressive and reactionary, without forgetting who she was before. In relation to my discussion of translation in Chapter 6, versioning presents a significant shift. First of all, notwithstanding its radical retheorizations, translation remains predicated on the notion of originality. Although the relation between original and translation has been redefined, reversed, and opened up to a logic other than that of fidelity, translation nevertheless presupposes a source text to which it is somehow indebted. Even the irreverent American remakers of Queer as Folk could not completely disavow the British original. Versioning, as I argue here, displaces notions of originality and essence more radically. Second, the source text for a translation is always singular; even when it exists in several versions, the text itself is seen as singular. Versioning, in contrast, can incorporate several existing texts at once, playing with all of them. Third, translation presupposes two subject positions to be filled by two temporally and spatially distinct subjects: the author of the source text and the translator, who produces a separate product. Versioning, on the contrary, has only one necessary subject position, which may, however, be occupied by multiple subjects. Hence, a text translated into a different language by its own author is more accurately known as a version. Samuel Beckett's self-translations from English into French, for instance, appear not as translations, but as versions so different that they require a subsequent translation back into English. In general, bilingual subjects do not translate between languages as much as version between them. Translation, finally, presupposes a source

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text that is not only singular but also stable and unchanging. In versioning, there is no stability: what came before is not a model, template, or base, but no more than a preliminary draft. Versioning' s relation to the draft brings out its futurity, its status as something yet to come. This picture accords with Bakhtin' s conception of the subject as always still becoming in a process that is not purely internal but prompted by intersubjective interactions with exotopic others. During its life, the subject succeeds only in compiling drafts of itself, never a final account. In Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Bakhtin appears to assign a negative value to the draft, when he likens it to a project displaying an abstract relation to the world, where there is no correlation with the event's "inescapable actual uniqueness" and no acknowledgment of answerability, a "rough draft of a possible actualization or an unsigned document that does not obligate anyone to do anything" (1993: 44). On the same page, he continues to argue that "only through the answerable participation effected by a unique act or deed can one get out of the realm of endless draft versions and rewrite one's life once and for all in the form of a fair copy." While this implies a potential unity and completeness, the fair copy Bakhtin speaks of is associated not with a lasting wholeness, but with the momentary uniqueness or singularity of experience of what he calls "act-performing thinking" (45). For Bakhtin, rough drafts are unacceptable because they imply the self's abdication of responsibility for the performed act, but the fair copy-as a signed document-marks answerability and responsibility only for the moment and in the moment of the act and its unique context. Because the signature cannot be guaranteed outside of this moment, as Derrida (1988) has also argued from a different perspective, it cannot underwrite a comprehensive account of the future or the past. For this reason, Bakhtin's fair copy is not a unique, singular, authoritative document. As one person's underwriting of the act-event, it presents a subjective, partial account of that event. It is the version of the event determined by one person's unique and unrepeatable place within the event's unfolding, the particular account this person is willing to take responsibility for. However, many fair copies may exist of the same event: there are as many different worlds of the event as there are individual centers of answerability, i.e., unique participative (unindifferent) selves (and their number is vast). If the "face" of the event is determined from the unique place of a

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participative self, then there are as many different "faces" as there are different unique places. (Bakhtin 1993: 45) The event, therefore, has no unique or unitary face, no "true story." Its documentation (archivization) is always multiple and riddled with doubt, which, as Hirschkop emphasizes, in "Bakhtin Myths, or, Why We All Need Alibis" (1998), is to Bakhtin a distinctive value. Bakhtin calls doubt "the basis of our life as effective deed-performing" and distinguishes it from "theoretical cognition," which seeks to posit a "unitary and unique truth of the world" (1993: 45). His consistent validation of doubt, ambivalence, and unfinalizability positions Bakhtin as a thinker torn between, on the one hand, a belief in a transcendent or metaphysical authority that would confer wholeness on his life, and on the other, a nagging (but also valued) doubt that perhaps the different versions of himself and his work would remain just that: competing accounts never resolved into an all-embracing fair copy. Certainly, the way Bakhtin refused to clarify aspects of his biography and authorship, coupled with the multiple versions he created of many of his texts, indicate his determination to resist finitude. 5 While Hirschkop underplays this effect by arguing that Bakhtin associated historical fact with a "secular vulgarity" (1998: 582), I contend that Bakhtin's equivocations testify to a conviction that historical facts, especially those pertaining to oneself, are not irrelevant but simply cannot be given meaning during one's lifetime. Consequently, we should ensure that they remain open to reinterpretation or versioning. In Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Bakhtin writes: For myself, none of my lived experiences and strivings can recede into the absolute past, into the past of meaning, which is detached and sheltered from the future, i.e., justified and consummated independently of the future. For, insofar as I find precisely myself in a given lived experience, ... as long as I am the one living in it, it does not yet exist in full. (1993: 117)

As long as subjects are alive, no definitive meaningful account of their being can be established, least of all by themselves. Moreover, the fact that the different versions of Bakhtin' s biography have not been disentangled more than thirty years after his death suggests that the process of versioning may continue indefinitely. Mter all, if "the plot or story of my personal life is created by other people" (Bakhtin, 1990a: m), there are no guarantees that these people are ever going to agree on a single version.

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Bakhtin' s active propagation of incompleteness in his work and life leads me to present him as a versioning thinker. This view has a close affinity with Anthony Wall's portrayal of Bakhtin as a "broken thinker," which understands Bakhtin "not as a whole but as a variously disjointed and juxtaposed set of fragments, each engaged in heterogeneous relations with any and many others" (1998: 682). The fragment here marks a moment of doubt, since it is never clear where precisely it belongs and which connections it will make. For Wall, fragments do not add up to a whole or fit seamlessly together like puzzle pieces. Instead, they form a network of liminalities that cannot be ordered into a closed system either spatially or temporally. The fragment's "logic of the multiple" connects to versioning's logic of the turn when Wall notes how "every fragment can potentially turn in any direction on its way to the next or prior one" (695). Despite this connection and the seeming appropriateness of calling Bakhtin "broken"-he was, after all, an amputee-1 have some reservations about taking the fragment as a figuration for Bakhtin' s thought. Primarily, this is because the fragment inevitably invokes an anterior completeness. Thus, although Wall duly notes that "it is forever impossible to restore broken pieces to the form in which they once belonged or to remember them and reestablish the wholeness they once upheld" (676), the very hypothesis of an original wholeness (a before the break) is problematic, particularly in relation to Bakhtin's theory of becoming, which, if it posits a wholeness at all, would place this wholeness in the eternally deferred future rather than in the past. Far from investing the subject with a unified prehistory, Bakhtin describes the infant, before its address by the other, as a "boundless, 'darkly stirring chaos' of needs and dissatisfactions" (1990a: 49). Thus, Bakhtin argues not that the self cannot remain one, but that it was never one in the first place. The terminology of the fragment insistently imposes the image of a preexisting wholeness that versioning seeks to dispel. In addition, the image of Bakhtin as "broken" implies something done to him rather than by him, whereas the notion of Bakhtin as a versioning thinker would see him as someone who actively crafted his work and his life into incomplete multiplicities. Such versioning activity, of course, is always intersubjective. As Wall notes, "it is not always advisable to treat a fragmentary piece as 'coherent' in itself, but often better to consider its inherent incompleteness as a call for help from the outside" (1998: 684). Again, however, outside help

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is not solicited to rebuild a whole, but to prevent this whole from being completed in the first place: the other is required to keep coherence (which for Bakhtin means death) at bay. A similar rejection of definitive determinations governs Julien's film, Territories, to which I now turn to flesh out the concept of versioning in a fuller form that involves the visual plane as well as the vocal one.

The Sound System and the Cutting Room Territories effects a vocal and visual versioning of the Notting Hill Carnival by employing all the forms of radical black signification listed by Gilroy in There Ain 't No Black in the Union jack (2002). It shows graffiticovered walls, break dancing, and includes a scene where a sound system is used to dub a reggae track. 6 The scene in question shows a black man standing next to a turntable and a tower of speakers, and dubbing over a reggae recording. The element of manipulation is emphasized: by singing over it, the man changes the record, and we also see, in a repeated closeup, the record itself being "scratched" on the turntable by a black hand. In addition, the scratched sound is matched by scratched images: the dub artist is intercut with repeatedly rewound and replayed images of black men dancing on the street during the Carnival. The image of the turntable aptly visualizes the logic of the turn inherent to the practice of versioning. Julien' s film applies this logic on all levels, turning and returning to the same voices, sounds, and images, each time rwisting them in a new direction. As a whole, Territories takes the form of a stripping down and rebuilding of histories, voices, bodies, and images. Images are juxtaposed and superimposed to create visual confusion. The same happens with the narrating voices: their doubling and uncertain attribution creates a destabilizing vocal disorder. In its visual and auditory multiplication of the stories, images, and sounds of the Notting Hill Carnival, Territories challenges not only the official interpretation of the event by the white authorities, but postulates all versions of the Carnival and its history, including black ones, as precarious versionings whose base track is no longer recoverable. In this obliteration of any notion of a recoverable, singular source, origin, or base lies the surplus value of the concept of versioning over dubbing or translation.

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In his insightful discussions of Territories, which have many points in common with my reading, Mercer argues that the film "appropriates the subversive logic of Carnival itself to creolise and effectively 'carnivalise' the filmic text" (1988b: n). He sees the film as a "fragmentary collage" that "'carnivalises' codes and conventions such as space-time continuity in editing" (1988a: 54). However, it is not just the linearity of the filmic text that is destabilized in Territories but also the Notting Hill Carnival itself in its reading as an event that is primordially black and inherently subversive. Julien' s film versions the carnival in order to present it, simultaneously, as a location of black self-assertion and as an event easily reappropriated by the authorities or by reactionary forces within the black community. Hence, the black community's interpretation of Carnival is not portrayed as unequivocally progressive either: Territories indicates how this interpretation includes a nostalgia for a fixed image of the lost Caribbean homeland, negative views of interracial contacts (especially sexual) and homophobia. The latter two aspects are critiqued by the film's repeated image of two bare-chested men (one black and one white) locked in an erotic embrace. 7 Hitchcock takes up the metaphor of the sound system to elucidate nation language, defined by Brathwaite as "the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and labourers, the servants who were brought in by the conquistadors" (1984: 5-6). Intoning or accenting a language as a nation (this term is used to claim a territory for a particular people within and against the colonial structure of the empire) works like a sound system in that it produces endless versions rather than guarantees of authenticity and origin: "The version is characterized by sound, the community is gathered in an aural mix which, because it is sound (and not whole), is in continual flux: there are versions of versions" (Hitchcock 1993c: par. 10). The sound system, through a versioning practice, inaugurates communal identities that are sounded (in the sense of articulated and heard) and sound (as in solid, that is, materially grounded) in the community's economic and social circumstances. They are, however, never sound in the sense of being secure ("safe and sound") because versions are never finite or authoritative: they are always already and can always be manipulated again. 8 The subject, I suggest, is situated within the sound system of social heteroglossia, which does not produce authentic words, but only the

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possibility of creating new versions of the already heard. In Nell, the possibility for versioning is limited by the homogenizing force of the cultural addressee, so that the subject is placed not within a sound system, but within a playback or karaoke machine, where it is forced to synchronize itself, to mimic rather than dub, to copy rather than version. The already heard relates the sound system to the already read (deja lu) of Barthes's intertextuality, which refutes notions of origin and filiation (1977: 160). Furthermore, the already heard speaks to Bakhtin's dialogism, where each word partakes in the "atmosphere of the already spoken" and the not yet said, orienting itself toward a past and a future that it also helps to constitute in the present (1996c: 280). Versioning, then, indicates the act of exploiting the spaces of difference created by these structural, subjectless processes. In its deliberately active tense, versioning uncovers and imposes on the processes of "jerry-rigged assemblage" (Chion 1999: 151) that underlie all narrative, history, and identity. It does not cause these processes, but attaches itself to them in order to make a (political) difference. Territories is structured like a sound system: it strips down the existing, racist determination of the black immigrant community in London and erects a new version of black identity that is not unitary, but multiple and provisional. This identity remains under construction, yet at the same time asserts itself in (and for) the moment as a powerful situated and political performative. The film not only versions voices but also images, placing the metaphor of the cutting room next to that of the sound system. In the cutting room, as in the Versioning Machine or the Stick-On program, the authorship of images is multiplied (cameraman, director, editor, producer, test audience) while their originality is undermined by the accumulation of camera angles, "takes," and "cuts," which together form a film's living archive out of which new versions can always be created. The appearance of the cutting room in Julien' s film renders the Notting Hill Carnival and the black identity it asserts multieyed as well as multivoiced: heteroscopic as well as heteroglossic. Visual versioning appears first in a repeated image that symbolizes the white authorities' attempts to control the Carnival, its history and territory. The image shows a white police officer leaning out of an upper-floor office window, capturing the carnival revelers and sound systems in his look. This look, because of its elevated position and its association with law enforcement, represents a visual instance of Silverman's "voice on-high"

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as "a voice which speaks from a position of superior knowledge, and which superimposes itself 'on top' of the diegesis" (1988: 48). The officer's "look on-high" superimposes itself on the event of Carnival and acquires a panoptical quality. It exceeds individuality and appears as a functionary of the cultural gaze, that" 'unapprehensible' agency through which we are socially ratified or negated as spectacle" (Silverman 1996: 133). Significantly, the image reoccurs just as one of the narrating voices asserts: "Carnival is neutralized and framed, contained as aesthetic spectacle." Together, image and voice bring out the oppressive dimension of the spectacle inherent in the cultural gaze. However, the way the camera zooms in on the officer at the word "spectacle" effects a crucial versioning: if the Carnival appears as a spectacle in the officer's eyes, the officer in turn becomes a spectacle in the camera's eye. The violent images of the 1976 Carnival riots that immediately precede the officer's reappearance suggest that, however much the cultural gaze wants to frame the Carnival as pure spectacle, the events on the street make this framing impossible. With the Carnival literally erupting into a territorial battle, it could no longer be contained or neutralized. The gaze cannot stay on-high, but has to acknowledge and incorporate competing visions of the Carnival. By including the official gaze in his film, Julien acknowledges its forceful effect, while at the same time destabilizing it by submitting it to the looks of camera, director, and audience. In Territories, the camera acts not as an accessory of the gaze but as a support for a multiple black perspective, through which it versions the singular screen of representative images that allow black culture to be seen. When it enters the image as one vision among others, the cultural gaze surrenders some of its power and the look-as a versioning agency-becomes the "locus for a resistant and even transformative vision" (Silverman 1996: 160). Like the film's struggling voices, its eyes or looks remember the Carnival's history and black identity imperfectly, as an inconclusive versioning. The visual versioning of Territories is enhanced when the cutting room appears. The sound system sequence is matched by a scene where the film's Carnival images, which the viewer assumes to be "live," are exposed as mises en abyme, images on a screen within a screen, directed not just by Julien but also inside the film by the two black women. As the camera zooms out from one of the Carnival scenes, we see that the images are being played on television: a red counter indicates that the footage is on

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video. The scenes are not authentic, original, or invariable, but archived on a tape to be reviewed and rearranged. The video and television are located in a room with editing equipment, where two black women sit with their backs to the viewer, watching the television screen and presumably controlling the flow of its images. The scene identifies video editing (in the image as well as of the image) as yet another version of versioning. The anonymous women (their faces cannot be seen) represent the black community's attempt to gain editorial control over the Carnival as a black cultural event: not to assign it a single, authoritative meaning, but to version it in its multiplicity through a retroactive and imperfect practice of remembering. The cutting room evokes Silverman's argument that: although the camera "sees" what the eye cannot, the images it produces through this fictive act of "seeing" can be retroactively worked upon in all kinds of transformative and destabilizing ways, and thereby stripped of their ostensible objectivity and authority. (1996: 193)

Prompted by Julien's use of the cutting room, I insist that what Territories inaugurates by means of its versioning is more than "a version of making history" (Hitchcock 1993c: par. 23). It turns history into versioning: a multiple, infinite, and necessarily imperfect making, remaking, archiving, and remembering of stories and images with neither original nor end in sight. History is created not by a single historian but by a multiplicity of historicizing voices: an intersubjective chorus. Conceiving of history, memory, and identity as processes of versioning situates them as performative reiterations where agency emerges in the subject's abilityparticularly when part of a collective-to see and speak a particular history, memory, or identity again and again, improvising on a shifting base track or base rhythm unable to control its own proliferations. The base trackthe "facts" about the Notting Hill Carnival, insofar as they exist, or the chronotope as it stages the subject through its regimes of seeing and speaking-functions not as a confining essence, but as a conditional limit open to creative play, to being turned, as in the title of the Clint Eastwood film, every which way but loose. Territories locates political agency in multiplying histories and identities, in manipulating the space of difference inherent in their performativity. The film does not make history from scratch, but revisions, retells, and remakes it as so many versions-racialized, gendered, localized. This

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process is inherently intersubjective. As Hitchcock writes, "what makes history telling is not the individuation of the voice, as the griots well know, but the process in which the story keeps getting told" (1993c: par. 24). The individuation of the voice is undermined by Julien' s doubled voices and his refusal to anchor them in specific bodies. Mercer pertinently refers to this process as Territories' "phatic mode of enunciation," a form of speaking that conveys a general sociability rather than a specific meaning or intention (1988a: 55). This utterance mode not only subverts the "univocal captioning role of the voice-over within the documentary genre," as Mercer argues, but the unambiguous authority of the voice, history, memory, and identity in general. In Territories, history is the unstable product of a versioning that is always already at work, even (or especially) in the archive; hence, the impossibility of pinning down the story of the Notting Hill Carnival, so precariously located in multiple times and spaces. In the words of one of the film's doubled female voice-overs: How far should we go to begin our story, the history of carnival. To 1976? To 1966? Or to 1959? Or should we turn to its origins in the Caribbean, in Africa, in ancient Babylon, centuries before Christ? We' re struggling to begin a story.

There is no one history of the Carnival, only provisional versionings, each marking out a territory, each acting as a political, ideological, performative statement that brings into being an identity in the moment and for the moment. Choosing the "true" account from among the film's auditive and visual versionings is an impossible task that Territories explicitly refuses to undertake. However, bringing the versions together in a dialogic encounter where they can version each other is a necessary, political act, an instantiation of Bakhtin's struggle over the sign. What Julien proposes in juxtaposing and superimposing voices and images is to regard each versioning through the eyes of the others, in the same way that the "critical interanimation of languages" makes it possible "to regard one language (and the verbal world corresponding to it) through the eyes of another language" (Bakhtin 1996c: 296). The visibility of the editing process in Julien' s film-appearing as it does as a montage rather than a narrative-works critically to version the territory of the Notting Hill Carnival, its history, and the black identity it

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performatively produces. Montage is a specific form of editing that features a "rapid alteration between sets of shots whose signification occurs at the point of their collision" (Hayward 2000: 96). Significantly, the juxtaposition of two images is seen to produce a "third meaning" (97) that exceeds that of the separate images without obscuring their individual significations. Although montage is usually sequential, Julien, in the second part of Territories, makes it contemporaneous by combining juxtaposition with superimposition and double exposures. The contemporaneity of versions and their archiving is crucial in any move to dissociate versioning from notions of essence and origin. In the second part of Julien' s film, entitled "Territories 11," the struggle to tell the story of the Carnival and its origins is abandoned. Its irreducible heterogeneity as a versioned and versioning event is now accepted. The critical interanimation of sounds and images reaches a climax when the film itself takes on the form of a giant sound and editing machine. Images, sounds, texts, songs, and voices are sampled onto each other in a lightning-speed montage sequence that brings white and black perspectives on the Carnival face to face in a dialogic encounter that establishes even more versions of the event. Translucent images of black faces are imposed upon the recurring image of the white police officer looking down upon the Carnival and newspaper photographs showing other policemen. White skin seen through black skin becomes white skin touching black skin in the image of the two bare-chested men sharing an intimate embrace. For the duration of the sequence, the screen is at all times occupied by more than one image, with the same images appearing in different configurations, creating an impression of simultaneity that refuses a fixed priority and any clear-cut distinctions among past, present, and future. The aim is not to see images in a chronological fashion, after each other, but to see them beside or even through each other, as layers of meaning, at once distinguishable and inseparable, literally bleeding and burning into each other (we see wounded faces and a Union Jack set on fire) but never obliterating their specificity. The flow of images and sounds keeps accelerating until we are once more faced with the white police officer and his surveying gaze. However, now that the film has under- and overwritten the territory of his gaze with a multitude of other looks, images, sounds, and voices acting like so many Stick-On patches, his authority has been permanently diluted. Territory's visual and auditory versionings have

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reduced his gaze, at least for the duration of the film, to one witness or version among many, one look in a heteroscopic, heteroglossic panorama of versioning. This versioning effect cannot be reduced to a mere pluralism, since the different versions actively interact with each other in the film, nor does it amount to relativism, because each version is grounded in a particular social and territorial politics that is not necessarily valued equally to all others.

The Versioned-Versioning Subject I have examined versioning as a continuous, intersubjective practice of rewriting, remembering, and reimagining in relation to texts, voices, and images. But how does it work in relation to the subject and its identities? Can we imagine the subject in terms of versioning? In this chapter, versioning appears in many different forms: dub, scratching, break dancing, graffiti, editing, archiving, translation, and montage all working to map multiple versions of objects and events onto a shifting plane of simultaneity. The process works in a similar way for subjects. I have already referred to Hitch cock's notion of dub identity. In another way, Durham's book on the simulacrum presents an image of the subject as montage. Durham discusses how, in Genet's novel Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, montage brings together the different worlds in which a single image lives, making these worlds confront each other face to face. This procedure recalls the Versioning Machine's on-screen arrangement of textual witnesses, only now the arrangement occurs within the subject itself. Not just the images are versioned, but also the subject's identity as it is constructed in relation to them. Again, there is no full resolution, since Genet's montage presents "a series of 'irrational cuts' between images whose precise relation remains indeterminate" (Durham 1998: 177). The subject in montage continuously plays out variations of itself. However, as I argue in Chapter 7, the way in which "the number of possible themes is limited by the past" (Durham 1998: ro8) means that this subject ultimately remains caught in the repetition-without-exteriority of the simulacrum. Versioning, on the contrary, allows for the possibility over time of changing the themes themselves by bringing in other elements from the outside and using them to move further and further away from existing patterns of repetition. Durham also presents montage as an

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essentially solitary, self-contained practice. Only on the very last page of his book does he indicate that, in order to have a truly transformative impact, the versioning force of the montage must be shared with others, so that it refers to "our collective power to become other than ourselves" (193). This is the point of intersubjectivity where I situate versioning in its transformative capacity. The subject is constricted in its versioning of itself by the intersubjectively constituted (and maintained) frameworks of the chronotope, performativity, the cultural gaze, and the cultural addressee. It is always already versioned by these structures. On the other hand, the subject's agency is located on the level of the concrete intersubjective interactions through which the same structures reiterate themselves. This is where it can version itself in different directions. My transcription of the subject as "versioned-versioning" marks this bidirectional process as unfolding in simultaneity: over the course of its life, in its interactions and across the principles of intersubjectivity through which it configures these interactions, the subject is at once subject to versioning and subject of verswnmg. Through the concept of versioning-to which Durham's simulacrum adds the strategic elements of feigning, of presenting difference as sameness and vice versa-I theorize the subject as a collection of rough drafts exposed to radical and often conflicting editing procedures that never produce a fair copy. Of course, the position of editor does not fall to the subject itself, but oscillates among self, other, and the Other of the look and voice on-high (the cultural gaze and the cultural addressee). The versioned-versioning subject is thus irreducibly intersubjective, both in the sense of being between subjects and in that of playing itself out across multiple principles of (inter)subjectivity. It is involved in a continuous, simultaneous process of active transformation, where each transformation lays claim to a provisional territory of identity. Versioning is not, therefore, a process without grounding, but one that creates shifting grounds for the subject to stand on, from which the subject can speak and look and (hopefully) make itself heard and seen. Just as the editorial changes made by the collaborators within the Versioning Machine and the Stick-On program are not neutral suggestions but textual territorializations (finding one's words covered over by someone else's inevitably signifies a loss), the versions of itself that the subject negotiates in its unending quest for

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wholeness all appear as situated determinations that cannot be abstracted from their contexts and that lay claim to the subject in specific and situated ways. With regard to collective identities or intersubjectivities, both "Forces of Victory" and Territories demonstrate how political agency can be expressed through practices of versioning that challenge the fixity of history, memory, and identity without denying the importance for emerging communities to create their own histories, memories, and identities. The fact that these are always subject to further versioning does not make them irrelevant or ineffectual, but, on the contrary, invests them with a versatility that enables communities to grow and change, one that makes them more resilient in the face of changing social relations and the new principles of (inter)subjectivity that are emerging in our age of globalization and complex new media landscapes.

Afierword

In its gradual move beyond Bakhtin, this book itself constitutes an act of versioning. Bakhtin' s concepts have not stayed the same. I have given each of them another theoretical turn by confronting them with my chosen cultural objects and the other theoretical frameworks these objects evoked. I close this book with a chapter on versioning because, more than merely another concept, versioning characterizes my method: cultural analysis works by versioning its objects and theories through each other. By bringing objects into the present, the cultural analyst effects an active, agential renewal that remembers what came before in an imperfect "remembering," but refuses to reify anything into an origin, essence, or authenticity. Versioning includes the before in the contemporaneity of the analysis. Thus, in my chapters, I consistently indicate what each of the concepts I discuss owes to Bakhtin, while insisting that their move into Bakhtin's beyond makes this obligation not one of fidelity. As an intersubjective practice, versioning entails affiliation rather than filiation, a living futurity rather than a dead past. Although versions are predicated on each other and form patterns, their interrelations are unstable and do not carry within themselves any preordained hierarchy or lasting chronology. All the concepts I discuss capture an aspect of the versionedversioning subject: the chronotope versions the subject's identity in terms of time, space, and performativity; the cultural gaze and the cultural addressee version the subject's identity in relation to chronotope-specific

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regimes of seeing and speaking (with the intersubjective look and the intersubjective address potentially able to transform these regimes); accents, speech genres, translations, and territories mark the subject's ability to version her identity in opposition to the structures of constraint and to make herself seen and heard differently. Versioning, therefore, renders both the intersubjective constraints of identity construction and the equally intersubjective means of their transformation multiple, differentiated, situated, and specific. It is not enough to expose identities as social constructions or to argue that these constructions should be deconstructed; identities need to be situated in the specificity of their constitution in order to find the precise locales where their most productive versionings (that is, those that generate actual social and political progress for marginalized communities) might take place. Ironically, versioning caught up with me as I was finishing this book. Flicking past MTV (Music Television) Europe one day, my eye caught a familiar shot of the New York skyline. For a moment, I thought MTV had started broadcasting Sex and the City (SatC), since the images presented an exact copy of this series' opening sequence. Soon, however, differences appeared: instead of announcing an HBO production, the screen revealed, in an identical layout and typeface, that I was watching a "Barber Original Production" presented by "Columbia Records." At this point, the MTV tag identifying the sequence as a music video appeared on the bottom of the screen. I was watching the video for the song "Girl" by the R&B group Destiny's Child, taken from their album Destiny Fulfilled. The video, I quickly gathered, did not present a faithful remake of the opening sequence, but a versioning. It obviously had a point to make about Sex and the City and its chronotopically staged identities. The versioning element does not lie in the lyrics of the song, which reiterate the series' positing of female friendship as the "cure" for all relationship woes. Thematically, the two objects are in perfect alignment. However, the changes the music video installs on the level of the image indicate that it indeed gives a versioning turn to Sex and the City. Most important, it replaces the four white main characters of the television program with the three black singers of Destiny's Child: Beyonce Knowles, Michelle Williams, and Kelly Rowland. The video starts by showing us Knowles in a luxury apartment opening up her laptop. This recalls the familiar SatC image of Carrie writing

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on her computer. The video replicates the senes ambivalent narrative structure by having Knowles take on the same dual narrator/ character role as Carrie. The laptop identifies her as a writer, investing her with a position of enunciation that exceeds her singing. Later in the video, there is a shot of the laptop screen with Knowles' s fingers on the keyboard typing the lyrics to the song as she sings them. This shot mimics the appearance of digital writing in the scenes where Carrie poses her episode-framing questions. Like Carrie's column, Knowles's lyrics appear as a text within a text, which at the same time functions as the video's script. Clearly, the video puts Knowles in Carrie' s place, allowing her to claim Carrie' s identity and doubled speech position for herself. And she does this as a black woman. After Williams and Rowland enter the apartment, the three women sit down and turn on the television, which shows the pseudo-SatC opening sequence. Instead of Carrie walking the Manhattan streets by herself, we see all three singers of Destiny's Child strutting down a sidewalk, arm in arm, smiling every bit as confidently as Carrie. When the video switches back to the women on the couch, they are watching the television screen in excited recognition of themselves so comfortably filling the shoes of SatC' s white protagonists. Although the lifestyle depicted in the video is exactly the same as that portrayed in SatC (designer clothes and shoes, luxury apartments, exclusive shops), the video versions the series by inserting black subjects into the Manhattan chronotope, turning it into an all-black universe. Where the video versions the television series is precisely in the way Destiny's Child, as a black group, claims the white territory of the SatC chronotope for itself, despite the series' consistent spacing out of black subjects and the subject of race in general. Thus, the landmarks of the SatC opening sequence are now interspersed with images of the three singers, boldly inscribed with their names: "Starring Michelle Williams"/"Beyonce Knowles"/"Kelly Rowland." Unlike Carrie, who loses control of the Manhattan stage when she encounters the passing bus bearing her image, the three singers stay firmly in control throughout the sequence. They look straight ahead as they walk, so that they do not encounter the gaze of the buildings and bridges. And when, at the end of the sequence, a bus drives by bearing the name of the group, a picture of their faces, and the name of their album, there is no splashing of water from the gutter: The singers continue walking

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without even glancing at the bus. Instead of coming face to face with the chronotope that stages them, as Carrie did, these women stay firmly within the chronotope, acting out a seamless belonging that challenges the way they, as black subjects, were excluded from this time-space by the SatC series. The video makes this point not by remaking the series altogether, but by versioning it, keeping some elements but changing others to assert a territorial claim. Of course, the statement the video makes is not as radical as it could be, since apart from the issue of racial exclusion it does not question any of the norms imposed by the Manhattan chronotope. The SatC identity is claimed for the black woman, but its other exclusions-in terms of class, age, and looks-are not addressed. With any versioning, it is vital to distinguish between the elements that are subjected to change and those that are left intact, for it is in this distinction that the political direction and scope of the versioning turn can be read. We live in an age and culture of versioning, where the intercontamination of ideas, identities, concepts, and objects is rife. Although its transformative effects are sometimes obscured by our lingering validation of originality and authenticity, versioning is right before our eyes, appearing sometimes as a form of relentless multiplication without content and at other times as a diversity, range, or variety that preserves the specificity and situatedness of each of its components, versioning them through each other. The Destiny's Child music video is just one (fortuitously timed but only mildly inspiring) example, and versioning is not limited to the realm of popular culture. Academia itself-interdisciplinarity in particular-is sustained by practices of versioning, as the multiplication of Bakhtin across literary, cultural, and linguistic criticism has amply demonstrated. Theory itself is versioned when it is pulled into new orbits, as when Bakhtin meets Butler or, more unexpectedly, Carrie Bradshaw. A culture of versioning is also apparent in the realms of literature, film, television, and art. Thus, in literature, books are versioned not just into hardcover and paperback, first and later editions, but also into translations, abridged and large-print formats, audiobooks, digital books, and film tie-ins, so that the work is transformed according to its specific medium and the constructions of time and space this medium produces. Likewise, films are versioned in terms of dubbing, remakes, director cuts, and DVD additional features, introducing difference into the product it-

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self and not just in its audiences. Television exhibits a similar pattern: programs are dubbed, remade, and formats are sold to different countries. Certain television channels, although operating under the same name (MTV, CNN, BBC World), show different programs in different places. In the art world, finally, many artworks exist in multiple versions, and so now do museums: there are two Tare galleries in London and others in Liverpool and St. Ives, while the Guggenheim spans New York, Bilbao, Venice, Berlin, and Las Vegas. Exploring the precise ways that books, films, television programs, artworks, and museums are versioned and version themselves, or how their different versions are predicated on specific chronotopic situations exceeds the present project. Here, I seek to indicate versioning's potential as a theoretical concept that locates a form of political agency in the way the subject's fundamental intersubjectivity keeps identities, texts, and images in motion on a plane of contemporaneity that eschews origins, confuses hierarchies, and rejects finality without discarding specificity and situatedness. To preempt an overly optimistic reading of versioning and its political potential, it pays to remember that versioning operates perhaps most forcefully in the realm of commodities and their marketing, where products are diversified for different segments of the market. 1 Even McDonald' s shrewdly adapts its menu to each country in which it operates. The aims and results of versioning are, therefore, not always laudable or desirablecommodity versioning tends to mask an overall homogenization, limiting choice rather than enhancing it, as the Starbucks coffee empire proves-and its direction is by no means unequivocally progressive in political terms. But versioning always marks a process that remains in development and, consequently, is capable of being redirected. It produces situated variations giving rise to equally situated critiques. As such, it indicates a promising movement from "The Real Me"-an identity claim drenched in essentialism-to what may be called, in a play of words not entirely inappropriate, "Versions 'R' Us." This phrase sums up my argument by accentuating the inherent multiplicity and intersubjectivity of the versionedversioning subject, which turns identity into a dynamic and creative task, without obfuscating versioning's potentially treacherous connections to capitalism and consumerism, all of which point to identity's reliance on and frequent complicity with powerful and frequently oppressive social structures.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

r. William Germano summarizes this trend as the "problem of posteverythingness" (1999: 332). Its two most recent and most prominent manifestations, notwithstanding their vastly different outlooks, are Terry Eagleton's After Theory (2003) and Gayatri Spivak's Death of a DiscipLine (2003). In "Theory Ends," Vincent Leitch playfully exploits the way that "ends" signifies demises and purposes as well as goals or targets, so that there always remains a possibility of life after death (2005). 2. In CuLturaL Analysis, Robert Wurhnow, James Davison Hunter, Albert Bergescn, and Edith Kurzweil posit cultural analysis as a new framework for studying culture derived from the intersections between the work of Peter Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jiirgen Habermas (1984). Cultural analysis is defined against social psychology and sociology as "the smdy of the symbolicexpressive dimension of social life," which has as its subject matter "the objective acts, events, utterances, and objects of social interaction" (259). Although this elaboration of cultural analysis is otherwise quite different from mine, we share a focus on social interaction or intersubjectivity (as does Bakhtin). 3· Bal writes that, in interdisciplinary discussions, "each participant is answerable both to his or her own disciplinary community back home and to the 'foreigners' in the country s/he visits in whose languages/he is not yet fluent" (2002: 34). Bakhtin makes answerability or responsibility integral to all moral acts: "An answerable act or deed is precisely that act which is performed on the basis of an acknowledgment of my obligative (ought-to-be) uniqueness" (1993: 42). In both cases, answerability is associated with a specificity of situation of which it is impossible to make abstractions. 4· The most extensive biography in English remains Clark and Holquist's Mikhail Bakhtin (1984). On the question whether Bakhtin was the actual author of works published under the names of V. N. Voloshinov and P. N. Medvedev, see chapter 6 of their book and Titunik (1984). Ken Hirschkop provides cogent discussions of Bakhtin's religious tendencies (2004) and the appropriation of

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Bakhtin by different academic disciplines (1997). And Peter Hitchcock finds in Bakhtin's prosthetic leg a witty and insightful connection to cyborg theory (1998c). 5· For a discussion of the Bakhtin archive-essentially a collection of papers held in a private apartment of which no reliable inventory exists-see Hitchcock's interview with David Shepherd, director of the Bakhtin Centre in Sheffield. In the same interview, Shepherd confesses to thinking that "a lot of Bakhtin studies is sort of running on the spot or going round in circles" (1998b: 756). 6. Craig Brandist's The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics (2002) is exemplary of this direction in Bakhtin studies. See also Brian Poole's meticulous examinations of Bakhtin's dependence on the work of Max Scheler and his outright plagiarism of Ernst Cassirer (20or; 1998). 7· In seeing Bakhtin's concepts as migratory even within his own work, Pechey opposes those who see his work as united by a stable set of "global concepts," defined by Morson and Emerson as "ones that seem to guide his thought pretty much throughout his career as he sought to solve certain recurrent problems" (1993: 95). 8. Gayatri Spivak notes how its Latin root idem already marks identity's reiterative or performative status: "the meaning of the Latin word idem is not exactly 'same' in the sense of one, but rather 'same' in the sense of multitudes or repetitions. That is to say, that which is primordial [anadz] and unique [ekamevadvatiam] is not idem, but rather that which can be cited through many re-citations, that is idem" (1995: 151). 9· This move into Bakhtin's beyond via Butler's theory of performativity is legitimized by his emphasis on the performed act as the center of human life and ethics: "my entire life as a whole can be considered as a single complex act or deed that I perform: I act, i.e., perform acts, with my whole life, and every particular act and lived-experience is a constituent moment of my life-of the continuous performing of acts" (1993: 3). ro. Nestor Garda Canclini's Hybrid Cultures contains an illuminating if rather pessimistic discussion of the relation between popular culture and popularity. According to Canclini: "'Popular' is what sells massively, what the multitudes like. As a matter of fact, what matters to the market and the media is not the popular but popularity.... While the people may be the place of tumult and danger, popularity-adhesion to an order, consensus on a system of values-is measured and regulated by opinion polls" (1995: 187-88). 1r. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno remain the most salient representatives of this perspective. Their critique of mass culture in "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" connects with Bakhtin in the way they distinguish the circus as the single positive exception to their negative view of mass culture: "The culture industry does retain a trace of something better in those

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features which bring it close to the circus, in the self-justifying and nonsensical skill of riders, acrobats and clowns, in the 'defense and justification of physical as against intellectual art'" (2oor: 85). This exaltation of the circus and its physicality recalls Bakhtin' s validation, in Rabelais and His World, of the carnival as an authentic form of folk culture linked to the grotesque body. Bakhtin's discussion of the postmedieval degeneration of carnival culture places him, with Adorno and Horkheimer, in the class of what Colin MacCabe labels the "culturally pessimistic definition" of popular culture, which opposes modern forms of popular culture to older and supposedly more authentic forms (1986: 3). 12. A well-known proponent of this celebratory view is John Fiske. See his Understanding Popular Culture and Television Culture (1992; 1987). For rebuttals of Fiske's work, see McGuigan (1998) and Frith (1998). 13. See High-Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment, where Jim Collins describes Pop Art as a movement that opposed the "sacralization of culture" by bringing popular culture into high culture, and High-Pop as a movement that transforms "Culture into mass entertainment" (2002: 5, 6). Both challenge any strict distinction between the popular and the elite. Phi! Patron commends the 1990 MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) exposition "High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture" for "its emphatic argument that popular culture has not simply been a passive source for high art, a tabletop of scattered clippings serving as material for it. Instead, the show emphasizes the mutual interactions of high and low" (1990). This is also my argument regarding Julien's use of the Notting Hill Carnival in Territories (1984). CHAPTER I 1. On the chronotope and Kant, see Scholz, who argues that Bakhtin historicizes and differentiates Kantian time and space by "substituting for Kant's 'one' time and 'one' space a series of historically manifest chronotopes" (1998: I6I). The chronotope, then, does for Kantian rime and space what Scott' s redefinition does for historiography's conception of experience, namely differentiate, historicize, and give discursiveness to categories previously considered a priori foundations for knowledge. 2. In literary criticism, the chronotope has remained remarkably undertheorized. Most often, the chronotope is applied to specific authors (Eckstrom) or to a particular narrative setting (Tray; Shumway). Exceptions are Zoran and Vlasov, who each use the chronotope to develop a general theory of literary space, and Morson, who employs the concept to theorize the temporalities of genre. None of these texts, however, adequately explores the way the chronotope figures time and space in their interrelationship. And when this interrelationship is indeed considered, as in Riffaterre' s article, "Chronotopes in Diegesis," the chronotope is rigidly restricted to its literary function.

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Notes to Pages 34-39

3· See http://www.hbo.com/city. In Reading Sex and the City, Kim Akass and Janet McCabe note how the Web site's marketing of the lifestyle portrayed in the series extended to auctioning off some of the clothes and accessories used filming it (2006: 6). 4· See Erving Goffman's seminal Frame Analysis (1974), which deals with subjects as social actors who play a range of social roles in the differently framed situations they encounter. The difference between frame analysis and the chronotopic analysis I am proposing here is that, whereas the chronotope is seen as constitutive of subjects and their worlds, Goffman's frame has a more limited function. More important, the frame does not cover the entire subject. For Goffman, the subject has a separate existence outside of framed situations, as is hinted by the possibility of out-of-frame behavior-where "role gives way to person" (273)-and by the existence of a "person-role formula" as the mode of connection between "the person, individual, or player, namely, he who participates, and the particular role, capacity, or function he realizes during that participation" (269). The situation, too, is not fully covered by the frame: spatial and temporal brackets distinguish a frame from the ongoing flow of social life, and each frame produces a "disattend" track consisting of events that fall outside the frame and have to be ignored by participants in the framed strip of activity. Finally, for Goffman, participation in a particular frame seems to be a largely intentional affair, whereas, as I later argue, belonging to a chronotope is not a question of choice. 5· On focalization, see chapter 7 of Bal's Narratology (1997), as well as Looking In: The Art of Viewing, where she specifies the concept as "the relationship between the elements presented-that which is 'seen' or perceived-and the vision through which they are seen or presented" (2001: 43). The chronotope, as I read it, places space, time, and their interrelation among the elements that cannot be objectively presented but can only be seen through a particular mode of vision. 6. See Rem Koolhaas's architectural manifesto, Delirious New York (1994), for an alternative chronotopic construction of Manhattan in terms of its "Culture of Congestion." 7· I discuss the gaze more extensively in Chapter 3 in the context of the intersubjective look. 8. Akass and McCabe provide an interpretation of the opening sequence similar to mine, perceiving it as a "visual montage of our female fldneuse caught in the act of seeing" (2oo6: 177). They, however, emphasize Carrie's subjection not to the space of New York, but to the surrogate male gaze of a passing Japanese tourist. 9· This point is reinforced in "Secret Sex" (season I, episode 6), which deals with the poster on the bus. Carrie makes sure the picture is exactly right and invites her friends to watch the bus drive by, only to discover that a giant penis has been drawn near her face. Again, this shows her inability to control her own image in the city space. Another instance of Carrie finding her own image beyond her

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control occurs in "They Shoot Single People, Don't They?" (season 2, episode 4). There, Carrie is invited to pose for a magazine cover with a "single and fabulous" theme. However, after she shows up for the shoot with a hangover, the cover shows her tired and worn-out, with the caption "single and fabulous?" not confirming but questioning her image. IO. Chronotopes can also be associated with particular types of representation or art forms, so that, for example, Waiter Benjamin's seminal essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," is seen to distinguish the chronotope of the auratic artwork-associated with a space-time of distance, uniqueness, and ritual-from the chronotope of mechanical reproduction as it appears, in different forms, in photography and film (characterized by closeness, plurality, acceleration). Similarly, in Television (2003), Raymond Williams can be seen to describe a specific chronotope for this medium by means of the spatioremporal concepts of mobile privatization, programming, and flow. 11. Barry Sandywell argues that Bakhtin retains "an 'auratic' concept of tradition as an unbroken continuum of cultural creativity, organized into an idealized dialogue of canonical texts" (1998: 209). While it is true that Bakhtin disregards the way tradition is bound up with politics, his view of tradition as an imersubjective practice leaves room for change and manipulation, for what Bal has called the "mobilization of tradition," where traditions serve "as markers of recognizable forms, through which new perspectives, critical ideas, might be figured" (2002: 252). Bakhtin merely cautions that tradition cannot simply be ignored or superseded without a process of collective renegotiation. 12. Chronotopes are transformed by gradual, historical processes that reflect changes in collective cultural practice. Bakhtin's emphasis on continuity over transformation has provoked justifiable accusations of ahistoricism (Hitchcock 2003: no), but his warning about the difficulty of sudden, complete, or individual transformations is well taken. Thus, David Dickson's juridical interpretation of the chronotope as a "type of contract that defines the constraints and sanctions for movement in a particular situation" and is always liable to cancellation (20or: 75), falls outside Bakhtin's parameters not because chronotopes cannot become obsolete, but because they are not entered into by choice and do not come equipped with escape clauses. 13. The author/art director is not necessarily in complete control of literary chronotopes either. As Scholz argues, "the producer of a narrative, it is clear, need not be aware of these [chronotopes] as principles; he simply utilises certain ways of ordering which are sanctioned by his culture. He may not even be aware of the activity of ordering. The plausible stories of a culture are, in a sense, found, not made" (1998: 164). 14. According to Tihanov, although both Voloshinov and Bakhtin departed from Marxism and Lebensphilosophie by assigning to language the power not only to reflect but also to refract reality, neither fully worked through the problem of

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having language fulfill these two inherently contradictory functions (1998: 6I2-13). 15. SatC's use of the sidewalk brings out the hierarchy implied in Bakhtin's distinction between the major or generic chronotope, which "defines genre and genre conventions" (1996b, 85) and minor chronotopes or chronotopic motifs, which function as "constituent elements in novelistic plots" (97). The major chronotope has a selective function in relation to the chronotopic motif: it chooses out of the potential plot elements generated by the motif only those it can accommodate into its own logic. 16. On Butler's notion of agency, see McNay (1999). For an early comparative reading of Bakhtin and Butler, see Thomson (1993). Lane (1997) provides a critical comparison of Bakhtin's and Bourdieu's views on popular culture and social transformation. q. Bakhtin asserts that "chronotopes are mutually inclusive, they co-exist, they may be interwoven with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or find themselves in ever more complex relationships" (1996b: 252). 18. According to McNay, "Bourdieu has no conception of multiple subjectivity" (2ooo: 56). Corcuff (1999) makes a similar point. 19. Gilroy appeals to diaspora studies to make "the spatialization of identity problematic" and to "interrupt the ontologization of place" (20ooa: 122). I call on the chronotope as a more general concept that goes further in its deessentialization of identity. De-essentializing identity is not a question of merely moving from roots to routes, as Gilroy advocates, but of exposing each of these conceptualizations as social constructions, so that neither rootedness nor being en route becomes a reified mode of identity. See my article, "Through the Lens of the Chronotope: Suggestions for a Spatio-Temporal Perspective on Diaspora" (20o6c). 20. Goffman assigns a similar double position to the frame when he writes, with respect to the temporal and spatial brackets that mark off a frame from surrounding events, that "these markers, like the wooden frame of a picture, are presumably neither part of the content of activity proper nor part of the world outside the activity but rather both inside and outside" (1974: 252). CHAPTER 2 I. In Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, Voloshinov makes a comparable point about class-consciousness: "The fact is that all the basic social evaluations that stem directly from the distinctive characteristics of a given social group's economic being are usually not articulated: They have entered the flesh and blood of all representatives of the group; they organize behavior and actions; they have merged, as it were, with the objects and phenomena to which they correspond, and for that reason they are in no need of special verbal formulation .... On the

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contrary, whenever some basic value judgment is verbalized and justified, we may be certain that if [sic] has already become dubious" (1976a: 101). According to this logic, Sex and the City's overt focus on the rules of the Manhattan dating scene in itself already begins to undermine them. 2. Burkitt (1998) likens Bourdieu's habitus to Bakhtin's speech genres, arguing that both are ideological constructs expressed through everyday practices that require a degree of competence. Gardiner also hints at a connection between Bakhtin and Bourdieu when he summarizes Bakhtin's philosophy of action in Toward a Philosophy of the Act in terms strikingly similar to those of Bourdieu' s practical sense: "What Bakhtin is striving to outline is a phenomenology of what he terms 'practical doing,' one that focuses on our incarnated activities within a lifeworld that exists 'prior' to the more rarefied operations of abstract cognition .... Being-as-event must therefore be lived through, and not passively comprehended from afar. ... theoretical cognition is only one aspect of a wider 'practical reason' " (1998: 136, emphases added). 3· Brandist notes how Voloshinov speaks of the reader being transposed into "an imaginary perceptual time-space not unlike Bakhtin's later 'chronotope,'" while acknowledging "that the wider social index-field, the Umfeld of the actual world in which the production and reception of the work as a whole is set, does crucially affect the interpretation of a particular world in a work" (Brandist 2004: m). This point could be expanded into a theory about the critical interaction between textual and social chronotopes, where not all readers would interpret the same novelistic or televisual world in an identical manner. 4· This difficulry is literally true for the quintessential performative of the wedding (in its Anglo-American incarnation), where those present are asked whether they know of any objection that would make the act of marriage impossible. 5· In Ce que parler veut dire, Bourdieu links the utterance's illocutionary force to social conditions. For each performative act, he argues, there exists a social institution that defines the conditions that need to be fulfilled for the act to be successful. This institution invests the agent with the social authoriry to act by saying and if the agent is not thus authorized, the performative will fail. I relate performativity less to a social authoriry that precedes the act than to the authoriry inherent in participative belonging, as it is granted or withheld by those present at the event. This restriction removes the force of the performative from the agent's intention and the conventionaliry of the act and moves it onto its reception. Performativiry is unstable because the same act performed by the same person with the same intention may be received differently. 6. See Culler's "Author's Preface" to Framing the Sign (1994). 7· Mona Lloyd critiques Butler's neglect of spatial context in relation to subversive parodic acts, arguing for the "contextualization of parodic performances" (1999: 209). Lloyd's conception of context, however, is predominantly spatial and does not link space to time.

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8. Turner's 1984 song features the following lyrics: ''I'm your private dancer/a dancer for money/1'11 do what you want me to do." 9· The same diagnosis applies to the chronotope, which operates within subjects in a constitutive manner, not just outside them in a purely situational capacity. IO. Brandist identifies Karl Biihler and Alan Gardiner as points of connection between Voloshinov/Bakhtin's theory of the utterance and speech act theory as developed by Austin and Searle (Brandist 2004: m, n. 53). n. For Bakhtin, the possibility of double-voiced discourse undermines the importance of intentionality: "The utterance so conceived [as double-voiced] is a considerably more complex and dynamic organism than it appears when construed simply as a thing that articulates the intention of the person uttering it, which is to see the utterance as a direct, single-voiced vehicle for expression" (1996c: 354-55) · 12. Derrida configures this specificity as a singularity similarly based in an instant of time-space, an instant of chronotopicity: "In the incoercible differance the here-now unfurls, without lateness, without delay, but without presence, it is the precipitation of an absolute singularity, singular because differing, precisely ljustement] and always other, binding itself necessarily to the form of the instant, in imminence and in urgency. ... No differance without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity without the here-now" (1994: 31). 13. On the compatibility of Derrida's deconstruction and Bakhtin's dialogism, see Cunliffe (1997), who argues that both theorists share a distrust of the spoken word as an expression of the full presence (to itself and to others) of the subject. For an exhaustive and insightful overview of attempts to link Bakhtin and Derrida, see Tim Herrick's dissertation, "From Kant to Phenomenology: The Philosophical Affiliations of M. M. Bakhtin and Jacques Derrida" (2005). The dissertation presents an illuminating account of the common philosophical roots of the two thinkers, which each appropriates and develops in his own way to arrive at sometimes comparable conclusions. Herrick insists, however, that these conclusions are based on fundamentally different conceptions of language and (inter)subjectivity. 14. It would appear that Laney' s mistake could also be analyzed in terms of what Goffman calls a "misframing," where "the individual actually lodges himself in certitude and/or action on the basis of wrong premises" (1974: 308). However, misframings are essentially errors with respect to the frame that applies to the situation at hand, whereas Laney is not so much mistaken about the frame of Samamha' s party as about her own ability to participate in this frame with credibility. 15. See Butler's discussion of Nella Larsen's novel, Passing, in Bodies That Matter, where she argues that "what can be seen, what qualifies as a visible marking, is a matter of being able to read a marked body in relation to unmarked bodies" (1993: 170).

Notes to Pages 73-8I CHAPTER

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3

An early version of this chapter was presented at the Eleventh International Bakhtin Conference in Curitiba, Brazil, and appears in the conference proceedings under the tide "Bakhtin's Excessive Eyes: Looking, Gazing and Seeing into 'The Real Me'" (Peeren 2004). I. In Ovid' s account, Narcissus does not drown but dies of desperation on the grass beside the pool after realizing that he has fallen in love with his own image. 2. On the mirror trope and the Narcissus myth, see the last two chapters of Bal's Quoting Caravaggio (1999c), as well as "The Knee of Narcissus" in Looking In: The Art of Viewing (2001). 3· In La domination masculine, Bourdieu similarly argues that the mirror serves not so much to sec oneself as one is, but to see oneself as one is seen lw others. He adds a gender dimension by arguing that because women, in the current social structure, are objects of symbolic exchange between men, being rcmalc equals being seen: ''l'etre (esse) est un etre-pen;:u (percipi)" (1998: 73). For Bourdieu as for Lacan, therefore, women exemplify visual subjection. 4· In" 'The Incomparable Monster of Solipsism': Bakhtin and Merlcau-Ponty" (1998), Gardiner argues that both Bakhtin's theory of vision and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception posit the reciprocal intersubjective look as a means for escaping narcissism. 5· On exotopy and its potential for feminist criticism, see Hitchcock (1993b). 6. In both idiopathic and heteropathic identification, the distinction between self and other as separate subjects, which Scheler calls the phenomenological "Jchdistcznz," is neutralized (1974: 34). 7· In Like Subjects, Love Objects, Benjamin proposes a relational psychoanalysis, where the other is no longer the passive, internalized object of the self's drives and desires, but is required to possess "a separate and equivalent center of self" that survives the intersubjective encounter (1995: 30). See also Benjamin's Shadow of the Other (1998). Laplanche's reformulation of Freud's theory of seduction in Essays on Otherness affirms "the priority of the other in the constitution of the human being and of its sexuality. Not the Lacanian other, but the concrete other" (1999: 212). In "Psychoanalysis as Anti-hermeneutics" (1996), moreover, Laplanche presents the intersubjective address as the prototype of meaningful subjectivity and the origin of all notions the subject will have of itself, including her ego and her unconscious. Both Benjamin and Laplanche thus depart from the Freudian orthodoxy rejected by Voloshinov in Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (1976a). 8. See Derrida's "Differance," where he associates the concept with a temporization that is "also temporalization and spacing, the becoming-time of space and the becoming-space of time, the 'originary constitution' of time and space, as metaphysics or transcendental phenomenology would say, to use the language that

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here is criticized and displaced" (1986: 123). Time and space are conjoined, removing all reference to origins, presences, and authenticities. AB in the chronotope, they become relational or differential categories. 9· In the 2002 documentary film bearing his name, Derrida argues that although Echo can only repeat what Narcissus says, she still succeeds in signifying her own love through his words: "An amazing ruse: she speaks for herself by just repeating his words. And as always with speech, there's blindness. So basically Echo, blind but quite lucidly, communicates with Narcissus (it's a love story, after all), who is also blind .... To see only oneself, to see nothing else, is a form of blindness." While Derrida ascribes agency to Echo, at the same time he characterizes her and Narcissus as blind, as acting without knowing, so that agency is divorced from intentionality. ro. See Handley for a comparative discussion of Bakhtin and Lacan. Regarding Lacan's mirror-stage, Handley notes: "the baby's initial experience of itself in the mirror gives the baby a false sense of wholeness, a representation of its somatic integrity that in Bakhtin's terms is a false sense of outsideness or exotopy" (1993: 150). n. The multiple story line is characteristic of Sex in the City: "Each episode is structured around Carrie researching her next column, with each girl providing a unique perspective on sexual experiences and dating calamities" (McCabe and Akass 2006: 3). 12. Bakhtin distinguishes several chronotopes connected to character-types, such as those of the rogue, clown, and fool, who "create around themselves their own special little world" (1996b: 159). In "Discourse in the Novel," moreover, he refers to "character zones" to denote a character's "own sphere of influence on the authorial context surrounding him, a sphere that extends-and often quite farbeyond the boundaries of the direct discourse allotted to him" (1996c: 320). 13. On the mortifying function of the camera, see Barthes's Camera Lucida, where he writes: "I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice" (woo: ro). The photographic pose does not express the photographic subject's will, but is created by the photographic apparatus. Barthes links photography to resurrection and death, because the moment the pose is captured it dies: "by shifting this reality to the past ('this-has-been'), the photograph suggests that it is already dead" (79). Thus, Samantha's intention of resurrecting her "hot" body in the future is foreclosed the very moment the camera clicks. q. Hirschkop points out that "the architectonic of I and other . .. is, according to [Bakhtin] not itself the product of historical evolution (let alone historical conflict!), but the absolute and invariable structure of experience" (2oor: 16). 15. I take the term interfoce from Grosz, who uses it in Space, Time, and Perversion to signify a two-way linkage of mutual definition and establishment (1995: ro8). The term is also appropriate to this chapter in its literal meaning of "between faces."

Notes to Pages 99-I05 CHAPTER

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4

A shorter version of this chapter was presented at the Identities/Alterities conference organized by the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis in March 2003 and appears in The Shock of the Other: Situating Alterities under the title "Vocal Alterity: Voice-Over, Voice-Off and the Cultural Addressee" (Peeren 200?b). 1. See "Word, Dialogue and Novel" (1987) for Kristeva's reading of Bakhtin and "The Bounded Text" (r989) and" 'Nous Deux' or a (Hi)Story of Intertextuality" (2003) for her theory of intertextuality. 2. Exotopy is as essential to dialogism as it is to excessive vision. Referring once more to Scheler, Bakhtin notes how "one cannot understand understanding as emotional empathy (Einfiihlung) ... as the placement of the self in the other's position (loss of one's own position). This is required only for peripheral aspects of understanding" (r986d: 141). 3· I am indebted to Peter Hitchcock for his suggestion that Carrie's voice-over presents the sonic equivalent of an impossible point of view shot: an impossible point of voice sound. It is clear that Carrie does not have personal access to all the events she comments upon, but the viewer accepts the double positioning of her voice as both narratorial and charactorial. 4· Virtualiry entails a different chronotopic structuration of time and space. In "Anifactualities," Derrida notes how virruality "affects both the time and the space of the image" (2002a: 6) and how "this other time, media time, gives rise above all to another distribution, to other spaces, rhythms, relays, forms of speaking out and public intervention" (7). 5· Poster, Bolter, and Landow believe the author's loss of control over the digital text is compensated by the reader's increased ability to intervene in it. I contend that the ephemeral nature of the digital text holds for both author and reader, inserting a parallel remove between text and reader by virtue of the digital text's structural lack of material continuity and the difficulty of pinpointing its exact location in space-time. The reader can change the text outside the author's control, but cannot be sure that these changes will endure any more than the author can be sure his text will survive intact. 6. Landow calls the blinking cursor "a moving intrusive image of the reader's presence in the text" (1992: 44). I regard it more as a sign of the presence in the text of the computer as "a terrible and tireless writing machine that is now relayed, in this Boating sea of characters, by the apparently liquid element of computer screens" (Derrida 2002b: 123). The cursor's incessant oscillation between visibility and invisibility also evokes the Derridean specter as "a trace that marks the presence with its absence in advance" (Derrida and Stiegler 2002: n7). The chronotope of the virtual, therefore, is characterized by a type of time and space that is best described as haunting.

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Notes to Pages IOS-I09

7· On the effects of digitality, see Sonja Neef's discussion of digital handwriting (2003) and Bernard Stiegler's examination of digital photography (2002). See also Gunther Kress, who argues that the screen represents a "new space of representation" signaling "a move from narrative to display" (1998: 72). 8. Its chronotopic specificity distinguishes the cultural addressee from Lacan's Symbolic, considered as a universal category. In Undoing Gender, Butler provides an eloquent critique of this conception of the Symbolic, proposing to view it instead as the sedimentation of specific social practices (2004: 40-56). 9· For this crucial passage from "The Problem of the Text," I use the translation proposed by Brandist (2002: r69) in preference to Vern McGee's translation in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Bakhtin r986c). ro. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin notes the presence of a third in the discourse of the protagonist in Notes from Underground: "While speaking with himself, with another, with the world, he simultaneously addresses a third party as well: he squints his eyes to the side, toward the listener, the witness, the judge" (r985: 237). In a footnote, Bakhtin identifies Dostoevsky as the inspiration for this idea: "We recall the characterization that Dostoevsky himself gave to the hero's speech in 'A Meek One': ' ... he either argues with himself or addresses some unknown listener, a judge as it were. However, it is always like that in real life'" (268, n. 28). n. Zizek approximates Bakhtin' s superaddressee when he writes that "there is a certain fundamental belief-a belief in the Other's basic consistency-that belongs to language as such. By the mere act of speaking, we suppose the existence of the big Other as guarantor of our meaning" (1999b: 51). However, as with Laplanche's enigmatic addressee and Derrida's specter, this big Other remains indeterminate. 12. This is not to deny that God is the incarnation of the superaddressee that Bakhtin privileges. Already in "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity," he writes: "Outside God, outside the bounds of trust in absolute otherness, self-consciousness and self-utterance are impossible, and they are impossible not because they would be senseless practically, but because trust in God is an immanent constitutive moment of pure self-consciousness and self-expression" (1990a: 144). Derrida's development of the spectral promise as a messianic without messianism also retains a religious dimension: despite Derrida's repeated protestations that his notion of the messianic is strictly secular, Christ is nevertheless distinguished as "the most spectral of specters," who "tells us something about absolute spectrality" (1994= 144). 13. Its capacity to take different forms distinguishes the superaddressee from Habermas's conceptualization of the ideal speech situation, where communication is guaranteed by ethical rules presumed to be universal and by a bracketing of relations of domination. T. Gregory Garvey agrees with Hirschkop (1998: 590; 2004: 396) that Bakhtin approaches Habermas precisely through the concept of

Notes to Pages IOf)-I26

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the superaddressee, but he also articulates a crucial difference between them: "The superaddressee marks a form of undistorted communication, but a form that is contextualized, rather than universalised, as it is in Habermas' model" (2ooo: 384). I4· Hitchcock discusses the specter as one of four approaches to the impossibly intersubjective (the others are becoming, matter, and image). Against those who make the specter stand for everything, he insists that "this symptom must be engaged and radically particularized rather than inflated" (2007: 34-5). I argue the same with regard to the superaddressee. 15. On suture in film theory, see Susan Hayward's Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (2ooo). Suture derives from psychoanalysis, where it refers to the ego's attempts to stitch the Imaginary and the Symbolic together to cover over the inherent split between them. In film theory, the shot/reverse-angle shot and other tools of continuity editing are considered suturing devices. Designed to make the film appear whole, suture in fact draws attention to the way the cinematic image is always incomplete. See also Silverman (1983). 16. The supra-I connects to the Freudian superego, which he compares, in "The Dissection of the Psychical Personality" (1964) and "The Economic Problem of Masochism" (1961), to a judge or censor and assigns the functions of self-observation and moral conscience. Although usually conceived as an allseeing agency, the superego has also been associated with speech. For Freud, the superego models itself on the reprimands expressed by parental authority figures. Silverman defines the superego as a "position of superior speech and hearing" that constitutes "a reflection of the symbolic order or auditory aura" (1988: 99). Zizek, finally, hears the voice of the superego "addressing me without being attached to any particular bearer, floating freely in some horrifying interspace," and evokes Chion's acousmetre as an exemplary form of its appearance (1999a: 15). If the superego is the all-seeing and all-hearing agency that enforces the ego-ideal (the image to which the ego aspires), then Bakhtin's superaddressee and supra-I may be seen in analogous terms, with the superaddressee as the image on which the subject models both itself and its speech, while the supra-I becomes the internalized agency of judgment that "checks" whether this modeling is successful. Still, the superego differs fundamentally from the supra! in terms of Freud's insistence that the superego is ultimately a phylogenetic force transferred from the unconscious of one generation to that of the next. CHAPTER

5

In part, this chapter is reprinted from The New Queer Aesthetic on Television: ESsays on Recent Programming, © 2006, edited by James R. Keller and Leslie Stratyner, by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 6n, Jefferson NC 28640. www.mcfarlandpub.com. See Peeren (wo6b).

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r. Sally Munt cites several hostile newspaper reviews of the British series and notes that many complaints from viewers were registered by the British Broadcasting Standards Commission and Independent Television Commission. At the same time, she asserts that "the association of the programme with contention, controversy and danger was intrinsic to its marketing and critical reception" (2000: 532). In the United States, particular hostility was expressed by organizations promoting "family values," and the series was initially shunned by advertisers. See Hamilton (2002), Peters (2000), and Johnson (2000). 2. With regard to the resignification of the term queer, McNay argues that "[I]t is not just a case of the resignification of dominant terms by marginal or abject groups because, in a sense, the ability of these groups to collectively institute new forms of identity suggests that their social location is not unambiguously marginal" (2000: 59-60). The question is how exactly to define Bakhtin's "social significance" and McNay's "social location." Do they concern numbers, economic power, or levels of institutionalization? 3· See Skeggs et al. (2004) for a useful discussion of the difference between Canal Street as a represented space in the British Queer as Folk and as experienced space in the lives of gay men, lesbians, and straight women. 4· Naficy points to television's suitability as an accented medium, singling out cable television as particularly effective because it can accommodate sensitive and demanding subject matters normally excluded from public television (2001: 29). 5· Already in its tide, Queer as Folk takes up Larry Gross's complaint, voiced in "Out of the Mainstream: Sexual Minorities and the Mass Media," that "hardly ever shown in the media are just plain gay folks, used in roles which do not center on their deviance as a threat to the moral order which must be countered through ridicule or physical violence" (2001a: 412). See also Gross's Up from Invisibility (2oorb). 6. Beirne argues that in Queer as Folk, "queerness is inaccessible terrain to all but a handful of gay white men" (2oo6: 44). See also Bernard ]ones's article, "Queer as (White) Folk or Queer Ass Folk" (2oor). While these criticisms are pertinent, there is also a legitimate counterargument that states that unfair pressure is put on cultural representations of minority groups to always include all aspects of these groups. Kobena Mercer aptly refers to internal demands for the full representation of a minority community without unduly emphasizing its negative points as the "burden of representation" (1990: 62). 7· See Derrida, "Des Tours de Babel" (r985a) and "Roundtable on Translation" (r985b). 8. As McNay argues after Nancy Fraser, minority accents are subject to cornmodification, recuperation, and depoliticization (2000: 59-60). Thus, the queer accent is associated not only with a political struggle for recognition, but also with a form of metropolitan consumerism of which Queer as Folk also takes part. This aspect of the gay media market is taken up by Beirne, who argues that Brian' s job in advertising (in the American Queer as Folk) makes visible the function of the

Notes to Pages IJ6-I59 "pink dollar," as he engages in the repeated "commodification of gayness"

249 (2006:

49), the negative aspects of which remain largely invisible.

9· In "Negotiating Caribbean Identities," Hall argues that a familiar artistic or epistemological framework prevents the ghettoization of minority art. Referring to the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, he writes: "What they said was, the experience of blacks in the new world, their historical trajectory into and through the complex histories of colonization, conquest, and enslavement, is distinct and unique and it empowers people to speak in a distinctive voice. But it is not a voice outside of and excluded from the production of modernity in the twentieth century. It is another kind of modernity" (1995: rr). ro. Brandist proposes discursive genres as a better translation: "the Russian rechevoi zhanr suggests genres of discourse, of language in use, more than of specifically spoken language, and it is clear from Bakhtin's article that he uses the term to refer to features common to both spoken and written genres" (2002: 157). However, since the speech genre is such an established concept in Englishlanguage Bakhtin studies, I retain it here. 11. The Concise Oxford Dictionary (COD) defines faggot as a specifically North American slang term for "a male homosexual." Curiously, in British English, the word is slang for "an unpleasant woman." On the contextuality of queer politics, see Manalansan (1995). 12. "Chat with Executive Producers Ron Cowen & Daniel Lipman," Showtime, December ro, 2000. Showtime Networks, http://www.sho.com/site/queer/ home. do. 13. Sparks's remarks contrast with those of Aidan Gillan (Stuart in the British Queer as Folk) in the 2000 documentary What the Folk? "Doing the sex scenes is a very important part of my character. He's a very kind of sexual personality.... There's not really much that you need to be told about touching somebody or having sex with somebody, really, unless you're, like, frigid." CHAPTER

6

1. The Concise Oxford Dictionary lists queer as generally meaning strange or shady and as an offensive slang term for homosexuals, especially used for men. In addition, it cites the specifically British meanings of "slightly ill; giddy; faint" and "drunk," as well as two British proverbs: "in Queer Street" for "in a difficulty, in debt or trouble or disrepute"; and "queer a person's pitch" for "spoil a person's chances, esp. secretly or maliciously." 2. Pay or subscription cable refers to television channels such as HBO and Showtime, which are not included in a basic cable package, but provided as separate services by the cable provider for an additional fee. 3· "Chat with Executive Producers Ron Cowen & Daniel Lipman," Showtime, December ro, 2000. Showtime Networks, http://www.sho.com/site/queerlhome.do.

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4· In "The Task of the Translator," with regard to languages, Waiter Benjamin writes that "kinship does not necessarily involve likeness" (1999a: 74). He advocates a restricted definition of kinship that does not rely on an identity of origin, but on a shared underlying intention "which no single language can attain by itself but which is realized only by the totality of their intentions supplementing each other: pure language" (74). The kinship between the two versions of Queer as Folk, then, would be a shared intention to further queer representation, but this intention would take different forms in the respective cultural and linguistic contexts. 5· The motivation for this radicalization is partly political and partly commercial. The main reason Showtime acquired the rights to a controversial series like Queer as Folk was to compete with the rival HBO network, which was pulling in large numbers of subscribers with other daring series such as Sex and the City and The Sopranos, featuring sex and violence, respectively. Thus, on the side of production, Queer as Folk features a split between the political interests of the writers/ producers, who seek to enhance queer representation, and the commercial interests of the network. 6. Censorship of the American Queer as Folk was limited to the cutting of swear words, the changing of Justin's age from fifteen to seventeen, and the shortening of sexual scenes that still ended up longer than those in the British series. See Shales (2000). 7· See Laplanche's Essays on Otherness (1999) and jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation, Drives, a collection of essays by and about Laplanche, edited by John Fletcher and Martin Stanton (1992). CHAPTER

7

Part of this chapter appears in my paper "From Territory to Territories: Travels of a Bakhtinian Metaphor," presented at the Twelfth International Bakhtin Conference in Jyvaskyla, Finland, and included in the conference proceedings (Peeren 2oo6a). 1. On the commercialization of the Notting Hill Carnival, see Ross Lydall, "Hands Off Carnival: Corporate Hospitality Angers Community" (2003). On continuing tensions between the Carnival and residents of newly gentrified Notring Hill, see Amina Taylor (2oo6). 2. Bakhtin' s idea that carnival brings into being a separate second world has been criticized even in relation to the medieval carnival (see Humphrey 2001). 3· Gilroy links territory to essentialist identities that rely on "the sedentary politics of either soil or blood" (2oooa: m). Fabian associates territory with origin, ethnicity, and defined boundaries (1998: 76, 81), while Robins sees dominant, fixed national identities as "constructed through the purification of space, through the maintenance of territorial boundaries and frontiers" (1999: 28). In his

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programmatic introduction to the first issue of the journal Diaspora, moreover, Khachig Tololyan defines territory as "a place that functions as the site of homogeneity, equilibrium, integration," where "differences are assimilated, destroyed, or assigned to ghettoes" (199I: 6). Even Chion's work on cinematic sound employs territory as a sign of closedness when he metaphorically opposes the centripetal, structuring "territory" of the male shout to the centrifugal, incorporating "limitlessness" of the female scream (1999: 79). 4· Brandist delineates a similar effort in his book, Carnival Culture and the Soviet Modernist Novel (1996), where he describes how in the early twentieth century the Russian authorities sought to limit the unregulated spectacle of street fairs by moving them away from city cemers and incorporating them into the official framework of the public holiday. 5· Although territory is primarily linked to space, time can also be territorial. In Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1991), for example, the regimentation of time into a disciplinary time characterized by timetables, exhausting physical routines, and a prohibition on wasting time is as much a site of territorial control and contestation as the prison's panoptical spatial organization. 6. The poem's status as a dub poem is discussed in Chapter 8. 7· See Cornelia Grabner's article "Here to Stay: The Performance of Accents in the Work of Limon Kwesi Johnson and Lemn Sissay" (2007) for an analysis of Johnson's poetry in terms of its performativity and its critical relation to Naficy's theory of accented media and Bhabha's notion of third space. 8. The military images were not restricted to the poem's words, but were also acted out, as indicated by Johnson' s description of the actual mas performed during the Notting Hill Carnival as" 'a military mas' with tanks, infantry, airforce, sailors and so on and so forth" (Caesar 1996: 69). 9· Watching the film, it is difficult to tell how many voices there are. The closing credits identify the offscreen voices as those of Maureen Blackwood, Kevin Graal, Andrea Julien, Nadine Marsh-Edwards, and Antonia Thomas. It remains, however, impossible to link these names to the specific voices in the film. The effect is similar to that described by Maric-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier in her article on Marguerite Duras' s film, India Song, which begins with a doubling of female voices without on-screen bodies. The voices, which cannot "be reduced to the mere addition of two stable entities" are "caught up in a dizzying resemblance where any stable identity is destroyed," both in relation to the subject and to the narrative (1980: 248). IO. I have marked differences between the two voices in italics. The texts used in the film are identified in the closing credits as extracts from works by Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Michelle Cliff, Paul Gilroy, and Kobena Mercer. Again, although there is a general attribution, no specific authorship is assigned for individual text fragments.

252

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CHAPTER

8

My paper "Carnival Politics and the Territory of the Street" (Peeren 2007a) contains part of this chapter and elaborates on it by comparing the politics of the Notting Hill Carnival with those of the 1999 Carnival Against Capital manifestation held in London's financial district as an expression of the anti-globalization movement. r. See "Police Carnival" 1989 (Association for a People's Carnival 1989) and Michael La Rose's M as in Notting Hill: Documents in the Struggle for a Representative and Democratic Carnival I989II990 (1990) for an account of the continuing disagreements within the carnival movement about its direction and meaning. 2. Dub in the strict musical sense is reggae stripped down to bass and drum and then rebuilt by means of speaking over the bass/drum track or by remixing the different musical elements using techniques of fading, filtering, and multitracking. See the British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC's) "Story of Reggae" Web site: http://www. bbc.co. uklmusic/features/ reggae/history. 3· It needs to be noted that dub music is not necessarily progressive. Julien, for example, has pointed to the homophobic aspect of Jamaican dub culture, where the black queer body appears as "the limit of a Black popular culture" (Morrow 1995: 4IO). 4· Versioning is used, for example, as a technical term in electronic database design and management. Han-Chieh Wei and RamezAlmasri employ it to designate the difference between "snapshot databases," which exist only in a current version, and versioning databases that include concepts of time and history by storing "current information, as well as past information and even information about the future events which are planned to occur" (2000: 25). 5· On the myths surrounding Bakhtin's biography, see Hirschkop (1998). Bakhtin's penchant for rewriting is most obvious in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, first published in 1929 and again in 1963 in a much-expanded form. The latter text constitutes a separate book that takes its place beside the original as a versioned or dub-Dostoevsky. The authorship debate was fueled by Bakhtin's refusal to claim or deny authorship of texts published under the names of Voloshinov and Medvedev. Cohen suggests that the accounts put forward within the debate have placed the question of who actually wrote the texts beyond any possible answer: "It has never been literally a case of historical evidence, of fact versus fiction, since the parameters of that dyad have been (indeed, systematically) erased by the inability to restore anything outside the need to compulsively re-narrativize this (hi)story" (1996: 64). The debate itself is what matters and, as such, it actualizes versioning's erosion of historical truth: in the words of Bakhtin's friend, Bocharov, "there is already more than a little testimony, but it cannot be proof" (quoted in Hirschkop 1988: 581).

Notes to Pages 219-233

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6. Sound systems originated in 1950s Jamaica and consisted of a record player and speakers placed in the street, drawing a crowd of listeners as a disc jockey played records and dubbed them. Hall ironically refers to reggae's "deeply tribal instruments, the transistor set, the recording studio, the gigantic sound system" to make the point that reggae is not an original or authentically African music but the product of a contextual versioning, of "the invention of tradition" (1995: 10). 7· On Julien's cinematic depiction of interracial homosexual desire, see Orgeron's "Re-membering History in Isaac Julien's The Attendant" (woo) and Julien's own "Confessions of a Snow Queen" (1994). 8. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari paint the image of "a musical machine of consistency, a sound machine (not a machine for reproducing sounds), which molecularizes and atomizes, ionizes sound matter, and harnesses a cosmic energy. If this machine must have an assemblage, it is the synthesizer. ... The synthesizer, with its operation of consistency, has taken the place of the ground in a priori synthetic judgment: its synthesis is of the molecular and the cosmic material and force, not form and matter, Grund and territory. Philosophy is no longer synthetic judgment; it is like a thought synthesizer functioning to make thought travel, make it mobile, make it a force of the Cosmos in the same way as one makes sound travel" (2004: 378). The versioning of the sound system produces a similar rhizomatic consistency without stability or, in terms of (inter)subjectivity, an identity that travels. AFTERWORD

r. See Shapiro and Varian (1998), who exalt the opportunities for increasing revenue by creating different versions of information goods, and Soberman and Parker (2004), who show how the strategic introduction of a lower-cost, nonbrand version of a popular consumer product can lead to overall price increases.

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Index

abjection, 57, 125, 136 absolute alterity, 29, 106, 120 Absolute Subject, n1-n2 accent: abjected, 135, 139, 140; accented cinema, 127, 134, 135, 136; accented discourse, 137-138, 139, 141; accented speech genres, 129, 141, 151, 156; exilic accent, 135; reaccentuation of speech genre, 129, 151; television as accented medium, 134-135, 136-137, 248n4 acousmetre, n2, n3, II4, 247nr6; commentator-acousmetre, 191; complete acousmetre, 191 acteur en soi, 167 active gift of love, 88-89, 94, 98, 154 active responsive understanding. See sympathetic understanding adaptation, and translation, 150, 161 addressee: cultural, 101, 106-107, 1II, n7, n8, n9, no, 124, 124-125, 126, 221, 227; enigmatic, 103-104, 105, ro6, 107; potential, 29, 101, 107, no-II1, III; spectral, ro6; superaddressee, 108-no, n8, 246m2, 246ni3-247ni3, 247m6 Adorno, Theodor, 236nn-237nii agency: alterity and, 151-152; Derrida on, 244n9; divorced from intentionality, 243n9; exterior, of embodiment, 28; habit and, 45-46; political, 157, 162, 183-186, 188-189, 197, 203, 228; remaking and, 151-152; translation and, 151; versioning as, 215 agnosia, 87

Akass, Kim, 238n3, 238n8 Almasri, Ramez, 252n4 alterity: absolute, 29, 106, no; agency and, 151-152; alterity-in-and-throughsimilarity, 166; alterity-in-identity, 166, 169; big Other, 16, 187, 246nn; dialogism and, 18, 100, 121; ethics of, 101, 171; intersubjectivities and, 14, q, 18, 19, 74; linguistic, roo; radical, 101, II2, u4, 127, 130; resignification and, 123; singularity and, 242m2; translation and, 30, 148, 158, 168; utterance and, 103, 105; viewer and, 85; virtuality and, 104; visual, vs. embodiment, 82; vocal, 98, 101, n6 Althusser, Louis: on Absolute Subject, 1n-n2; ideology theory, 42, 44 Arrg, Ien, 14, 16, 17 anoriginal, 154, 160 answerability, 4, 73, 216-217, 235n3 Apted, Michael, 29 Apter, Emily, 17o-171 Apuleius, I2 archives, 213-214, 221, 224 auratic artwork chronotope, 239mo Austin,]. L., 61, 242mo authoritarian domain, 181, 182 authoritative discourse, 14o-141 "The Baby Shower" (Sex in the City episode): alienation metaphor in, 54; chronotopic belonging/performativity in, 54, 58-6o; contexts in, 54, 68, 70;

272

Index

framing in, 62; habitus in, 55, 56; identity panic in, 56; individual/collective memory in, 70; insider/outsider in, 54-56, 59, 65, 70-71; in(visibility) in chronotopic belonging in, 71-72; performativity/performance in, 54, 6o, 6r-64 Bakhtin, Mikhail: on answerability, 235n3; "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity", 77, I52, 246m2; on authoritative discourse, I4G-I4I; on carnival, 172, 174-175, 196-197, I98-199, 20}, 204, 2IO, 237llii, 250n2; on character zones, 244m2; on chronotope, 32, 33, 35, }6, 39-40, 41, 42, 43> 56-)7, 240m5, 240m7; on context, 69; on continuity, 2391112; on dialogism, 3, 13-14, roo, 120, r8o, 221; "Discourse in the Novel", r8o, 244m2; on empathy, 78, 245n2; on excess of seeing, 74, 75, 77, 8r, 83, 88, 89, 9o-91, 98; on fair copy, 216-217; on identity, n-12, 13, r 5; on internally persuasive discourse, I4G-I4I; on intersubjective look, 75, 77, 243n4; on intersubjectivity, 73, 74; on mimicry, 121, 122, 123; on mixing languages, 135-136; myth surrounding biography of, 252n5; on other view of self, 96; on performed act, 236n9; on popular culture, 174-175; on power of language to refract reality, 23911I42401114; "The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art", 179-r8o; Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 246n9, 252115; Rabelais and His World, 172, 173, 237nrr; on resignification, 143; on silence, II7; on speech genres, 29-30, 127, 138-139, 249nro; on stratification, 128-129, 138, 140, 144; on subject-as-translator, 166, 167-168; on superaddressee, 107-108, 109, no, 246m2, 2461113-24711I3, 247nr6; on supra-!, rr8, 247m6; on sympathetic understanding, roo, 124; on sympathy, 90; on territory, 179-180; Toward a

Philosophy of the Act, 216-217, 24m2; on tradition, 239nrr; on translation, 152-153, 158, r68-169, 170; on utterance, 69-70, 105, 154, 242m1; as versioning thinker, 218-219 Bal, Mieke: on aim of cultural analysis, 9; on answerability, 235n3; on cultural analysis, 2; on cultural gaze, 92; on cultural memory, 41; on ecstatic aesthetic, So; on empowerment of object, 3; on focalization, 238n5; on framing, 62; on mise-en-scene, and framing, 5o-52; on performance/performativity, 6o-6r; on tradition, 239nr1; on traveling concepts, 4 Baptiste, Selwyn, 183, 203 Barthes, Roland, 82, 83, 204, 212, 221, 24411I3 Baudrillard, Jean, 150, 151, 158, I79 becoming: becoming-space of time, 243n8; becoming-time of space, 243n8; being and, I4; bodily, 75; carnival as feast of, 210; subject and, 78, 151, 159, 166-167, 2I6, 2I8; subjectivity as, I}, 74; territory and, 178 being-as-event, 13, 241n2 Beirne, Rebecca Clare, 248n6, 248n8249n8 Bell, Vikki, 59 belonging: Bell on, 59; chronotopic, 54, 58-59, 71-72, 104; ecology of, 32-33; performative, 54, 58-59, ?I Benjamin, Andrew, I49, I 54 Benjamin, Jessica, 19, 78, 85, 243n7 Benjamin, Waiter, 150, I53, I65, 239ni0, 2)0n4 Benveniste, Emil, I32 Berger, Peter, 235n2 Bergesen, Albert, 235112 beyond: of Bakhtin, I-}, 4, 5-6, 7-8, 9, I4,33, 152, I72,173, 177,229, 236n9;of identity, ro-rr, 17; as site of destabilization, 20 Bhabha, Homi, 177 Btihler, Karl, 242mo

Index big Other, r6, 187, 246mr. See also alterity Blackwood, Maureen, 25In9 bodily becoming, 75 body image, 84,87-88 body, real/ideal, 93 Bolter, Jay David, !05, 245n5 Bourdieu, Pierre: on gaffes/blunders, 71; on habitus, 46-47, 55; on performative act, 24m5; on real/ideal body, 93; on semantic elasticity, 141; on social fields, 44, 49-50; on study of cultural artifacts, 25; on women and visual subjection, 243n3 Brandist, Craig, I08, 236n6, 24rn2, 242niO, 249niO, 25Iil4 Brashinsky, Michael, 150, 165 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 24, 220, 251niO Burkitt, Ian, 55, 24m2 Bushnell, Candace, 33-34, 53 Butler, Judith: on abjected accent, 135, 139, 140; on contexts, 68-69; on dialogism, n9; on gender performativity, 44-45, 47, 6r, 63-64; on identities, IOn, 19; on liberal coalition/dialogue feminists, IOT; on matter, 75; on performative dimension of identity, 14; on performativity, 46, 56; on queer politics, 129; on reading marked/unmarked body, 242m5; on signs, 186; on subjugation, 42; on Symbolic, 246n8; use of spatial metaphor, 54 Caillois, Roger, 122 camera, mortifying function of, 244m3 Canclini, Nestor Garda, 236nro carnival: Bakhtin on, 172, 174-175, 196197, 198-199, 203, 204, 210, 237tul, 250n2; as feast of becoming, 2IO; medieval, 196-197, 2!0, 250n2. See also Notting Hill Carnival Carnival and Arts Committee (CAC), 203-204 Carnival Development Committee (CDC), 20}, 204

273

Carter, Trevor, 185 Cassirer, Ernst, 236n6 Caughie, John, 26-27 character-plot knot, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97> 98 character zones, 244m2 Chase, Louis, 204 Chion, Michel, n2, IIJ, 191, 205, 247nr6, 25lll3 choral support, no, n6 chronotope: absence of universal, 40; of auratic artwork, 239nro; Bakhtin on, 32, 33, 35, 36, 39-40, 41, 42, 43, s6-57, 240m5, 240m7; as bridging concept, 36; chronotopic prompts, 47; chronotopic values, 43-44; extraliterary, 41; illusio and, 56-57; major, 2401115; of mechanical reproduction, 23911I0; minor, 240m5; as mise-en-scene, 41; motif of the road as, 42-43; multitude of, 40, 48; of Notting Hill Carnival, 182-183, 184, 187, 189, 191-192, 197, 199; performativity of, 47; of Queer as Folk, 130, 132-134, 151, 157; of Sex and the City, 40-41, 43-44; social chronotope, 41; spatiality of, 40; of television, 239mO; theory on, 237m2; as unit of textual analysis, 41 chronotopic belonging, 54, 58-59, 71-72, 104 chronotopic interpellation, 51, 184, 197 cinematic identification, 79 Clark, Katharina, 235n4 Cliff, Michelle, 24, 25IniO Clifford, James, 25, 41, 207 close reading, 3, 24 Code, Lorraine, 89 Cohen, Tom, 120 Coleman, James, 6o-61 Collins, Jim, 237m3 colonial mimicry, 122-123 commentator-acousmetre, 191 complete acousmetre, 191 consummation, 89 contemporaneity, 69, 70, 154, 225, 229, 233

274

Index

context, 67-69, 141; in Sex and the City, 54, 68, 70. See also recontextualization contradictory spaces, 193-194, 195 copy: failed, 67; fair, 216-217, 227; relation with original, 146; as semitranslation, I69; simulation and, 158-159, r6o, 163, 164; translations and, 165-166; versioning and, 221 Corcuff, Philippe, 240m7 corporeal identification, II3-II4 Cowen, Ron, 159, 160, r6r, r62, 163, 165 creative understanding. See sympathetic understanding Culler, Jonathan, 2, 45, 62 cultural addressee: in Flawless, 124-125; in Nell, rq, II8, II9, 120, 124, 126, 221; other and, 227; relation with dialogism, II9-120; in Sex and the City, 101, ro6-ro7, III, 124 cultural analysis: close reading technique in, 3, 24; defining, 2, 235n2 cultural capital, 44, 48, 49-50 cultural domain, 29, rs6, ISO cultural gaze: Bal on, 92; Lacan on, 7476; in Nell, II9; other and, 227; in Sex and the City, 76, 82-85, 86, 92; in Territories, 222 cultural memory, 41, 70 cultural object, 2-3 cultural studies, 2, 19 Cunliffe, Robert, 242m3 cutting room, 221 daemonic simulacrum, 159, 165, r66-r67 Davies, Russell T., r6o, r62, r65 de Niro, Robert, 53 "dead points," 152, 153, 169 Dean, Jodi, 124 Deleuze, Gilles, 173, q8, 179, 198, 253n8 Dentith, Simon, 202 Derrida, Jacques: on agency, 244n9; on archives, 213, 214; on diffirance, 81, 242m2, 243n8-244n8; on frame, 51; on iterability, 70, 104; metaphorical fantasy on translation, 135; on problem of

context, 67-68; specter of, ro6, 109roo, II2-II3, no, 245n6, 246m2; on territory, 177-178; on translation, 150, 158, r66, r68; on virtuality, 245n4 Destiny's Child music video, 230-232 deterritorialization, of Notting Hill Carnival, 192-193, 198, 199 dialogism: alterity and, r8, roo, nr; Bakhtin on, 3, 13-14, roo, 120, 180, 221; Butler on, II9; cultural addressee relation with, II9-120; definition of, roo!01; in Flawless, 121, 123-124; in Nell, no-r2r; preconditions of, no; as privileged form of intersubjectivity, 17-18, lOO

Dickson, David, 239m2 differance, 8r, 94, n6, 242m2, 243n8244n8 digital text/writing, ro5, 231, 245n5, 245n6, 246n7 discourse: accented, 137-138, 139, 141; authoritative, 140-141; double-voiced, 192, 194, 199, 242nn; internally persuasive, 140-141, 177 discursive genres, 249n9. See also speech genres dissimulation, 163-164 Doane, Mary-Ann, 102 domain: authoritarian, 181, 182; cultural, 29, 156, r8o; exclusive, 29; of subject, 54; territory vs., 181, 194 dominant fiction, 44 double-voiced discourse, 192, 194, 199, 242nll Douglas, Mary, 23502 draft, 31, 216, 227 dread, r85-r86, r88, 204, 205, 206 "The Drought" (Sex and the City episode): cultural addressee in, ror, ro6-107, III; discursive control in, 103-!04, 105; enigmatic addressee in, 105 dub/dubbing: dub identity, 185-186, 206-207, 226; dub in reggae music, 252n2; dub poetry, 23, 24, 205; dub-

Index bing vs. versioning, 207-208; in "Forces of Victory", 205-207; Gilroy on, 207, 219; Hitchcock on, 205-206, 207, 226; as renaming, 206 Duras, Marguerite, 207, 25Ill9 Durham, Scott, 158, 164, r66-r67, 226-227 Eagleton, Terry, 25, 235m Eastwood, Clint, 223 Echo, So, 8r, n6, 243n9 Eckstrom, Lisa, 237n2 Eco, Umberto, 202 ecology of belonging, 32-33 ecstasy, So, 170, 192; political, 79 ecstatic aesthetic, So Einstein, Albert, theory of relativity, 33 embodiment: cultural gaze and, 82; excess of seeing and, 74, 98; exterior agency of, 28; process of, 87; spatiality and, 46; territory and, 178; visual alterity vs., 82; of voice-off, n3, 114, n6, II7 Emerson, Caryl, 236n7 embodied look, 95> 97 empathy, 78, 245 enigmatic addressee, 103-104, 105, 106, 107 ethics of alterity, ror, 171 excess of seeing, 74, 75, 77, 8r, 88, 89, 90-91, 97' 98 exilic accent, 135 exotopy, 77, 78, 8r, 100, 158, 24411I0, 245n2 experience, 33, 237nr, 244nr4; !-experience, n8; we-experience, n8-n9, 126, 184, 194 Fabian, Johannes, 20, 174, 250n3 faggot, meanings of, 142-144, 249nii fair copy, 216-217, 227 Fassung, 210 female voice, representation ofro2, II4II5 Feuer, Jane, 137 field. See social field Fiske, John, 237m2 Flawless (film), 2, 8-9, 28; cultural addressee in, 124-125; dialogism in, 121,

275

123-124; framing in, 6r; insider/outsider in, 54, 57-58, 65, 66; mimicry in, 123; other in, 57-58; performance/performativity in, 61, 64-65, 66-67; reflective solidarity in, 124; synopsis, 51-52 Flower MacCannell, Juliet, 69 focalization, 37, 238n5 folk culture, 22, 174, 175, 237nn "Forces of Victory" (poem; L. K. Johnsan): dread in, 184, 188, 204, 205, 206; dubbing in, 205-207; political agency in, r83-r86, r88-r89, 203, 228; territory in, 30; versioning in, 24, 202 Foster, Jodie, 99 Foucault, Michel, 235n2, 25m5 fragment, 218-219 frame analysis, 61-62, 238n4, 240n2o framing/reframing: Bal on, 50-52, 62; defining framing, 50; in Flawless, 61; framing vs. staging, so; mise-en-scene and, 50-52; misframing, 242nr4; in Nell, ns; in Queer as Folk, 137; in Sex and the City, 51, 62, 76, 77, 8r, 86, 94, 99, ror; staging vs., 50 Fraser, Nancy, 248n8 Freud, Sigmund, 79, 243n7, 247m6 Frith, Simon, 22

gaffe, 71 Gardiner, Alan, 242nro Gardiner, Michael, 13, 90, 175, 24m2, 243n4 Garvey, T. Gregory, 246nr3-24711I3 gaze. See cultural gaze gender performativity, 44-45, 47, 6r, 6364 Genet, Jean, 167, 226 Germano, William, 235m ghost, no, 198, 205 Gillan, Aidan, 249m3 Gilroy, Paul, 24, 25Inro; on dubbing, 207, 219; on identity, u, 15-r6, 148, 171; on territory, q6-177, 183, 250n3 Goffman, Erving, 6r-62, 238n4, 240n20, 242lli4

good enough, 93-94, 98 Grabner, Cornelia, 25rn7 Graal, Kevin, 25rn9 Gramsci, Antonio, 23 Grant, Hugh, !73 Gray, Herman, 136 Grindstaff, Laura, 150 Gross, Larry, 248n5 Grosz, Elizabeth, 39, 87-88, 122, 244n15 Grove Music (documentary film), 175, 186 Guattari, Felix, 173, 178, 179, 198, 253n8 Habermas, Jurgen, 235n2, 246m3-247m3 habit, 45-46; negative habit, 45, 47, 55 habitus, 46-47, 49, 55, 56 Hall, Stuart, 17, 26, 249n9, 253n6 Handley, William R., 244nro Haynes, Deborah, 90 Hayward, Susan, 247m5 hegemony, 23, 140-141 Herrick, Tim, 242m3 heteroglossia, 135, 220-221 heteropathic identification, 78, 79-So, 86, 88, 153, 24}n6 high culture, 2, 21, 24, 237 Hirschkop, Ken, 108, 175, 217, 235n4236n4, 24411I4, 24611I3-24711I3 Hitchcock, Alfred, 91 Hitchcock, Peter: on Bakhtin, 7, 236nn45; on chronotope as bridging concept, 36; on dread, 185-185; on dubbing, 2052o6, 207, 226; on intersubjectivities, 17, r8; on silence, n7; on sound system, 220; on specter, 247m4; on translation, 149, 154, r6r; on voice-over, 245n3 Hoffman, Philip Seymour, 53 Holquist, Michael, m, 235n4 Horkheimer, Max, 236nn-23711I1 Humphrey, Chris, 202 Hunter, James Davison, 235n2 hybridity, 209 I-experience, n8 identification: cinematic, 79; corporeal,

n3-II4; heteropathic, 78, 79-80, 86, 88, 153, 243n6; idiopathic, 78, 79, So, 243n6; imaginary, r86 identity: Bakhtin on, II-12, 13, 15; beyond, 1o-n, 17; Butler on, 1o-n, 19; de-essentializing, 240m9; defining, 17; dialogically lived, 16; as ecology of belonging, 32-33: Gilroy on, II, T5-16, T48, 171; identities-as-intersubjectivities, q, rS20, 27; identity-at-a-distance, 79; identity panic, 56: identity-as-self-sameness, 13; identity-as-unity, 15; normative, 13, 29, 47, 94; performative dimension of, 14, 236n8; Silverman on, 79 ideology theory, 42, 44 idiopathic identification, 78, 79, So, 243n6 illusio, 28, 56-57 Imaginary, 247m5 insider/outsider: in Flawless, 54, 57-58, 65, 66; in Sex and the City, 54-56, 59, 65,70-71 interface, 2441115 internalized body map, 87-88 internally persuasive discourse, 140-14I, 177 interpellation: chronotopic, 51, 184, 197; coercive nature of, 17, II2, uS; performative, 14, 46, 98; structures of, u6I27; unproblematic, 66 intersubjective address, 99 intersubjective eye, 74-75 intersubjective gaze, 92 intersubjective look, 74, 75, 77, 243n4; in Sex and the City, 86-89, 92, 98. See also cui tural gaze intersubjective mirroring, 76-77 intersubjective, territory as, 179-181 intersubjective voice. See cultural addressee; dialogism intersubjectivities: alterity and, 14, 17, 18, 19, 74; Hitchcock on, 17, 18; Notting Hill Carnival and, 189 intersubjectivity: Bakhtin on, 73, 74; dialogism as privileged form of, 17-18,

Index roo; in Territories, 224; translation relation with, 148-149 intertextuality, 28, 66, roo, 221 intralingual translation, 149, 150 iterability, 67, 70, 104 Jackaman, Charles, 182 Jakobson, Roman, 149 Johnson, Limon Kwesi, 23, 24, 30, 31, 183-186, 188-189, 202, 203, 205, 251n8 Johnston, John, 157 ]ones, Bernard, 248n6 Julien, Andrea, 251n9 Julien, lsaac, 23, 30, 190, 205, 212, 222, 224, 253n7 juxtaposition: in Sex and the Clty, 91; in Territories, 219, 224, 225 Kant, Immanuel, 237m kinship, 51, 123, 159, 250n4 Klossowski, Pierre, 167 Knowles, Beyonce, 230-231 Koolhaas, Rem, 238n6 Krcss, Gunther, 246n7 Kristeva, Julia, roo Kumar, Amit, 2I2 Kurzweil, Edith, 235n2 La Rose, Michael, 252m Lacan, Jacques: big Other of, 16, 187, 246mr; on ego development, 79; on gaze, 74-76; mirror stage of, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 244nro; on Symbolic, 246n8 Landow, George, 105, 245n5, 245n6 Lane, Jeremy, 24om6 Laplanche, Jean: on enigmatic addressee, 103-104, ro6, 107; on subjectivity, 19, 78, 243n7; on translation, 169 Larsen, Nella, 242nr5 Laslett, Rhaune, 176 Lauretis, Teresa de, 46 LeBlanc, Marie Nathalie, 214-215 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, 154-155 Leitch, Thomas, 162 Leitch, Vincent, 235m

277

Lewis, Philip E., 151 Lipman, Daniel, 133-134, 159, 160, 161162, 163, 165 Lloyd, Mona, 241n7 logic of the same, 152, 207, 209 logic of the turn, 31, 209-210, 218, 219 look: embodied, 95. 97; look on-high, 222; situated, 74, 98. See also intersubjective look Lovell, Jerry, II4 Lydall, Ross, 250nr Lynn, Cheryl, 94 MacCabe, Colin, 237nn Machan, Tim William, 2II-2I2 major chronotope, 240nr5 Man, Paul de, 100-101, 160, 165 Mann, Thomas, 109 Marsh-Edwards, Nadine, 251n9 Martin, Henri, 186 mass culture, 21, 236mr-23711I1 McCabe, Janet, 238n3, 238n8 McDonald, Jarom, 212 McGee, Vern, 246n9 McNay, Lois, 46-47, 49, 240nr8, 248112, 248n8 medieval carnival, 196-197, 210, 250112 Medvedev, P. N., 235n4 Melville, A. D., So Mercer, Kobena, 24, 209, 220, 248n6, 25Il1IO Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 243n4 Methuen, Peter, 187, 188 mimicry, 121, 122; colonial, 122-123 minor chronotope, 240nr5 mirror stage, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 244mo mise-en-scene, 35-37, 50-52 mises en abyme, 222-223 Mitchell, Roger, 187 montage, 24, 199, 224-225, 226-227, 238n8 Morson, Gary Saul, 236n7, 237n2 Mum, Sally, 130, 144-145, 248m

Nachtraglichkeit, 89, 154, 160 Naficy, Hamid: on accented cinema, 127,

278

Index

134, 135, 136; on accented discourse, 137-138, 139, 141; on chronotope, 41; on television as accented medium, 248n4 naming/renaming, 185, 186-187, 188, 206 Narcissus, 76, So, 8r, 82, 86, 93, 243nr Neef, Sonja, 246n7 Neeson, Liam, 99 Nell (film), 2, 8-9, 29; assimilation in, roo, II9; authority/authorship in, II5; bad translation in, 149; colonial mimicry in, 122-123; conventional solidarity in, 124; corporeal identification in, II3-II4; cultural addressee in, II7, n8, II9, 120, 124, n6, 221; cultural gaze in, n9, 122; dialogism in, 120-121; framing in, II5; !-experience in, n8; limits on versioning in, 221; mimicry in, r2r, 122; power relations in, 120-121, 170; subjection in, n8; synopsis of, 99-100; vocal alterity in, II6; vocal corporalization in, u5; voice-off in, IIJ, II4, II5, n6, n7, II9; we-experience in, II9 normative identity, 13, 29, 47, 94 Notting Hill Carnival, 2, 9, 30-31; as act of cultural memory, 198-199; background of, 173-174; chronotope of, 182-183, 184, r87, 189, 191-192, 197, 199; collective appositional identity at, 174, 189; commercialization of, 250m; deterritorialization of, 192-193, 198, 199; dread in, r86, r88, 206; history of, 176-177; intersubjectivities of, 189; as performative memory, 196; performativity of, 189, 197, 198; political agency of, 197; renaming, r86-187, r88; reterritorialization of, 189, 199; reverse masquerade in, 185; territorialization of, 195; as territorial dispute, 18r-r83; versioning in, 202-203; voice-over in, r86. See also "Forces of Victory"; Territories Notting Hill (film), 197 Notting Hill in the Sixties (Phillips and Phillips), 197-198, 201

optical forgery, 77, 83, 88, 95 original: translation and, 30, 151, 153-154, 155, 157-158, r6o-r6r, r63-r66, r68I70, 209, 215-216, 252; versioning and, 209-210, 214, 215, 2!6 Other, big, 16, r87, 246nn Ovid, So, 243n1 Owen, Rob, r63 parergon, 51 Parker, Philip M., 253n1 Parker, Sarah Jessica: on cover of Sex and the City novel, 34-35 (fig). See also Sex and the City (novel; Bushnell): cover art Patner, Andrew, r62 Patron, Phi!, 237m3 pay/ subscription cable television, 249n2 Pechey, Graham, 6, 236n7 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 45-46, 55 performance of performativity, 66, 67 performance/performativity: Bal on, 6o6r; Butler on, 14, 46, 56; in Flawless, 6r, 64-65, 66-67; gender, 44, 44-45, 47, 6r, 63-64; identity as, 14, 236n8; Notring Hill Carnival, r89, 197, 198; performative memory, 196; in Sex and the City, 54· 6o, 61-64 performative act, 24rn5 performative belonging, 54, 58-59, 71 performative interpellation, 14, 46, 98 performative, time-space as, 47 Phillips, Mike, 182, 189, 196 Photograph (slide installation; Coleman), 6o-61 Pi no, Jose, 213 point de capiton, 187 political agency: in "Forces of Victory", r83-r86, r88-r89, 203, 228; of Notting Hill Carnival, 197; in Queer as Folk (US), 157, r62; in Territories, 223-224, 228

Poole, Brian, 78, 236n6 popular culture, 20-27; Bakhtin on, 174175; defining, 20-24; difficulties in

Index studying artifacts of, 25-26; dominant culture relation with, 26; politics of, 26-27; popularity relation with, 236n10 Poster, Mark, 245n5 potential addressee, 29, TOI, 107, no-rn, Ill

queer, meanings of, 24911I Queer as Folk (television series, UK), 2, 9, 29-30; as accented television, 134-135, 136-137; AIDS theme in, 137; chronotope of, 130, 132-134, 157; contextual specificity of queer speech genre in, 141; documentary mode of, 139; framing in, 137; hostility to in UK, 127, 248m; inside/outside in, 133; lesbian absence in, 163; opening credits, 156, 157; reaccentuation in, 129; remainders in, 157-158; resignification in, 127, 129, 133, 136, 141-147; sexual candor in, 163; social stratification in, 127-128, 140; speech genre of, 138, 156; strategic use of pronouns in, 131: stratifications in title of, 127-128, 129; voice-over in, 130, 131 Queer as Folk (television series remake, US), 30; as accented television, 134135, 136-137: AIDS theme in, 137, 157; as anoriginal, 160; censorship of, 250n6; chronotope of, 130, 133-134, 151, 157; closing credits, r6o-r6r; consumerism in, 248n8-249n8; contextual specificity of queer speech genre in, 141; deterritorialization in, 173; dissimulation in, 163-164; framing in, 137; hostility to in US, 127, 248nr; influence of UK version on, 159-162; as intralingual translation in, 149, 150; lesbians in, 163; opening credits, 156, 157; political agency in, 157, 162; production issues, 30, 146, 250n5; relationship with UK series, 150-151, 155156; remainders in, 155, 157-158, 163,

279

164; resignification in, 127, 133, 141147; as responsible translation, 17o17T; reterritorialization in, 157, 173; as semitranslation, 169; sexual candor in, 163; social stratification in, 140; speech genre of, 138; stereotype in, 146, 156; strategic use of pronouns in, 131-132; title of, 155; translation in, 30, 160-161; translation/original relation in, 164166; voice-off in, 131 Queer as Folk 2: Same Men, New Tricks (television series sequel, UK), 144-145 quietude, rr6-II7 radical alterity, T01, II2, u4, 127, 130 reaccentuation, 129 "The Real Me" (Sex and the City episode), 28-29; active gift of love in, 88-89, 94, 98; agnosia in, 87; ambivalence in, 95-96; character-plot knot, of Carrie, 93, 95, 98; character-plot knot, of Charlotte, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 98; character-plot knot, of Miranda, 96, 97; character-plot knot, of Samantha, 84, 85, 86, 96; compliance in, 96; cultural gaze in, 76, 82-85, 86, 92; difji!rance in, 84, 94-95; discursive control in, 97; evidentiary role of photograph in, 82-83; excess of seeing in, 88, 89; framing in, 76, 77, 8r, 86; friendship in, 89-90; good enough in, 94, 98; heteropathic identification and, 86; ideal/real body in, 93, 94; intersubjective gaze in, 92; intersubjective look in, 86-89, 92, 98; intersubjectivc mirroring in, 76-77; reframing in, 94; visual imago in, 87 recontextualization, r, 27 Rector, Monica, r81 reflective solidarity, 124 reggae, 23, 24, r86, 206, 252112, 253116 remainder: domestic remainder, 155, 157, 163, r66; foreign remainder, 155, 157, 163, r66

28o

Index

remake. See Queer as Folk (television series remake, US) remembering imperfectly, 199-200 resignification, 26, 47, 143; alterity and, r23; in Queer as Folk, 127, 129, 133, 136, 141-147 reterritorialization, 189, 199 reverse masquerade, 185 Richardson, Natasha, 99 Riffaterre, Michael, 237112 Roberts, Julia, 173 Robins, Kevin, 169, 250n3 Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire, 25rn9 Rowland, Kelly, 230, 231 Sandywell, Barry, 41, 68, 239nu Scheler, Max, 78, 79-80, 236n6, 243n6 Schilder, Paul, 79 Scholz, Bernard, 237nr, 239m3 Schreibman, Susan, 212 Schudson, Michael, 25 Schumacher, Joel, 53 Scott, Joan W., 33, 237nr screen, 91, 93-94, 98, 106, 246n7 Searle, John, 242nro semantic elasticity, 141 Sex and the City (novel; Bushnell): cover art, 34-35; "Downtown Babes Meet Old Greenwich Gals" chapter, 53, 55, 56; mise-en-scene in, 37 Sex and the City (SatC) television series, 2, 8, 25; chronotopic belonging in, 104; chronotopic motif of the road in, 40-41, 240nr5; chronotopic values in, 43-44; constructed environment of, 34; cultural addressee in, ror, 124; cultural gaze in, 38, 75, 81, 91, 238n8; episode framing in, 99, 101; functional equivalence of chronotope in, 41-42; gender identity in, 47-48; genesis of, 33-34; intersubjective look in, 75; lack of control in, 38-39, 6o, 238n9239n9; marketing of identity in, 34; mise-en-scene in, 37, 39, 57; multiple storyline in, 244nr1; opening credits,

38-39, 57, 91, ro3, 238n8; "other" in, 41; rules, focus on, 55, 56-57, 24111I; "Secret Sex" episode, 238n9; social fields in, 48-49; spatiality of, 37-38; spatiotemporal organization in, 40, 43; temporality of, 37-38; "They Shoot Single People, Don't They?" episode, 238119; versioni11g and, 230232; voice-over in, 59, 83, 86, 93, I01I03, 245113; Web site, 34, 238n3. See also "The Baby Shower" episode; "The Drought" episode; "The Real Me" episode Shapiro, Car!, 253nr Shepherd, David, 236n5 Shumway, Suza11ne Rosenthal, 237n2 silence, n6-n7, 126 Silverman, Kaja: on active gift of love, 88-89; on cultural gaze, 82, 91-93; on distance, 85-86; on dominant fiction, 44; on embodied voice-over, ro2; on female voice, 102, II4-II5; on good enough, 93-94; on ideal image, 93; on identity, 79; on mirror-stage, 84-85; on remembering imperfectly, 199-200; on subjectivity, 19; on superego, 247m6; on sympathy, 90; on temporal regression, 102; on visual imago, 87; on voice on-high, 221-222; on voice-over, ro3; on ways of seeing, 223 simulacrum, 150; daemonic, 159, 165, 166-r67; digital text as, I05 simulation: copy and, 158-159, 160, 163, 164; dissimulation, 163-164; simulation model of translation, 151; strategic simulation, r 59, 170 singularity and alterity, 242m2 situated look, 74, 98 Skeggs, Beverley, 248n3 Soberman, David A., 253nr social chronotope, 41 social field, 44, 48-50, 49-50 social location, 248n2 solidarity, 124 sound machine, 253n8

Index sound system, 195, 220, 253n6 Sparks, Hal, 146-147, 249m3 spectacle, 222 specter, ro6, I09-IOO, II2-II3, u6, 120, 245n6, 246nr2, 247ni4 spectral addressee, ro6 speech genres: accented, 141, 151, rs6; Bakhtin on, 29-30, 127, 138-139, 249n10; standardized, 138, 139, 141 Spivak, Gayatri, 81, 84, us, u6, 148-149, 170, 235m, 236n8 spontane simulateur, 167 staging (of the subject), 50 standardized speech genres, 138, 139, 141 Stengers, Isabelle, 6 Stick-On (computer program), 213-214, 227 Sriegler, Bernard, 158, 246n7 Storey, John, 20, 22-24 strategic simulation, 159 . 170 stratification, 127-129, 138, 140, 144 subject-as-translator, r66, r66-r67, 167168 subjectivity: becoming as, r3, 74; Laplanche on, 19, 78, 243n7; Silverman on, 19 superaddressee, ro8-uo, u8, 246m2, 246ni3-247ni3, 2471116 superego, 2471116 supra-!, uS, 247m6 suture, n5, 190, 247n15 Symbolic, 246n8, 2471115 sympathetic understanding, roo sympathy, 90 Taylor, Amina, 25onr television, as accented medium, 134-135, 136-137> 248n4 territorial, time as, 251115 territorialization: deterritorialization, 178, 179; of Notring Hill Carnival, 195; reterritorialization, 178 Territories (experimental film), 24, 30, 31; cutting room in, 22r, 222-223; double exposure in, 225; double-voice in, 192-

281

194, 199, 203, 224; homosexuality in, 253n7; intersubjectivity in, 224; juxtaposition in, 219, 224, 225; montage in, 24, 199, 207, 224-225; political agency in, 223-224, 228; second part, Territories II, 225-226; sound system in, 221, 222; spectacle in, 222; superimposition in, 24, 219, 224, 225; versioning in, 202, 212, 219-220, 221-226; voice-ofF in, 190, 251119 territory: Bakhtin on, 179-rSo; becoming and, 178; concept of "home" and, 178179; defining, 250n3-251113; Derrida on, 177-178; as dislocation, 177-178; domain vs., r8r, 194; embodiment and, 178; Gilroy on, 176-177, 183, 250n3; inner, 180; interindividual, r8o-18r; as intersubjective, 179-181; nonhuman animal relation to, 179; Voloshinov on, r8o-r8r third meaning, 212, 225 Thomas, Antonia, 25!119 Thomson, Clive, 5, 199 Tihanov, Galin, 39-40, 90, 239DI4240DI4 Titunik, I. R., 235n4 Tololyan, Khachig, 251113 Tower-of-Babe!, r35, 155 tradition, 239nu translation: agency and, 151; alterity and, 30, !48, 1)8, r68; bad translation, 149· 150, 153; Bakhtin on, 152-153, 158, 168169, 170; copy and, 165-166; Derrida on, 150, 158, 166, 168; dialogic translation, 154-155, 157-158; Hitchcock on, 149, 154, 161; intersubjectivity relation with, 148-149; intralingual, 149; original and, 30, 151, 153-154, 155, 157-158, r6o-r6r, r63-r66, r68-r7o, 209, 215216, 252; in Queer as Folk, 30, r6o-r6r, 164-166; responsible (good), 158, 169170; reterritorializing, r 57; semitranslation, r66, 169 Troy, Marianna H., 237112 Turner, Tina, 242n8

282

Index

Ukhtomskij, A. A., 33 utterance: addressivity of, no-n1; alterity and, !03, I05; Bakhtin on, 69-70, !05, 154, 242nn; chain of utterances, I05; relation with context, 69 Varian, Ha! R., 253nr Venuti, Lawrence, 150, 154-155 Verhoeff, Nanna, 82 version: as archive, 213-214; definition of, 208; definitive, 209 versioning, 24, 31, 208-210, 229-230; as agency, 215; copy and, 221; in critical edition context, 21o-2II; culture of, 232-233; of electronic database, 252n4; as exceeding inversion, 2!0; link with technology, 2!!-2!2; in Notting Hill Carnival, 202-203; original and, 2092!0, 214, 215, 216; in Sex and the City, 230-232; in Territories, 202, 212, 219220, 221-226; translation vs., 215-216; versioned-versioning subject, 227-228, 229 Versioning Machine (computer program), 212-213, 214, 226, 227 virtuality, 104, 245n4 visor effect, II3 Vlasov, Eduard, 237112 vocal alterity, 98, !01, II6 vocal corporalization, II5 voice-off, n2-n7; embodiment of, n3, Il4, n6, II7; in Nell, Il3, II4, II5, !!6, II7, II9; in Queer as Folk, 131; in Terri-

tories, 190, 192, 251n9. See also acousmetre voice on-high, 221-222, 227 voice-over, 245n3; embodied, I02; filmic space distinction and, 102; gender and, I02-I03; in Notting Hill Carnival, 186; in Queer as Folk, 130, 131; in Sex and the City, 59> 83, 86, 93> 101-!03, 245n3; sound-image split and, I01-I02 Voloshinov, Valentin N., 235n4; on classconsciousness, 240111-241111; on context, 68; on !-experience, n8; on normative identity, 12-13; on power of language to refract reality, 23911142401114; on territory, r8o-r8r; on addressivity of utterance, uo-nr; on weexperience, n8-n9 Wall, Anthony, 199, 218 Wallon, Henri, 79 we-experience, n8-n9, 126, 184, 194 Wei, Han-Chieh, 252n4 Weintraub, Barry, 163 Williams, Michelle, 230, 231 Williams, Raymond, 239nro Winnicott, D. W., 93 Wuthnow, Robert, 235n2 Young, Iris Marion, 191-192 Zeller, Hans, 21o-2n, 212 Zizek, Slavoj, 84, 91, 187, 246m1, 2471116 Zoran, Gabriel, 237n2

Cultural Memory in the Present

Regina Mara Schwartz, When God Left the World: Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism Ranjana Khanna, Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, I830 to the Present Esther Peeren, lntersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond Eyal Peretz, Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma's Cinematic Education of the Senses Diana Sorensen, A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes From the Latin American Sixties Hubert Damisch, A Childhood Memory by Piero del/a Francesca Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy Asja Szafraniec, Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature Sara Guyer, Romanticism After Auschwitz Alison Ross, The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy: Presentation in Kant, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers' Reflections from Damaged Life Bella Brodzki, Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, rmd Cultural Memory Rodolphe Gasche, The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy Brigitte Peucker, The Materia/Image: Art and the Real in Film Natalie Melas, All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison Jonathan Culler, The Literary in Theory Michael G. Levine, The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival

Jennifer A. Jordan, Structures of Memory: Understanding German Change in Berlin and Beyond Christoph Menke, Reflections of Equality Marlene Zarader, The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations,

Fragment~~

Histories

James Siege!, Naming the Witch J. M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Reading Derrida I Thinking Paul: On justice Richard Rorty and Eduardo Mendieta, Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself:· Interviews with Richard Rorty Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine Renaud Barbaras, Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China James Phillips, Heidegger's Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience lstvan Rev, Retroactive justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger Krzysztof Ziarek, The Force ofArt Marie-Jose Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary Cccilia Sjoholm, The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow ... :A Dialogue Elisaberh Weber, Questioningjudaism: Interviews by Elisabeth Weber Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, Counterpath: Traveling with jacques Derrida Martin See!, Aesthetics of Appearing Nanette Salomon, Shifting Priorities: Gender and Genre in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting

Jacob T aubes, The Political Theology of Paul Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nr1zi Germany Anne Freadman, The Machinery of Talk: Charles Peirce and the Sign Hypothesis Stanley Cavell, Emerson s Transcendental Etudes Stuart McLean, The Event and Its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity Beate Ri:issler, ed., Privacies: Philosophical Evaluations Bernard Faure, Double Exposure: Cutting Across Buddhist and Western Discourses Alessia Ricciardi, The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film Alain Badiou, Saint PauL· The Foundation of Universalism Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enerny Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb, eds., just Being Difficult? Academic Writing

in the Public Arena Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, edited by Simon Sparks Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, edited by Rolf Tiedemann Patricia Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film

Theory Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity Dorothea von Miicke, The Rise of the Fantastic Tale Marc Redfield, The Politics ofAesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape Dan Zahavi, Husserls Phenomenology Rodolphe Gasche, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kants Aesthetics Michael Naas, Taking on the Tradition: )acques Derrida and the Legacies

of Deconstruction Herlinde Pauer-Studer, ed., Constructions of Practical Reason: Interviews on Moral

and Political Philosophy Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given That: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment lan Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy Martin Stokhof, World and Life as One: Ethics and Ontology in Wittgenstein s

Early Thought Gianni Vattimo, Nietzsche: An Introduction

Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, I97I-I998, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg Brett Levinson, The Ends of Literature: The Latin American "Boom" in the Neo-

liberal Marketplace Timothy J. Reiss, Against Autonomy: Cultural Instruments, Mutualities,

and the Fictive Imagination Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Religion and Media Niklas Luhmann, Theories of Distinction: Re-Describing the Descriptions of Modernity, ed. and introd. William Rasch Johannes Fabian, Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity Gil Anidjar, "Our Place in Al-Andalus ':· Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab-

jewish Letters Helene Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils F. R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation F. R. Ankersmit, Political Representation Elissa Marder, Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wflke of Modernity

(Baudelaire and Flaubert) Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing

Concepts Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud!: Toward a History of Painting Jean-Luc Nancy, The Speculative Remark: One of Hegel's bon mats Jean-Fran