On Representation : Deleuze and Coetzee on the Colonized Subject 9789042034129, 9789401206990

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Introduction: Absurdity and the Outside
Chapter One: The Body of Dusklands
Structures of Subjectification: The Enlightenment
Bodies, Incorporeals, and Becoming
Infinite Identity
Simulacra and Simulation
Suspension: The Body without Organs
Judgment
Chapter Two: The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians
A Strong Geography
A Weak Geography
Smooth and Striated Space
The Nomad and the War Machine
Chapter Three: The Language of Foe
The Structure-Other
The Collapse of the Structure-Other
A Missing People
The Exhaustion of Language as a New Condition of Struggle
A Minor Language and a Minor Literature
Conclusion: The Other Question
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

On Representation

C

ROSS ULTURES

Readings in Post / Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English

142 SERIES EDITORS

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Bénédicte Ledent (Liège) CO-FOUNDING EDITOR Hena

Maes–Jelinek

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

On Representation Deleuze and Coetzee on the Colonized Subject

Grant Hamilton

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011

Cover image: www.freeimages.co.uk Cover design: Inge Baeten The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3412-9 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0699-0 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2011 Printed in The Netherlands



For M.H.3



Table of Contents

Introduction: Absurdity and the Outside Chapter One: The Body of Dusklands Structures of Subjectification: The Enlightenment Bodies, Incorporeals, and Becoming Infinite Identity Simulacra and Simulation Suspension: The Body without Organs Judgment

Chapter Two: The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

ix 1 6 13 22 30 39 45 51

A Strong Geography A Weak Geography Smooth and Striated Space The Nomad and the War Machine

55 66 74 84

Chapter Three: The Language of Foe

103

The Structure-Other The Collapse of the Structure-Other A Missing People The Exhaustion of Language as a New Condition of Struggle A Minor Language and a Minor Literature

106 112 121 125 134

Conclusion: The Other Question

149

Works Cited Index

171 179

Introduction 

Absurdity and the Outside

You and I are strangers – you even more than I — J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

T

HE CONCERN OF THIS BOOK IS AT ONCE THREEFOLD AND SINGULAR .

It concerns the colonized subject, subjectivity, and resistance in postcolonial theory and literature, and also the modality by which each of these sites is conceived in the practice of knowledge-formation. As such, while this book tends towards three very specific sites of interrogation, it is also mindful of the act of interrogation itself. Given such a context, I want to begin with what may seem a curious question, but the way in which one responds to this question informs the ideas that frame the thesis of the book. How can one define the verb to be without falling victim to absurdity? Of course, resonating in this consideration of the infinitive to be is every possible extension of the concept of Being. Aristotle discusses in Metaphysics the question of Being, proposing the notion that “there is a science that studies being as being.”1 As such, a dual arrangement of Being is exposed. First is the idea that Being can be understood by a return to an entity that proves its existence through being in the universe – which is to say, trees are, animals are, or flowers are: Being as entities within the world. The second arrangement ensures the division between entity and Being. To say there is a science that studies being as being is to discuss such entities as entities rather than to discuss the particularities of an individual entity. Within this arrangement, Aristotle is led to discuss Being as that which is common to all things, which in 1

Umberto Eco, Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, tr. Alastair McEwen (Kant e l’ornitorinco, 1997; London: Secker & Warburg, 1999): 10.

ON REPRESENTATION

x



consideration of entities is to appeal to the fact that they are – the fact of their being. So, Aristotle situates Being in ousia (substance) and parousia (arrival). That is to say, Being as an object of knowledge and as essence, the sense of that which stably is, is bound by a formal relationship with time. Now, in this environment of object and essence, substance and time, one returns to the linguistic expression of the verb to be as that which releases all the possibilities of Being. The speaker is furnished with not only an expression for the fact of the being of something, but also with an expression for the activity of being. Where is the absurdity here? To answer this question one has to consider the most obvious arrangements of a response to the opening question: perhaps these would be, ‘Being is...’ or ‘to be is...’ The absurdity lies in the realization that one cannot begin to define Being without using the very term that is to be defined in the definition. Indeed, even if one proposes Being as a synonym of to exist, one cannot escape from the problem of self-reference, as the etymology of the term reveals that “ex-istre meant ‘to leave from,’ ‘to manifest oneself,’ and therefore ‘to come into being.’”2 One is seemingly embroiled in an endless play of circularity through self-reference. It is in such a sense that Charles Sanders Peirce argued that Being is an abstract quality of everything that can be expressed. Thus, for Peirce, Being has “an unlimited extension and null intension (or comprehension).”3 That is to say, while Being refers to everything, it can never claim a significant definition for itself. Of course, an inability to define Being is a curious state of affairs, given that this term is used, either directly or indirectly, to define everything else. Indeed, the failure of definition to ‘capture’ Being reveals a certain set of problems with the structural products that allow representation to function as the constitutive mode of knowledge-formation. The process of definition reduces an object of investigation to a ‘knowable’ unitary totality. As such, it interrogates certain structural elements in order to assign the object of investigation to a taxonomic category. But the language of definition – limitation, reduction, essentialism, and universality – is also found in the concept. Consider, for example, this passage from Trinh Minh-ha’s extended essay “No Master Territories” in which she searches for a suitable reply to the question, “‘could you tell us what it is like in... (your country)?’ As a minority woman, I… As an Asian-American woman, I… As a woman-of-colour filmmaker, I…

2 3

Eco, Kant and the Platypus, 11. Kant and the Platypus, 10.



Introduction

xi

As a feminist, a…, and a… I…”4 Minh-ha probes for an adequate subjectposition from which to answer the question, and in so doing displays an array of identity-concepts. The project of definition and the role of the concept are exemplary here, since such assertoric speech-acts display the structural products that allow representation to function as the constitutive mode of knowledge-formation. First is the organization of taxonomies. In manifesting each identity-concept as a marker to categories of differentia, Minh-ha necessarily organizes taxonomies. Implicit in Minh-ha’s stuttering response to the question posed is the understanding that in order to define the identity-concept ‘feminist’ one must first set it in opposition to a series of other subject-positions. The obvious conclusion to this arrangement is that a single identity-concept cannot elucidate a subject-position. Indeed, we are forced to conclude that each identity-concept only becomes meaningful – which is the same as saying ‘definable’ – once it is understood in relation to a set of identity-concepts. In this context of the necessary relationship of concepts, the project of definition is shown to be intimately related to the generation of taxonomic categories. The second structural product that allows representation to function as the constitutive mode of knowledge-formation is its appeal to essence or ‘sameness’. One must ask what the identity-concept ‘feminist’ seeks to represent here. Clearly, the concept is employed by Minh-ha as a designation that represents a set of commonalities – in this instance, a certain formalized political and theoretical agenda. Thus, when Minh-ha evokes other identity-concepts, we are invited to see each as the designation of a distinct set of commonalities. To this end, we are seemingly encouraged to conclude that there is some kind of internal consistency or constancy within each identity-concept. Simply put, each identity-concept offers an established order, an attribute of sameness that seemingly discloses an internal essence of being, say, ‘a woman-ofcolour filmmaker’. However, such claims have been contested. Gayatri Spivak’s critique of Julia Kristeva’s About Chinese Women problematizes such an arrangement of identity-concepts by calling into question whether even the concept of ‘woman’ or ‘womanhood’ is extensible across global communities.5 4

Trinh T. Minh-ha, “No Master Territories: Cotton and Iron,” in When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1991): 18. 5 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “French Feminism in an International Frame” (1981), in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1988): 134–53.

xii

ON REPRESENTATION



Spivak’s critique exposes the concept as the product of a process of homogenization that collapses “an infinite number of heterogeneous components”6 into an artificial unity, an illusory totality. If one is to return to the question of Being, then, such evocation of identityconcepts does little to elucidate a definition of Being, save a recognition that its operation is diverse. Rather, what is revealed is the practice of representation and its role in the construction of structures of knowing. In order to render the world knowable, representation requires definition to produce artificial structures of taxonomic categories and the concept to organize and reduce the heterogeneous into discrete units of generalizations. In such a manner, representation can only instruct talk of genera (in the concept) or differentia (in definition) that, consequently, can only collapse the diversity of difference into a set of impoverished and oversimplified categories. Perhaps the most broadly ranging and comprehensive taxonomy is that generated by the dichotomy of res cogitans and res extensa, which issues from René Descartes’ dictum “I think, therefore I am.”7 It is this arrangement that inaugurates the separation of the thinking, and therefore rational, subject from the world. The rational subject claims Being through the ability to posit itself, which subsequently conditions thinking as the pre-eminent form of being in the world. However, it is with such an observation that one can begin to trace a certain blindness in the structurality of representation. Descartes’ dictum necessitates that the subject is the centre of any permutation of Being. In negotiating the distinction between falsity and truth, Descartes writes: And since all the same thoughts and conceptions which we have while awake may also come to us in sleep, without any of them being at that time true, I resolved to assume that everything that entered into my mind was no more true than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately afterwards I noticed that whilst I thus wished to think all things false, it was absolutely essential that the ‘I’ who thought this should be.8

6

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy?, tr. Hugh Tomlinson & Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia U P , 1994): 18. 7 René Descartes, “Discourse on the Method: I V ,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. John Cottingham, tr. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff & Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1985), vol. 1: 127. 8 Descartes, “Discourse on the Method: I V ,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 127.



Introduction

xiii

That is to say, the ‘I’ who thought this should exhibit Being. In this consideration, it is only the rational subject, the ‘I’, that can begin to decipher the truth of Being. Indeed, even in Martin Heidegger’s extended work on the question of being, it is only through the intellectual ability to posit Being that one can engage in its critique.9 But, we must ask, what is behind such attempts at clarifying the condition of Being? For Derrida, the discussion of Being is dominated by the search for origin, “the law which somehow governed the desire for a centre in the constitution of structure.”10 The centre in this statement is the unique point of departure that an enquiry formulated in rationalism demands: an intention, a truth, a meaning, an origin. Indeed, such elements may operate as points of structural genesis, a way of orienting an enquiry, a means to refer an enquiry to a point of presence, but they also neutralize the structurality of the structural products of representation (taxonomies constructed by discrete units of generalization). Here, representation is unwilling to disclose its own process of structurality other than by proposing the concept of the centred structure, which is to substitute or transform a recognized artificiality of its practice – Derrida’s “play of the structure”11 – into a coherent fixed locus of origin. Thus, one may turn to Aristotle’s Metaphysics once again and question the centred structure of the proposition that Being is finally designated by ousia and parousia. Indeed, that the concept of being-as-presence slides from concept to truth, from play to the immobility and certitude of the centred structure, exposes an operation of privilege, a political act of homogenization, that allows Descartes to position the thinking subject as the pre-eminent factor (the origin) in any other set of relations.12

9

See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (Sein und Zeit, 1927; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962). 10 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, tr. Alan Bass (L’Écriture et la différence, 1967; London: Routledge, 1978): 280. 11 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 279. 12 This, of course, is where the work of René Descartes and Martin Heidegger diverge. Heidegger only poses the thinking subject as the minimal condition for the questioning of Being. Through the inauguration of Dasein, Heidegger collapses the notion of subject and object together so that it is impossible to encounter Being other than by interaction with other elements of the world. This is why Derrida lists Heidegger in the company of Nietzsche and Freud – as authors who write the “structurality of structure.” See Derrida, Writing and Difference, 280–81.

xiv

ON REPRESENTATION



One can now return to the opening question with some semblance of a reply. How can one define the verb to be without falling victim to absurdity? One cannot if it is a requirement that one has to maintain orthodox methodologies predicated on representation. That is to say, if definition cannot grasp Being by organizing taxonomies; if the concept can do nothing other than reduce diversity and the heterogeneous to an artificial totality; and if representation as process exhibits a blindness to privileged movements and positions under certain conditions, then there is occasion to call for a significantly different mode of clarification when approaching enquiries that issue from a discussion of ontology: a mode that steps outside the traditional methods of enquiry predicated on representation. Such a call for the revision of the practices of enquiry finds its significance in the site of the colonized subject. Since it is certain that the question of knowing the colonized subject is, at its most fundamental level, an ontological question that issues from the same set of problems that arise from the consideration of Being, one is necessarily charged with the endeavour to interrogate the site of the colonized subject other than by the mode of representation. However, the problem with such an endeavour is that, for the postcolonial theorist or critic, the colonized subject is seemingly locked within the very framework of representation. Of course, one may point to Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism as an example of such. Orientalism rests on the notion that the colonized subject, bound within the space of the Orient, is manufactured through a Western discourse that is founded on the (intentional and non-intentional) project of representation. Said argues that the Orient stands as an imagined geography of Western academic interest, and as such exemplifies Vico’s observation that men make their own history, and what they know is what they have made. Thus, the project of the West to know the Orient must necessarily require a design to make it. Such a design manifests the Orient through “statements about it, authorising views of it, describing it, [and] by teaching it.”13 Thus, for Said, the Orient is made knowable through a common discursive movement that organizes a complex matrix of representation that issues from the imaginative musings of poets, novelists, and philosophers, on the one hand, and the texts and discussions of those in the academy, such as the anthropologist, sociologist, historian, and philologist, on the other. Given that knowledge of the Orient originates in such diverse quarters, Said’s claim that Orientalism as discourse maintained an “internal consistency” of representation 13

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995): 3.



Introduction

xv

may be qualified by his insistence that the project of Orientalism as representation was always independent of “any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a ‘real’ Orient.”14 Indeed, it is this very separation, of representation from the ‘actual’, that allows the colonized subject to be written from afar and locked within a body of representation that need never be qualified by a comparison to the real. Said’s discussion of Orientalism as the West’s practice of organizing the unnamed subject of the Other of Europe is contextualized by Frantz Fanon’s work on nation (and, by extension, ‘nationalism’ and ‘national identity’), and is continued by theorists such as Benedict Anderson, Partha Chatterjee, John Plamenatz, and Homi Bhabha.15 Each theorist encourages the term ‘nation’ to be read as an artificially constructed political entity that represents a disparate set of communities through a process of homogenization based on either a semi-fictional or a forged sense of historical continuity.16 Thus, the Western practice of manufacturing the domain of the ‘virtual’ in order to replace that of the ‘actual’ is exposed through the need to manifest the site of the nation as a contained political unit on the world map.17 Given such a context, Graham Huggan argues that the construction and appropriation of the unit ‘nation’ leads one to read nation as a concept revealing the explicit inscription of a colonialist rhetoric on an imperial geography that leads to “cartographic enclosure” and “cultural limitation.”18 What is revealed by such work, then, is not only the construction of a privileged site of interrogation that formalizes 14

Said, Orientalism, 5. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean–Paul Sartre (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; tr. 1963; New York: Grove, 1968); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed, 1986); John Plamenatz, “Two Types of Nationalism,” in Nationalism: The Nature of an Evolution of an Idea, ed. Eugene Kamenka (Canberra: Australian National U P , 1973): 22–37; and Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990). 16 Eric Hobsbawm & Terence O. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1983): 7. 17 See José Rabasa, Inventing A-M-E-R-I-C-A: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentricism (Norman & London: U of Oklahoma P , 1993). 18 Graham Huggan, “Decolonising the Map: Postcolonialism, Poststructuralism and the Cartographic Connection,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 20.4 (October 1989): 124. 15

xvi

ON REPRESENTATION



the concept of nation as a truth, but also the complex web of representation that is projected onto the colonized subject. As such, the colonized subject is once again presented as irremediably locked within the intricacies of a representation that straddles history and politics; a representation that ultimately produces in the topos ‘map’ not only an expression of the world but also an authoritative expression of world reality. Therefore, the question that must be posed is: How can one interrogate the colonized subject if it is firmly enmired in colonial discourse? It would seem most obvious that to examine the colonized subject one must, in some way, propose a retrieval of the subject from the exercise of representation of colonial discourse. However, from the brief discussion above it may be clear why an attempt to retrieve a subject from such discourse can only lead to failure. The subject that must be proposed by the idea of retrieval is necessarily only recognizable from within the matrix of a system of representation that constructs it. That is to say, the ‘colonized subject’ is merely a production of positions granted by its very representation. What would be recovered by such an attempt of retrieval is a non-position, merely “a pointer to an irretrievable consciousness,”19 nothing but the virtual space from which the process of representation began. It is this recognition – that the colonized subject can only be retrieved from an always already constructed position – that leads Spivak to claim that the subaltern cannot “know and speak itself.”20 The subaltern is bound by the structures of representation of colonial discourse, to the extent that the theorist must now ask him- or herself whether there is, or can ever be, a space within Europe’s production of the Other that the colonized subject can occupy to express itself.21 Spivak famously concludes that the subaltern cannot speak; but at what expense is this conclusion made? If one agrees with Spivak, then the discussion of the colonized subject must move away from an interrogation of constitution and move towards the question of agency. If the subaltern is subsumed entirely under the project of representation through colonial discourse, hence “cannot speak,” then the colonized subject must necessarily be considered as given and, as such, it is not endowed with the ability to transcend the structures of the given. In such a context, it would 19

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams & Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia, 1994): 82. 20 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 80. 21 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 75.



Introduction

xvii

seem that the colonized subject cannot affect the structures of its creation, such as literature, the education system, the judicial system, and so on. Simply put, there can be no site of resistance to the project of imperialism from within this appreciation of the colonized subject. Of course, such a conclusion is clearly problematical. Indeed, I think one would meet little opposition if one were to argue that a binding characteristic of postcolonial criticism and literature is the attempt to offer resistance, on some level, to a eurocentric discourse of domination. Here, then, is the problem that this book seeks to address. If the colonized subject is constituted by a representation that issues from colonial discourse, then how can one articulate the ability of the colonized subject to offer resistance to such structures? How can the colonized subject be given but also possess the capacity to transcend the condition of the given? It is in response to this question that this book aims to demonstrate that the theoretical notion of a structured colonized subject must be collapsed in favour of an appreciation of a practical colonized subject. This book aims to demonstrate that it is only under the condition of perpetual movement and change that one can begin to trace the affective operation of the colonized subject. Such affective operations are moments of resistance, and such moments of resistance are necessarily products of the capacity to transcend the structured determinations formalized by colonial discourse. So, if the colonized subject is to offer resistance to colonial discourse it must necessarily refuse the claim of elucidation offered by the process of representation – of the certainty granted by the activity of definition, and the reductionist practices of totality found in the concept born of the artificial gravity claimed by representation’s association with the actual. It is for this reason that this book, in recognition of Derrida’s work, does not reduce discussion of the colonized subject to an analysis of an organized centred structure – as a search for the lost origins of enquiry – but, rather, seeks to elucidate an unorganized structure of the colonized subject. Even though Derrida cautions that “one in fact cannot conceive of an unorganised structure,”22 it is worth pausing to reflect on the way in which contemporary physics, especially Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and the resultant notions of “quantum claustrophobia” and “quantum fluctuation,”23 has built a framework to 22

Derrida, Writing and Difference, 279. Werner Heisenberg formulated the uncertainty principle in 1927. The theory claims that there are features of the universe, such as the position and velocity of a particle, which cannot be known simultaneously with complete precision. The physicist 23

xviii

ON REPRESENTATION



challenge such observations. In short, while it may seem to instruct a paradox to suggest an arrangement of the colonized subject in terms of an unorganized structure, there is certainly precedent for such a claim within the sciences and philosophy. One might begin a negotiation of this claim by considering Michel Foucault’s intriguing methodology for exposing the “structurality of structure” through the analysis of any concept that is promoted as truth. In the first instance, Foucault argues that the discipline of history takes moments of contingency, provisionality, and discontinuity and collapses such to form a linear narrative that aims to produce a distinct movement of coherence. Thus, for Foucault, the orthodox methodological imperatives of the discipline of History are complicit in the neutralization of a political agenda that seeks to organize a centred structure of enquiry, which necessarily allows for the construction of the centre (privileged) and margin (dominated) binary. Foucault’s work addresses this concern by writing history in terms of the very moments of contingency, provisionality, and discontinuity that orthodox history essentializes. As a means of exemplifying this process, Foucault’s histories discuss those concepts that have come to be read as truth. One may note here the History of Sexuality, which emphasizes the varying modes of construction that have traversed the concept of sexuality, and Madness and Civilisation, which reveals the discontinuity of the European apprehension and treatment of those designated by the concept of madness. In each analysis, the concept that is presented as given is exposed as a discontinuous, fragmented, and provisional fabrication. As such, what draws these histories together is not how they complement each other to produce a finalized coherent narrative, but, rather, Foucault’s underlying interest in the way in which individuals have been ‘administered’ through varying structures of power. In addition to orthodox histories that have traced the operation of power through institutions which have always been regarded as ‘possessing’ power (monarchies, the landed gentry, governments), Foucault argues that structures of power can also be read as

Brian Greene writes, “Such uncertain aspects of the macroscopic world become ever more severe as the distance and time scales on which they are considered become ever smaller. Particles and fields undulate and jump between all possible values consistent with the quantum uncertainty. This implies that the microscopic realm is a rolling frenzy, awash in a sea of quantum fluctuations.” Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999): 424.



Introduction

xix

those which organize lives in the most banal and invisible of ways. It is in such a context that Foucault radically rewrites the term ‘power’: In short this power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the ‘privilege,’ acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions – an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated. Furthermore, this power is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who ‘do not have it’; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them; it exerts pressure upon them, just as they themselves, in their struggle against it, resist the grip it has on them.24

As such, power is not located in one sovereign centre but everywhere. In the History of Sexuality, Foucault writes: Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere […] There is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix […]. One must suppose rather that the manifold relations of force that take shape and come into play in the machinery of production, in families, in limited groups and institutions, are the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage that run through the social body as a whole.25

It is this idea, that an analysis of power and power relations makes visible aspects of lives that would otherwise remain largely transparent, which places Foucault’s histories outside of the orthodox, and makes them valuable as a means of discussing the colonized subject. As power is displaced as a force that emanates from a central point of dominance that always and only moves in a single direction towards the dominated as a means of oppression, and becomes a two-way process, the relational character of power begins to problematize the idea of origin and the unitary locus of investigation that one finds discussed in Derrida. That is to say, if power is everywhere and is not simply “exercised as a prohibition,” it becomes impossible to locate a single

24

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan (Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, 1975; New York: Pantheon, 1977): 16–17. 25 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1: An Introduction, tr. Robert Hurley (Histoire de la sexualité, 1: La Volonté de savoir, 1976; New York: Pantheon, 1978): 92–94.

ON REPRESENTATION

xx



event that can reasonably claim to be the cause of an effect. This means that if one is to map resistance – which, of course, is the project of the Subaltern Studies group, who chart a chain of Indian peasant insurgencies during colonial occupation26 – one must now recognize that there is plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial.27

Any attempt to locate a definitive cause of resistance, or a single locus of rebellion, or a “pure law of the revolutionary,” will necessarily instruct a regression ad infinitum. In this context of a modified arrangement of power, the colonized subject ‘appears’ as the product of the relationship between power and resistance. That is to say, the colonized subject can be read as a product of the relationship between the operation of power and a subjective agency that is manifested as a means to affect it. Thus, a simple discussion of the representation of the subject constructed as the present manifestation of a coherent and linear past is replaced by a project to reveal how power has been deployed at any time and the sort of life it has made possible. The recognition that the subject is something that cannot exist in contradistinction to power is the recognition that power must organize the subject on some fundamental level. And, indeed, Foucault argues that power organizes the subject in quite specific terms. From the limitless potential of the possibility of behaviours, arrangements of bodies, and emotional states of the subject, Foucault argues that power is conditioned to select certain fundamental constitutive arrangements of such so that the subject is rendered knowable and thereby controllable. As Patrick Fuery and Nick Mansfield note, such “analysis defines what it is possible for us to be as subjects. We are to be made well, and kept sane and law abiding” through the varying structures of power that condition “the machinery of production, in families, in limited groups and institutions.”28

26

See, for example, Ranajit Guha, ed. Subaltern Studies, vol. 1 (Delhi: Oxford U P ,

1982). 27

Foucault, The History of Sexuality, I, 96. Patrick Fuery & Nick Mansfield, Cultural Studies and Critical Theory (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2000): 175. 28



Introduction

xxi

Thus, Foucault demonstrates that the operation of power turns interior life, which is to say subjectivity, into material for analysis. This can be seen most clearly in the project of psychoanalysis, a discourse aligned with institutions that profess to make us well and keep us sane and law-abiding. Clearly, psychology and psychiatry map a range of possible behaviours on a line whose poles are sanity and insanity. This exemplifies the economy of balance and imbalance which operates on the Freudian topographical division of mind that traces specific functions to the preconscious, conscious, and unconscious. The subject is positioned on such a line according to a reproduction of behaviour that has already been considered acceptable through the mediation of the privileged discourse of the psychoanalyst. Any attempt to live life outside of such categorization is subject to a power that limits liberty through institutionalization. Thus, for Foucault, power conditions the subject by limiting the potential arrangements of subjectivity, and the power-relation between the psychoanalyst and the subject exposes a predetermined organization of the subject. However, if the practice of psychology and psychiatry is to rectify an imbalance of mind, then one is led to question what the psychoanalyst claims when the subject is presented as restored to health. For it is precisely this kind of enunciation that can do nothing but mark the authoritarian regime of subjectification within the discourse of psychoanalysis. Therefore, even though the subject that is proposed by the discourse of psychoanalysis is necessarily fractured, it is the artificial fixities instituted through the topographical and economic division of the mind that insists on the (re)organized arrangement of the fractured subject. In such a manner, the ‘restored’ subject who renounces the condition of madness can only be read as the product of the psychoanalytic practice of reorganizing subjectivity. Psychoanalysis, then, offers a reading of a fractured subject but has to approach the subject as an organized structure (as an entity that is to be made well). Thus, the taxonomic categories relied on to achieve a restoration of subjectivity cannot represent a truth of subjectivity, but, as Foucault argues, can only act to structure knowledge through a process of replication that merely facilitates the operation of power. Ultimately, then, psychoanalysis is revealed to be a privileged discursive site that does little to further discussion of the colonized subject as an unorganized structure. However, if one is to continue with Foucault’s notion that the subject can be made knowable through charting the relational dynamic of power, we must consider how we can best characterize the movements, connections, and filiative arrangements of power. To this end, Bill Ashcroft writes, “when we

xxii

ON REPRESENTATION



understand the rhizomic nature of power, we may better understand the potential for its transformation by the dominated.”29 And, indeed, it is with the notion of the rhizome that my critical methodology for this book is made most visible; for the rhizome proves invaluable for characterizing the continual movement of the operation of power throughout this book. In adapting a biological term for a root system that spreads horizontally rather than vertically, and grows from several points rather than a single tap-root, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari posit the rhizome as a means of rewriting structures and systems in terms of “relations” and “interconnectedness.”30 The rhizome operates in contradistinction to what Deleuze terms the “arborescent model” of knowledge-formation, and by understanding this difference one can begin to approximate certain characteristics of the rhizome.31 Deleuze presents the arborescent model of knowledge-formation as the overriding image of Western learning. Similarly, Foucault writes that the tree has been the symbol of knowledge and reason in the West. Indeed, if the chaotic world is symbolized as the unquantifiable movement and interaction of the waters of an ocean, Foucault writes, then the tree of reason “forms the mast of the ship of fools”; a ship that transports “madmen in search of their reason”32 by negotiating the very territory of unreason. However, for Deleuze, the tree symbolizes not only knowledge but also the modality of knowledgeformation. One either begins an investigation from a tap-root (as a fixed point of departure) and continues through dichotomy (the affirmation or negation of postulates) to a point of elucidation, or one seeks to expose the tap-root, the origin, the universal statement, the theory of everything, that governs a chaotic world. In each case, the arborescent model of knowledge-formation is de29

Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2001): 53. See Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2, tr. Brian Massumi (Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Milles plateaux, 1980; London: Athlone, 1999): 3–25. 31 Throughout the main body of this book I have chosen to refer only to Gilles Deleuze. That is to say, where a quotation originates in a text that is co-authored by Deleuze and Guattari I attribute the quotation in the main text solely to Deleuze for purposes of simplicity and clarity of exposition. However, the referencing associated with such quotations will always recognize Guattari’s role in the constitution of the statement where applicable. 32 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, tr. Richard Howard (Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, 1961; London: Routledge, 2002): 19. 30



Introduction

xxiii

monstrated to proceed by a binary logic. Yet, it is clear that such logic necessarily collapses heterogeneity because of its very structure. Binary logic cannot reveal those instances of the ‘in-between’, those instances that are neither positive nor negative. One is reminded, of course, of a similar inability in the project of representation; and it is indeed this similarity that encourages Deleuze to discuss the arborescent model of knowledge-formation as a totalizing model of “representational thought.” For Deleuze, representation’s carefully constructed reliance on the comprehensive unit will always already undermine any attempt to be inclusive of heterogeneity. As such, where representation promotes Leibniz’s monadology as the supreme elevation of the unit as mode of knowledge-formation, Deleuze offers the mode of nomadology. As Brian Massumi notes, nomadology does not immure itself in the edifice of an ordered interiority; it moves freely in an element of exteriority. It does not repose on identity; it rides difference. It does not respect the artificial division between the three domains of representation, subject, concept, and being […]. The concepts it creates do not merely reflect the eternal form of a legislating subject, but are defined by a communicable force in relation to which their subject, to the extent that they can be said to have one, is only secondary. They do not reflect upon the world but are immersed in a changing state of things.33

Thus, the model of nomadology makes knowable the condition of the rhizome. In distinction to representational thought, the rhizome stands as that which fundamentally refuses the unit and, therefore, the unitary base of knowledge. It survives as the substantive multiple, the attempt not only to incorporate heterogeneity but as the modality of heterogeneous thought itself. In this way, the single tap-root of origin is replaced with a condition of growth that is postulated on the multiple, so that the centred structure is replaced by the multi- (hence, non-) centred system. The removal of privilege from the totality of the unit in knowledge-formation ensures that connectivity becomes the integral element of any analytical practice. Under such conditions, the rhizome allows for a system of knowledge that endeavours to offer modes of analysis that operate against the rational determinism of linearity – cause and effect. With the collapse of the discrete, deterministic, and artificial arrange-

33

Brian Massumi, “Translator’s Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy” (1999), in Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, xii.

xxiv

ON REPRESENTATION



ment of the subject and object, one is left to consider what kind of subjectivity is presentable under such revitalized conditions of heterogeneity. Perhaps the best-known discussion of a subjectivity that occupies the space of the collapsed division of subject and object is Martin Heidegger’s Dasein. Heidegger argues that any enquiry is an activity, something engaged in by a particular type of being; and that ‘particular type of being’ is the only being that can interrogate the world intellectually – the human. This postulate reveals the very personal process of interaction that is required, and is indeed a priori, in the activity of enquiry. Simply, there is no enquiry that can be conceived of as external or separate from the enquirer. Therefore, as Stephen Mulhall concludes, on the most fundamental level, enquiry cannot be anything other than a reflection or inflection of the condition of Being of the enquirer.34 As such, we must conclude that there is no neutral stance of investigation from which one can begin to interrogate the world, or any element of it. So it is that, with the amalgamation of the enquirer and the enquired in the act of enquiry, the amalgamation of subject and object in the act of interrogation, that one can map the emergence of Heidegger’s Dasein. Such an appreciation leads one away from an examination of the world through a pointillist endeavour of securing an object of knowledge, a quality, or essence of an entity, external to Dasein, and moves one towards an understanding based on a complex web of interactions that is proposed and modified by a dynamic subjectivity. Deleuze seeks to question subjectivity in a similar way, without the return to a discussion of an inherent quality of sameness or the totalizing gesture of identity. Deleuze engages subjectivity by collapsing the artificial division of subject and object through the process of becoming. Becoming, as a present participle, refuses to hierarchize, privilege, or determine specific discrete points in time and thereby insists that the subject is in a continuing moment of change. Given such a dynamic environment, one is encouraged to ask the simplest of all questions: What, then, is the subject ‘becoming’? This question marks the “line of flight,” the condition of connectivity, between the multiplicity of the subject and the object, in the multiplicity of the encounter itself. It is in such a context that Deleuze writes of the process of “becoming-animal” in the texts of Herman Melville and Franz Kafka, “becoming-Jewish” in the works of Henry Miller and Joseph Losey, and “becoming-black” in the 34

Stephen Mulhall, Heidegger and “Being and Time” (London: Routledge,

2000): 12.



Introduction

xxv

writings of William Faulkner.35 In each case, the becoming is an activity of movement, the process of passing from the position of the ‘major’ to the position of the ‘minor’. In this environment of perpetual movement, the process of becoming-minor reveals a multiplicity, one that not only negotiates the withdrawal of the subject from the majority but also inaugurates the minor position as an agent of difference. Yet, as Daniel Smith notes, if becoming “refers to an objective zone of indistinction or indiscernibility that always exists between any two multiplicities,” then becoming must be “a zone that immediately precedes”36 the respective differentiation of the two multiplicities. That is to say, the process of becoming is, first, always already non-personal and, secondly, always already incomplete in terms of an historical specificity. The process of becoming only instructs the introduction of the encounter between multiplicities. As Daniel Smith writes, it is “something between the two [multiplicities], outside the two.”37 In such a manner, the arrangement of becoming, as nothing other than a non-personal mode of connectivity between two multiplicities, must facilitate the force of an exterior event that conditions the assemblage of multiplicities (and therefore, necessarily, subjectivity). Such an exterior event is what Deleuze terms a pure affect or percept. Massumi writes of the terms ‘affect’ and ‘affection’: Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting body.38

35

The texts that Deleuze and Guattari discuss in such terms of becoming are Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), Arthur Miller’s Focus (1945), Joseph Losey’s film Mr. Klein (1976), and William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (1948). See Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 233–309. 36 Daniel W. Smith, “Introduction – ‘A Life of Pure Immanence’: Deleuze’s ‘Critique et Clinique’ Project,” in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, tr. Daniel W. Smith & Michael Greco (Critique et clinique, 1993; London: Verso, 1998): xxx. 37 Smith, “Introduction – ‘A Life of Pure Immanence’,” xxx. 38 Brian Massumi, “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements” (1999), in Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, xvi.

xxvi

ON REPRESENTATION



That is to say, in the philosophy of Deleuze, affects and percepts are autonomous events, haecceities, which are “packets of sensation and relations that outlive those that experience them. Affects are not feelings, they are becomings that go beyond those that live through them.”39 Affects and percepts reside as the qualities of possibilities within a virtual indeterminate space before they have been actualized into a specific spatio-temporal-geo-historico milieu.40 The insistence here is that it is the exteriority of relations that conditions the subject; moreover, in Deleuze’s essay on Hume’s theory of human nature, Empiricism and Subjectivity, such relations are always already external to their terms. For Deleuze, this decentering of the human subject from the always existent non-personal forces of Life is evidenced in the act of grouping simple ideas into complex ideas. Deleuze argues that simple ideas do not involve an inherent principle of association that offers connections to other ideas. Rather, it is in the practice of forming relations (in the literal composition of a complex idea) that the subject is constituted. Thus, Deleuze writes that complex ideas are designated in the mind at the same time that the mind itself becomes a subject […]. Under the influence of the principles of association, ideas are compared, grouped, and evoked. This relation, or rather this intimacy, between complex ideas and the subject, such that one is the inverse of the others, is presented to us in language; the subject, as she speaks, designates in some way ideas which are in turn designated to her.41

As such, it is only through the operation of such haecceities that the subject is constituted. Indeed, that subjectivity is composed by a condition of possibility which resides exterior to the subject is significant, since it necessarily implies that the pre-experiential (the non-affected) subject is unorganized. However, given that the forces emitted by the practice of Life must always subsume the subject, one must question whether such a pre-experiential state of the subject can exist. In negotiating this question, it is helpful to ally the domain of af39

Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990, tr. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia U P , 1995): 137. 40 See Massumi, “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements.” Here he writes: “In French, milieu means ‘surroundings,’ ‘medium’ (as in chemistry), and ‘middle.’ In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, ‘milieu’ should be read as a technical term combining all three meanings” (xvii). 41 Deleuze, Negotiations, 101.



Introduction

xxvii

fects and percepts with the plateau of Peirce’s “Firstness.” In this way, affects and percepts are to be understood in terms of the qualities that draw the attention before recognition: i.e. the attention that precedes the act of enunciation. Explaining this curious state of affairs, Smith writes that the qualities of affects and percepts “are not themselves either sensations, feelings, actions, or states; they express rather the quality of a possible sensation or feeling.”42 Following this, where Peirce locates “Secondness” or the plateau of the real, the sensation of the feeling itself or the act of enunciation, Deleuze locates the collapse of possibility, of the predetermined in the moment of determination. Given such a context, Foucault’s claim that “power is everywhere because it comes from everywhere” insists that power must have as its sensory and relational correlate affects and percepts; and the only state in which an individual can claim to be free of the continuing intimacy of power or the proliferating forces of Life – hence, the operation of haecceities – is deep sleep. Indeed, in sleep without dreams the individual cannot attain or claim any kind of subjectivity, for such a condition of sleep, to borrow a phrase from Deleuze, is a state of “negative intensity.” Other than this state of negative intensity, the subject is only knowable in terms of its immersion in the perpetual proliferation of the conditioning forces of the affects and percepts of an everchanging world. Given this, one is led to the conclusion that the interiority of a subject is knowable as a structure, in the sense that subjectivity is the product of endless encounters with the non-personal forces of the haecceities of the world; but such a structure is itself only knowable as an involuntary transforming flux without a discernible pattern. Here, then, is the unorganized structure of subjectivity that this book is concerned with – the purely intensive body disclosed by Antonin Artaud and written by Deleuze as the Body without Organs.43 It is the argument of this book that subjectivity understood in terms of the Body without Organs can only facilitate an appreciation of the colonized subject through its practice, and it is only with such an appreciation that one can describe the ability of the colonized subject to offer resistance to colonial discourse. It is an argument that necessarily rejects the practices of theorization 42

Smith, “Introduction – ‘A Life of Pure Immanence’,” xxxi. See Antonin Artaud, “To Have Done With the Judgement of God” (1948), in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, tr. Helen Weaver (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976): 555–75. Artaud writes, “For you can tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing more useless than an organ” (571). 43

xxviii

ON REPRESENTATION



that are complicit with the operations of staticization, limitation, and essentialism inherent in the project of representation; it is an argument that must go beyond representation in order to retain the movement and, thereby, the heterogeneity of the colonized subject. In elucidating this argument, this book turns to the fiction of the South African (and now Australian) academic and novelist, J.M. Coetzee. Much has been written on the fiction of Coetzee following the publication of his first and perhaps most stylistically challenging ‘novel’, Dusklands (1974). While the primary endeavour of the early criticism on Coetzee’s work seemingly geared itself to locating his fiction within a set of defined borders and boundaries offered by the certitude of specific positions,44 contemporary criticism of his fiction tends to recognize the limitations that such projects necessarily impose. So, with writers such as David Attwell, Sue Kossew, Dominic Head, and, more recently, Derek Attridge, one can witness a shift in the treatment of Coetzee’s novels.45 In each case, the importance of Coetzee’s fiction is no longer found in its specificity relative to the ‘real’ of an already known geographical location or pre-existent political situation, but is, rather, found in the way in which it ‘opens out’ on to something else. It is a split in scholarship that results from the two possible approaches to the ambiguity that Coetzee purposefully employs in his fiction.46 Either one refuses Coet44

I am thinking here of work such as Teresa Dovey, The Novels of J.M. Coetzee (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1988), which claims Coetzee’s novels are “inhabited” by a Lacanian thematic; David Ward, Chronicles of Darkness (London: Routledge, 1989), which clearly places Coetzee’s novels in the domain of the postmodern; and, Susan VanZanten Gallagher, A Story of South Africa: J.M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1991), which situates Coetzee’s novels in terms of the political environment of South Africa. 45 See David Attwell, J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley: U of California P , 1993); Sue Kossew, Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J.M. Coetzee and André Brink (Cross / Cultures 27; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1996); Dominic Head, J.M. Coetzee (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1997); and Derek Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2004). 46 Concerning the ambiguity that resides in Coetzee’s fiction, Derek Attridge talks of his initial “bafflement” upon finishing Coetzee’s Dusklands. It was a bafflement, Attridge writes, that arose because Dusklands was “unlike any other fiction emanating from South Africa” (Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, ix). As with Coetzee’s other fiction, Dusklands exhibits elements seemingly drawn from the



Introduction

xxix

zee’s ambiguity for the negative effect that it ‘must’ have on the immediate political concerns of a people – such is the basis of Abdul JanMohamed’s and James Booth’s criticism (among others)47 – or, as in the present book, one embraces the quality of the ambiguity in and for itself. It is an ambiguity born of Coetzee’s sincere refusal to “subsume the novel under history, to read novels as […] imaginative investigations of real historical forces and real historical circumstances.”48 It is a refusal that allows Coetzee to produce a political literature that goes beyond the historical present, to offer “a more lasting type of relevance […] something more substantial”49 than those texts that are produced for “today’s readers.”50 That is to say, the aura of ambiguity that conditions Coetzee’s fiction is also the means by which it opens out on to a people “yet-to-come.”51 Thus, one finds in the resonance of ambiguity that emanates from Coetzee’s novels an environment of invention: the invention of a ‘new’ people who connect to the political text in the revolutionary instant; and also, importantly, the invention of new social forces and powers to describe such movement. Under the condition of such creativity, literature ceases to be “a static, diverse practices of realism, modernism, and poststructuralism. Moreover, it is both a contemporary and an historical novel, and, perhaps, both too local and too global in its reach. 47 See Abdul JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (Autumn 1985): 59–87. JanMohamed writes that “Waiting for the Barbarians [...] refused to acknowledge its historical sources or to make any allusion to the specific barbarism of the apartheid regime [...]. In its studied refusal to accept historical responsibility, this novel […] attempts to mystify the imperial endeavour” (73). See also James Booth, Susheila Nasta, Prabhu Guptara, John Thieme & Charles Steele, “X V I I I : African, Caribbean, Indian, Australian, and Canadian Literature in English,” in The Year’s Work in English Studies, vol. 65 (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1984): 665–761. Booth claims that Coetzee has “absolutely no conception of any positive values outside his own ‘civilisation’ ” (699). 48 J.M. Coetzee, “The Novel Today,” Upstream 6.1 (1988): 2. 49 T. Kai Norris Easton, “Text and Hinterland: J.M. Coetzee and the South African Novel,” Journal of South African Studies 21.4 (December 1995): 587–88. 50 Richard Begam, “An Interview with J.M. Coetzee,” Contemporary Literature 33.3 (Fall 1992): 430. 51 See J.M. Coetzee, “Interview V,” in Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1992): 243–50. The phrase Coetzee uses is the “not yet emerged” (246).

xxx

ON REPRESENTATION



self-sufficient, formal entity which, while it may be a product of historical processes and the occasion for various interpretations across time, is itself a fixed linguistic structure without a temporal or performative dimension.”52 Rather, literature becomes dynamic. “Literature happens”53 – it exists always and only as an ‘event’, as a moment of transformation that draws together the writer and reader in ever newer, ever more unexpected ways.54 Given this context, what Attridge describes as the event of transformation between writer and reader is what the present study describes as – referring to my earlier discussion – the moment of a becoming. It is the zone of indistinction that precedes the encounter between the two multiplicities of the Self and the Other. And it is also, therefore, always already a non-personal and historically incomplete force of a Life of immanence – a non-possession, which can only be accessed by the writer. As such, this book shares Attridge’s determination that “otherness [...] is at stake in every literary work,”55 since otherness is clearly implicit in every encounter with literature. Coetzee’s fiction can do no other than offer entry to the forces of Life through his writing and thereby write the Other. It is an entry to Life that cannot be achieved through the act of representing personal experience or the forging of common existence (since this would merely constitute a mimicking of Life), but only by demonstrating the intense experience proposed by the operation of haecceities drawn from the milieux of intensity from which the Other (as well as the Self) cannot be separated. The distinction to be made, then, is between the “staging”56 implicit in fiction (demonstration) and the theorization implicit in a book (representation). Since it is certain that fiction need not argue a position, it is free to offer an infinity of positions that need not respond to or invoke any correspondence to the “real.”57 In other words, it is the dynamic environment of creation and move52

Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, 10. J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, xii. 54 While Attridge introduces his study of Coetzee’s fiction with the idea of “literature as event,” the fullest discussion of this conceptualization can be read in Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004). 55 Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, 12. 56 J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, xii. 57 I take Derek Attridge’s and Emmanuel Levinas’s point that this circumstance should result in some kind of ethical responsibility towards the Other. However, rather than formalizing such an ethical responsibility, this book holds that there is an implicit 53



Introduction

xxxi

ment of Coetzee’s novels that ensures that every subject, including the Other, is most profitably considered in terms of the intensive reality of a body that is conditioned by its constant communion with the forces of an ever-changing world. Thus, Coetzee writes the Body without Organs, and in so doing exposes the relational forces that stage the Other. This, then, marks this book’s departure not only from the work of Attridge but also from the other contemporary studies of Coetzee’s fiction. While Attridge proposes that Coetzee makes the force of such otherness felt by drawing on certain aspects of modernism in order to make “representational methods convey with sufficient force and richness [...] an alterity that makes demands on us […] by the very intensity of its unignorable being-there,”58 I contend that Coetzee’s novels render visible the force of the alterity of the Other by ultimately transgressing the threshold of representation. Coetzee, namely, does not stage the Other by forcing representational methods to register otherness but, rather, by collapsing the certainty and gravity claimed by such representational methods as totalization, homogenization, essentialism, staticization, identification, and so on. As such, I claim only to interrogate Coetzee’s style of writing – the way in which Coetzee tests the limits and finally goes beyond the authoritarian regime of representation by tracing the resistance of the Other to the dominant discursive arrangements it moves through (discourses of capture and subjectification, where subjectification assumes the meaning of both the organization of the individual into a subject and the domination of that subject) and the non-personal forces of Life that inevitably condition its ontological character. With the recognition of such conditioning non-personal forces of Life operating on the Other, formalized solely in terms of the unstructured intensive reality of the Body without Organs, the present study stakes its claim to originality by considering Coetzee’s fiction through the intersection of the work of Gilles Deleuze and postcolonial theory. While to date there has been no full-length study that explores the synthesis of Deleuze’s critical writings and the theories adopted by cultural studies – save for Peter Hallward’s tentative step in this direction with his questioning of the role of the singular and specific in postcolonial writing in Absolutely Postcolonial – the aim of this book is demonstration of an ‘aura’ of ethical responsibility emanating from the novels of Coetzee. It is an ethics that instructs a moment of pause at the instant in which revolutionary potential begins to tend towards becoming fascist. 58 Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, 13.

xxxii

ON REPRESENTATION



to offer a Deleuzian approach to Coetzee’s fiction that subsequently facilitates a reappraisal of the postcolonial critical concern with the colonized subject. Given that there is limited critical material of a Deleuzian nature in cultural studies, I necessarily engage with the work of Coetzee by keeping in mind the production of theoretically and critically original readings – readings that are consequently without sustained reference to, although mindful of, the critical field of scholarship that has arisen around Coetzee’s oeuvre. As such, this book derives a significant amount of its terminology and critical perspective directly from the work of Deleuze. It is an inheritance that promises genuinely new insights into the thematic areas that make up the main elements of this book – the body, space, and language. Indeed, it is Coetzee’s treatment of these three sites that, I argue, best exemplify his staging of the Other and his associated challenge to the discourses of domination. However, the manner in which I have chosen to present these sites is to a certain extent arbitrary. While it is certain that these themes stretch across Coetzee’s writing, I have chosen to engage each of the sites of the body, space, and language through reference to just one of Coetzee’s novels. As such, the site of the body forms the focus of my reading of Dusklands, while my reading of Waiting for the Barbarians concentrates on the idea of space. The final central chapter is a reading of Coetzee’s Foe that focuses on the operation of language. In each case, the choice of novel is determined by a belief that it is in that specific work that one finds Coetzee’s fullest account of the above sites. So, it is by happy accident, rather than considered intention, that the novels appear in chronological order here. My intention, namely, in organizing Coetzee’s novels in this way is merely to bring these sites together in order to present a broader consideration of the way in which Coetzee manages to test the limits of representation, more broadly than the study of a single thematic concern would permit. Accordingly, Chapter One begins by reading Coetzee’s first novel, Dusklands, in terms of the thematic concern of the body. The claim this chapter makes is that Coetzee writes the physical body as an unorganized structure that grants access to the site of the ‘real’, which is always already beyond representation, since experiences of the body are necessarily pre-linguistic. By elucidating the Stoic framework of the novel, it becomes apparent that Coetzee ascribes to the physical body the ability to interrupt the practices of the Ideational. The result of such an arrangement of the corporeal and incorporeal orders of the world is a ‘split subject’ that can posit itself as an ‘I’ only to the extent that it encourages the self to represent to itself the activity of its own



Introduction

xxxiii

thought. In other words, the subject is made to think of itself as an event that is constituted by the recognition of an Other that also resides in the Self. Ultimately, such a condition of the subject leads to an over-articulation of the Self, a practice of over-determination through the proliferation of the use of the personal pronoun, so that the reader is presented with ‘a’ subject that exhibits an infinite range of possible articulated identities. Such creative excess through over-articulation, it is claimed, refuses the reductionist drive of representation; and as the chapter goes on to develop the link between the body and the real through the practice of masochism, Deleuze’s concept of the Body without Organs enters into sharp focus. Given such a context, the intensive reality of the body – the Body without Organs – proposes a mode of resistance to dominant (colonial) discourses that can only be described in terms of its movement: a movement, that is, which always already repels acts of capture and subjectification while simultaneously reclaiming the value of the personal body through its authoritative production of meaning. The second chapter engages with Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians by way of geography. Here, I argue that Coetzee’s text not only offers two combative images of space but also two dynamic conceptualizations and operations of space, which ultimately constitute the ontological character of the subject. On the one hand is a representational treatment of space, formalized through the position of the State, which always seeks to construct knowledge of the world by an invasive programme of organization, delineation, and limitation; and on the other hand is a non-representational treatment of space found in the perpetual movement of the nomad, which refuses to condition the earth in terms of the strict striation proposed by holding objects and origins in ascendancy over the forces of the earth. Rather, the earth is thought of in terms of a ‘smooth space’ that holds a limitless potential for movement, and as such can only be described by tracing the trajectory of haecceities – intensities, thresholds, qualities, affects, and percepts – that induce the process of becoming. While it would seem that such an organization of combative images inevitably instructs a strong dualism formed by consideration of the machinations of territorialization (State position) and non-territorialization (nomadic movement), it is characteristic of the ambiguity which Coetzee embraces that such a structure is complex. In the character of the Magistrate, Coetzee writes a becoming-nomad who draws these two fundamentally different means of knowing the world together. The implication, then, is that subjectivity is constructed by a highly personal negotiation of the non-personal forces of striation and the forces of the earth.

ON REPRESENTATION

xxxiv



Chapter Three draws on the findings of the first two chapters in order to offer a sustained critique of perhaps the most significant site of representation’s claim to totality in knowledge-formation – language. I centre this discussion in Coetzee’s Foe – a rewriting of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a novel Coetzee views as “unabashed propaganda for the extension of British mercantile power in the New World and the establishment of new British colonies.”59 As such, Foe seems to sit quite happily within the framework of a postcolonial strategy to rewrite the European literary record. Of course, to rewrite the European literary record is to enter into a certain kind of resistance to colonial discourse. In order to formulate this kind of resistance, this chapter details the way in which Coetzee offers a conceptualization of solitude that is formulated through a complex exposition of the role of the Other in a dynamic world of movement and possibility. It is an exploration of solitude that ultimately allows Cruso and Friday to assume a fundamentally different position in relation to each other (and the island) from the one presented in Defoe’s novel. Through such a revision of the concept of solitude, Coetzee exposes a force of exhaustion that conditions the narrative of Foe. Following this, I argue that language is itself also subject to Coetzee’s treatment of exhaustion, and one is thus presented with a text that uses language in a capacity that transcends its orthodox and simply representational quality. Thus, this chapter traces Coetzee’s attempt to push language to its very limit in terms of what it can represent and the kinds of meaning it retains as it enters into a non-representative state. The conclusion returns to the theoretical debate that frames this book. However, it is the distinction between the possibility of writing the Other and the possibility of theorizing the Other that marks the specific concern of the conclusion. Here, the book assumes a self-reflexive character in order to interrogate its own ability to ‘capture’ the alterity of the Other as staged by Coetzee.



59

J.M. Coetzee, “Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe,” in Stranger Shores: Essays

1986–1999 (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001): 24.

Chapter One 

The Body of Dusklands

The father cannot be a benign father until his sons have knelt before his wand. The plotting of the sons against the father must cease. They must kneel with hearts bathed in obedience. When the sons know obedience they will be able to sleep. — J.M. Coetzee, Dusklands

U

N D E R T H E E N T R Y ‘ V I C T O R Y ’ in a report, commissioned by the American Department of Defense, on the potential success of various propaganda techniques in the theatre of Vietnam, Eugene Dawn writes of the need to crush native insurrection. It is a call for a state of total domination based on both interpretations of the term ‘subjectification’. First, it is a call for irresistible violence to be meted out to the body of the Vietnamese population in order to quell every kind of resistance; secondly, it is a call to condition the Vietnamese body by bringing it into the American/ Western ‘family’ of the self-same – to transform the incomprehensible Other into the known value of ‘subject’ by means of identification through representation: i.e. to become “the sons” of imperialism. But Dawn recognizes that such a project of domination is destined to remain incomplete until “the sons know obedience.”1 It is an acknowledgement of the significance of both knowledge-formation in the process of subjectification and the role that the internalization of such knowledge plays in determining the ontological character of the subjectified. For what Dawn contends is that it is only once the

1

J.M. Coetzee, Dusklands (1974; London: Vintage, 1998): 27. Unless otherwise indicated, further page references are in the main text.

2

ON REPRESENTATION



Other is conditioned as a subject: i.e. constructed by an authoritative totalizing representation that offers a means of identification to be internalized and reprojected, that the West can begin to control and thereby quell native opposition to its imperial project. Thus, the process of subjectification is carried out on the body – the body becomes that which is identified and that which is conditioned by a representation that operates most commonly under the guise of ‘scientific’ or ‘objective’ knowledge. However, even though Dawn suggests this course of action for the American military, the epiphany that accompanies his proposal resonates with a certain sense of uneasiness – “we are all somebody’s sons” (27). The implication of this dramatic statement is clear; like the Vietnamese Other, Dawn, too, must kneel in obedience before the “wand of the father” – the symbol of power, of law and punishment. It is the moment in which Dawn understands the element of the Other that inheres in the multiplicity of his Self, and it is therefore the moment in which Dawn understands, for the first time, the process of subjectification that is necessarily operating upon his body. In being simultaneously Subject and Other to the process of subjectification, Dawn recognizes a split in the constitution of his Self: If you are moved by the courage of those who have taken up arms, look into your heart: an honest eye will see that it is not your best self which is moved. The self which is moved is treacherous. It craves to kneel before the slave, to wash the leper’s sores. The dark self strives toward humiliation and turmoil, the bright self toward obedience and order. The dark self sickens the bright self with doubts and qualms. I know. It is his poison which is eating me. (27)

The split acknowledges a certain divergence – of Dawn-as-subject, which Dawn thinks of as “the bright self,” and Dawn-as-Other, “the dark self.” It is Dawn’s negotiation of this divergence that becomes the concern of his narrative, for the negotiation and attempted reconciliation of a recognized split between the Self-as-Other and the Self-as-subject inevitably leads to a condition of trauma. Now, a most interesting point of entry into Dawn’s condition of trauma, which also illuminates the complex structure of Dusklands as a whole, is found in Walter Davis’s contemporary account of the passage of trauma and recovery.2 Davis explains that trauma “occurs when something 2

See Walter A. Davis, “Death’s Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche After 911,” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 8.1 (Spring 2003): 127–32. Although Davis is guilty of rather severe acts of homogenization and essentialism in



The Body of Dusklands

3

shatters the ego and its defences.”3 Such a shattering of the ego occurred when the images of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York found their conceptual correlate in the “forgotten, ungrieved, vigorously denied”4 images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Davis argues, such images “spoke” directly to collective memories that had been repressed for almost six decades. And in the moment of connection between images of contemporary events and repressed images of past events, the American psyche fractured, with the ego torn in two – one bound to the horror of the attacks of 9/11 and the other cast into the nightmare Hiroshima landscape of post-nuclear discharge. So, for Davis, any kind of recovery from this state of trauma is bound to the painful retrieval of such repressed memories, which form a “hidden history” that recalls a collective anxiety that ultimately threatens complete psychic dissolution. Eugene Dawn’s position is notably similar: Dawn’s ego is shattered and torn in two by the disavowal of an Other that becomes a recognizable constitutive element of his Self. In a contest over the authoritative determination of the Self (identity), the rebellious Other and the organizing principles of subjectification enter into combat upon Dawn’s body. Traumatic confrontation, Davis proposes, can be quieted only after the ego has been reunified. In the context of the 9/11 attacks, Davis offers two possible routes for such reunification: either the subject can try to internalize eventsin the light of a long-deferred mourning process for the trauma caused by bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which suggests that the subject can only understand the meaning of its actions against the Other after it has seen the same deed done to itself; or the subject can react externally by evacuating all inner conflict in favour of an unlimited projection of self-same ideals and a sustained affirmation of superiority. The first possibility for the reunification of the ego depends on introspection and self-interrogation in association with

discussing “the American psyche,” the link that he develops between contemporary and historical consciousness is the force of the argument that I wish to highlight. I am thus willing to borrow Davis’s phrasing and employ it, with the proviso that it be treated in terms of Spivak’s “strategic essentialism.” For a discussion of the latter, see Angela McRobbie, “Strategies of Vigilance: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” Block, 10 (1985): 9–13; and, of course, Spivak’s In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1988). 3 Davis, “Death’s Dream Kingdom,” 127. 4 Death’s Dream Kingdom,” 127.

4

ON REPRESENTATION



an equal and contemporaneous Other, while the second possibility is a reassertion of the Self by positioning the Other as an object of contempt to be obliterated. For Davis, as well as for the Coetzee of Dusklands, the subject always repeats the second possibility of unification, which at its heart conditions a moment of weakness into a confirmation of omnipotent power through an excess of violence: in the Bomb the manic triad – triumph, contempt, and dismissal – celebrates its Sabbath. Metapsychologically, the transformation is complete and can be schematized thus: abjection reversed, blockage overcome, aggression unbound.5

Postulated in terms of a return, an instance of revenge for when the subject finds itself the object of the Other’s wrath (Pearl Harbour), the “narcissistic grandiosity” found in the “phallic mirror of the mushroom cloud”6 is a moment of jouissance founded on the Bomb’s power to compel submission through an aggression that feels righteous. The similarities to Jacobus Coetzee’s narrative cannot go without mention. Yet, the images of the suffering Hottentot and Bushman in the narrative of Jacobus Coetzee seems to subvert the moment of self-assertion gained through such acts of violence. Indeed, it is such images that provide the momentum for a memory of conscience, a disquieting collective memory that necessarily insists that the past has not yet been fully constituted. Of key importance here is the recognition that the meaning of an historical event is only revealed through an associated contemporary event, and that the meaning of a contemporary event is only revealed through an associated historical event. In other words, the initial force of every event necessarily remains potential, incomplete, awaiting a return of the same. Without the return of the same, the traumatized subject repeats the psychological operation of a refusal – a refusal to internalize the meaning of events. Thus, the events of Eugene Dawn’s narrative only find their meaning once Dawn (or the reader) understands their correlative in the events that constitute the narrative of Jacobus Coetzee, while the events of Jacobus Coetzee’s narrative only find their meaning once Jacobus (or the reader) understands their correlative in the events that constitute the narrative of Eugene Dawn.

5 6

Davis, “Death’s Dream Kingdom,” 129. “Death’s Dream Kingdom,” 129.



The Body of Dusklands

5

Thus, the programme of recovery, of the reunification of the shattered ego of the traumatized subject, seems surprisingly simple. Rather than evacuate inner conflict through the projection of a superior Self, one must internalize the meaning of deeds done to Others. However, it is clear that the ability to internalize the meaning of the event is far from a simple procedure. Davis’s programme for the process of internalization for the American subject proceeds along the following lines: one must root out everything in American culture that weds the subject to the collective psyche that “dropped the Bomb”; and one must also rid oneself of the notion that admitting error ensures renewal through the ability of the American “protean self” to reclaim the ideals that make American history the story of inevitable progress. Following such a cleansing ritual, Davis’s programme of recovery takes on a dynamic quality: one must sustain and deepen the condition of trauma as the destiny of the historical subject who knows that recovery “can only begin when one is willing to plumb the depths of a collective disorder.”7 It is just such a project of plumbing the depths of a collective disorder that Dusklands engages in. Clearly, the divergent narratives of Dusklands work together to produce an environment of collective disorder. Each narrative, namely, not only reflects certain concerns of the other – for example, the parallel narrative concern with the projection of imperial power – but also penetrates the Other by exerting a certain force of composition, a force aligned with Davis’s description of the temporal production of meaning. Yet, the play of parallelism and penetration discloses more than the modalities of the relationship between Dawn’s narrative and that of Jacobus; it also reveals the genetic relationship of the complex chronology that persists in Dusklands. If each narrative asserts an integral force in the composition of the other, then one cannot allocate a logical temporal sequence to the narratives. This means that neither Dawn’s nor Jacobus’s narrative can claim to be the “originary” moment of Dusklands. Rather, one is encouraged to decompose a linear, causal chronology in favour of a temporality that is seen to perpetually oscillate between past and future. Thus, as Jacobus’s narrative enters and elucidates Dawn’s narrative, one witnesses the past entering the future – a movement that is, of course, reciprocated. It is a temporal complicity that is manifested in the notable sequence in which the narratives appear in Dusklands; where the reader begins with Dawn’s twentieth-century account and proceeds

7

Davis, “Death’s Dream Kingdom,” 130.

6

ON REPRESENTATION



forward through the novel by moving backwards in time, to the eighteenthcentury testimony of Jacobus. However, in Dawn’s attempt to sustain and deepen his condition of trauma in order to reconcile his Self-as-Other with his Self-as-subject, one can trace something other than Dawn’s necessary reliance on the narrative of Jacobus Coetzee as the means of entering such a collective disorder. It is in Dawn’s practice of sustaining and deepening his condition of trauma that one can also trace the alterity of the Other as it inevitably seeks to resist the conditioning structures that the process of subjectification employs to render Dawn’s body knowable.

Structures of Subjectification: The Enlightenment “The Vietnam report,” Dawn writes, “has been composed facing east into the rising sun and in a mood of poignant regret (poindre, to pierce) that I am rooted in the evening-lands” (6). That is to say, the Vietnam report has been written in a specific political and social climate – from within the context of decolonization. Yet, as Don Maclennan observes, “evening-lands,” bearing echoes of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols,8 signifies more than the pending conclusion to the process of colonial expansionism; it also signifies a fundamental misgiving about the assertion of a scientific rationality that coincided with the colonial enterprise.9 Dawn thus situates himself in the “Dusklands” of a closed teleology of colonization, and from this position is afforded the ability to look back at the colonial enterprise as a holistic, totalized process. However, as he does so, it is not only the process of colonial expansionism that becomes a closed system but also history itself. In this immersion in rationality, the “New Life Project” to which Dawn contributes purports to be more than a report that discusses the potential successes of various propaganda techniques in the theatre of Vietnam; it also becomes an attempt to propose a beyond to the acknowledged end of history. Attwell concludes that the Project can do little

8

See Don Maclennan, “Dusklands,” in Perspectives on South African Fiction, ed. Sarah Christie, Geoffrey Hutchings & Don Maclennan (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1980): 71–82. 9 David Attwell, J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993): 37–38.



The Body of Dusklands

7

except hope to restore the crumbling edifice of colonial expansionism.10 Since the Project has the same ideological imperatives and dialectical relationships present in colonialism, it is predestined to sit within the closed teleological system of colonial expansionism, thus likewise succumbing to the “end of history.” Thus, Dawn’s position is once again duplicitous. On the one hand, he must recognize a certain colonial history in an attempt to contribute to the American imperial project (Dawn’s “bright self”); on the other, he knows that any ‘new’ engagement with the imperial enterprise is merely the final expression of the end of all history (Dawn’s “dark self”). It is this realization, the end of all history, that necessarily leads Dawn to a further conclusion. If he is indeed in the dusklands of history, he must also be in the dusklands of the structures that facilitated the coherence – the meaning – of history. Dawn must therefore draw a parallel between the end of history and the end of the rational efficiency that underscored the philosophical principles of the Enlightenment. Indeed, if one is to register fully the allegory of names present in the opening sections of Dusklands, one is prompted to consider: Of what is Eugene the ‘dawn’? Certainly, Dawn cannot announce a new history. Rather, he announces his condition of trauma, as a result of his engagement in a project that demands the overturning of the philosophical principles of the Enlightenment so they are no longer privileged. Dawn signals the painful intention of going beyond history from within the confines of history itself; to transgress the conceptual limitations of contemporary structured methodologies that necessarily withhold access to meaning, since they always already circulate above the real.11 For it is certain that the meaning of such structures is what concerns Dawn. “I know the world,” he announces, but “I am curious to know the truth, very curious” (11). Dawn thereby expresses a need to go beyond the structures that provide ‘factual’ knowledge in order to arrive at the meaning of such structures. In terms of Davis’s discussion of trauma and recovery, Dawn searches for a resolution to his traumatic position of transgression by attempting to internalize the meaning of the structural predicates of the Enlightenment project. 10

Attwell, J.M. Coetzee, 38. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, tr. David Carr (Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, 1936; Evanston I L : Northwestern U P , 1970). 11

8

ON REPRESENTATION



Indeed, Dawn’s condition of trauma is inescapable, given that the philosophical principles of the Enlightenment inform every moment of knowledgeformation. As Edmund Husserl writes, the Enlightenment promised a superior survey of the world […] unfettered by myth and the whole tradition: universal knowledge, absolutely free from prejudice, of the world and man, ultimately recognising in the world its inherent reason and teleology and its highest principle, God.12

The aim of the Enlightenment was thus never to replace myth and tradition blindly but, rather, to build knowledge out of independent enquiry and criticism that contested such an intuitive knowledge on every level.13 At the root of such independent enquiry was the singular principle of reason that, as Kant explained in the Critique of Pure Reason, claimed to be the faculty of “deducing the particular from the general.”14 Given such an ability to organize the world, reason became a totalizing methodological imperative that assumed the condition of a true and genuine value in and of itself. Thus, with the growth of structures that professed to generate knowledge of the world, the object of inquiry became confused with the very methodologies employed to understand it. This confused environment merely doubled the force of estrangement exerted on the human subject. Since man was cast in the image of God, it was thought that he shared the same autonomous relationship with the world; he stood like God, external to the system of the world and therefore separated from the realm of subjective experience.15 While structural methodologies claimed access to the truth of the world through objective enquiry, truth through subjective induction became a problematical and subversive claim. Certainly, any insistence on the value of subjective experience could only have corrupted the methodological imperative of reason, which operated not only without such recourse to human experience but also by actively mistrusting the world of the senses. As Nietzsche notes, man “was advised to draw in

12

Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 7. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 8. 14 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781), quoted in Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. John Cumming (Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente, 1944, rev. 1969; New York: Seabury, 1972): 81. 15 See Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1984): 6–13. 13



The Body of Dusklands

9

his senses, turtle fashion, to cease all intercourse with earthly things.”16 The growth of rationality signalled the death of value and truth gained through subjective experience, and ultimately promised the death of the body in favour of an extension of the value of the Ideational. In locating such value in the Ideational above the corporeal, one is, of course, returned to Descartes and his formulation of the mind/ body duality. For Descartes, the body is a simple machine that is directed by the superior element of the mind. Indeed, Descartes considered the mind so superior to the body that the condition of human existence was to be fixed upon the essential dominance of the ability to think. Such ability, guided by the principle of reason, became the recurring factor in the Enlightenment endeavour. According to Kant, the Enlightenment encouraged “man’s emergence from his selfincurred immaturity,” an immaturity that described the “laziness and cowardice” that prevented each man from managing his own affairs and reaching an autonomous understanding of the world.17 Thus, the principle of rationality in the Enlightenment marked the European progression from a lazy culture, content with superstition and tradition as modes of understanding the world, to a civilization built by a thinking subject that stood beyond the corporeal world and constructed knowledge through systems of representation dependent on formal methodologies. Importantly, this is the collective disorder of representation and imperialism that Dawn attempts to transgress – the imperialism of a reason that ceaselessly replaces ‘the real’ with a ‘truth’ that can only be derived from its imposed structured methodologies. Dawn is certainly aware that the connection of such truth to the real can only be artificial. In demonstrating such awareness, Dawn compromises the structure of history by calling into question the veracity of its claim to truth. Dawn notes that truth in this instance is only an issue of committing speculation to paper: “the truth of my Vietnam formulations already begins to shimmer […] through the neat ranks of script. When these are transposed into print their authority will be binding” (14–15). Dawn’s charge is that the moment of authority lies not in the integrity of the content of a proposition but, rather, in the form of its expression. Thus, history as a purposeful process resulting 16

Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Anti-Christ” (1888), in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. & tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954): 581. 17 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’,” in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, tr. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1970): 54.

10

ON REPRESENTATION



from the coalescence of divine guidance and human initiative is only different from the written “violent novelties on the walls of lavatories” (14) because it appears on the page. Yet, history must share the “true reason” of all writing. If, as Dawn observes, “we write on lavatory walls to abase ourselves before them,” then the book of history must instruct the same response – our “abasement before the page” (14). Here the moment of debasement described by Dawn refers back to Kant’s condition of immaturity. The ‘enlightened’ thinking subject suffers humiliation because of an inability to arrive at an “autonomous understanding of the world.” Every act of reading or writing that subscribes to a higher methodology enters into a masochistic relationship with the “hard master” of print. Indeed, every act results in the humiliation of the subject as the latter defers the ability to discern meaning to the authoritarian regime of print, and regresses to a state of pre-enlightened cowardice. The question for Dawn becomes how to avoid such humiliation. Part of the answer lies in a writing that is not already contained by a structured methodology: Mythography, my present specialism, is an open field like philosophy or criticism because it has not yet found a methodology to lose itself forever in the mazes of. When McGraw–Hill brings out the first textbook of mythography, I will move on. (31)

Here, Dawn demonstrates his challenge to the tenets of the Enlightenment agenda. Not only does mythography operate without a structured methodology; as a discipline it refuses to subscribe to the proposed “superior survey of the world,” since it values the very thing that reason seeks to devalue – myth. Indeed, it is only by opposing such tenets that Dawn can claim a true act of authorship and, more importantly, claim to have “merely told the truth” (31). However, it is certain that Dawn cannot escape all of the limiting principles of the Enlightenment. For example, one need only note Dawn’s continued privileging of the Ideational above the corporeal as an echo of the privileging witnessed in Descartes. In the opening paragraph of his narrative, Dawn proclaims: “I am a thinker, a creative person, one not without value to the world” (1). One can only conclude that, just as Dawn writes from inside history to problematize it, he similarly writes from within the conceptual limitations of the Enlightenment project to achieve the same end. Dawn must thus be content to share Husserl’s project of revealing the constructed and negative condition of the naturalized, unquestioned belief in the value of scientific rationalism, rather than offering an alternative through its complete overhaul.



The Body of Dusklands

11

Husserl goes on to state that science can only master the infinity of its subject through the infinities of method, and can only master the infinities of method “by means of a technical thought and activity which are empty of meaning.”18 Similarly, Dawn invokes scientific knowledge only to state that its value is compromised because of an inability to conceptualize the “true meaning” of its deployment: P R O P -12 is a soil poison, a dramatic poison which, washed into the

soil, attacks the bonds in dark silicates and deposits a topskin of grey ashy grit. Why have we discontinued P R O P -12? Why did we use it only on the lands of resettled communities? Until we reveal to ourselves and revel in the true meaning of our acts we will go on suffering the double penalty of guilt and ineffectualness. (29)

It is the search for such “true meaning,” the meaning in which Davis locates the passage of both trauma and recovery of the American psyche, that stretches across both narratives of Dusklands and ultimately reduces to the singular activity of attempting to reclaim one’s own true being from the limiting principles of rationality. It is a search that requires Dawn to question the Self’s presence to the Self, a moment of self-analysis that is “not of one’s self but of the self, of the soul.”19 Whereas Dawn talks of the universal attempt of the West to determine itself in contrast to the Vietnamese Other,20 Jacobus Coetzee reflects on his individual act of self-determination, “Through their deaths I, who after they had expelled me had wandered the desert like a pallid symbol, again asserted my reality” (106). Both narratives demonstrate that the search for true meaning is predicated on a struggle for existence. Therefore, it is no coincidence that both narratives pivot on Dawn’s ontological inquiry, “I have high hopes of finding whose fault I am” (49). Of course, it is precisely this kind of self-analytical question that stands outside of the remit of scientific rationality, and it is precisely this kind of question that insists on the reassertion of subjective value and truth in an excessively scientific world.

18

Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 51. J.M. Coetzee, “Interview V,” 244. 20 He writes: “we landed on the shores of Vietnam clutching our arms and pleading for someone to stand up without flinching to these probes of reality: if you will prove yourself, we shouted, you will prove us too” (17). 19

12

ON REPRESENTATION



Yet, one must acknowledge that both Dawn and Jacobus, in their attempts to reclaim a ‘true being’ in answer to their shared ontological inquiry, confess a certain failure. Dawn drops his project to discover the site of “true meaning” through tracing the relations between the “fine distinctions of the world,” and returns to the world of substantives that cannot in themselves elucidate meaning: It has all come down to this (I ease myself in and tell over the clear, functional words): my bed, my window, my door, my walls, my room. These words I love. I sit them on my lap to burnish and fondle […] This simple place is for men in need of simplicity. (43)

“This simple place” is the psychiatric institution in which Dawn finds himself after the attempted murder of his son in a Californian hotel room. It is within the confines of this institution that Dawn willingly refers the ability to discern the meaning of his crime to the psychiatrists who similarly refer meaning to the structured methodology of psychoanalysis. Similarly, Jacobus refers the meaning of his massacre of his deserted Hottentot servants to the judgment of God and the operation of history: All are guilty, without exception. I include the Hottentots. Who knows for what unimaginable crimes of the spirit they died, through me? God’s judgement is just, irreprehensible, and incomprehensible. His mercy pays no heed to merit. I am a tool in the hands of history. (106)

In such a manner, both men eventually return to the defining principles of Enlightenment philosophy because of an inability to continue an examination of the Self. However, Dawn’s and Jacobus’s failure to reach a sustained account of the condition of their own true being through their respective acts of selfdetermination reveals a contradiction in the Enlightenment project. Kant’s claim to an enlightened individuality premised on the axiom sapere aude21 is inevitably compromised by the necessity to defer meaning to an organizing structure. That is to say, the act of thinking for yourself is always already caught in a process of referral: from the inadequate individual to the authoritative structure. Thus, authoritative structures such as Christianity, history, and psychoanalysis all serve to think for the subject, to offer access to a ‘true

21

Immanuel Kant uses the motto sapere aude to define the meaning of the Enlightenment. The motto comes from Horace and translates as “think for yourself.” See Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’.”



The Body of Dusklands

13

meaning’ of the world that is wholly independent of individual subjective experience. Once again the subject must abase himself before the more authoritative structure as he is cast into a masochistic relationship to play the submissive counter to the dominance of structured methodologies. In such a context, the authoritative structures do not so much offer access to meaning as seek to formalize a relationship of dominance that ultimately conditions the subject. By exerting an organizational force drawing on a revitalized veracity of value and judgement, each structure acts as a function of designation: i.e. a conduit for the operation of subjectification and subjugation. Given such an environment, Kant’s mantle of individualism would indeed seem to be “a poisoned shirt” (32). With the failure of both Dawn and Jacobus to offer continued resistance to such processes of subjectification and subjugation, one is left to consider whether Dusklands merely narrates the pessimistic fortune of all those engaged in the activities that a modernity predicated on reason facilitates. Although it is tempting to draw such a conclusion, it would seem that Dusklands aims at something quite different. Dawn makes a certain enigmatic remark and the reader is given hope that the ‘imperialism of reason’ can be resisted – “There are significances in these stories that pour out of me, but I am tired. They may be clues” (32). The reader is charged to to find the clues to a sustainable resistance to the naturalized subjectifying and subjugating imperialism of reason and its structured methodologies. In doing so, it would seem that one must begin an apparently contradictory endeavour: the reassertion of the value of subjective experience in the production of meaning – in the context of a resistance to every attempt to organize the subject.

Bodies, Incorporeals, and Becoming One might begin the negotiation of such a reassertion of subjective value and truth in knowledge-formation by widening the “fault” (or “fault line”) acknowledged by Dawn – “I have high hopes of finding whose fault I am” (49). The “fault,” or “crack,” runs between the corporeal and incorporeal ascendancies of the text; and it is within this fault line that Dawn locates his ontological query. In an operation that reflects the Stoic separation of the corporeal and incorporeal orders of the world, the world of Dusklands is cloven in two along the fracture caused by the seemingly divergent geo-temporal-historico relationship of its constitutive narratives. Thus, one reads each constitutive narrative of Dusklands as a specific account of colonialism: Dawn’s narrative read

14

ON REPRESENTATION



as a colonialism predicated on the ascendancy of the incorporeal, while Jacobus’s is read in terms of its genetic concern with the ascendancy of the corporeal. However, when the narratives are taken together under the banner of Dusklands they unite to reveal the double character of the ‘singular’ process of colonialism. On the one side is the prophet of the colonial enterprise, on the other, the knight-errant. The distinction to be made is between “he who preaches the Idea and he who crosses space.”22 Thus, Eugene Dawn stands as the prophet of colonialism: I see things and have a duty toward history that cannot wait […]. I sit in libraries and see things. I am in an honourable line of bookish men who have sat in libraries and had visions of great clarity. I name no names. You must listen. I speak with the voice of things to come. (29)

And Jacobus Coetzee stands as the knight-errant: In a life without rules I could explode to the four corners of the universe. Doggedly I set one foot in front of the other […]. A thin figment of my earlier fat self, I plodded on, searching diligently for food and drink, devouring the miles, rubbing my skin with the body fat of dead beasts against a sun which humoured me to pink and red but would not bring me to brown. (99)

However, the elucidation of such a distinction is not the final extension of the Stoic structure of Dusklands. Indeed, the most important element of Stoic thought is not the maintenance of a strict duality between the corporeal and incorporeal orders of the world but, rather, is the way in which these orders fundamentally interact with each other. In this way, Stoicism is an attempt to discern the world as a dynamic environment of constant movement and change, an environment of ‘becoming’; and it is this dynamism that Dusklands inherits. In Stoic thought, then, there are two orders of ‘entities’ within the world. The first order concerns “bodies,” giving rise to the claim that Stoic thought could best be described as a philosophy of materialism.23 Bodies are, perhaps, most easily thought of as those tangible structures of the world. So, for 22

Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 115. Brad Inwood and Lloyd Gerson argue that the continuity and novelty of Stoic thought is best defined by three main ‘-isms’ – materialism, empiricism, and naturalism. See Inwood & Gerson, “Introduction” to Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings, ed. & tr. Inwood & Gerson (Indianapolis I N : Hackett, 1997): xv. 23



The Body of Dusklands

15

example, the book, the house, and the human are alike in the sense that each is tangible (material). However, beyond this sensory determination, bodies are most commonly defined by the three properties that Diogenes outlines as the operative criteria of the category of the body: a “body is that which is extended in three [dimensions], length, breadth, and depth.”24 In addition to this understanding of bodies premised on physical qualities, Simplicius identifies a further three “primary categories.” The category of “substrates” recognizes a genetic relationship between bodies, while the categories of “dispositions” and “relative dispositions” facilitate a definition of bodies in accordance with certain “states of affairs” (of themselves, or with respect to something else).25 One is thus encouraged to move a discussion of bodies away from a simple consideration of physical qualities and towards a more profitable focus on tensions, actions, and states of affair. That is to say, one must focus on the dynamic function of bodies. As David Hahm notes, while the dynamic function of bodies never directly appears in the primary sources as a theoretical definition, it has always been presupposed that the most distinctive aspect of a body is precisely its capacity to act or to be acted upon.26 However, such an economy of exchange between bodies only becomes distinctive once it is placed in the schema of Stoic orthodoxy. Marcelo Boeri writes: among the ancient authors there was a wide acceptance that the Stoics were champions of the idea that the corporeal is the essential hallmark of the existent. According to the Stoic orthodoxy, something is actually real if it is corporeal.27

Boeri might also have recalled Arius Didymus here, and noted that, similarly, only the ‘present’ is existent.28 In any case, it is clear that two axiomatics must be brought to any discussion of bodies in Stoic thought. First, only bodies exist in space; and, secondly, only the present exists in time. One can justly conclude, then, that bodies only exist in the present and the capacity of such

24

Inwood & Gerson, Hellenistic Philosophy, 133. Hellenistic Philosophy, 170. 26 David E. Hahm, The Origins of Stoic Cosmology (Columbus: Ohio State U P , 1977). 27 Marcelo Boeri, “The Stoics on Bodies and Incorporeals,” Review of Metaphysics, 54.4 (June 2001): 726. 28 Inwood & Gerson, Hellenistic Philosophy, 167. 25

16

ON REPRESENTATION



bodies to act or to be acted upon can, similarly, only occur in the present. Of course, this description of bodies that inhabit the strict and, ultimately, limited time of the present insists on a severe cleavage of the causal relationship. Logically, if a body cannot ‘escape’ the grip of the present, then something quite different must complete the chain of cause and effect. After all, what one is being asked to consider is a world in which “all bodies are causes – causes in relation to each other and for each other.”29 And that insists on a world in which a body cannot be described as the effect of another body. What, then, of effects? In Stoic thought, effects are ascribed to the second order of entities, which is the ‘incorporeal’. Sextus Empiricus notes four kinds of such incorporeal entity: void, place, time, and lekta (‘things said’ or ‘sayables’).30 While these incorporeal entities lack the qualities necessary to be classified as existent according to strict Stoic orthodoxy, each entity nevertheless qualifies as a ‘something’. Indeed, such incorporeal entities are considered to have a minimum condition of being, which places them in a strange position that cannot be described as either ‘real’ or ‘unreal’. Rather, one is encouraged to say that incorporeal entities ‘subsist’ or ‘inhere’ in reality. Therefore, there is an intricate relationship between bodies and incorporeals, and Aetius uses the quotidian object of the jar to exemplify this association. For Aetius, the incorporeal entity of void is best understood as the privation of all bodies, and as such describes the state of an empty jar. Contrary to this state of affairs is place, which describes the full jar or that which is wholly occupied by a body; and between these two extremities is the partly filled jar, or that which is partly occupied by a body, which is called space.31 Following this, one might recall Diogenes’ description of a three-dimensional body in a slightly different light, because it is no longer possible to posit a body that is independent of the incorporeal entities that ultimately condition it. Importantly, this means that “singular objects cannot exist unless they are in the

29

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, tr. Mark Lester & Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia U P , 1990): 4. 30 The term “lekton” (ó) has proved difficult to translate. See Michael Frede, “The Stoic Notion of a lekton,” in Language, ed. Stephen Everson (Companions to Ancient Thought 3; Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1994). Given this, I have chosen to continue to use the original word, but reproduced in an anglicized script. The reader must thus be aware of the distinction between the singular form of the word (lekton) and the plural (lekta). 31 Inwood & Gerson, Hellenistic Philosophy, 167.



The Body of Dusklands

17

domain of a specifically defined spatial relationship,”32 and such a spatial relationship can only be described by negotiating the economy of the incorporeal entities of void and place. In addition to the acknowledgement of the spatial relationship between bodies and incorporeals, one must also acknowledge the importance of the temporal relationship in the construction of ‘objective reality’. And it is here that one finds the chief concern of Hellenistic philosophy: the balance between continuity and change. Returning to Aetius’s jar, one might note that this description of different states remains static. That is to say, Aetius’s description of the jar cannot describe the operation of filling the jar. However, if one were to pour liquid into such a jar one would note a transition of states: the void of the empty jar would become space as a liquid began to enter it, and this in turn would become place once the jar became full. Of course, such an operation cannot occur, and cannot be described, unless the possible combinations of incorporeals and bodies are acknowledged through the factors of ‘before’ (empty jar) and ‘after’ (full jar). Thus, as Boeri argues, it is only through the temporal that one can establish a relation of causality and thereby distinguish between cause and effect.33 This observation introduces a subtle distinction into the discussion of temporality. Arius Didymus notably claims that only the present exists, and follows this by stating that “the past and future subsist.”34 Now, given that only bodies are existent, this claim seems to be problematical, for how can we theorize the present in the condition of incorporeality if only the past and future are said to subsist? Interestingly, the germ of a response to such a question can be found in the pages of Plutarch. Describing the Stoic conceptualization of time, Plutarch writes that ‘now’ is not any part of the present but is, rather, divided between the future and the past.35 As such, one is introduced to a time that is doubled: first, in the sense that one must entertain an account of time that describes only the living present of corporeal objects; and, secondly, in the sense that one must entertain an account of time that is infinitely divisible into past and future. This leads Deleuze to note the seemingly contradictory nature of time – “only the present exists in time and absorbs the past and the future. But only the past and future inhere in time and 32

Boeri, “The Stoics on Bodies and Incorporeals,” 731. “The Stoics on Bodies and Incorporeals,” 731. 34 Inwood & Gerson, Hellenistic Philosophy, 167. 35 Hellenistic Philosophy, 166. 33

18

ON REPRESENTATION



divide each present infinitely.”36 Yet, it is important to note that such a conceptualization of time does not necessarily insist on a schism informing a strong dualism. Rather, this curious conceptualization arranges time in terms of a complementary function that operates simultaneously between past, present, and future. For Chrysippus, the seeming paradox invoked by rendering time as an incorporeal entity, constituted by the two separate movements of the ‘present’ (existent) and the ‘past and future’ (subsistent), is avoided if one accepts that no time is wholly present.37 It is tempting to read this statement as a simple refusal of Arius Didymus’s observation, and indeed one can. But such a reading does not bring out the somewhat more important quality of Chrysippus’s assertion of the role that lekta (‘sayables’) play in the construction of the corporeal, bodily, world. Indeed, it can be argued that it is not the relationship between present, past, and future that produces the seeming paradox of competing conceptualizations of temporality, but the very act of conceptualizing and expressing such concepts. On this matter, Boeri writes: For the Stoics there is a crucial difference between saying something and uttering it: sounds are uttered but things or the states of affairs, which indeed are sayables, are said. It is obvious […] that for the Stoics sounds are uttered and meaningful things are said but also that if a corporeal thing X is something to a human, it must be meaningful, and X is significant if and only if it is analysed through the logos.38

The distinction to be made here is between ‘uttered sounds’ and ‘things said’. While the act of uttering undoubtedly possesses the same physical qualities as the act of saying (i.e. the physical disturbance of air caused by the vibration of the vocal cords), only the act of saying is believed to encompass the operation of sense. According to Stoic thought, what is ultimately said through word, proposition or argument, even if such propositions or arguments are false, can only be a register of the significant intention of a particular kind of discourse. And within the determination of ‘significant intention’ circulates a certain logical-linguistic rationalism that formulates an important relationship between the ‘objective’ world and the ability to know and express it. Thus, when Chrysippus declares that no time is wholly present, he necessarily en-

36

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 5. Frede, “The Stoic Notion of a lekton,” 117–18. 38 Boeri, “The Stoics on Bodies and Incorporeals,” 732. 37



The Body of Dusklands

19

courages one to consider the subtle distinctions involved in the conceptualization of terms such as ‘to be present’, ‘to be there’, and ‘to be real’, and subsequently reveals the implicit role of the lekton in constituting the material world. Accordingly, it can be argued that one can only interrogate the bodily world after first realizing the incorporeal world. That is to say, it is only after organizing the spatio-temporal and linguistic determinations of corporeal objects that one can begin to form a coherent account of not only individual objects but also the way in which such objects interact with other objects. However, in terms of accounting for causation, where only bodies are causes (and only in relation to other causes) and only incorporeal entities are effects, there is a certain risk of creating a strong dualism. According to Stoic orthodoxy, one is encouraged to distinguish between bodies as the only ‘real’ entities in the world and incorporeals as the mere ‘accident’ (the effect) of two bodies operating on each other. In terms of this arrangement, incorporeals become a construct of logic, or dialectic, and like bodies they can never claim an independent moment of existence. Given this, it is tempting to think of incorporeals as Proclus describes them, as things that merely subsist in the mind. Whether this claim is true or not, and it would seem that there are no primary sources to support this conclusion,39 one might justly argue that it is only through the intellectual ability to posit the function of incorporeals that one can begin to engage in a coherent critique of a changing (dynamic) world. To exemplify this claim, one can consider how a conditional predicate instructs a dynamic account of the world. Arius Didymus writes: “walking ‘exists for me’ when I am walking, but when I am reclining or sitting it does not ‘exist for me’.”40 Here one is directed to consider the more complex features of the event rather than a simple object in the world. The question at hand centres on how one can account for something that appears to alternate between the states of existence and non-existence. In answer to this question, one must first determine whether walking only exists in the faculty of the mind (as would be claimed by Proclus), or whether it assumes a different condition located in the materially real. Therefore, one must consider the operation of the lekton as the means of understanding and expressing the event of walking, and the quality of inherence shared by incorporeal entities (since 39

Anthony Long & David Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1987), vol. 1: 304. 40 Inwood & Gerson, Hellenistic Philosophy, 167.

20

ON REPRESENTATION



clearly the event of ‘walking’ can be ascribed to the realm of the incorporeal, as it possesses none of the attributes necessary for it to be defined as a body). Regardless of the conclusions one can arrive at regarding this paradoxical reading of an event, such questions about the changing states of things can only be raised if incorporeals are introduced into the corporeal world. Indeed, the world of the real, which is to say the world of corporeal bodies, remains static until it is provided with locomotive properties engendered by incorporeals. If, then, the most distinctive aspect of a body is its capacity to act or to be acted upon, the most distinctive aspect of an incorporeal is its capacity to describe such change. Following this, one can conclude that incorporeals should not be thought of in terms of an ‘inferior reality’ but, rather, as essential ‘entities’ that enter into a reciprocal dependency, so that one order of entity cannot exist without the other. Given this, one might be led to wonder what is more intimate or essential to bodies than the events touching on them.41 Importantly, it is only through events such as pouring, walking, or cutting that one can describe the dynamic quality of the world. Indeed, without such events the world remains a purely static body, a world that, although existent, is significantly devoid of a way of being. Writing on this causal relationship between bodies and incorporeals in his reconstruction of Stoic thought, Émile Bréhier comments: When the scalpel cuts the flesh, the first body produces upon the second not a new property but a new attribute, that of being cut. The attribute does not designate any real quality […], it is, to the contrary, always expressed by the verb, which means that it is not a being, but a way of being […] This way of being finds itself somehow at the limit, at the surface of being, the nature of which it is not able to change: it is, in fact, neither active nor passive, for passivity would presuppose a corporeal nature which undergoes an action. It is purely and simply a result, or an effect which is not to be classified among beings.42

Bréhier invites the reader to conceptualize the distinction between bodies and incorporeals within the linguistic. The incorporeal event is identified as the verb, while the static structures of material bodies are best thought of as substantives or adjectives. However, hidden in the ‘event’ of the verb is a dualism that yields a certain paradox. Given that, according to Stoic thought, incor41

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 5. Émile Bréhier, La Théorie des incorporels dans l’ancien stoïcisme (1928), quoted in Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 5. 42



The Body of Dusklands

21

poreal events cannot occupy the present, one is prompted to conclude that such events can only describe a way of being that inhabits the past or future. To return to Bréhier’s example of a scalpel cutting flesh: the event of cutting does not express ‘a state of affairs’ of a body located in the present but, rather, invokes what has already been cut (past) and what is yet to be cut (future). The moment at which a cut is made can only be described through the divergent temporalities of past and future. That is to say, the moment of cutting perpetually eludes the present (that which is happening) and becomes contingent on two competing directions of logic: the anterior and the posterior. Of course, “good sense,” as Deleuze observes, “affirms that in all things there is a determinable sense or direction (sens).”43 Nevertheless, the paradox of the incorporeal event rests on what appear to be the affirmation of several directions of logic (sense) at any one time. As the verbal event remains infinitely divisible, it can only describe a present activity by invoking both the past and the future simultaneously. For Deleuze, this is the simultaneity of a becoming.44 In a Stoic world of the measurable and limited assignations of singular objects, the notion of becoming describes that which never rests, the discharge of the immeasurable and unlimited effects that always seek to go beyond the last assignation; the superlative that can never reach its logical conclusion, since, if it did, it would no longer be a becoming but rather “would be so.”45 Concerning the linguistic element of this equation, one must ask whether such an operation of becoming therefore accounts for two kinds of languages that are ‘internal’ to a singular standard language, since it would seem that one language seeks to designate and order the world by naming (nouns), and the other language introduces movement by constantly escaping the corporeal description of the world (verbs). Indeed, it is tempting to argue that language demonstrates precisely this kind of schizophrenic relationship to itself. In order to ascertain the identity of something, language fixes the limits of possibility through the substantives and adjectives that Dawn finds himself returning to in the psychiatric institution. However, it also seeks to transcend these limits by offering the unlimited becoming of the verb. In this arrangement, language produces a contradictory account of identity that oscillates between the bodily and the incorporeal; the fixed assignation of qualities and that which is always already transcended. The consequence of this operation for 43

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 1. The Logic of Sense, 1. 45 The Logic of Sense, 2. 44

22

ON REPRESENTATION



personal identity is dramatic, since the paradox of an unlimited becoming informs the paradox of an infinite identity, where the fixed designation of a proper name is eternally contested through an irresolvable dialogue conducted between two divergent directions of sense – past and future; active and passive; cause and effect; “too much and not enough.”46 And this is the condition in which the reader finds Dawn.

Infinite Identity More significant to me […] I now find, is the problem of names. Like so many people of an intellectual cast, I am a specialist in relations rather than names. Think of the songbirds of the forest. With each other, as well as with other phenomena, they have rather simple relationships. Therefore one tends to ignore songbirds in favour of things that enter into more complex relationships. This is an example of the unfortunate tyranny of method over subject. (36)

Dawn continues: “It would be a healthy corrective to learn the names of the songbirds” (36), but the sentiment is fundamentally misplaced. While Stoic thought describes a dynamic world of corporeal elements in a state of perpetual change, the designatory function of identity serves only to draw the process of such movement to a condition of ‘rest’. Indeed, it is clear that the operation of identification attenuates the rich complexity of exchange and interaction between bodies. This relationship of exchange and interaction is thus forsaken for the ability to name and to ascribe an object to a conceptual category. It would then seem that Dawn’s “tyranny of method over subject” is not revealed by the study of relationships per se but, rather, by a particular kind of relationship. The distinction to be made is between ‘relationship as process’ and the ‘relationship of names’. The distinction is subtle yet important. Zygmunt Bauman invokes such a relationship of names in his writing on the Holocaust: We suspect (even if we refuse to admit it) that the Holocaust could merely have uncovered another face of the same modern society whose other, so familiar, face we so admire. And that the two faces are perfectly comfortably attached to the same body.47

46 47

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 2–3. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Oxford: Polity, 1989): 7.



The Body of Dusklands

23

What is revealed here is an incomplete modernity, one that necessarily develops “unevenly.” Bauman’s statement is something that recalls an observation made by Arno Mayer in the early 1980s – that modernity progresses through a condition of imbalance.48 Now, it is clear that the same principles of rational efficiency inscribed in the philosophical structure of the Enlightenment made possible great technological advances that facilitated both emancipatory ends and a fascist doctrine of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Because of this curious constitution, Bauman writes, quite correctly, that every element of the Holocaust can be conceived of as ‘normal’, to the extent that it was “fully in keeping with everything we know about our civilisation, its guiding spirit, its priorities, its immanent vision of the world.”49 Importantly, Bauman’s critique is not intended as an indictment of modernity or its associated technologies. Instead, it is a diagrammatic observation of the divergent demeanours of modernity: the coextensive ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarous’ demeanours that subsist in the project of rationality itself. Similarly, Fredric Jameson has written on the imbalanced condition of the colonial project. He claims that, while one can trace the economic imperative of the colonial project, the project itself nevertheless attempts to mask this drive of its operation.50 And, indeed, the effacement of economic motive in the narrative of Jacobus Coetzee does not pass without comment in discussions of Coetzee’s novel.51 However, in addition to exposing such economic effacement in the colonial enterprise, Jameson argues that a type of social effacement also occurs. It is claimed that the populace of the colonial power exhibit a wilful refusal to acknowledge the colonies, the violence, or the exploitation on which their metropolitan prosperity is founded. It is an allegation that one can direct against Marilyn’s and her friends’ reactions to Dawn’s involvement with Vietnam. Clearly, there is a desire to evade any deep interrogation of the violence involved in America’s imperial project. Dawn reflects on the attitude of his estranged partner, Marilyn:

48

See Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (London: Croom Helm, 1981). 49 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 8. 50 Fredric Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” Critical Inquiry 29.4 (Summer 2003): 695–718. 51 Peter Knox–Shaw, “Dusklands: A Metaphysics of Violence” (1982), Commonwealth Novel in English 2.1 (January 1983): 68.

24

ON REPRESENTATION



She lives in the hope that what her friends call my psychic brutalisation will end with the end of the war and the Vietnam Project, that reinsertion into civilisation will tame and eventually humanise me […] Marilyn and her friends believe that everyone who approaches the innermost mechanism of the war suffers a vision of horror which depraves him utterly. (9–10)

While Marilyn and her friends are perhaps aware of the brutality associated with the Vietnam conflict, it is too facilely contained in, and by, the phrase of “psychic brutalisation.” Marilyn and her friends remain strictly removed from close contact with such violence. What enables this kind of epistemological slippage is the fact that “the truth of metropolitan experience is not visible in the daily life of the metropolis itself.”52 Indeed, it is only the disguised image of a lived colonial experience that rises to the surface of contemporary metropolitan experience when it becomes a matter of private importance. Therefore, the ‘truth’ of colonial violence and exploitation exists beyond the immediate space of America, in the “Other-lands” of Vietnam. Such an observation is reducible to an epistemological distance that is doubled: between the dominant and the dominated, in the act of concealing the significance of the Other through submersion in colonial discourse and representation; and between the artist and the everyday citizen, as knowledge of the imperial objective is rendered abstract and enigmatic. Hence, both Bauman’s and Jameson’s accounts disclose the operational criteria of an imbalanced structure in terms of a relationship of names: between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘barbarous’ demeanours of rationality; between the ‘dominant’ and the ‘dominated’ in the colonial encounter; and between the ‘artistic’ and the ‘quotidian’ in the metropolitan experience of colonialism. Indeed, in both instances the fluid economy of the imbalanced world is predicated on the affirmation of such binary opposites. However, given that binary opposites seek to convey a particular kind of separation, to claim a certain ‘difference’ from each other, it is important to note that such terms only condition a formal relationship once one term announces a stable identity. That is to say, the affirmation of binary opposites rests on the designation of fixed, rigid identities. The actual difference between the terms is negated and ultimately excluded from the construction of a relationship that is wholly dependent on a difference that is reduced to the ‘same’. Moreover, if the notion of imbalance is predicated on a certain movement (since a condition of im52

Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” 700.



The Body of Dusklands

25

balance can never claim the petrified state of balance), then the moment in which one term announces a stable identity necessarily brings this movement to an end. Now, because the act of identification requires a dynamic world to become static, the fluid economy of imbalance becomes punctuated with instances of pause or rest. The economy of imbalance maintained by a relationship of names, then, proceeds by ‘fits and starts’ in a manner not far far removed from that of the digital signal. However, it is important to note that the relationship interrogated as process is not organized through the affirmation of binary opposites. Rather, the affirmation of the relationship is extended through the condition of divergence itself. In such a context, two contradictory elements are affirmed through their difference rather than through their individual identities. That is to say, one no longer identifies two contrary elements by a reduction to the ‘same’ but, rather, by affirming the distance that relates one element to the other. The distance between the terms is no longer a distance to be overcome; it is instead a distance to be embraced as a positive characteristic of the relationship of the terms.53 Such a position arises in Nietzsche’s discussion of health. In Ecce Homo we are encouraged to continually shift perspective: To see healthier concepts and values in the perspective of the sick, and conversely, to look down out of the abundance and self-assurance of a rich life to behold the secret doings of the instinct of decadence […] Now this gift is mine, now I have the gift of reversing perspectives.54

Here, Nietzsche demonstrates that sickness is a ‘living’ perspective of health, and health a living perspective of sickness. In short, both terms provide a vantage from which one can initiate an exploration or examination of the other. The divergence between terms is no longer an exclusive principle, predicated on binary opposites, but is itself an affirmation of the singular condition of difference. It is this affirmation of divergence that allows Nietzsche to reflect as follows: The perfect lightness and levity, even exuberance of the spirit, which The Dawn reflects, are quite compatible in my case not only with the deepest physiological weakness, but even with excessive pain. Amid the tortures that go with an uninterrupted three-day migraine and 53

See Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 172–76. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (1888), excerpt in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. & tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954): 658–59. 54

26

ON REPRESENTATION



agonising phlegm-wretching, I possessed a dialectician’s clarity par excellence, and very cold bloodedly thought through matters for which, in healthier states, I am not enough of a climber, not subtle, not cold enough.55

Simply put, there can be no contradictory sense to Nietzsche’s claim to an “exuberance of spirit” amidst the “tortures that go with a three-day migraine,” since health is not built upon the strong binary opposites of “sickness” and “well-being.” Indeed, health assumes an entirely different status here. To talk of a certain condition of health is necessarily to evoke the Idea of health in consideration of a realization of states of being: Nietzsche talks of an exuberance of spirit, the tortures of migraines, and agonizing retching. While each verbal event instructs the realization of a certain state of affairs, each verbal event, more importantly, also becomes an element in the continuum of a condition of health. ‘Health’ thus ceases to be a concept and becomes a-conceptual; it becomes an event in itself that simply draws from the continuum of all possible effectuations (states of affairs), placing them into a “pre-individual, non-personal” space.56 So, although the event of health certainly shares a strong relationship with the subject that expresses it, it nonetheless situates itself in a space beyond the subject, in the space of the ‘virtual’, to act as the copula between the incorporeal realm of the Ideational and the corporeal realm of actualized states of affairs. In Dusklands, the copula between the incorporeal and corporeal is shared by both narratives and is found in the ‘event’ of pain. Much like Nietzsche’s copula of the health-event, part of the continuum of the pain-event is an actualized state of affairs in which pain itself is not registered by the contemplative mind. However, wherever discussion of the body is raised in the narratives of Dusklands it is always informed by a moment of pain. Therefore, while Dawn contemplates the creative intricacies of his introduction to the New Life project in the “Harry S. Truman” library, his body is forgotten: both silent and silenced in terms of the narrative concern. Yet, in the moment at which Dawn experiences pain, his focus is uncontrollably diverted to the condition of his body: But my body betrays me. I read, my face starts to lose its life, a stabbing begins in my head, then, as I beat through gales of yawns to fix

55 56

Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 657–58. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 52.



The Body of Dusklands

27

my weeping eyes on the page, my back begins to petrify in the scholar’s hook. The ropes of muscle that spread from the spine curl in suckers around my neck, over my clavicles, under my armpits, across my chest. Tendrils creep down legs and arms. Clamped round my body this parasite starfish dies in rictus. Its tentacles grow brittle. I straighten my back and hear bands creak. (7)

Similarly, Jacobus’s ideational musings which constitute his ‘sermon’ on the metaphysical property of the gun are framed by descriptions of his pained body: I imagined the swelling in my buttock as a bulb shooting pustular roots into my fertile flesh. It had grown sensitive to pressure, but to gentle finger-stroking it still yielded a pleasant itch. Thus I was not quite alone. (83)

Indeed, it is the pain that encourages Dawn to wish true the Cartesian separation of the mind and body. He writes, “My spirit should soar into the endless interior distances, but dragging it back, alas, is this tyrant body” (32). But if there is a ‘truth’ to be discerned here it is in the realization that the body and the mind are inextricably linked, since they are invoked simultaneously and coextensively through an act of subjectivity instructed by the painevent.57 However, that Dawn reflects on “this tyrant body” exposes a very particular conception of the body, one that recognizes the independent external reactions of the body. The body becomes an autonomous structure, an individuated creature – a “parasite starfish,” as Dawn complains – acting independently of the mind that contemplates it. Under such conditions, the mind can only consider itself by first bearing witness to the autonomous actions of a body that expresses the affects of pain. Given the context of Stoic thought, such a conception of the body is further complicated. Since Stoicism maintains that only bodies are existent, each account becomes a description of the interruption of the Ideational through the assertion of the corporeally real. The pain-event affirms the difference between the corporeality of the real and the incorporeality of the Idea, and therefore provides a point of access to the ontological condition of an “own true being” that both Dawn and Jacobus search for. With strong echoes of Antonin Artaud’s insistence that corporeal pain is the only means to insert

57

Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 124.

28

ON REPRESENTATION



sensation and therefore sense into existence,58 the pain-event becomes a moment of valued subjective experience that is to be enjoyed upon its arrival. Therefore, when Dawn is being subdued by the police in the Californian hotel room after stabbing his son he comments, “Now I am beginning to be hurt. Now someone is really beginning to hurt me. Amazing” (43). Similarly, Jacobus seeks the ‘reward’ of self-assurance in pain. He recalls: I awoke the next morning ravenously hungry. The fever and weakness had gone, all that was left was the carbuncle. I tested it by gently pressing and was rewarded with an acute access of pain and a slow detumescence. (86)

In such an arrangement, the body is much more than the Cartesian machine piloted by the mind, and also more than an autonomous “animal” that acts independently of the mind. The body is itself ‘split’, so that what is ultimately described is a body within a body. Dawn writes: I am unfortunately unable to carry on creative thought in the library. My creative spasm comes only in the early hours of the morning when the enemy in my body is too sleepy to throw up walls against the forays of my brain. (6)

Such a conception of the split body extends into the consideration of the ‘self’, since it is necessary for “the individual to grasp herself as an event; and grasp the event actualized within her as another individual grafted onto her.”59 In considering such a “communication of events,” one might recall Arthur Rimbaud’s poetic formula, “I is an other.”60 Much like Rimbaud’s account, the subject-as-event rests on the divergence between the ‘self’ and the ‘I’ that regards it. Importantly, however, by demonstrating that such divergence is affirmed through the determining affect of time, the Self-as-Other announces the “infinite identity” of the subject. Deleuze notes that Descartes’s dictum “I think therefore I am” contains a certain conceptual problem.61 If an undetermined existence (“I am”) is only to

58

Helga Finter, “Antonin Artaud and the Impossible Theatre: The Legacy of the Theatre of Cruelty,” T D R : The Drama Review 41.4/T150 (Winter 1997): 15–40. 59 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 178. 60 Arthur Rimbaud, “Letter to Georges Izambard” (1871), in Complete Works, ed. & tr. Paul Schmidt (New York: Harper & Row, 1975): 101. 61 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 29.



The Body of Dusklands

29

be determined by a thinking substance (“a thing that thinks”), then “how can the determination apply to the undetermined if we cannot say under what form it is ‘determinable’?”62 For Deleuze, the only conclusion to be reached is that existence is determinable in time, which is to say through the ‘form’ of time. Under the condition that the ‘self’ is a receptive or passive entity that can only experience change in time, the ‘I’ becomes the active, logicallinguistic determination of existence, which asserts the ‘self’ only insofar as it encourages the ‘self’ to “represent to itself the activity of its own thought.”63 Deleuze accordingly observes that the ‘self’ and ‘I’ are always already separated by the line of time, which relates them to each other only under the condition of a fundamental difference. Thus, individual existence can never be determined in terms of an activity or spontaneity of being, but must always be expressed in terms of a passive ‘self’. That is to say, the self represents to itself the ‘I’ of determination as an Other that affects it. This, of course, is precisely the basis of the ‘trick’ that Dawn must play on himself in order to abscond with his son from his relationship with Marilyn: I had only to say to myself, enunciating the words clearly: ‘You will pack a bag. You will take your son’s hand and walk out of the house. You will cash a check. You will leave town’. Then I did these things. (36)

In such an arrangement, the Self is clearly passive, submitting to the determinations of the authoritative Other. Thus, for Dawn the trace of the Other follows the line of the internal “voice of the father” (24) that conditions his own actions. In a doubling of the schizophrenic condition of language extrapolated from Stoic thought, Dawn becomes his own father (and also, therefore, his own son) in a movement that is reminiscent of Artaud’s declaration, “I, Antonin Artaud, am my son, my father, my mother, my self.”64 Dawn embraces the moment of divergence in the constitution of Self and in doing so necessarily recognizes himself as an event that straddles genealogies and ultimately refuses to assume the same identity – he announces variously throughout his narrative: “I am a thinker,” “I am my old self,” “I am a hero of resis62

Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 29. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 29. 64 Antonin Artaud, “Here Lies,” in Artaud Anthology, tr. F. Teri Wehn & Jack Hirschman (San Francisco: City Lights, 1965): 238. 63

30

ON REPRESENTATION



tance.” The forces that constitute Dawn’s ‘life’ thus pull in two divergent directions, towards the past (as father) and towards the future (as son), in “an endless discourse of character, the self reading the self to the self in all infinity” (38). From this position one need no longer wait, as Stéphane Mallarmé suggests, for the end of an existence before one acknowledges Life,65 the self-as-event ensures that Dawn’s life is “torn open and kept open” for inspection:66 My mouth opens, I am aware, if that is awareness, of two cold parted slabs that must be lips, and of a hole that must be the mouth itself, and of a thing, the tongue […] Also, something which I usually think of as my consciousness is shooting backwards, at a geometrically accelerating pace, according to a certain formula, out of the back of my head, and I am not sure I will be able to stay with it. (41–42)

Through the paralyzing condition of autoscopia, Dawn is drawn ‘outside’ of himself to witness the event of his own life. And, the event responds by laying bare the destruction of the self in a literal act of self-destruction brought about by the precession of an infinite identity and the collapse of reason. Under such conditions, Dawn tends towards “becoming-imperceptible”67 in the final extension of the logic of infinite identity. But he does not disappear; his body and the pain-event give evidence of his condition of being. Dawn’s is an existence of the suffering of the body, a suffering that “takes authority in the production of its own undeniable power.”68

Simulacra and Simulation I have Herzog and Voss, two reputable books, at my elbow, and I spend many analytic hours puzzling out the tricks which their authors perform to give to their monologues […] the air of a real world through the looking-glass. (37)

65

Mallarmé writes famously, “Tel qu’en Lui-même enfin l’éternité le change.” See Stéphane Mallarmé, “Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe,” in Poésies (1899), ed. Lloyd James Austin (Paris: Gallimard, 1989): 99. 66 Smith, “Introduction–‘A Life of Pure Immanence’,” xxix. 67 See Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 233–309. 68 Coetzee, “Interview V,” 248.



The Body of Dusklands

31

Dawn’s condition of infinite identity is only intensified by his continuing interrogation of the real. When he talks of Saul Bellow’s Herzog and Patrick White’s Voss a certain parallelism between interiority and exteriority is invoked. While Bellow’s Moses undertakes an internal journey into the self, White’s Voss penetrates the open expanse of the Australian continent. It would seem that the reader is provided with another model for a tentative negotiation of the two narratives of Dusklands. Simply, Dawn explores human interiority through the Ideational and ‘becomes’ Moses, while Jacobus explores the Western Cape of South Africa and ‘becomes’ Voss. Yet, it is important to note again that such a parallelism is not described by the relationship of names but, rather, by the intimate condition of the event. That is to say, the terms ‘interiority’ and ‘exteriority’ merely stand as two possible expressions of the continuum of all possible effectuations. Thus, the reader is once more encouraged to reflect on the simultaneity of the event, and in so doing is again drawn to consider not only the becoming-Moses of Dawn but also the ways in which he becomes Voss. Of course, given that such an operation must also be applied to Jacobus, the most efficient consideration of such ‘becomings’ can be reduced to a singular examination – the way in which Dawn and Jacobus become each other across the distance forged by two hundred years. However, such an examination is destined to remain incomplete unless it embraces the force that accompanies Dawn’s passing reference to Lewis Carroll. Dawn’s search for “the air of the real world through the looking-glass” rests, namely, on an instructive parallelism between the real and the fake fashioned through the pursuit of the true in the fictional. Deleuze writes that Lewis Carroll “provided the first great account, the first great mise en scène of the paradoxes of sense.”69 While Dawn does not write an explicit treatise on the paradoxes of sense, his admiration for the intimate relationship between truth and falsity, his search for the true in the fictional, is ultimately predicated on just such an observation. Importantly, the proposition that the false can in some way disclose the true necessarily has implications for the way in which one can think about the connection between sense and nonsense. While one can undoubtedly trace the often-noted relationship between sense and truth in the constitution of meaning, it is the less-noted relationships that can be extrapolated from this set of possibilities that become most important – the relationships between falsehood and sense, nonsense and truth. For one can no 69

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, xiii.

32

ON REPRESENTATION



longer continue to claim that meaning is only formed by the determination of the ‘logically true’. Indeed, one must acknowledge that meaning can also be formed through the divergent trajectories of the false. There is, of course, a conceptual problem with accepting this revised account of the fundamental and intimate relationship between the false and the logically true, since it is claimed that knowledge is formed by a certain level of access to the “truth of the real.” For example, Walter Benjamin’s economy of the shock of a “direct, lived experience” and the aura of a retrospective “privileged, inward experience” describes just such a belief in the role of the real in knowledge-formation.70 Yet, as Alice Jardine notes, it is certain that the relationship between experience of the real and knowledge of the real can no longer be regarded in terms of Benjamin’s reflective, natural, or unmediated condition.71 Rather, all knowledge is always already the product of an ideological and culturally sensitive experience of the world. For Deleuze, the loss of innocence that accompanies the loss of belief in objective and naturalized determinations – which simultaneously claim access to the ‘real’, the revelation of the side of ‘right’, and the moral ground upon which claims of the most ‘just’ are made72 – marks the era of ‘anti-Platonism’ – an era that can be characterized by a fundamental misgiving about the structural predicates of representation and its associated concern with the formal distinction between essence and appearance (model and copy). Deleuze argues that, since truth eludes the very structure that it facilitates, it is no longer a determination of the true that is important in knowledge-formation but, rather, the operation of the Pseudos, which is to say “the highest power of the false.”73 The distinction to be made, then, is not between representation’s system of the archetypal model and its copies, but between the archetypal model and the force engendered in the ‘false’ copy of the simulacrum. Given that the simulacrum maintains such a close association with falsehood, it can only offer a perversion of the ‘real’ world. Since the project of representation, which facilitates the proliferation of simulacra, needs to maintain the façade of an intimate relationship with the real, such a perversion of 70

See Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, tr. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973). 71 See Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configuration of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1985). 72 Jardine, Gynesis, 146. 73 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 263.



The Body of Dusklands

33

the ‘real’ world is obviously untenable. Therefore, representation seeks to distance itself from the simulacrum. It attempts to submerge the simulacrum by privileging the site of the good or true copy. The simulacrum, as the bad or false copy, is suppressed in the process of knowledge-formation. However, the attempt of representation to fully contain the ‘precession of simulacra’ is predestined to fail because simulacra always already climb from the depths to the surface to “insinuate themselves everywhere.”74 This is the force that accompanies Eugene Dawn’s reference to Lewis Carroll, and ultimately conditions the ‘becoming’ of Dawn and Jacobus. It is the force of inversion demonstrated by the ascendance of the simulacrum to the position of privilege denied by representation. This inversion, namely, describes both Dawn’s search for “the air of the real world through the looking-glass” and its parallel, Jacobus Coetzee’s suspicion that the explorer’s “hammer” will crack reality open to reveal only a fiction: How then […] can the hammer-wielder who seeks to penetrate the heart of the universe be sure that there exist any interiors? Are they not perhaps fictions, these lures of interiors for rape which the universes uses to draw out its explorers? (78)

While representation seeks to absorb the fiction of the simulacrum, Jacobus realizes that it is, instead, the fiction of the simulacrum that conditions and “envelops the whole edifice of representation.”75 Jacobus can no longer regard the simulacrum as simply a corrupted copy of a copy. Rather, it assumes a different order. The simulacrum offers its own fictions and myths of the world; indeed, it offers its own world. While copies proceed through claiming a certain resemblance to the originary model – the world, in this instance – Jacobus’s simulacrum moves to supplant the originary model itself. This is not to say that interiors simply cease to exist for Jacobus because they are considered fictions but, rather, that such interiors stand instead of the representation of a ‘real’ world. For Jacobus, every interior has become hyperreal. Indeed, in a sense, every interior has become more than real, since Jacobus must insert himself into the fiction (into the interior) in order to produce meaning. In this subjective act of production, every interior necessarily becomes a simulation of the real, as every interior circulates above, and in dis74

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 257. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, tr. Shelia Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1994): 6. 75

34

ON REPRESENTATION



tinction to, the semblance of reality. So, Jacobus must experiment with the ways in which he invests his subjectivity in the proliferation of series that defines the unlimited signification of the simulacrum in order to impose order on, and thereby discern a meaning in, the hyperreality of the interior: Here I was, free to initiate myself into the desert. I yodelled, I growled, I hissed, I roared, I screamed, I clucked, I whistled; I danced, I stamped, I grovelled, I spun; I sat on the earth, I spat on the earth, I kicked it, I hugged it, I clawed it. (95)

As Jacobus himself notes, “every possible copula was enacted that could link the world to an elephant hunter” (95). However, the reader is certain that Jacobus’s experimentation with inserting his subjectivity into the simulation of the South African interior reveals no clearer meaning in the image of the simulation itself. It is with Deleuze’s observations on the topography of the simulacrum that one can begin to speculate why. Deleuze writes: “the simulacrum implies huge dimensions, depths, and distances that the observer cannot master.”76 Jacobus’s thrust for mastery, for authority and control over the simulation, is always already compromised by the sheer potential of extension of the simulacrum. Indeed, given such a topography, Jacobus’s attempt to bring order by limiting the possible significations of the simulacrum only ensures the continual transformation and deformation of the simulation itself. In short, the simulation of the interior changes as Jacobus changes his point of view. Jacobus can only examine the image of the simulation as it is presented relative to his current position, and so the possibility of a totalized interpretation is always already denied. Therefore, it is not surprising that Jacobus convincingly narrates two competing death scenes for Klawer (93–95). Indeed, it is Jacobus’s attempt to arrest or apprehend what must always escape that reveals another ‘becoming’ – the unlimited movement of a becoming-mad or a becoming-delirious of a subject who can only search for entry into the simulation by putting himself into a state of continual flux. Here, one might talk of a delirium-event that assumes a character much like that of the pain-event. However, the copula of the delirium-event goes beyond connecting together the corporeal and incorporeal orders of the world; it also draws together Dawn and Jacobus in a becoming that is initiated by their shared negotiation of the immeasurable depths and distances of the simulacrum. Jacobus writes: 76

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 258.



The Body of Dusklands

35

My fevers came and went, distinguishable only by the flexings of the soul’s wings that came with fever and the lumpish tedium of the return to earth. I inhabited the past again, meditating upon my life as tamer of the wild […] With a slight thrust of my wings I inhabited the horses that had lived under me (what had they thought of it all?), the patient leather of my boots, the air that had pressed on me wherever I moved. (77)

Jacobus’s delirium-event forces him to enter into a series of becomings: becoming-horse, becoming-leather, becoming-air. Ultimately, what is described is Jacobus’s condition of infinite identity that, again, jumps around divergent temporalities and ways of being. Jacobus’s life is torn open and kept open in exactly the same manner as Dawn’s. And it is the inability of Dawn and Jacobus to close their lives that insists that they exert a certain force of composition on each other.77 After Dawn’s own delirium in the Californian hotel room, he comments on the method of treatment proposed by his psychologists: “their argument is that my treatment ought to start at my beginnings far in the past and work up gradually towards the present” (44). Given that twentieth-century American imperialism shares a genealogy with eighteenthcentury colonial expansionism, the “beginnings” to which the psychologists refer, as they test the hypothesis that Dawn’s breakdown was connected to his background in warfare, indeed lie “far in the past.” It is in this sense that one can chart both the encounter of Dawn and Jacobus, as each enters the other’s world, and the line of flight that results in the event of the becoming of Dawn and Jacobus. Simply, it is the shared exteriority of the spatio-temporal-historico relationship that conditions the interiority of both subjects – and, therefore, both narratives. Implicit in the state of an unlimited becoming that issues from an infinite identity is a revision of the status of the truth of the real. Since experience of the real no longer guarantees access to the meaning of the real, both Dawn and Jacobus seek to prove the existence of the Other (and, by extension, themselves) by drawing conclusions from meditations on the metaphysical properties of the gun. The gun, it is claimed, formalizes the relationship between the subject and object in the most direct way, so that the Other is 77

Both of the narratives of Dusklands end on ‘open’ phrases – Eugene Dawn’s narrative concludes with the open ontological query, “I have high hopes of finding whose fault I am” (49), while Jacobus Coetzee’s narrative concludes with the insistence that “I have other things to think about” (107).

36

ON REPRESENTATION



reduced to a concrete object that stands before the ‘Western’ subject. Jacobus Coetzee writes: The gun stands for the hope that there exists that which is other than oneself. The gun is our last defence against isolation […] The gun is our mediator with the world and therefore our saviour. The tidings of the gun: such-and-such is outside, have no fear. The gun saves us from the fear that all life is within us. (79)

Dawn draws similar conclusions in his meditation on the encounter between America and Vietnam: We brought with us weapons, the gun and its metaphors, the only copulas we knew of between ourselves and our objects. From this tragic ignorance we sought deliverance. Our nightmare was that since whatever we reached for slipped like smoke through our fingers, we did not exist; that since whatever we embraced wilted, we were all that existed. (17)

In both meditations it is clear that the Western subject can only determine itself by devastating its object, the Other. However, in dying, the Other takes its revenge for being used as a foil in a process of self-determination, and in death finally defies the encounter of an imperial power that needs to grasp it. The Western subject enters a paradoxical situation where it must seemingly sacrifice the Other so that it may assume a point of entry into the real. Yet, it is important to note that such a sacrifice circulates only in terms of simulation. In the economy of exchange between signs, the Other becomes a referential simulacrum that renders the colonial encounter a pure simulation. As the selfdetermining force of the colonial encounter collapses, it survives only through its re-imagined task of injecting the fictions of violence against the Other everywhere, in an attempt to conceal its inability to profitably render the real. Importantly, this is not to suggest that colonial encounters were without violence, but, rather, that the force of such violence finds its true value to the imperial power in the fictions and myths of violence that enter the ideological economy of empire, since they offer revitalized belief in the real. Yet, even the suspicion that access to the real has suffered irremediable decomposition has the potential to result in the philosophical positions of solipsism, narcissism, and perhaps even nihilism witnessed in Dawn’s and Jacobus’s speculation on the metaphysical properties of the gun. For Dawn and Jacobus, such philosophical positions ultimately lead to an impoverished



The Body of Dusklands

37

ethic that constantly searches for a point of connection to the real.78 For Jacobus, the attempt to formalize a communion with the real relies on the structuralism inherent in the project of enumeration: We cannot count the wild. The wild is one because it is boundless. We can count fig-trees, we can count sheep because the orchard and the farm are bounded. The essence of orchard and farm sheep is number. Our commerce with the wild is a tireless enterprise of turning it into orchard and farm. When we cannot fence it we reduce it to number by other means. Every wild creature I kill crosses the boundary between wilderness and number. (80)

Such an ethic premised on enumeration exposes the impossibility of Dawn’s effort to “impose order on the area of chaos” (44) known as Vietnam. The impossibility of Dawn’s project lies in the absolute inability to enumerate, to homogenize, the Vietnamese people in terms of a dominant ideology, and therefore the inability to offer an effective singular propaganda programme. David Attwell returns to the original documents that Dawn’s narrative parodies in order to suggest that in many respects the ideology of the Viet Cong insurgency was, rather, a set of ideologies inherited from the heterogeneous influences of South Vietnamese traditions.79 That is to say, in the same way as the political agenda of the insurgency movement embraced the diversity of communist and nationalist intentions, the cultural constitution of the movement ranged from Catholicism to Chinese Buddhism.80 The impossibility of negotiating the constitutive diversity of the Viet Cong insurgency seems to reflect the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, a realization that does not escape Dawn. He comments, “When I joined the Project I was offered a familiarisation tour of Vietnam. I refused” (14). It is not that Dawn embarks on the production of an illusory Vietnam, since he realizes that an inability to gain access to the real must also announce a similar fate in the project of illusion. He reflects, “I am a story not of emotion and violence – the illusory war-story of television – but of life itself” (27). Rather, Dawn embarks on a story of life that rests on parody, which exposes the colonial encounter as a moment of simulation. His introspection as a means of knowledge-production parodies the activities of

78

Attwell, J.M. Coetzee, 36. Attwell, J.M. Coetzee, 43. 80 Attwell, J.M. Coetzee, 44. 79

38

ON REPRESENTATION



“bookish men who have sat in libraries and had visions of great clarity” (29), and his “New Life project” parodies the Hudson Institute’s series of studies concerning “national security and international order.”81 In such an environment of parody, Dawn can only reveal the colonial encounter to be already anticipated in terms of its presentation and possible conclusions. It is a violent military contact that circulates around probability charts and the certainty of victory: Victory is a matter of sufficient force, and we dispose over sufficient force […]. When we strike at a target, we define the probability of success as: P1 = aX-3/4 + (bX–c)Y, where X measures release altitude, Y measures ground fire intensity, and a, b, c are constants. (28)

The colonial encounter is exposed as a simulation, since it functions as a collection of signs that are dedicated exclusively to its own recurrence as a totalizing sign. Yet, as Jean Baudrillard notes, there is a certain impossibility of isolating the process of simulation from the real, and in this impossibility is revealed an apparatus of power that must ally every simulation with the form of the real, since it cannot function anywhere else.82 That is to say, when the real no longer guarantees the association between the referent and the sign, then there is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality that rest on second-hand truth, objectivity, and authenticity. Baudrillard goes on to observe that “A referential order can only reign over the referential, a determined power can only reign over a determined world.”83 Consequently, the mechanism of power that seeks to limit the proliferation of the series of significations caused by simulation is compromised. Indeed, the operation of power is dismantled in this space because it is fundamentally disconnected from its instructed objective of order and knowledge. Power becomes a simulation of power that can only dedicate itself to the effects of power.84 In this context, power redoubles its effort to force a certain gravity upon the social situation by attempting to reinsert the real and the referential into the operation of simulation. Baudrillard highlights the way in which power motivates the discourses of crisis and desire for this end:

81

See Attwell, J.M. Coetzee, 40–47. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 21. 83 Simulacra and Simulation, 21. 84 Simulacra and Simulation, 22. 82



The Body of Dusklands

39

‘Take your desires for reality!’ can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power since in a non-referential world, even the confusion of the reality principle and the principle of desire is less dangerous than contagious hyperreality. One remains among principles, and among those power is always in the right.85

However, it is not, as Baudrillard suggests, the “confusion” between the real and simulation that power must encourage in order to maintain its organizing function of subjectification. Rather, power must motivate the external object of desire as the ultimate effort to reassert the principle of reality through representation, as the real is the only space in which any external object can reside. Yet, in a certain sense such a project to redeem the veracity of the ‘true’ representation of the real must always fail, since it is always already predicated on a revitalized condition of significance in the production of meaning through a subjective experience of individual and personal desire. This, of course, is a position that the philosophical principles of the Enlightenment cannot tolerate.

Suspension: The Body without Organs Discussing René Girard’s notion of mediated desire, Coetzee comments: Girard writes in a philosophical tradition that stretches from Hegel to Sartre which attaches crucial importance to the ability of the subject to choose his own desires. In fact, in Hegel the stage of self-consciousness does not arrive, the ‘I’ does not come into being, until the subject becomes aware of itself as the locus of a lack, a desire. Thus the being of the ‘I’ is wholly implicated in its desires; and for the ‘I’ to yield its autonomy as a desiring subject is to yield its being. This yielding is what Girard calls an ‘ontological sickness’: in turning his desire toward the desiring mediator, the subject yields his ontological autonomy […] The question arises at once, of course: Why is the self so mistrusted that it cannot desire its own desires?86

Here, Coetzee asks an important question that requires one to reconsider the link between subjective desire, the external object of desire, and the force of mediation between the two – Why is the self so mistrusted that it cannot 85

Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 22. J.M. Coetzee, “Triangular Structures of Desire in Advertising,” Critical Arts: A Journal of South–North Media Studies 1.2 (June 1980): 36–37. 86

40

ON REPRESENTATION



desire its own desires? It would seem that to avoid the desiring subject’s falling into what Girard calls an “ontological sickness” one must think of the ways in which the self can indeed “desire its own desires.” That is to say, one is driven to question whether the self can produce an internal circuit of desire that does not require the agency of an external object. Such an enquiry reveals its significance in the fact that it must instruct a break in the link between desire and reality, since in the classic system of desire it is only the external object of desire that restores the reality principle. Simply, the external object of desire informs a belief in the real because it is the only space in which it can reside. An intriguing point of entry into this reconceptualization of the process of desire has already been discussed: Dawn’s revelation of the subject’s masochistic relationship with the “hard master” of print. It is certain that Dawn is aware of the contract of submission that exists between the subject and the authoritarian regime of the structured methodologies of the Enlightenment. But, as Deleuze notes, “the manner in which the contract is rooted in masochism remains a mystery.”87 Clearly, it must have something to do with the subversion of the formalized notion of desire as a moment of lack, since the defining quality of masochism is that it breaks the chain of relation between desire and pleasure. It is certain that every moment of desire is brought to a conclusion at the moment of its fulfilment. And, for the masochist, the fulfilment of desire arrives in the form of pleasure. Yet, pleasure is the very affect that the masochist seeks to allay through the pain and humiliation meted out to the body. The masochist makes use of the pain that washes over the body, not as a source of pleasure in itself but as something that facilitates the uninterrupted process of desire. In such a context, pleasure becomes a principle that only interrupts the process of desire, and it is clear that it is the affect of desire itself that the masochist seeks; not the pleasure of pain, not the pleasure in suspending the completion of desire, or the completion of the circulating process of desire (in pleasure itself). In every way, the masochist seeks to constitute a desire that postpones the end of the process of desire announced by pleasure. Thus, what is essential to the masochist is the waiting or the suspense, which becomes a condition of intensity in itself. Dawn understands this proposition well: “I am addicted to driving long distances, the longer the better, though it exhausts me. I find masticating a disgusting process, yet I eat inces87

Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 53.



The Body of Dusklands

41

santly” (11). In each case it is the process, the intensity caused by suspending the conclusion of the process, that ultimately attracts Dawn. Perhaps more profoundly, the photographs that provide Dawn’s lethargic imagination with the stimulation it requires to continue his work on the Vietnam report also respond to the formula of suspension. Each image is a “frozen scene” and as such can never discharge the intensity bound in their suspension, even though Dawn hopes each image, “Under the persistent pressure of my imagination, acute and morbid in the night, may yet yield” its interiority (17). The photographs are informed by a doubled condition of suspension. While each print captures the intensity of the frozen scene, Dawn’s continual and inconclusive examination of the photographic images becomes another moment of suspended desire. The force of this condition is revealed in the treatment of the echo of suffering that reverberates in the masochist’s production of desire: Dawn drives long distances even though it exhausts him, he finds masticating a disgusting process even though he eats incessantly. In each case, the potential to suffer is displaced by the contract of submission. But it is also clear that the contract of submission brings with it a certain amount of suffering through humiliation. The distinction to be made, then, is between suffering as an external relation and that of a suffering immanent to the masochist’s production of a submissive desire. Given such a context, the masochist ensures that all external relations are removed from the production and circulation of desire, and, as such, desire itself is raised to a condition of immanence. One is therefore returned to a state in which the self can once again “desire its own desires,” free from any reference to an exterior agency, whether it be “a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills in.”88 However, it is certain that the Self can only achieve this state by employing certain programmes that facilitate this objective. And, masochism is just such a programme – one that subverts the organizing drive of authoritarian structures, since it describes a field of immanence in which only intensities exist. Thus, one is left to consider the kind of bodily territory such a programme necessitates. Deleuze responds to this query by first recalling Artaud’s profound response to judgment: “tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing more useless than an organ.”89 What is proposed is the Body without Organs, a body that can only be described in terms of haecceities – of the affects, events, and intensities

88 89

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 154. Artaud, “To Have Done With the Judgement of God,” 571.

42

ON REPRESENTATION



that attain a certain consistency upon it.90 Deleuze motivates the embryological condition of the egg in order to elucidate its form.91 The egg is “an intensive field, literally without organs, defined solely by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, displacements and migrations.”92 The Body without Organs shares this predetermined condition of contingency, possibility, and immanence. It is the intensive reality of the body, the immanence of a life that lies ‘beneath’ the determined form and functions of the organized body. As Dawn suspects, it is the “being bound in a prison of flesh” (47), where the “flesh” simply stands as the final extension of the organizing drive of the body’s organs. However, it is important to note that it is not the organs themselves that are the ‘enemy’ of the Body without Organs but, rather, the principle of ‘organization’ that is implied and conditioned with their employment. Organization demands that the Body without Organs becomes a structured organism, a “body.”93 Under such a condition, every contingency and possibility born of the field of immanence that describes the Body without Organs reaches their final extension in the organ, and each organ finds its place in the final arrangement of the body. As such, the body can only be read as the product of an imposed, structured methodological account of the Body without Organs. In such a manner, the immanence of a Life that survives as the intensive real90

See Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 506–08. The concept of the Body without Organs is a recurring element of Deleuze’s writing. Key statements concerning this concept can be found in Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, tr. Paul Patton (Différence et répétition, 1953; London: Athlone, 1994): 214–17, 249–52; Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem & Helen Lane (Capitalisme et schizophrénie 1: L’Anti-Oedipe, 1972; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1983): 9–16; and Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 149–66. 92 Smith, “Introduction – ‘A Life of Pure Immanence’,” xxxvii. 93 It is clear that Deleuze and Guattari do not use the terms “organism” and “body” synonymously. For Deleuze and Guattari, the organism is specifically that which is the product of an organizing drive, and the Body without Organs is the “true” condition of the “body.” As such, the “body” as a structure is obviously more conversant with the Body without Organs than with the concept of organism. However, in an effort to retain clarity I have chosen to contrast the “body” with the Body without Organs. Thus, in my argument the “body” is to be read as the resultant knowable totality of a project of organization that is administered on the site of the Body without Organs. See Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 158–59. 91



The Body of Dusklands

43

ity of a body is contained through the formation of the subject, a knowable structure that necessarily presents itself for interpretation. Indeed, it is access to this moment of interpretation that the operation of power strives for. Simply put, power cannot bear the Body without Organs, because, in order to exert control over the forces of life, it must draw life from its condition of immanence in the Body without Organs and organize itself into an organism, a body, a subject that signifies and can therefore be subjectified. As Deleuze notes, power must always call for order: You will be organised, you will be an organism, you will articulate your body […] You will be signifier and signified, interpreter and interpreted […] You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the enunciation recoiled into a subject of the statement.94

Dawn knows that his Body without Organs can only oppose the imperative of organization inherent in power. Contrasting his anti-methodology of mythography to his manager’s structurally driven methodology of game theory, Dawn states that his manager “cannot understand a man who experiences his self as an envelope holding his body-parts together while inside it he burns and burns” (32). At every turn, the structuralist methodology, which “starts with the axiom that people act identically if their self-interests are identical” (32), attempts to organize the Body without Organs into a singular subject. But the Body without Organs always opposes. While power demands an articulation of the body (“I am…”), the Body without Organs encourages disarticulation through over-articulation. Now, it is true that the subject may be apprehended by singular articulations of the body, but the proliferation of such articulations collapses the concept of the subject itself. Jacobus Coetzee’s delirium-event which forces him into the series of becoming-horse, becoming-leather, and becoming-air is precisely this moment of a destruction of the self (77). However, it is important to note here that such ‘self-destruction’ has nothing to do with the Freudian ‘death drive’. Rather, it is an action of affirmation that opens the body up to the distributions of intensity that describe the milieu as an assemblage.95 For Jacobus and Dawn, such affirmation is processed through the pain-event. The only singular articulation of the body left to produce is that made by Jacobus, “My gut would dazzle if I pierced myself” (78). Such is the real94 95

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 159. A Thousand Plateaus, 160.

44

ON REPRESENTATION



ization that even the disarticulation of an infinite identity can only disclose certain aspects of the infinitely complex plane of consistency that describes the Body without Organs. Given such an inability to offer a totalized interpretation of the Body without Organs, interpretation itself is always already something that is displaced. It is clear that Jacobus’s series of becomings are a product of experimentation rather than the interpretation of a way of being. In such a series, Jacobus’s consciousness becomes a means of exploration rather than a condition of the subject, since, as Deleuze observes, in every sense there is no longer a self that feels, acts or recalls, only a non-organized structure that has affects and experiences only movement.96 One finds perhaps the clearest expression of this in Jacobus Coetzee’s delirious formulation of exploration: In the wild I lose my sense of boundaries. This is a consequence of space and solitude. The operation of space is thus: the five senses stretch out from the body they inhabit, but four stretch into a vacuum. The ear cannot hear, the nose cannot smell, the tongue cannot taste, the skin cannot feel. The skin cannot feel: the sun bears down on the body, flesh and skin move in a pocket of heat, the skin stretches vainly around, everything is sun. Only the eyes have power. The eyes are free, they reach out to the horizon all around. Nothing is hidden from the eyes. As the other senses grow numb or dumb my eyes flex and extend themselves. I become a spherical reflecting eye moving through the wilderness and ingesting it. Destroyer of the wilderness, I move through the land cutting a devouring path from horizon to horizon. There is nothing from which my eye turns, I am all that I see. Such loneliness! Not a stone, not a bush, not a wretched provident ant that is not comprehended in this travelling sphere. Where is there that is not me? I am a transparent sac with a black core full of images and a gun. (78–79)

Thus, the Body without Organs tears consciousness away from the organization of the subject, tears the unconscious away from the possibility of interpretation, and finally tears the vitality of life away from the structured account of the body. This, then, is the site of resistance to the organizing structured methodologies of the Enlightenment that both Dawn and Jacobus search for. The Body without Organs reveals itself to be both the genetic and the con-

96

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 162.



The Body of Dusklands

45

cluding state of the ontological enquiry and the search for true meaning that drives the narratives of Dawn and Jacobus. However, the value and truth of subjective experience remains an enigmatic property of the Body without Organs. Clearly, the Body without Organs involves a decomposition of the organized form and function of the subject in favour of an intensive reality. Yet, in doing so, one is denied the ability to qualify the affects that circulate upon the body – to know or refer to the affects as experiences. This is the paradox of the Body without Organs. It grants access to the real, and it reveals a fundamental level of meaning, but the affects of such must necessarily remain pre-linguistic. That is to say, at the moment of enunciation the pure affects that circulate upon the Body without Organs are lost in the ideological and culturally invested activity of retrospection that seeks to condition them for a system of signification. Such affects remain so deeply personal and incommunicable as categorical markers of experience that they are best thought of as beyond the legitimate possession of an individual. Therefore, the Body without Organs can only facilitate a very specific kind of resistance.

Judgment Jacobus Coetzee begins his narrative by stating the categorical difference between the “White man” of South Africa and the Hottentots: The one gulf that divides us from the Hottentots is our Christianity […]. We are Christians, a folk with a destiny. They become Christians too, but their Christianity is an empty word. (57)

The insistence is that two kinds of Christianity are in operation in eighteenthcentury South Africa: the ‘convenient’ Christianity simulated by the Hottentot and the ‘true’ Christianity of the white South African. For Jacobus, what marks the difference between these two Christianities is the belief in the promise of faith, the promise of a destiny drawn from an immortal soul that has been born and survives in the Christian teleology of Genesis, the Last Judgment, and the eternity of the afterlife. But in what way does the Christian pay for such promises? It was Nietzsche who first posed this question, and offered an answer – he does not. The Christian bears the consciousness of being in debt to God and, since the Christian soul is immortal, the debt is infinite and

46

ON REPRESENTATION



subsequently unpayable.97 Indeed, as Deleuze observes, “The infinity of the debt and the immortality of existence each depend on the other, and together constitute ‘the doctrine of judgement’.”98 That is to say, every Christian is in a relationship between existence and infinity and is judged according to the infinity of his debt. For Nietzsche, as well as for D.H. Lawrence and Antonin Artaud, the charge at hand is that the authoritarian structure of Christianity crystallizes a new image of power, the power to stand in judgment.99 The doctrine of judgment is present in the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment. It is the manifestation of an ultimate power that encompasses a will to condition every corporeal and incorporeal element of the world, a will to be the last word spoken, and a will to destroy all that hope to stand beyond its reach.100 It is the product of the machinations of the architect-priest (of Judas, John of Patmos, and Saint Paul), who constructs and presides over the meaning of a Christianity that is knowingly and actively confused with Christ. The architect-priest is tyrannous, turning the individual into a member of a flock through the assurance of an eternity that can only be promised by keeping “Christ on the cross, ceaselessly leading him back to it, making him rise from the dead.”101 To judge or to be judged is to invoke such a condition of power, to invoke the relationship of dominance between the architect-priest and the flock, and thereby instruct the organization of the bodies through which judgment itself acts. Yet, it is certain that the Body without Organs, as a non-organized structure, is beyond the reach of the otherwise all-encompassing will to power of judgment. It necessarily resists the process of subjectification and subjugation by escaping the organization of the body demanded by judgment. However, in

97

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), ed. & tr. Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967): 90. 98 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 126. 99 The idea that Christianity exerts a negative force on the human subject is a persistent theme in Friedrich Nietzsche’s work. For perhaps his most abrasive critique of Christianity, see Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ (1888). For D.H. Lawrence’s discussion of the operation of power in Christian doctrine, see Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (1931; New York: Viking, 1982). Antonin Artaud’s thoughts on Christianity are perhaps made clearest in his “To Have Done with the Judgement of God.” 100 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 39. 101 Essays Critical and Clinical, 37.



The Body of Dusklands

47

its resistance to judgment, the Body without Organs forms an alternative point of access to justice. It connects to a justice that writes directly on the body, a system of cruelty that ensures that bodies are marked by each other. In direct opposition to the doctrine of judgment, which sees all debts tallied in a divine book that quietly “condemns us to an endless servitude,”102 the system of cruelty is a writing of “blood and life” that returns value, authority, and power to the operation of the pain-event that circulates upon the Body without Organs. Conceptualized by Nietzsche and examined by Artaud in his “Theatre of Cruelty,” the system of cruelty necessarily goes beyond the confines of a representation of violence and tends towards the “genesis of creation” itself.103 Certainly, Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty” finds a double expression in Dusklands – the theatre of the Vietnam War, which marks the boundary of the territory of massacred bodies; and Jacobus’s theatre of punishment that conditions his return to the Hottentot village as a violent performance which goes beyond representation, since it is a clear act of altering those around him bodily (such is the genesis of creation). Indeed, Jacobus’s actions reveal the dual aspect of punishment as proposed by Nietzsche: we must distinguish two things: first, the relatively enduring aspect, the custom, the act, the ‘drama’, a certain strict succession of procedures; on the other hand, the fluid aspect, the meaning, the aim, the expectation which attends the execution of these procedures.104

Jacobus’s punitive return to the Hottentot village certainly includes the element of Nietzsche’s “drama.” Jacobus writes: “We descended on their camp at dawn, the hour recommended by the classic writers on warfare” (100), but the meaning of such a procedure reaches beyond a simple act of self-assertion. It is for this reason that Jacobus frames his anticipated action of punishment as homage paid to the judgment of God: We do not require of God that he be good, I told them, all we ask is that he never forget us. Those of us who may momentarily doubt that we are included in the great system of dividends and penalties may 102

Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 128. Antonin Artaud, “Letter to Paule Thévenin” (1948), in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, 585. 104 Friedrich Nietzsche, Toward the Genealogy of Morals (1887), excerpt in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. & tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954): 452–53. 103

48

ON REPRESENTATION



take comfort in Our Lord’s observation on the fall of the sparrow: the sparrow is cheap but he is not forgotten. As explorer of the wilderness I have always thought myself an evangelist and endeavoured to bring to the heathen the gospel of the sparrow, which falls but falls with design. There are acts of justice, I tell them (I told them), and acts of injustice, and all bear their place in the economy of the whole. Have faith, be comforted, like the sparrow you are not forgotten. (101)

Such meaning, generated by Jacobus’s return to divine judgment, Nietzsche claims, is at first sight better than no meaning at all – a return to the comfortable assurance of a father’s authority that absolves the individual of responsibility. As Nietzsche states, “man [...] does not negate suffering as such: he wants it, even seeks it out, provided someone shows him some meaning in it, some wherefore of suffering.”105 Jacobus’s referral of the meaning of his actions to the certainty of God’s “just, irreprehensible and incomprehensible” (106) judgment is just such a motion towards offering an answer to the “wherefore of suffering.” But such referral of meaning only leads to a more profound kind of suffering than a simple rejection of meaning can cause. Jacobus continues: “Will I suffer? I too am frightened of death” (106). The cost of erecting meaning, the cost of drawing on something (the divine) rather than accepting nothing (nonsense), is a suffering that is more poisonous, since it gnaws at Jacobus’s very life. Such suffering fills the “undifferentiated plenum, which is after all nothing but the void dressed up as being” (101), with a hatred “against everything human [...] against everything animal, everything material [... a disgust] with reason itself.”106 As such, the despair Jacobus feels with the “undifferentiated plenum” that cannot resist or offer a limit to the projection of his power is a product of the realization that a return to the judgment of God only stands apart from nihilism (nothing) because it maintains a will to nothingness – the difference between the want of nothing and the want of the concept of nothingness itself. Dawn seems to parallel Jacobus’s realization: Since February of 1965 their war has been living its life at my expense. I know and I know and I know what it is that has eaten away my manhood from inside, devoured the food that should have nourished me. It is a thing, a child not mine, once a baby squat and yellow whelmed in the dead centre of my body, sucking my blood, growing 105 106

Nietzsche, Toward the Genealogy of Morals, 453. Toward the Genealogy of Morals, 454.



49

The Body of Dusklands by my waste, now, 1973, a hideous mongol boy who stretches his limbs inside my hollow bones, gnaws my liver with his smiling teeth, voids his bilious filth into my systems, and will not go. I want an end to it! I want my deliverance! (38–39)

But it is an end to the will to nothingness that Dawn wants, deliverance from the prospect of an endless self-analysis in a search for one’s own true being. The question remains: how to draw such analysis to a satisfactory conclusion? If the interrogation of Self is a search for one’s soul, then the closure offered by absolution from analysis can do nothing except reinstate the judgment of God. Rather, Dawn must become the centre of a metamorphosis – he must refuse the act of subjectification found in the process of identification by proliferating identity itself; he must compromise the act of subjectification found in the process of totalization by defining himself only in terms of becoming; and he must escape the act of subjectification found in every judgment by sustaining his Body without Organs. It is a metamorphosis, then, that ultimately recognizes the capacity of escape from the structures of subjectification only in the reclamation of the authority of the body to affect and be affected through a will to power. In this way, the system of cruelty, in association with the apprehension of the intensive reality of the Body without Organs, ensures that meaning is always already a non-personal product of the affects caused by the practice of living. Thus, Dawn’s attempt to sustain and deepen his condition of trauma in order to reconcile his Self-as-Other with his Self-as-subject results in a refusal of every kind of organizational practice that issues from representation. Indeed, in compromising the moment of subjectification – of every conditioning projection of representation – Dawn enters a state of perpetual metamorphosis that renders visible the trace of the activity of the Other as it exposes and resists the structures that seek to condition Dawn as a subject. That is to say, Dawn’s metamorphosis is a direct response to the antagonism between the staticization inherent in the project of representation and the continual movement of resistance evidenced by the Other. Such antagonism repeats itself in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians; but that novel indicates how the State’s relentless conditioning of space by means of representation ultimately results in its own demise.



Chapter Two 

The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

There is no woman living along the frontier who has not dreamed of a dark barbarian hand coming from under the bed to grip her ankle, no man who has not frightened himself with the visions of the barbarians carousing in his home, breaking the plates, setting fire to the curtains, raping his daughters. These dreams are the consequence of too much ease. Show me a barbarian army and I will believe. — J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

C

W A I T I N G F O R T H E B A R B A R I A N S 1 derives not only its title but also its conceptual force from a poem by C.P. Cavafy.2 This poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” describes the nervous tension of a State that awaits the imminent arrival of a usurping barbarian force. However, it is clear that the anticipation experienced by the citizenry of the unknown town is over-coded by another kind of anticipation. It is a doubled anticipation which arises in an Empire that must anticipate the Other in order to define, and place, itself in the world. So it is that in Cavafy’s poem the barbarian is always already “some sort of solution” for Empire – it allows the State to place and know itself in contradistinction to the Other. Yet the poem concludes by problematizing the certainty of this arrangement. The barbarians that promise a mirror of self-assertion for the State never arrive, because 1

OETZEE’S

J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980; London: Minerva, 1997). Unless otherwise indicated, further page references are in the main text. 2 See C.P. Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” in The Poems of C.P. Cavafy, ed. & tr. John Mavrogordato (London: Hogarth, 1951): 28–29.

52

ON REPRESENTATION



“there are no Barbarians anymore.” It is a statement that strikes at the very structure of the epistemological and ontological basis of Empire. The statement suggests that the Empire has achieved the impossible – the appropriation of every local element of the exterior, so that nothing can be thought of as outside, beyond, or other to the Empire.3 Under such conditions, the Empire must have universal dominance and must therefore lose ‘the solution’ by which it can know itself. Cavafy thus reveals the inherently paradoxical nature of an aggressively assimilationist agenda – to attain absolute universality, to become everything, is simultaneously to become nothing. However, while Cavafy motivates the trajectory of the Ideal in order to offer a certain kind of resistance to the imperial drive of nations, Coetzee follows a quite different trajectory. Coetzee’s concern with the Empire/ Other relationship has its roots firmly in the chaotic realm of the corporeal. In distinction to Cavafy’s poem, Coetzee makes it beyond doubt that the Other is existent – which, of course, means that the assimilationist project of Empire is incomplete. It is clear why Coetzee must offer a substantially different interrogation of the Empire/ Other relationship from that of Cavafy when one realizes that, for Coetzee, the paranoia of the State witnessed in Cavafy’s poem – “what will become of us without Barbarians?” – simply cannot be conditioned by the uncertainty of the non/existence of the barbarian. Since it is certain that the barbarian is existent, such paranoia becomes a simple product of the State’s uncertainty about its (in)ability to discern in what capacity the barbarian is existent. Now, it is this seemingly minor shift in perspective that leads to Coetzee’s highly complex interrogation of the Empire/ Other relationship – an interrogation that necessarily incorporates and combines an examination of both epistemology and ontology, since to ascertain the capacity of something one must always return to a method or system of ‘knowing’. In thinking about how to contrast systems of knowing, Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians turns towards noology. Noology, “which is distinct from ideology,” Deleuze writes, is “the study of the images of thought, and their historicity.”4 Put simply, noology is the study of the architecture of thought, the study of the structures or systems that condition thinking. And what Coetzee uncovers through his interrogation of 3

The similarity to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s position concerning imperial sovereignty cannot go without acknowledgement. See Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2000): esp. 183–204. 4 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 376.



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

53

the Empire/Other relationship are two very different and irreconcilable “images of thought.” On the one hand, there is a State thought, which proceeds in much the same manner as the archaeologist – starting at the surface of the object of contemplation and slowly working downwards to reveal the object’s essential quality.5 State thought establishes a profound link between object and memory. Each object of contemplation seemingly possesses uniquely layered properties that allow for the processes of identification, stratification, and conservation to be performed on it. As such, the layered properties of the object of contemplation become a kind of expressive lamellae, which can only be transgressed through an act of penetration that must begin at the outermost layer and work downwards. Therefore, it is only through the invasive act of breaking the surface and penetrating the layers that the essential quality of the object of contemplation is revealed. Of course, this is precisely the manner in which both the Magistrate and Colonel Joll “hunt back and forth” across the body of the barbarian girl in the hope of “seeking entry” (46) to what one might think of as her ‘essence’. And, significantly, it is also the manner in which State history assumes its veracity, exposing the essence of objects and events in order to accommodate them in the museum of the contemporary historical record. In terms of an image of thought, such a procedure is that of striation – organization and stratification born of a belief in causality instructed by the operation of the line. Thus, just as time is perceived and treated in terms of a linear trajectory, so space is perceived and treated in terms of linear cartography. On the other hand, there is a rhizomic image of thought that stands in sharp contrast to that of striation. Where the archaeological image of thought seeks origins through the extensive operation of striation, the rhizomic image of thought maps and evaluates intensive displacements. This means that the direction of interrogation is no longer the top-down (archaeological) method associated with striated thought. Rather, the direction of interrogation assumes the bottom-up vector associated with intensities, thresholds, qualities, and affects. It is no longer a question of objects and origins but of becomings and intensities. For Coetzee, it is an image of thought that is best conceptualized in terms of the smooth geography of the nomad, where the topography of thought is no different from the topography of the earth. As Deleuze notes, the rhizomic image of thought leads to an unconscious that “is no longer an 5

I am adapting here Deleuze’s conceptualization of the archaeological and cartographic conceptions of psychoanalysis. See Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 63.

54

ON REPRESENTATION



unconscious of commemoration but one of mobilisation, an unconscious whose objects take flight rather than remain buried in the ground.”6 The necessity of penetration is replaced by the necessity of affection, as the Magistrate writes of the barbarian girl: In the snowbound warmth of the tent I make love to her again. She is passive, accommodating herself to me. When we begin I am sure that the time is right; I embrace her in the most intensive pleasure and pride of life; but halfway through I seem to lose touch with her, and the act peters out vacantly. My intuitions are clearly fallible. Still, my heart continues its affectionate glow towards this girl who so briskly falls asleep in the crook of my arm. There will be another time, and if not, I do not think I mind. (71–72)

That the narrative of the Magistrate can be used to elucidate both images of thought is extremely telling in Coetzee’s novel. One witnesses a seemingly impossible ambivalence in the Magistrate, where, on the one hand, he adopts the striation of State thought and, on the other, he adopts the rhizomic image of thought. Yet it would be erroneous to think of the Magistrate’s condition in terms of ambivalence. Rather, like Eugene Dawn in Dusklands, the Magistrate undergoes a metamorphosis. It is a metamorphosis that is informed by a ‘becoming-nomad’, involving a departure from State thought and towards rhizomic thought. After his relationship with the barbarian girl, the Magistrate enters a perpetual ‘becoming-nomad’ and, because of this relationship, is afforded access to a fundamentally different way of conceiving the world from that of the State. It is a world in which the chaotic forces of the earth are to be embraced rather than subjugated or organized; it is a world of unlimited movement that stands in strong opposition to the efforts of the State to impose structural gravity, inhibition, and, thereby, limitation; and it is a world, finally, in which the composition and instruction of territory are an intolerable imposition on the earth. Thus, while the State can only maintain control of the chaotic forces of the earth by using the limiting and organizational practices of representation, the Magistrate opens up to a way of knowing that can only destabilize such State endeavours. In this way, the Magistrate is forced into a combative relationship with the State – a struggle that is conducted on a complex geography that is

6

Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 63.



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

55

formed as much by the practices of epistemology and ontology as it is by the earth itself.

A Strong Geography Geography unquestionably holds a special place in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. Yet the geography that Coetzee proposes is not that which is “caught within the disciplinary and epistemological assumptions of the Western ‘scientific’ mastery of space.”7 It is far more intricate than this. Coetzee presents a rhizomic conceptualization of geography. It is a geography with ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ properties and associations, one that not only describes exterior physical landscapes but one that also describes pre-personal and personal relationships. The operation of Coetzee’s geography thus tends towards the operation of place as highlighted in postcolonial thought. Making a clear effort to establish a certain conceptual distinction between ‘landscape’ and ‘place’ within a representational geography, Ashcroft et al. write: By ‘place’ we do not simply mean ‘landscape’. Indeed, the idea of ‘landscape’ is predicated upon a particular philosophic tradition in which the objective world is separated from the viewing subject. Rather ‘place’ […] is a complex interaction of language, history and environment.8

So it is that the concept of place does not merely recognize a physical landscape but also attempts to recognize “the immense investment of culture in the construction of place.”9 However, it would seem that not even this extended appreciation of place fully accounts for the intricacies of Coetzee’s geography. In addition to the already complex interactions forged by the inclusion of language and history in a consideration of place, Coetzee offers the compositional qualities, interior substances, annexed powers, and events of geographical space. In short, he removes the given character of the geographical and establishes it solely through relations or, more specifically, through relational forces that ceaselessly connect the environment to subjectivity. Waiting for the Barbarians describes a geography that is never a staticized

7

Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, 150. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, ed. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 391. 9 Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, ed. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 391. 8

56

ON REPRESENTATION



place of investigation but a place of becoming. And it is the very incompleteness of every becoming – as a present participle that can never reach its logical limit – that guarantees a chaotic geography of perpetual movement and continual change. Such a dynamic geography poses clear problems for the project of Western scientific mastery of space. As both Bill Ashcroft and Horacio Capel demonstrate, it is certain that geographical knowledge was considered the key to the growth, and consequently the wealth, of imperial nations. From the President of the Société de Géographie de Paris in 1884 one reads: Sirs, Providence has dictated to us an obligation to know the earth and to conquer it […] The great motive of civilised people in their enterprises consists above all in the accumulation of wealth, wealth which can only be produced by an increase in transactions and exchange. It is to this end that commercial and economic geography have recently been created.10

Similarly, the secretary of the Sociedad Geográfica de Madrid penned: The earth, we repeat, will belong to whoever knows it best. It is not possible to use the wealth that a country contains, nor to govern its inhabitants in a manner in keeping with the innate, historical condition of their race, without a profound knowledge of the people and the land.11

Of course, linked to such calls to ‘know’ the earth was the expansion of the discipline of cartography. Cartography promised an expression of the world in the form of the map, a form of expression that would maintain “objectivity in spatial representation.”12 In order to do so, cartography drew together the privileged Western sites of visual perception and the scientific rationalism of the monad in an attempt to render the world ‘knowable’. Following Ptolemy, the world was represented and understood through the mathematical unity given by an artificial and arbitrary geometric grid that wrapped around the globe. Such was the framework for a scientific methodology that resulted in

10

Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, 146. Horacio Capel, “The Imperial Dream: Geography and the Spanish Empire in the Nineteenth Century,” in Geography and Empire: Critical Studies in the History of Geography, ed. Anne Godlewska & Neil Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994): 72. 12 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990): 245. 11



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

57

the representation of a space that could always be thought of as “conquerable and containable for purposes of human occupancy and action.”13 Yet, while the map represented both geographical space and the power of the West to create and hold a meta-terrestrial – almost cosmically fixed – viewpoint from which to know and administer the populations of each empire, it also represented the gaps in Western knowledge. Such gaps were represented literally, through the blank spaces that punctuated the clearly delineated territories of empires and the world. Indeed, it was such blank spaces or fancifully filled expanses (terra incognita) that exposed the immanent deficiency in the totalizing endeavour of imperialism. While the call was made for imperial maps to present an intimate knowledge of the Other in order to better subjugate and control colonized peoples, the subject of each map clearly remained Europe. Nowhere is this better evidenced than in Ashcroft’s question, “For whom are these spaces blank?” The reply is obvious, but it prompts an explanation of why such voids should exist: “The blank spaces are there because Europe isn’t, these places represent the absence of modernity, of civilisation.”14 As such, the intimate knowledge of the Other produced by maps was ultimately limited to a purely relational affect of Europe itself. Given such an arrangement, the blank spaces on the imperial maps marked the borders and limitations of European thinking as surely as the conventional division of the world into North, South, East, and West intentionally marked the perceived and instituted cultural boundaries between European civilizations and “other Countries […] overspread with Barbarisme.”15 It would seem, then, that, rather than facilitate a growth in the production of knowledge concerning the Other, the topos of the map became a tool of empire that enabled “cartographic enclosure” and “cultural limitation.”16 That is to say, the map made possible a mode of intension rather than extension – a transparent act of artificial impositions, divisions, and distancing by the West. It endeavoured to fix Europe as a fragile centre point in what Deleuze terms “an immense black hole of chaos”;17 the character of a world that can only be 13

Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 246. Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, 131. 15 Hondius Janssonius Mercator, Atlas or a Geographicke Description of the World (1636), ed. R.A. Skelton, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1968). 16 Huggan, “Decolonising the Map,” 124. 17 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 312. 14

58

ON REPRESENTATION



described by the flux of perpetual movement and ceaseless change. Indeed, such maps reflected the efforts of the imperial project at large – to bring order to chaos by imposing borders on knowledge; by limiting the potentialities and possibilities of a dynamic geography; and by drawing conceptual boundaries around the heterogeneous to proliferate the privileging of the homogeneous. In this way, the imperial map can be read as an attempt to calm the nondimensional force of chaos that surrounded Europe. It provided European empires with an image of the territories of Europe at a manageable pace of change, and subsequently allowed for the creation of the inherently organized territorial assemblage of the State itself. But, whereas the European states used the map to create and order territory for themselves, the overseas territories continued to survive in the European imagination simply in terms of a refrain of chaotic, terrestrial, and cosmic forces.18 Such is the ‘strong’ geography proposed by Coetzee in Waiting for the Barbarians. It is an enduring, indissoluble geographical framework predicated on the interaction of those chaotic, terrestrial, and cosmic forces. From the chaos of a land that experiences the almost impossible environmental forces of desertification and seasonal snowfall, the walls of the unnamed frontier town offer a limitation of space, a border that attempts to keep the Stateorganized space of the town from direct contact with the chaotic space of the natural world. It is under these conditions that the need to patrol the unnamed settlement’s walls is made clear – maintain the limit of organized space or suffer an ‘infection’ of the chaotic wilderness; maintain the distinction between civilized societies and barbarian hordes or suffer the consequences of a chaos generated by the barbarians. This, then, is the need for the myth of the barbarians that permeates every level of the State’s hierarchy in Waiting for the Barbarians. The myth is the psychological equivalent of the physical wall. It forms a psychological barrier between the empire and the Other. Given such a context, the territorial refrain of the State – the imposition of boundaries, borders, and limits on physical space – is inextricable from the territorial refrain of State thinking. The imaginary myth and the materially real territorializing of a physical space form two superimposable parts of a single trajectory that tends towards an identifiable, solitary, defensible State structure. However, such trajectories are not limited to the governance of the State apparatus. Each trajectory is both predicated on and created by the interaction 18

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 312.



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

59

of two zones of intensity: the subjectivity of an individual, and the milieu through which one travels. Most commonly, a milieu is given a singular cartographic character, such as the milieu of the house, the milieu of the street, or the milieu of the town. But a milieu is always more than a singular cartographic element; it is always already a site of complex exchanges. As Deleuze writes, “A milieu is made up of qualities, substances, powers, and events.”19 Describing the arrival of Colonel Joll’s first ‘prisoners’, the Magistrate relates the complexity of a milieu: From my window I watch them cross the square between their mounted guards, dusty, exhausted, cringing already from the spectators who crowd about them, the skipping children, the barking dogs. In the shade of the barracks wall the guards dismount; at once the prisoners squat down to rest, save for a little boy who stands on one leg, his arm on his mother’s shoulder, staring back curiously at the onlookers. (18)

Here, the milieu of the frontier town is constituted by three main elements: the material substance of the town square and the walls that offer shade to the exhausted; the noise of the crowd, the barking dog, and the children at play; and the drama of the arrival of the Colonel’s prisoners. Yet, while the milieu described by the Magistrate is used as the reference to a certain geography of place, it can also be used to refer to a person. The curious boy who clings to his mother’s shoulder imposes a rather more personal milieu upon her. The mother takes on various qualities for her child to ‘travel’ through: a literal support, a psychological comfort, a familiar milieu amidst the unknown milieu of the town. In this way, the mother’s body becomes a veritable town in and of itself with its own compositional and associated features that the young child can knowingly trace. Clearly, the milieu of the mother, as well as every other individual, is conditioned by an exterior, material, zone of distinction. However, in addition to this zone of distinction are the three zones that interest both the Magistrate and the State: the intermediary, the annexed, and the interior.20 The intermediary zone of a personal milieu refers to the membrane, or limit, of the body. It is the point at which the geography of the body meets the geography of the world, and it is this zone on the barbarian girl that so confounds and intrigues the Magistrate. He writes: “with this woman it is as if

19 20

Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 61. Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 313.

60

ON REPRESENTATION



there is no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry” (46). Indeed, the theme of the barbarian girl’s ‘surface’ is a ritournelle for the Magistrate, “With a rush of feeling,” he says, “I stretch out to touch her hair, her face. There is no answering life. It is like caressing an urn or a ball, something which is all surface” (52). Like the young child with his mother, the Magistrate travels the girl’s body charting its qualities and powers in order to formulate a map that can offer an intimate knowledge of the Other. However, just as the European imperial maps returned images of enclosure and limitation tending towards introspection rather than providing an intimate knowledge of the Other, the Magistrate’s map of the barbarian girl’s body returns a similarly self-centred image and introspective realization. The girl’s body yields to the Magistrate only inasmuch as it offers his “doubled image cast back” at himself. He continues: I shake my head in a fury of disbelief. No! No! No! I cry to myself. It is I who am seducing myself, out of vanity, into these meanings and correspondences. (47)

It is the very inaccessibility of the barbarian girl’s body that makes her the symbolic guardian of the threshold between State knowledge and the ‘incomprehensible’ Other. Indeed, it is the promise of revealing a secret knowledge of the interior of the incomprehensible, the same promise of his archaeological activities, that leads the Magistrate to declare that “until the marks on this girl’s body are deciphered and understood I cannot let go of her” (33). For the State, it is the annexed zone of a personal milieu that generates much paranoid interest. Operating in this zone are the actions and perceptions of the individual. In terms of a paranoid State, it is the zone of rebellion, the zone in which barbarians trail detachments of new conscripts, launch smallscale raids on merchants and farmers, and gather together to form a largescale machine of war. Now, it is precisely because of the revolutionary potential of this zone that Colonel Joll is deployed by the State to find the ‘truth’ behind supposedly noted barbarian movements and activities. In discussion with the Magistrate, Joll explains how he must penetrate the intermediary zone of a personal milieu to uncover the truth which is located firmly in the interior of every barbarian Other: I am speaking only of a special situation now, I am speaking of a situation in which I am probing for the truth, in which I have to exert pressure to find it. First I get lies, you see – this is what happens – first



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

61

lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth. That is how you get the truth. (5)

But, as the Magistrate is well aware, such a formula for obtaining “the truth” does nothing except reproduce a preconceived State truth. It would, however, be a mistake to conclude that such an exercise is without profit for the State. While the extraction of new information is beyond the remit of Colonel Joll’s particular activity, it nonetheless encourages a widespread belief in the veracity of State-created information and, consequently, future State articulations. Thus, the paranoid stance of the State apparatus is transmitted to, and reproduced by, its population. As an example of this, one can turn to the figure of Mai, an ex-helper and friend of the Magistrate, who inevitably expresses the paranoia circulating within the State structure: ‘I am terrified,’ she says. ‘I am terrified to think what is going to become of us. I try to hope for the best and live from day to day. But sometimes all of a sudden I find myself imagining what might happen and I am paralysed by fear. I don’t know what to do anymore. I can only think of the children. What is going to become of the children? (167)

Such paranoia, it seems, is directly invested in the geography of a Stateconditioned space. While the State cannot produce evidence of the ill deeds or ill intentions of the barbarians towards the empire – other than the oft-recounted stories of minor skirmishes and thievery – it nonetheless seems to carry a motif, or code, of the barbarian within its own constitution. The Magistrate writes: For the duration of the winter the Empire is safe: beyond the eye’s reach the barbarians too, huddled about their stoves, are gritting their teeth against the cold. (40)

Importantly, the barbarian is always “beyond the eye’s reach,” circulating in a subliminal collective consciousness that ceaselessly postulates and invokes “the barbarian” while never being able to touch or point to one as an objective concrete fact. Now, it is precisely the repetition of the myth of the barbarian in this subliminal collective consciousness that allows one to read in the primacy of the construction of the exterior walls of any natal frontier town the implication that barbarians not only exist, but that they exist with an innately aggressive disposition towards such settlements.

62

ON REPRESENTATION



This psychological geography of the State highlights the importance of a ‘real’ barbarian girl living within a town’s defensive walls. For the population of the unnamed town in Coetzee’s novel, the girl becomes the physical manifestation of the State’s code of the barbarian. That is to say, she becomes a major component of each State-conditioned milieu, a component that stimulates a periodic repetition of appraisal and reappraisal of the myth of the barbarian. In this context, Mai’s paranoid-filled diatribe on the barbarians is of particular importance, since she has personal experience of working alongside the barbarian girl in the Magistrate’s kitchens. Talking of the girl, Mai declares: ‘ I liked her very much […]. We all did. She never complained, she always did what she was asked, though I know her feet gave her pain. She was friendly. There was always something to laugh about when she was around.’ (166)

If nothing else, Mai’s admission attests to the depth and force of such State codes, which can seemingly contradict lived experience without suffering too much degradation. However, it is precisely the realization of this contradiction that drives the actions of the Magistrate, and ultimately forges the ideological confrontation between himself and Colonel Joll. Yet, what conditions the Magistrate’s actions is not so much the actuality of the barbarian girl herself as the scars that populate the intermediary zone of her personal milieu. On the edge of sleep, or “oblivion” as he describes it, the Magistrate gently questions the girl about her interrogation at the hands of Colonel Joll’s men: ‘What did they do to you?’ I murmur. My tongue is slow, I sway on my feet with exhaustion. ‘Why don’t you want to tell me?’ She shakes her head. On the edge of oblivion it comes back to me that my fingers, running over her buttocks, have felt a phantom criss-cross of ridges under the skin. ‘Nothing is worse than what we can imagine,’ I mumble. (34)

Clearly, the scars on the girl’s body serve to reinstate the Empire as the subject of every interrogation of the Other. That is to say, while the Magistrate seemingly encourages the girl to articulate her ordeal at the hands of Colonel Joll in order to limit the metamorphic potential of memory (the potential to make ‘bad’ things ‘worse’), the true intention of his encouragement is to find a limit to the metamorphic potential of his own imagination, which always returns to the ill deeds of the Empire. For the Magistrate, then, the scars promise



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

63

access to the “mysteries of the State” (7); they are evidence of the “secret” history of barbarity that accompanies the progress of “civilisation” itself. And, it is this noted association, of imperial history with pain, that leads the Magistrate to hope that there is an unmarked people; a people that escapes the corporeal and incorporeal tortures that inevitably follow the imposition of Empire. The Magistrate writes: “I never wished it for the barbarians that they should have the history of Empire laid upon them” (169). But such a wish is wholly antithetical to the project of imperial control. To be beyond the reach of imperial history is to be beyond the reach of a process of imperial identification and conditioning; and that is to attain the intolerable condition of the imperceptible. The Magistrate is thus predestined to be unsuccessful in his attempts to recall an image of the unmarked barbarian girl: I cast my mind back, trying to recover an image of her as she was before […] I know that my gaze must have passed over her when, together with the other prisoners, she sat in the barracks yard waiting for whatever was to happen next. My eye passed over her; but I have no memory of that passage. On that day she was still unmarked; but I must believe she was unmarked as I must believe she was once a child. (36)

Here, the Magistrate acknowledges that the scars on the girl’s body exist as marks of Empire that ultimately signify the operation of a violent incorporeal transformation that turns the imperceptible Other into the determined quantity of “barbarian.” Thus, the Magistrate recognizes in the very constitution of the scars the power of the State to author its territory – to convert every personal milieu into known terrain. In returning the girl to the nomads who inhabit the horizon, incessantly travelling the varying geography of mountain and desert, the Magistrate suspects that However kindly she may be treated by her own people, she will never be courted and married in the normal way; she is marked for life as the property of a stranger. (148)

The implication is clear – that the scrawled signature of Empire, the crisscross of scars on the human body, is even easier to read than the formalized word: The Colonel steps forward. Stooping over each prisoner in turn he rubs a handful of dust into his naked back and writes a word with a stick of

64

ON REPRESENTATION



charcoal. I read the words upside down: E N E M Y … E N E M Y … E N E M Y … E N E M Y . He steps back and folds his hands. (115)

The return of this nightmare is born of the same preconditions witnessed in Kafka’s ‘penal colony’.21 Indeed, what Deleuze writes of Kafka’s text is more than telling for Coetzee’s: The law is a pure and empty form without content, the object of which remains unknowable: thus, the law can be expressed only through a sentence, and the sentence can be learned only through a punishment.22

Clearly, the constitution of the law – which is to say, its internal composition – remains an enigma to everyone that it contacts. The Magistrate believes he knows the process of the law, but this is denied to him;23 Colonel Joll acts with the authority of the law, but consistently operates in the “twilight of legal illegality”;24 and the barbarian prisoners, who have neither the will nor the opportunity to learn of the law, can only “get to know it in the flesh.”25 As long as the marks of the State maintain a spatial and expressive character (such as with the scar), in favour of a directional and functional one, it will territorialize the body – simultaneously creating the subject and absorbing it into its territory through a process of determination that ultimately conditions the subject’s response to itself.

21

Or should one say “In the Penal Settlement?” The difference found in the various translated editions of Kafka’s text is highly interesting, given the context of Waiting for the Barbarians. The version I prefer, and the one to which I refer throughout this book, is the lexically closer rendering of “In der Strafkolonie” in Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” in Metamorphosis and Other Stories, ed. & tr. Malcolm Pasley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000): 127–53. 22 Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, tr. Dana Polan (Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure, 1975; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1986): 43. 23 For example, the Magistrate demands due process of the law from Colonel Joll. During an interrogation session he shouts, “ ‘ I am waiting for you to prosecute me! […] When are you going to do it? When are you going to bring me to trial? When am I going to have a chance to defend myself?’ ” (123). 24 J.M. Coetzee, “Into the Dark Chamber: The Novelist and South Africa,” New York Times (12 Jan 1986), Late City Final Edition, Sec. 7: 13. 25 Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 132.



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

65

Such acts of territorialization are first of all the result of the observation of a “critical distance,” be it ideological, social or physical, between individuals. After all, for Deleuze, “What is mine is first of all my distance.”26 Without the distance between the State and the barbarian, the expressive quality of the scar upon the body becomes purely functional – the body’s reaction to the tearing of the skin. With distance, the scar becomes a matter of expression of the State as surely as the frontier town it imposes on the landscape. That is to say, it is the relationship between the distances of matters of expression that ultimately mark territories. Both the Magistrate and the barbarians make this relationship explicit. Realizing certain similarities between himself and Colonel Joll, the Magistrate exclaims, “I must assert my distance from Colonel Joll! I will not suffer for his crimes!” (48). Similarly, the barbarians assert their distance from the Magistrate during the return of the barbarian girl – it is an exchange that refuses the touch of the Other (77–79). Clearly, critical distance attempts to keep the chaotic potential of the unknown at bay, beyond the territorializing expressions and the territorialized functions of a territory. However, it also regulates the coexistence of subjects in a singular world by keeping ‘the known’ and ‘the unknown’ distinct but, nevertheless, in a constant rhythm of contact and retreat. In such a context of rhythm, the barbarian girl’s scars enter into a state of perpetual transcoding.27 While they are evidence of an act of personal violence by an empire that claims to combat the barbarity of Others, they are also the evidence of a universal barbarity implicit in the Imperial project to determine the world. The girl’s scars are indicative of much more than her personal milieu. They open out onto other more ‘cosmic’ scars that, in losing their terrestrial character, form a strong and constant motif through the rhythm of every newly constituted, dissipating, or communicating milieu of the world. It is this realization that forces the Magistrate to revise his initial assertion that “There is nothing to link me with torturers, people who sit waiting like beetles in dark cellars” (48), into a more subtle and complex arrangement: I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid Colonel. I was the lie that the Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth when harsh winds blow. Two sides of imperial rule, no more, no less. (148–49)

26 27

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 319. A Thousand Plateaus, 313.

66

ON REPRESENTATION



In this way, the critical distance between the Magistrate and Colonel Joll ceases to be one premised on strong conceptual differences, and instead entails the slipperiness of a distinction between truth and lies. Nevertheless, a critical distance remains and is exposed in the trajectory that the Magistrate chooses to adopt concerning the barbarian girl and her scars.

A Weak Geography There are only two possible conclusions to the scenario of two competing territories contacting each other. Either a territory expands or retreats before another territory, or a territory opens itself up to the other. The distinction to be made is that witnessed between war and love. In war, territories are fought over – they are won and lost, administered, and controlled. In love, territories are opened up – they offer up a ‘crack’ in their borders through which another can enter. In Waiting for the Barbarians both reactions are charted. A young lieutenant, discussing the activities of the barbarians with the Magistrate, states: ‘We are not going […] Even if it became necessary to supply the settlement by convoy, we would not go. Because these border settlements are the first line of defence of the Empire.’ (56)

Unsurprisingly, the lieutenant thinks of the frontier town in terms of the activity of war. The town marks the limit of the territory of the Empire, “the first line of defence” against the barbarian hordes. In contrast, the Magistrate is always willing to open the gates of the town, to offer a crack to the Other through which they can tentatively cross the border of State territory. If not a gesture of love, it is a gesture of peace that reveals his liberal-humanist stance: It used to be that groups of nomads would visit the settlement in winter to pitch their tents outside the walls and engage in barter, exchanging wool, skins, felts and leatherwork for cotton goods, tea, sugar, beans, flour. We prise barbarian leatherwork, particularly the sturdy boots they sew. (40–41)

The prohibitions placed on the barbarian, such as the prescribing of barter as the only mode of exchange, and the decree that taverns must remain closed to the barbarian, is premised more on an observation of the moral condition of this frontier town’s ‘civilized’ population than on mistrust of the barbarian. The Magistrate writes: “Where civilisation entailed the corruption of bar-



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

67

barian virtues and the creation of a dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilisation” (41). Yet, it is in the relationship between the Magistrate and the barbarian girl that we are given the full extent of the effect of opening up one territory to another. The milieu of the Magistrate’s chamber is undoubtedly a territorialized space – a nest that he prepares by himself, which awaits the arrival of the next female to complete its function. Indeed, the promiscuity of the Magistrate is beyond question, “‘From the kitchen to the Magistrate’s bed in sixteen easy steps’ – that is how the soldiers talk of kitchenmaids” (34). While such talk might inhabit the domain of idle banter, it certainly seems to reflect the Magistrate’s own recollection of events. Reminiscing about his first years as magistrate in the frontier town, he recalls the “easy morals” of “the complaisant sloe-eyed women.” He continues: that promiscuity modulated into more discreet relations with housekeepers and girls lodged sometimes upstairs in my rooms but more often downstairs with the kitchen help, and into liaisons with girls at the inn. (48)

But, for the first time, the Magistrate’s courtship of a woman, the barbarian girl, is just as territorialized as his chamber. He produces a territorial refrain that is composed of many elements, the most dominant of which is his behaviour towards the girl. The reader is told: I begin to wash her. She raises her feet for me in turn. I knead and massage the lax toes through the soft milky soap. Soon my eyes close, my head droops. It is rapture of a kind. (31)

The water, the cleansing ritual, and the induction of sleep are major elements of the Magistrate’s territorial refrain towards the barbarian girl. However, the refrain achieves its consistency by drawing together elements that are far more diverse than this; it also encompasses the act of interrogation, the elusive sense of embarrassment, and the intimacy of touch. In the words of Deleuze, what this refrain describes is the moment at which a “territorial assemblage opens onto the courtship assemblage.”28 That is to say, it describes the moment at which the barbarian girl undergoes a certain kind of metamorphosis – she ceases to be a simple determined function in the territorial assemblage of the Magistrate and becomes the constitutive element of the social

28

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 324.

68

ON REPRESENTATION



assemblage of courtship. The barbarian girl proves to be an “assemblage converter,” a catalyst or passage for the social assemblage to gain autonomy from the territorial assemblage that strives to condition all of the heterogeneous forces of the milieux it is imposed on. Thus, for the Magistrate, the scars that cover the barbarian girl’s body eventually lose their status as markers of territory; they become deterritorialized: I am with her not for whatever raptures she may promise or yield but for other reasons, which remain as obscure to me as ever. Except that it has not escaped me that in bed in the dark the marks her torturers have left upon her, the twisted feet, the half-blind eyes, are easily forgotten. (70)

Nevertheless, the Magistrate finds it hard to reconcile the deterritorialized condition of the girl’s scars with his own lived experience. Questioning himself, he continues: Is it then the case that it is the whole woman I want, that my pleasure in her is spoiled until these marks on her are erased and she is restored to herself; or is it the case […] that it is the marks on her which drew me to her but which, to my disappointment, I find, do not go deep enough? Too much or too little: is it she I want or the traces of a history her body bears? (70)

In answer to the question, it is certain that it is the “whole woman,” the impossible “everything” that constitutes the barbarian girl, that manifests the Magistrate’s desire, since if he ultimately desired the “traces of history her body bears” it would inevitably return him to the territorial assemblage that the barbarian girl deterritorializes. Indeed, the mere possibility of the Magistrate’s recognizing the barbarian girl as a “whole person,” rather than through the marks of State territory, is significant, since such recognition can only occur through the operation of deterritorialization. Given such a context, the relationship between the Magistrate and the barbarian girl insists on a further distinction, because the relationship cannot be considered as either of those found in the geography of a milieu or territory. Deleuze is certain that milieu groups cannot sustain any kind of recognition of an individual, while territorial groups can only sustain the recognition of an individual from within a territory.29 Clearly, the relationship between the Magistrate and the barbarian 29

It is perhaps worth clarifying the terms ‘milieu groups’ and ‘territorial groups’. Milieu groups consist of collective organizations. As such, there is nothing like an



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

69

girl fits neither of these situations. Rather, the Magistrate’s recognition of the ‘whole person’ occurs independent of place, whether within the State territory of the frontier town or within the complex milieu of the impossible geography that lies beyond its walls. Such is the condition of “love couples,” Deleuze writes, which always attain a certain autonomy from the determining character of a territory.30 And it is beyond doubt that it is love the Magistrate feels for the barbarian girl. During the return journey to his frontier town, after escorting the girl to “her own people,” the Magistrate articulates just such a sentiment – “Plodding across the salt I catch myself in a moment of astonishment that I could have loved someone from so remote a kingdom” (82). Thus, the Magistrate offers a crack in his territory for the barbarian girl to enter, and the consequence of this is dramatic. The intersection of the territory of the Magistrate and the territory of the barbarian girl leads to a forced deterritorialization, a fact that does not escape the Magistrate as he places perhaps the most prophetic words of the text in the mouth of the barbarian girl: From the very first she knew me for a false seducer […]. If only she had found the words to tell me! ‘That is not how you do it,’ she should have said, stopping me in the act. ‘If you want to learn how to do it, ask your friend with the black eyes.’ Then she should have continued, so as not to leave me without hope: ‘But if you want to love me you will have to turn your back on him and learn your lesson elsewhere.’ (148)

The charge the Magistrate makes for himself, via the barbarian girl, is to find an “elsewhere,” a place that is beyond the (ideological and physical) spaces territorialized by the State. Indeed, it is for this reason that he must accompany the girl back to the nomads who are beyond the sight and the reach of individual that can be recognized independently from the group. Perhaps the simplest way to grasp this situation is to think of a colony of bees. While each bee is certainly an individual, each is only recognizable in terms of a collective endeavour to gather pollen from a shared operational milieu, and return it to the collective hive. Territorial groups, on the other hand, are composed of recognizable individuals. However, the recognition of an individual cannot transgress the borders of a shared territory. For example, the State sets a territory in order to know its population. Those who are outside of the State’s territory are homogenized into the conceptual category of ‘the Other’. Thus, in this example, the recognition of an individual can only occur within the borders of State territory. See Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 324. 30 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 324.

70

ON REPRESENTATION



Empire. The Magistrate is forced into a condition of movement, a deterritorialization, that will see him leave behind not only the territory of the State but every territorial assemblage known to him – those created by himself and those created by others. It is not even that the Magistrate must exchange one territory for another, State territory for the territory of the nomad. He must negate all such organized, territorialized forces of the world in favour of “the liberated or regained forces of a deterritorialised Cosmos.”31 However, this is not to suggest that the Magistrate must create a space of pure abstraction. Just as the scars of the barbarian girl lose none of their particularity when they open out on to the other more cosmic scars caused by the universal epistemological violence implicit in the Imperial project to determine the world, so the Magistrate must organize a trajectory for his deterritorialization that is both particular and absolute. His movement is, therefore, twofold: the physical journey towards the mountains and the waiting barbarians which constitutes his particular trajectory (the specific); and the accompanying mental journey, the movement of a psychological deterritorialization from the State, which assumes an absolute trajectory (the singular). Experiencing the condition of a continuing absolute deterritorialization from the State, the Magistrate witnesses the territorializing sounds of Empire, the tones produced by the bugle-calls of the ramparts, the language of the frontier people, both being consumed by their own elemental condition. “All at once,” he writes, “the wind rises to a scream […] I shout. My words are nothing but a whisper, I cannot hear them myself” (72). He also imagines the stones that construct the borders of the Empire returning to a deterritorialized state, “as though not one spadeful of earth had been turned or one brick laid upon another” (55). Ultimately, the Magistrate looks through everything that is terrestrial, everything that can be territorialized, to see the “forces of a deterritorialised cosmos.” So, in describing the early days of his incarceration, he writes: I stare all day at the empty walls, unable to believe that the imprint of all the pain and degradation they have enclosed will not materialise under an intent enough gaze; or shut my eyes, trying to attune my hearing to that infinitely faint level at which the cries of all who suffered here must still beat from wall to wall. I pray for the day when these walls will be levelled and the unquiet echoes can finally take wing. (87) 31

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 324.



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

71

The Magistrate’s reflection on his incarceration clearly reveals the deterritorialized forces of the cosmos. Such manifestations of pain and suffering simultaneously belong to nobody and everybody, and, like caged birds, seek escape from the manufactured confinement of the cell. Thus, the Magistrate can no longer conceptualize the world, the earth, solely in terms of a chaos to be subjugated or organized at the hands of a territory. Through his state of deterritorialization, he returns to a conceptualization of the earth as a literal support for the foot, as a support for movement rather than as a support for any kind of colonization. It is the attainment of this state that he relentlessly pursues. “I look forward to exercise times,” he relates, “when I can feel the wind on my face and the earth under my soles” (87). It is a desire to commune with the deterritorialized forces of the earth itself. However, the force of the Magistrate’s absolute deterritorialization is not realized until he returns to the site of his old territory. Quite apart from the almost spiritual awakening associated with the process of deterritorialization is his experience of a lost territory. As the Third Bureau literally removes him from his magistracy of the frontier town, it forces the Magistrate to experience all State territory in terms of loss, which consequently forces him to experience himself “as an exile, a voyager, as deterritorialised”:32 A man sits at my desk in the office behind the courtroom. I have never seen him before […] The shelves have been cleared, dusted and polished. The surface of the desk glows with a deep lustre, bare save for a saucer of little glass balls of different colours. The room is spotlessly clean […] I stand beside my guard in the same clothes I travelled in, my underwear washed once or twice but my coat still smelling of woodsmoke, waiting […] The careful reorganisation of my office from clutter and dustiness to this vacuous neatness, the slow swagger which he uses to cross the room, the measured insolence with which he examines me, are all meant to say something. (84–90)

What such factors “say” is that the Magistrate has been stripped of his territorial assemblage and reterritorialized: ie. reclaimed by the State. Clearly, it is no longer possible for the Magistrate to forge a territorial assemblage from the elements of a State apparatus. Indeed, it seems that such elements serve only to accelerate the speed at which he undergoes his deterritorialization. Even in the familiar territory of the town, the Magistrate finds himself in a curious landscape that is populated solely by strangers, of whom he is merely one. 32

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 339.

72

ON REPRESENTATION



The Magistrate asks himself, “Why are there only strangers around?” (107), and tells Colonel Joll, “‘You and I are strangers – you even more than I’” (12). In this indeterminate landscape of strangers, identity slips away and is replaced by the universal character of form. But, here, even form fails to achieve consistency, slipping away to enter a state of perpetual variation. Just as the desert begins to modulate through the variable topography of the shifting dunelands, the Magistrate begins a metamorphosis that will put him in confrontation with the State; and the confrontation will not always be conducted on a ground that is terrestrial. In his variable, but absolute, deterritorialized form, the Magistrate chooses to return to the frontier town as a “hero of the cosmos.”33 Never content to rest in contemplation of either the milieu of his solitariness or the horror of a territorialized earth that has been ravaged and dismembered at the hands of the State, he opens himself to the forces of the cosmos in order to render visible the non-visible forces implicit in the power exercised by Empire. Only in this way can he hope to combat the State – to capture the non-visible forces of State domination, such as the intensity, density, and weight of its trace, and expose them to its territorialized people to serve as a catalyst for revolution. The Magistrate must “dwell as a poet,”34 encouraging private thought to exceed State thought and in so doing sow the seeds for a “new” people to demand autonomy from State control. This, of course, is the force behind the Magistrate’s continued resistance to the State’s position regarding the barbarian. It is a potential force that Colonel Joll both recognizes and wishes to dissipate. During interrogation, Joll says to the Magistrate: ‘When I arrived back a few days ago, I had decided that all I wanted from you was a clear answer to a simple question, after which you could have returned to your concubines a free man […] However, you seem to have a new ambition […]. You seem to want to make a name for yourself as the One Just Man, the man who is prepared to sacrifice his freedom to his principles.’ (124)

That Joll links the stance of the Magistrate to the concept of the “One Just Man,” and later to the concept of the “martyr,” reveals both the potential route and potential product of the Magistrate’s refusal to conform to State thinking.

33

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 342. Paul Virilio, L’insécuritié du territoire (1975), quoted in Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 345. 34



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

73

Clearly, the possibility of the Magistrate’s private thoughts connecting to the collective consciousness of the wider populace is intolerable to State authority, since it would blur the veracity of all State-created information and future State articulations. This is why Joll leads with a seemingly innocuous offer that promises to dissipate the static energy building behind the Magistrate’s position. But the offer is nothing other than an attempt to get the Magistrate to adopt and enunciate the preconceived truth of the State. As such, the offer is little more than a repetition of Joll’s interrogation technique as related by himself to the Magistrate earlier in the novel. It is an attempt to collapse the annexed zone of the Magistrate’s personal milieu in order to territorialize him. Yet such manoeuvres only double the resolve of the Magistrate. In declining Colonel Joll’s offer, the Magistrate reasserts his state of deterritorialization, a deterritorialization that allowed him to proclaim, on returning from his journey, “my alliance with the guardians of the Empire is over, I have set myself in opposition, the bond is broken, I am a free man” (85). Nonetheless, the State opposes the deterritorialized forces of the cosmos drawn together by the Magistrate with a refrain of methodical and total territorialization. The State seeks to territorialize everything, to make everything known through a process of limitation that results in the absolute inhibition of possibility. For Deleuze, this process describes the progressive closure of all assemblages and results in an “ever wider and deeper black hole.”35 Ultimately, this black hole of inhibition finds its clearest expression in the literal black hole of the Magistrate’s “dark chamber” – his prison cell: brushing my hand mindlessly over my face, I realise how tiny I have allowed them to make my world, how I daily become more like a beast or a simple machine […]. Then I respond with movements of vertiginous terror in which I rush around the cell jerking my arms about, pulling my beard, stamping my feet, doing anything to surprise myself, to remind myself of a world beyond that is various and rich. (93)

One can perhaps recognize the most visible effort of the State to limit the proliferation of competing representations of itself in the form of the prison cell. The prison cell is the product of the State’s excessive territorialization of the forces of the earth. Indeed, it is the product of an absolute territorialization that aims to reassert State power through the capture, control, and eventual annihilation of the cosmic forces of deterritorialization embodied by the

35

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 345.

74

ON REPRESENTATION



Magistrate. Thus, while the Magistrate continues to threaten the release of destabilizing forces, the State reacts with the familiar strategy of disconnection. Through this, the prison cell promises not only to disconnect the Magistrate physically from the population, but also to disconnect his private thoughts from the collective consciousness of the frontier town. In its fullest extent, the prison cell is intended to be experienced as a “tiny world,” a microcosm that functions as a metonym of the actual world. In this tiny world, it is beyond doubt that the State holds absolute domination, and it is this exactitude that the State hopes the prisoner will internalize and apply to the actual world upon release. Therefore, the Magistrate, if he is to remain in opposition to the State, must offer resistance to the tiny world created by his prison cell. He must remind himself of the “world beyond that is various and rich,” and the only way he can do this is to reclaim the very possibility of movement that is denied him by his confinement – he must jerk his arms, pull his beard, and stamp his feet as a reaffirmation both of his deterritorialization and of possibility itself.

Smooth and Striated Space Thus, at the heart of this complex conceptualization of geography one can discern, through the metamorphosis of the Magistrate, two very different treatments of space. One is the strong geography of a literal geo-graphism – a literal writing on the surface of the earth caused by the need to make territories out of milieux. The other is the weak geography of exchange between such territories – an exchange that draws together the forces of the earth and the forces of the cosmos to offer a more fluid description of space. The distinction to be made is between “striated” State space and “smooth” nomadic space.36 Striated space is descriptive of the way in which the State seeks to code and decode space in order to render it knowable. It is the way in which the State marks not only the earth but also the bodies of the people who populate it. In his official capacity, the Magistrate writes: We have been here more than a hundred years, we have reclaimed land from the desert and built irrigation works and planted fields and built solid homes and put a wall around our town. (55)

36

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 353.



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

75

Such endeavours as the construction of irrigation works, homes, and defensive walls, as well as the planting of fields, are all the product of a writing on the earth. The chaotic forces of the earth are marshalled by a State that sees the ground only as a means of support for the structures which it can impose upon it: space is organized and segmented, made measurable in order to formalize a certain gravity between the earth and that which is written upon it. Smooth space, by comparison, is only an implied geography. As the nomad walks, a geography of unlimited and unknown space is revealed. Clearly, the earth still offers support to the nomad, but it is always and only a literal support for the foot that must traverse it. Therefore, in distinction to State-striated space, the only process of formalization that smooth space offers is the possibility of movement itself. Under such conditions, smooth space is best thought of as a geography of writing and forgetting in distinction to the geography of writing and memory that characterizes State-striated space. It is the intensive spatium instead of the extensio of projection.37 As the Magistrate becomes increasingly aware of nomad space through his deterritorialization and his ‘becoming-nomad’, symbolized most overtly by the caterpillar scar he shares with the barbarian girl,38 he begins to understand how the State’s striation of physical space cannot be separated from the striation of its populace. In addition to the most obvious manner in which the State writes on people, the Magistrate uncovers a covert State procedure that has exactly the same effect on its populace as the scar: What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. (146)

Again, then, smooth space is equated here with the cosmic forces induced by the Earth’s relation to other celestial bodies. But what is more striking in this instance is the clarity with which the Magistrate manages to penetrate the

37

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 479. Compare, for example, the Magistrate’s description of the barbarian girl’s facial scar, “I notice in the corner of one eye a greyish puckering as though a caterpillar lay there with its head under her eyelid, grazing” (33), with his own, “the wound on my cheek, never washed or dressed, is swollen and inflamed. A crust like a fat caterpillar has formed on it” (125). 38

76

ON REPRESENTATION



naturalized forces of the State to arrive at a comment on striation. It is an observation that history becomes a boundary as tight as the prison walls themselves, because the discourse of history produces a “truth” which comes to locate the very identity of the subject.39

However, one should perhaps temper the certainty that this observation gives to the product of history, for it is far from certain that such manoeuvres of history manage to precisely locate the identity of the Magistrate. Nevertheless, while the Magistrate hints at a smooth space in which the self is distributed in openness governed by the cosmic, history is presented as a process of perpetual closure and allocation. History is the product of striation, the State’s attempt to render visible, and therefore condition, not only the various and rich substances of the world but also the term of their infinitely complex connection – time. Clearly, the operation of history is not the only means of the State’s striation of physical and truly metaphysical space. As the Magistrate relates, I collect the tithes and taxes,administer the communal lands, see that the garrison is provided for, supervise the junior officers who are the only officers we have here, keep an eye on trade, preside over the lawcourt twice a week. (8)

In his official capacity, the Magistrate is consumed in the act of striation. The land and those who occupy it are assigned a dimensional and metric quality. Thus, the earth is distinguished by the terms of its use (farmland / communal), people are distinguished by the terms of their profession (soldiers/ merchants / criminals), and each is literally accountable to the arbitrary value of the coin (tithes /taxes). In this way, the State structures its attempt to take control not only of the geography of the land on which it is imposed but also of the geography of the people who facilitate its being. And, in the function of taking control, the act of striation is revealed to be, first of all, an act of relentless possession where the undifferentiated is determined only to the extent that it can be ascribed to an owner. Again, as the Magistrate states, “We think of the country here as ours, part of our Empire – our outpost, our settlement, our market centre” (55). Key to this ideological impetus of ownership is the realization that the State “only reigns over what it is capable of internalising, of

39

Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, 170.



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

77

appropriating locally.”40 Thus, striation survives as a method of translation that seeks to represent the universal in the ultimately impoverished particular. And so we are once again returned to the necessary ascendancy that the State gives to the earth – as a ground of support for the continuing structured territories imposed upon it – over the ascendancy of deterritorialized cosmic forces witnessed in the constitution of the nomad. Such ideological positioning by the State lets it adopt a seemingly totalizing stance. In its conditioning project to know and control the chaotic forces of the earth, the State assumes a relational role towards every physical element of the world. Thus, nothing can be considered wholly independent of its existence. However, this totalizing stance is problematized by an “outside,” as Deleuze notes, which “appears simultaneously in two directions.”41 While the State attempts to marshal the world, there are certain formations that necessarily operate beyond its control and achieve a certain degree of autonomy from the State. Operating beyond the State, in every sense of the word, is the formation of organized religion. The Magistrate relates: There is news of the lieutenant’s two deserters. A trapper has come upon them frozen to death in a rough shelter not far from the road thirty miles east of here. Though the lieutenant is inclined to leave them there […] I persuade him to send out a party. ‘They must have the rites,’ I say. ‘Besides, it is good for the morale of their comrades. They should not think that they too might die in the desert and lay forgotten.’ (58)

The need to fulfil the ‘obligation’ of last rites has an impact that transcends the boundaries of rationalism established by the State. It is the moment in which religion reveals its power to make the absolute (the Divine) appear in the particular (the soldiers’ corpses). Replying to the Magistrate’s request to retrieve the bodies of the two perished soldiers, the lieutenant says, “Thirty miles there and thirty miles back in this weather: a great deal for men who are no longer men, don’t you think?” (58). So, while it seems that the State only measures the value of such men in terms of their production, in the way in which they support the State, the Magistrate realizes the value of the eternal “whole person.” Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to conclude, because of such divergence, that religion is in opposition to the State. Just as the State

40 41

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 360. A Thousand Plateaus, 360.

78

ON REPRESENTATION



promotes the final organization of substances, religion promotes the sedimentization of populations through the practice of directed worship. Now, it is clear why the State largely tolerates the tendency of religion to assume a certain autonomy through its self-elevation to the level of the relatively global when one realizes that religion offers itself as an encompassing horizon at the moment in which it makes the absolute appear in the local. In doing so, it attempts to establish a solid and stable centre that can be reterritorialized by the State and subsequently employed in the latter’s project to tame the chaotic forces of the earth. Yet, while the structure of religion gives it an extensive character that operates outside of State control, one can locate an outside of State control that is purely intensive in character. It is clear that, while the State is engaged in a project to know the world through the appropriation and stratification of the local, it is also necessarily creating marginal and minority groups that, in their very being, “affirm the rights of segmentary societies in opposition to the organs of State power.”42 The “barbarian problem” posed by the State is a result of its own processes of control. The barbarian / nomad, as presented in Coetzee’s novel,43 implies a form of continual variation that resists the State’s procedure of identification necessary to reduce all forms to components of itself. Such inability to designate the diversity of its own interiority causes the State to endure the movement of a forced deterritorialization. Such movement is described by the State’s own becoming-minor, a process of deterritorialization that arrives because of the State’s fabrication of both the barbarian myth (code) and its inability to satisfactorily condition it. Yet, it is certain that the State apparatus suffers an entirely different fate from the individual at the hands of such deterritorialization. The State apparatus experiences deterritorialization through the metamorphoses of its own industrial and technological innovations, and the interruption of its commercial circuits. It is a metamorphosis that motions towards the exteriority of State apparatuses, an outside

42

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 360. It is by no mistake that the State conflates the concept of the “barbarian” with the indigenous “fishing folk” and the “nomad” of the plains and mountains. Since these societies assert a certain autonomy from the State, the State seeks to define them through an impoverished designation. Of course, the Magistrate himself is guilty of such conflation, recounting how he returns the “barbarian” girl to the “nomads,” which are “her own people” (148). 43



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

79

which “presents itself as a diffuse and polymorphous war machine.”44 Following a suspected barbarian offensive against the State, where part of an embankment had been cut away in order to flood planted fields, the Magistrate writes: I can see that weeks of hard work await the farmers. And at any moment their work can be brought to nothing by a few men armed with spades! How can we win such a war? What is the use of textbook military operations, sweeps and punitive raids into the enemy’s heartland, when we can be bled to death at home? (109–10)

Importantly, while the commercial value of the frontier town’s farmland is clearly compromised by this disruption of striated space, the manner in which it is conducted proves also to be worthy of State concern. That the weapon of this act is the tool of the agriculturalist reflects the kind of metamorphosis indicative of forced deterritorialization. The tool, which ordinarily prepares matter in order to bring it into a state of equilibrium, is turned into a weapon that conditions an entire economy of violence – “a way of making violence durable, even unlimited.”45 As such, the very technology that supports the State’s conquest of physical space is transformed into the means by which such endeavours are interrupted, and the State, in the words of the Magistrate, “bleeds to death at home.” Such metamorphoses, however, are not limited to the innovations or commercial circuits of the State apparatus. The segmentary societies in opposition to the organs of State power have the potential to reconstitute the equivalent of this metamorphosis in the collective body of the State. As the State is induced into forcible deterritorialization through its inability to satisfactorily condition every component of its interiority, certain elements of its collective body experiences the metamorphosis of a becoming-minor. By claiming a certain privilege of autonomy from the State, such collective bodies “open onto something that exceeds them, a short revolutionary instant, an experimental surge.”46 Thus, the Magistrate claims a certain privilege through his association with the barbarian girl and “opens onto” a revolutionary instant through an experimental surge. On his return from escorting the barbarian girl to the nomads of the mountains, the Magistrate finds himself in an interroga44

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 360. A Thousand Plateaus, 396. 46 A Thousand Plateaus, 366–67. 45

80

ON REPRESENTATION



tion conducted by an unnamed Warrant Officer of the Third Bureau. “‘Why have you been consorting with them? Who gave you permission to leave your post?’ I shrug off the provocation. ‘It is a private matter,’ I say” (85). The Magistrate’s close affiliation with a member of a segmentary society merely doubles the privilege associated with his high-ranking official position in the State apparatus. It results in his perceived privilege to keep personal matters private, even under the pressure of a State that insists that such matters intersect with public security. In claiming this privilege, the Magistrate knowingly enters into a becoming-minor, a becoming-nomad, which can do no other than act as a revolutionary force of deterritorialization on the State apparatus. Clearly, the becoming-nomad of the Magistrate conditions his project to destabilize the established powers of the State, for it is certain that he wishes to turn the self-constituting exterior gaze of the Empire upon itself. “‘We have no enemies’,” the Magistrate says under interrogation, “‘Unless I make a mistake […] Unless we are the enemy’” (85). It is certain that the Magistrate’s particular deterritorialization does not take a form that is directly opposed to the State. Rather, it is one that aims at undermining the certainty of State thinking without formalizing itself as a competitor. The Magistrate demonstrates the architecture of such State thought as he tries to discern the meaning of some enigmatic wooden slips recovered from the ruins of an ancient buried civilization. The Magistrate attempts to discern the meaning of these slips Inscribed with characters in an unknown language, by arranging them in every permutation allowed by logic: There were two hundred and fifty-six slips in the bag. Is it by chance that the number is perfect? After I had first counted them and made this discovery I cleared the floor of my office and laid them out, first in one great square, then in sixteen smaller squares, then in other combinations. (16–17)

Such combinatory efforts reveal an architecture of thought, built on the processes of homogenization, stratification, and identification, that plays itself out through the modality of striation. It is a return to the belief that every component of the world is coded by intrinsic properties that, if revealed, can ultimately describe their internal nature. However, it is certain from the Magistrate’s failed attempts to read the slips that the world will not always succumb to such logical translation. Even so, he finds it impossible to break the linear condition of State thinking – “I have even found myself reading the slips in a mirror, or tracing one on top of another, or conflating half of one with half of



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

81

another” (17). It is because of the inability to think outside of State thought that its reciprocal condition with the State apparatus becomes apparent. While State thinking clearly borrows its architecture from the model of the State apparatus, the latter profits from the immutability of State thought, since it functions to generate a cooperative consensus in the population. The charge at hand is that, if the operation of the cogitatio universalis of State thinking cannot discern a meaning, then there is no meaning to discern; and this becomes the consensus of rational opinion. Such power to condition rational opinion on all matters is significant, since it is only this power, Deleuze writes, that “is capable of inventing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, of elevating the State to the level of de jure universality.”47 And it is only after the elevation of the State to the universal that it can claim to span the whole world, thereby claiming the right to be the defining principle by which rebel subjects can be separated from consenting subjects.48 Therefore, the force of the Magistrate’s becoming-nomad, his condition of constant variation, has the potential not only to corrupt the linearity of State though, but also to destroy the fictitious gravity arrogated by the State apparatus from the consensus bred by State thinking. This is why the State will, first, try to dismantle the properties of the Magistrate’s deterritorialized condition. In an effort to reterritorialize him, to make him subscribe once again to its position, it will place him in the confinement of the prison cell, an environment over which the State has absolute control, and then, secondly, attempt to overhaul his perception of himself. To this end, Colonel Joll interrogates the Magistrate, endeavouring to train his self-image by repeating the assertoric speech-acts bound to the imperium of State truth: ‘Believe me, to people in this town you are not the One Just Man, you are simply a clown, a madman. You are dirty, you stink, they can smell you a mile away. You look like an old beggar-man, a refuse scavenger. They do not want you back in any capacity. You have no future here […] You are living in a world of the past. You think we are dealing with small groups of peaceful nomads. In fact we are dealing with a well organised enemy. If you had travelled with the expeditionary force you would have seen that for yourself.’ (124–25)

47 48

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 375. A Thousand Plateaus, 375.

82

ON REPRESENTATION



Colonel Joll’s diatribe is a blatant ploy to make the Magistrate internalize the accusations and denunciations of State opinion. It is a process of saturation that reflects, once again, State thinking – to know solely through an internalization of the local. The Magistrate is perhaps too quick to rebut the claims made against him, since he merely reverses the role of the accuser and repeats the operation of State thinking, “‘You are the enemy, Colonel […] You are the enemy, you have made the war, and you have given them all the martyrs they need’” (125). While the Magistrate’s reversal may have a certain currency on the personal level, it cannot be a sustainable position of resistance to the State apparatus, because it is one that relies on the very ground that is problematized by his becoming-nomad. Indeed, before the anger, before the impassioned defence of his character, the Magistrate produces a far more damaging assault on the State. In the exchange between the Magistrate and Colonel Joll concerning the meaning of the ancient wooden slips, the Magistrate offers a counter-thought to State thinking. It is an epistemologically aggressive act that creates an image, through the figure of the barbarian, which does not assume a stance of direct opposition but, rather, one that simply threatens the destruction of the model of State thought. That is to say, the counter-image that the Magistrate produces problematizes the very possibility of the State endeavour to subordinate thought to a model of the True, the Just, or the Right:49 Now let us see what the next one says. See, there is only a single character. It is the barbarian war, but it has other senses too. It can stand for vengeance, and, if you turn it upside down like this, it can be made to read justice. There is no knowing which sense is intended. (122)

Although the Magistrate remains ignorant of the true meaning of the characters, the readings he produces expose the conditioning impetus of the history written by the unitary State apparatus. The Magistrate’s reading of history is one of dynamic layers, multiple narratives sitting one atop the other, narratives that penetrate, reflect, and deflect the force of other narratives according to whether they reveal convergent or divergent directions of sense. As such, the sedentary and singular quality ascribed to State history is exposed as an artificial construct of a State that seeks only to control the complexity of the multiple through limitation. In reclaiming control through limitation, the State is exposed in its project to collapse history, which is implicitly the domain of 49

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 377.



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

83

collective assemblages of enunciation, into a unitary enunciation. Thus, the Magistrate’s history cannot, and does not even attempt to, reconcile the ambivalence that inheres in the historical text. Moreover, the indeterminacy of the literal meanings of the characters on the wooden slips results in “other troublesome political implications,”50 specifically: The history of the progressive establishment of justice is inseparable from, is in fact merely another name for, the history of war, of vengeance. The liberal attempt to overcome barbarism thus turns back upon itself, until the very concept of the just regime ceases to have a stable meaning that merits respect.51

The Magistrate thus manifests the most disruptive product of his own deterritorialization – his outside thought, which necessarily enters into combat with State thought. It is as though the Magistrate’s counter-thought joins together with external forces to make what Deleuze terms “a war machine,”52 a machine that does not encounter the State in any other space than its interior, even though it has repercussions that span the whole of its spatio-geographic extent. It is a war machine that functions by bringing something incomprehensible into the State apparatus. For the Magistrate, the war machine of counter-thought opens up the conditioning projections and enunciations of the Empire that, once unveiled, can never again be ignored: I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering. I ought never to have taken my lantern to see what was going on in the hut by the granary. On the other hand, there was no way, once I had picked up the lantern, for me to put it down again. The knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end. (22–23)

It is a knowledge that has the potential to combat the State by influencing the consensus of opinion that had previously been the sole preserve of State 50

Michael Valdez Moses, “The Mark of Empire: Writing, History, and Torture in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians,” Kenyon Review, New Series 15.1 (Winter 1993): 122. 51 Moses, “The Mark of Empire,” 122–23. 52 It is worth noting that Deleuze makes the distinction between the machinery by which war is waged and the mechanisms by which the possibility of combat can occur. The term ‘war machine’ refers strictly to the latter, and is the sense in which I employ it throughout this book. See Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 351–423.

84

ON REPRESENTATION



thinking. All that the potential force of the Magistrate’s private thought requires to become revolutionary is the new people that such thought will make manifest. Thus, while the State forces the Magistrate into the solitude of his prison cell, it is an extremely populous solitude. It is, as Deleuze postulates, “a solitude already intertwined with a people to come, one that invokes and awaits that people, existing only through it, though it is not yet here.”53 The enigmatic marks in the Magistrate’s prison cell bind him to the apparitions of all subjugated people; and it will be all such subjugated people that will lend their ear to the Magistrate to hear the incomprehensible. “I discover that I am not without friends,” the Magistrate writes, “particularly among women, who can barely conceal their eagerness to hear my side of the story” (139).

The Nomad and the War Machine The Magistrate invokes a new revolutionary people, but the question remains of the constitution of the “incomprehensible something” that he promises to bring into the State. Indeed, what can be considered incomprehensible to the relatively global posture of the State apparatus? The answer is an ‘impossible’ form of exteriority that presents itself as an outside to, rather than a relative spatial distance from, the State apparatus. It is the form of the nomad and the nomadic war machine, a form of deterritorialization born from the open space of the nomos.54 Therefore, to elucidate the character of the nomad, as presented in Coetzee’s novel, is to elucidate the character of the potential force that the Magistrate wields through his deterritorialization. Contrary to common perception, the nomad can be said to have a territory. Indeed, it is a territory that is composed like the State, inasmuch as it, too, consists of points and paths. For the State, such points are the tangible structured assemblages of the barracks, the house, the town, and so on, while for the nomad they are the equally tangible assemblages of nodal structures such as water-holes and dwelling-places. However, State territory and nomadic territory can be distinguished from each other through their differing treatment of the relationship between points and paths. While the State privileges the point over the path, thinking of travel only in terms of the coordinates of 53

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 377. The nomos should be thought of in these terms: “nondelimited, unpartioned; the pre-urban countryside; mountainside, plateau, steppe” (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 481). 54



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

85

departure and arrival, for the nomad points are subordinate to paths. Even though such points necessarily determine the paths of the nomad, the nomad thinks of each point only in terms of transition. As Deleuze writes, it is as if “every point is a relay and exists only as a relay.”55 That is to say, for the nomad, points are always and only to be left behind, as the Magistrate notes during his journey to the mountains, “We leave our well behind us, and the mound of earth we dug, to press on northwards” (70–71). Here, the function of the path that the nomad travels is qualitatively different from the path or road of the State. The State road is the product of the striation of space. While it clearly facilitates travel from point to point, the form of the road serves to regulate the direction of travel by closing off the vague space that sits at its border. Thus, the road is the attempt to marshal the chaotic forces of the wilderness by limiting the interaction of such forces with those that choose to traverse it. In contradistinction, the path that the nomad travels is the unbound polymorphous geography of space itself. Since the nomad subordinates points to the path, the path achieves a consistency independent of the points that serve to punctuate its flow. In this way, the nomad traces a perpetual trajectory and is brought to points by necessity rather than endeavour. However, the perpetual trajectory of the nomad does not mean that the latter can be defined by the condition of movement. Where State striation distributes space among people in order to control communication, the nomad is distributed through a smooth space: he “occupies, inhabits, holds that space.”56 And “that space” of the undifferentiated nomos becomes the nomad’s principle of territoriality. Unable and unwilling to separate the self from this global milieu, the nomad pulls the nomos-territory directly onto the body so that he can only ever reterritorialize on his own deterritorialization. It is the act of becoming the absolute Deterritorialized. Thus, it is clear that the nomad moves to the extent that he attains a perpetual trajectory across the plenary milieu that conditions his deterritorialization. But it is equally clear that the nomad cannot transcend this truly universal milieu. As the Magistrate intimates to a young officer, the nomad is as permanent as any other element of the earth: ‘There are old folk alive among them who remember their parents telling them about this oasis as it once was: a well-shaded place by the side of the lake with plenty of grazing even in winter […]. They do not 55 56

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 380. A Thousand Plateaus, 381.

86

ON REPRESENTATION



doubt that one of these days we will pack our carts and depart to wherever it was we came from, that our buildings will become homes for mice and lizards, that their beasts will graze on these rich fields we have planted.’ (55)

Here, the State striation of space is shown to be an interruption, a blockage, a mere inconvenience to the flow of the nomad’s trajectory. It is not even as though the State can enforce the departure of the nomad from his territory in order to bring him into the territory of the State, since, first, nomadic territory is of the body and, secondly, State territory is exposed as nothing except a temporary and impoverished translation from the nomad’s milieu. As such, it is certain that the nomad is purely stationary in comparison to the people of a State that measures itself in relation to the amount of space that it ‘captures’ from the chaotic forces of the earth. Therefore, the nomad appears to present an intriguing paradox, maintaining an unlimited trajectory while ultimately being absolutely stationary. However, the perception of this curious arrangement as a paradox holds only until one appreciates the quality of the nomad’s (im)mobility. The distinction to be made is between speed and movement. While the terms appear to be synonymous, which is perhaps the root of the perceived paradox of the ontological position of the nomad, it is clear that each term expresses a distinctive concept. As Deleuze observes, “a movement may be very fast, but that does not give it speed; a speed may be very slow, or even immobile, yet it is still speed.”57 The distinction, then, is between the extensive character of movement and the intensive character of speed. Movement describes the motion of a body relative to the points of its emanation and conclusion. So it proves to be a most suitable term for characterizing the journeys made by those conditioned by State thinking. Speed, conversely, is the description of the absolute motion of a body. As speed is not bound by the condition of relativity, a body with such speed has the inherent potential to instantaneously manifest at, or recede from, any point. Coetzee makes it beyond doubt that the nomad possesses such speed. A sentry, talking to the Magistrate, describes how the barbarian / nomad raids are never witnessed: ‘They cut away part of the embankment over there and flooded the fields. No one saw them. They came in the night. The next morning it was like a second lake.’ (108)

57

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 381.



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

87

It is as if the nomads simply appear from nowhere and, similarly, recede back to nowhere. Soldiers who chased a band of barbarians into the wilderness recall: ‘We froze in the mountains! We starved in the desert! Why did no one tell us it would be like that? We were not beaten – they led us out into the desert and then they vanished!’ (161)

Now, it is clear that the possibility of such instantaneous manifestation and recession of the nomad is what prompts the State’s fear of the outsiders. Singularly, the nomad has the potential to enter every stronghold, cross every protected threshold: There is no woman living along the frontier who has not dreamed of a dark barbarian hand coming from under the bed to grip her ankle, no man who has not frightened himself with the visions of the barbarians carousing in his home, breaking the plates, setting fire to the curtains, raping his daughters. (9)

But as a collective body, the nomad has the potential to offer a significant threat to every part of the State apparatus, simultaneously. It is a threat that the State seeks to counter directly, through the impossible effort involved in distributing its military forces over every part of its territory, simultaneously: In the capital the concern was that the barbarian tribes of the north and the west might at last be uniting. Officers of the general staff were sent on tours of the frontier. Some of the garrisons were strengthened. Traders who requested them were given military escorts. (9)

Furthermore, whether as a single entity or as a part of a collective body, the nomad exhibits infinite patience. The speed that produces such State fear is equally the speed of the nomad’s “stationary process.”58 By remaining still, the nomad still manages to move. For example, the Magistrate recalls how the barbarian girl still manages to ride her horse while asleep (65), just as he relates to others tales from the capital of the speed of nomad raids on traders and farmers. Indeed, Coetzee’s barbarians remain true to those of Cavafy, always enigmatic, always just beyond inspection, an absence that proves only to be a catalyst for State action and reaction. It is as if the nomad were in constant variation, being immanent and catatonic, simultaneously manifest and imaginary. But such variation is, rather, evidence of the ability of the nomad to change “pace.” The stationary process of the nomad describes every pos58

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 381.

88

ON REPRESENTATION



sible tempo, so that waiting becomes as invested with speed as any other activity. In such a manner, the nomad never feels the necessity to engage in direct confrontation with the State, since the ability to wait results in the same force of destabilization wielded by a direct assault: ‘Every year the lake water grows a little more salty […]. The barbarians know this fact. At this very moment they are saying to themselves, “Be patient, one of these days their crops will start withering from the salt, they will not be able to feed themselves, they will have to go”.’ (55)

Such speed proves to be not only an essential conditioning factor of the nomadic war machine but also an essential conditioning factor of nomadic space. It is clear that the earth deterritorializes itself for the nomad – land becomes merely support for the foot; structured assemblages lose all integrity of finality; paths lose the intensity associated with the conduit that determines direction of travel, becoming ever wider and more consistently intertwined until they eventually become indiscernible from the nomos upon which they are written. Through its deterritorialization, the earth creates a smooth space, the Magistrate realizes, which is “no meaner or grander than the space above the shacks and tenements and temples and offices of the capital. Space is space, life is life, everywhere the same” (17). It is a space, therefore, that cannot possibly hold the memory of any kind of structurality: i.e. any kind of organization. So, while the Magistrate tries to find “in the vacuousness of the desert a special historical poignancy,” his efforts are predestined to be “Vain, idle, misguided!” (18). Indeed, it is for this very reason that the Magistrate will always struggle to fashion a territorial position within both the plenary milieu of the nomos and the changing milieu of his own body: When I wake it is with a mind washed so blank that terror rises in me. Only with a deliberate effort can I reinsert myself into time and space: into a bed, a night, a world, a body pointing west and east. (69)

For the nomad, it is always already a matter of merely being of the nomos. Through a trajectory that necessarily insists on the perpetual traversal of the nomos, the nomad becomes an agent of expansion, a vector of its continual deterritorialization. As Deleuze writes, nomads make the desert no less than they are made by it […] They add desert to desert, steppe to steppe, by a series of local operations whose orientation and direction endlessly vary.59 59

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 382.



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

89

The “local operations” to which Deleuze refers are the steps that a nomad takes across the nomos. And so, with every step, the nomad announces a stronger and more intricate bond to the earth, until eventually all evidence of the discrete reference points to the relationship (the nomad / the earth) is lost entirely. In this regard, one might just as well speak of the forces of the earth in order to talk of the nomad, or, conversely, speak of the nomad in order to talk of the forces of the earth. The nomad, namely, is coded by the forces of the earth just as much as the forces of the earth are coded by the nomad. It is a relationship of direct and immanent coding just as much as the relationships between the orchid and the wasp, and the spider and the fly.60 Smooth space can truly be thought of as nomadic space or, more precisely, nomad-space – a space that can only be characterized as a continuum of all possible effectuations of the nomad–earth relationship. Thus, when the State launches a campaign against the nomads it is simultaneously a campaign against the forces of the earth. In the prophetic words of the Magistrate, “the expeditionary force against the barbarians prepares for its campaign, ravaging the earth, wasting our patrimony” (90). However, it is certain that, although the State recognizes the fundamental relationship between the nomad and the forces of the earth, it is not fully understood. The State’s attempts to condition the earth only serve to expand nomad-space: Someone has decided that the river-banks provide too much cover for the barbarians, that the river would form a more defensible line if the banks were cleared. So they have fired the brush. With the wind blowing from the north, the fire has spread across the whole shallow valley. I have seen wild fires before. The fire races through the reeds, the poplars flare up like torches […] They do not care that once the ground is cleared the wind begins to eat at the soil and the desert advances. (89–90)

The implication of the Magistrate’s observation is clear – as the desert advances, so does the nomad. As nomad-space gnaws at the borders of the State, so the nomad assumes the potential to show up at the very gates of the frontier town and enter into combat with the military forces of the State. By ravaging the earth through a misguided belief in the power of striation to render the 60

Deleuze and Guattari discuss both of these relationships in terms of codes and the cyclical operation of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. For the orchid / wasp and spider / fly relationship, see Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 10, 314.

90

ON REPRESENTATION



unseen seen, the unknowable knowable, the State merely hastens its own demise. Yet such direct confrontation always seems unlikely. All that is required of the nomad for him to witness the collapse of the frontier town is that he maintain the pace of his stationary process, exhibit infinite patience, and let the eternal elemental forces of the cosmos (wind and fire) compete against State striated land. Nevertheless, such action by the State draws attention to the rhizomic shifts in topology of smooth space. While the State is responsible for the minor and erratic expansion of the desert, its major extension occurs at the hands of the ubiquitous nomad and in accordance with aggressive elemental forces that ceaselessly capture, move, and deposit the desert upon itself. Indeed, it is the irresistible movement of the sand that so discourages the workers at the Magistrate’s archaeological site. As the Magistrate observes, The work is unpopular, for the diggers must toil under a hot sun or in a biting wind with no shelter and with sand flying everywhere. They work half-heartedly […] discouraged by the speed at which the sand drifts back. (15)

Bound only by the elemental forces of the cosmos, the desert undergoes continuous modulation, an incessant march across itself that keeps blurring and reconditioning the line of horizon. Just as with a snowscape, it is as though there were no separation between earth and sky. Any attempt to coax the distinct from the vague fails to the same extent as imposed structures lose their solidity: From horizon to horizon the earth is white with snow. It falls from a sky in which the source of light is diffuse and everywhere present, as though the sun has dissolved into mist, become an aura […]. The square extends before me, blending at its edges into the luminous sky. Wall, trees, houses have dwindled, lost their solidity, retired over the rim of the world. (10)

The Magistrate’s description of a snow-covered frontier town is no less convincing because it emanates from a dream. In fact, he composes an excellent picture of the loss of perspective, the loss of contour, the overall limiting of visibility associated as much with the protean modulation of the desert as with the constantly forming lamellae of the snowscape. Of course, such a limiting of visibility has consequences that evoke the epistemological construction of space in modern European consciousness. Bill Ashcroft writes:



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

91

The beginning of the European disruption of colonial space lies in the way in which the West conceives space itself. More specifically, it lies in the prominence given to vision since classical thought privileged sight above all other senses. Aristotle opened his Metaphysics by claiming the primacy of sight, which alone among the senses ‘makes us know and brings to light many differences between things.’61

Here, the loss of visibility is equated with the loss of knowledge; and this situation intimates a certain loss of control by the State, since “it is the representation of the surveillance by which the surveyed comes into being.”62 That is to say, visibility stands in direct relation to knowledge only via the connective synthesis of the structured methodology of reason. Now, if the constant modulation of the desert collapses the possibility of discerning, in Aristotle’s words, the “differences between things” – be that the relation between material objects or the relation between material objects and the earth, or even the relation between the earth and the sky – then it must bring a significant force of destabilization to bear on State thought. In the absence of the possibility of surveillance, as the extensive operation of sight, vision is reconditioned to the perception of the local. The gaze of the Lacanian grande-autre is forced to lower, from the horizon to the floor. Thus, the endeavour to make the “surveyed come into being” staggers at the point at which it meets the nomadspace of the desert. This smooth space can only frustrate the operations of striation – identification, objectification, and subjection. Any such acts of organization are predestined to result in seeing the desert as an unknowable and chaotic force in and of its own right: The storm-wall is not black anymore but a chaos of whirling sand and snow and dust. Then all at once the wind rises to a scream, my cap is whirled from my head, and the storm hits us. I am knocked flat on my back: not by the wind but by a horse that breaks free […]. ‘Catch it!’ I shout […]. The horse vanishes from sight like a phantom […] I inch my way back towards the girl. It is like crawling against running water. My eyes, my nose, my mouth are already stopped with sand, I heave to breathe. (72–73)

What is omitted from the Magistrate’s description of the snowscape is dramatically reclaimed in this account of the storm-front he encounters while in the

61 62

Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, 125–26. Post-Colonial Transformation, 141.

92

ON REPRESENTATION



desert. Here, vision once again loses its determinative dominance, receding to the extent that it can only capture the most proximate of objects. Similarly, the nose and mouth are filled with sand, effectively disengaging them from the process of registering substance. The only senses that survive the onslaught of stimulation brought about by the storm are hearing and touch, and it is only through these that the Magistrate is able to form an experience of the desert. It is an experience that cannot be determined by the relational quality of points or objects of reference, but derives wholly from the conscious recognition of the immediacy of haecceities. Thus, the Magistrate describes the desert in terms of its sonorous qualities: the cacophony of the wind clashing with the sand and snow, and the sand and snow striking the bodies of the travelling party. For it is certain that under such circumstance the sonorous cannot be separated from the subjectivity apprehending it. The subjective body is forced to wrest the capacity to render indisputable truth from the methodological imperative of reason. Put simply, it is as though haecceities were working directly upon the body in order both to substantiate the becoming between subjectivity and environment, and to condition the nomad-space of the desert as a tactile rather than visual space: From the dust there is no hiding: it penetrates our clothing, cakes our skin, sifts into the baggage. We eat with coated tongues, spitting often, our teeth grating. Dust rather than air becomes the medium in which we live. We swim through dust like fish through water. (65)

The modulation of the desert introduces a substantial programme of destabilization into the genealogy of State-conceived striation. All at once, the desert problematizes the certainty of the relationships between visibility and identification, identification and knowledge, knowledge and objectivity, objectivity and truth, truth and visibility. With the loss of this organizational framework, the desert presents a way of knowing that will always escape State thought. It allows itself only to be known in terms of the function of haecceities operating on the body. That haecceities are always already prior to personal sensation insists that the milieu-space can no longer be conceived of as an individuated reality external to the subjectivity that apprehends it. Therefore, the milieu becomes the element of a “passage of Life,”63 the element that informs nomadic becoming– nomad-space. And because of this, it becomes impossible to distinguish the nomad from smooth space. While the modulation of

63

See Smith, “Introduction – ‘A Life of Pure Immanence’,” xxxiv.



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

93

the desert necessarily erases the paths of the nomad, the nomad reacts by creating new paths of direction; these have the potential to create space for the desert to move into, which subsequently offers the nomad new trajectories, ad infinitum. Thus, the nomad and smooth space are best conceptualized as a singular process with an absolute movement (a speed) – rather than as a relationship that has sideways movement (penetration and reflection) – that gnaws ceaselessly at the borders of State-striated space. This, then, is the charge of the State apparatus: to manage the speed of smooth space and thereby formalize its dominant relationship to the barbarian / nomad. It is a charge that aims at taming the most characteristic force of the nomadic war machine. Given this context, the practice of striation relates directly to the “capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital, etc.”64 So it is no surprise that the State seeks to capture the speed of all types of assemblages in Waiting for the Barbarians – to limit the possibility of flow by attempting to make speed adopt the relativity that is characteristic of movement. It is the moment at which the State recognizes that it can no longer tolerate the operation of speed. As the reader learns, traders travelling safe routes had been attacked and plundered. Stock thefts had increased in scale and audacity […] shots had been fired at a provincial governor during a tour of inspection. There had been clashes with border patrols. (8)

Here, speed always already tends towards the outside of the State apparatus, always already hints at the impossibility of absolute State control and domination, and always already breeds paranoia and fear whenever its immediacy is felt or suspected: All night, it is said, the barbarians prowl about bent on murder and rapine. Children in their dreams see the shutters part and fierce barbarian faces leer through […] Clothing disappears from washing-lines, food from larders, however tightly locked. The barbarians have dug a tunnel under the walls, people say; they come and go as they please, take what they like; no one is safe any longer. (134)

Undoubtedly, the State recognizes that movement is more easily regulated, more easily managed and controlled, than speed; but such an observation does not seem to temper the efforts of the State to tame speed. Indeed, the very 64

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 386.

94

ON REPRESENTATION



composition of the frontier town stands as a testament to the State endeavour to capture movement and impose a certain gravity on speed. Paul Virilio writes: the gates of the city, its levies and duties, are barriers, filters against the fluidity of the masses, against the penetration power of migratory packs.65

Yet, while Virilio postulates the operation of the gate in terms of another means of State defence against outside agents, here it is clear that the gate works in exactly the same way for the inverse operation. The function of the gate and, more importantly, the State apparatus, involves no distinction between interior and exterior agents, between the conditioning of the consenting subject and the rebel subject. Therefore, it is not a question of the gate signifying a border or imposing physical confinement on a population but, rather, of restricting the possibility of a proliferation of undirected trajectories. Because of this we can begin to note how the structural composition of the town resembles the structural composition of the earthworks observed by the Magistrate: The earthwork itself, the low mud wall that runs for nearly two miles and keeps the lake-water in check when it rises to its summer limit, has been repaired, but almost the whole of the intricate system of channels and gates that distributes the water around the fields has been washed away. (109)

Certainly, the “intricate system of channels and gates” is no less sophisticated than the intricate system of roads and gates that determines the space of the frontier town. Just as the trajectories of the town’s population must be managed, so the trajectory of water must be conditioned in order to be distributed effectively and efficiently. However, the Magistrate’s (perhaps) unintentional allegory is an ominous portent for the future of the frontier town. The reader is told that the damage wrought on the town’s irrigation system is at the hand of the nomad/ barbarian. Now, this ‘fact’ alone does not bode well for the town. Yet this is not the true force behind the act. Manifesting and receding unseen and instantaneously, the nomad wreaks a very specific kind of damage on the town’s irrigation system. By cutting away part of an engineered embankment, the nomad restores the natural flow of the town’s lake, which 65

Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, tr. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext[e], 1986): 13.



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

95

subsequently consumes the irrigation works. It is thus an act that relies on the double process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. As the nomad interrupts the State striation of space by cutting away the embankment, he commits a forced act of deterritorialization that results in the lake’s reterritorializing of State land. It is a reterritorialization driven by the elemental force of the lake’s assuming its natural character. And so, this is the ominous portent for the future of the town that the Magistrate’s allegory carries with it – that the unseen nomad will bring about a deterritorialization that compromises the State striation of space and will ultimately lead to an undirected flow of people leaving State-conditioned territory. Which is precisely the process that unfolds: Every week there is a convoy of the prudent leaving town, going east, ten or twelve families travelling together ‘to visit relatives’, as the euphemism has it […] They leave, leading pack-trains, pushing handcarts, carrying packs on their backs, their very children laden like beasts. (142–43)

Faced with these kinds of deterritorialized movement, the State suffers a significant disruption to the gravity of its relationship with control. That is to say, in losing its affinity with the restrictive apparatus of control, the State’s striation of space is demonstrated to be a wholly temporary practice. Clearly, such a situation is intolerable to a State that claims global status. The State consequently attempts to counter the surge of deterritorialization at the hands of the nomadic war machine by gradually assuming the posture of an opposing war machine. Retaining belief in the strength of the genetic elements of striation, the State responds first by promoting military visibility: officials of the Third Bureau of the Civil Guard were seen for the first time on the frontier, guardians of the State, specialists in the obscurer motions of sedition, devotees of truth, doctors of interrogation. (9)

Yet, it is important to note that the applicability of this promotion of visibility rests solely on its association with number: Tens, hundreds, thousands, myriads: all armies retain these decimal groupings, to the point that each time they are encountered it is safe to assume the presence of a military organisation.66

66

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 387.

96

ON REPRESENTATION



Indeed, it is a procedure of organization that is conditioned by the practice of striation. The State endeavours is to arrange a strong association between visibility and number, to produce and display a knowable military force that can be measured by the opposition in direct relation to their own forces. However, it is certain that only similarly organized forces can conduct such measurements. While the State ensures that number retains the principle of measurement in striated space, for the nomad number is the principle of smooth space itself.67 The number of nomad-space is the substantive multiple. In nomad-space, number is never a question of metric organization but, rather, the principle of direction. Given the ability of the nomad to appear and recede instantaneously, number proves to be the principle by which “the everywhere” and “the simultaneous” affirm a non-abstracted character, and attest to the potential of the nomad to form a discernible force of opposition from “nowhere.” Thus, narrating his first vague sighting of the nomads, the Magistrate notes: As the pinks and mauves of the sunrise begin to turn golden, the specks materialise again on the blank face of the plain, not three of them but eight, nine, ten, perhaps twelve […]. Then as I watch the figures begin to move. They group in a file and like ants climb the rise. On the crest they halt. A swirl of dust obscures them, then they reappear: twelve mounted men on the skyline […]. Though I keep my eye on the crest, I fail to catch the moment at which they vanish. (75)

Without number but numerous, without distinction but individual, without substance but not abstract, the nomad owns the rhizomic character of the forgotten pack through his ramified extension in every direction;68 an extension that is only possible when number assumes the unlimited condition of the substantive multiple. Given such a context, the nomad / barbarian hordes cannot be thought of in terms of a numbered or structured organization, even if 67

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 389. Deleuze argues that Sigmund Freud ceaselessly worked to crack multiplicity apart in order to ascertain a singular understanding of the unconscious. In this respect, Deleuze notes that where a subject demonstrated a neurotic or psychotic association with a multiplicity, Freud always sought to reduce the association to a singular object. Thus, for example, it was never a question of a subject’s association with a pack of wolves for Freud, but, rather, always a question of the subject’s association with the wolf. In this sense, the pack is always forgotten. See Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 26–38. 68



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

97

separate nomad tribes threaten to unite (9). It is the association between nomad and pack, between nomad and unlimited extension, that means the State’s combative organization of visibility and number is predestined to fail along with its attempt to lessen the effects of deterritorialization, since the nomad cannot measure the number of his force against the number of the State’s military force. Like the rat and the cockroach, the nomad has the speed entailed by the substantive multiple described by the rhizome. Number becomes a principle of direction rather than measurement, a principle of extension rather than intension, thus placing the nomad, rat, and cockroach “nowhere” and “everywhere” simultaneously. Thus, while the Magistrate talks to Colonel Joll “about rats and ways of controlling their numbers” (2), he demonstrates a State-conditioned way of thinking that can just as easily talk about nomads and the ways of controlling their numbers, since the terms of the respective problems are identical.69 Certainly, one will be wary of drawing analogies between the nomad and such creatures because of the negative connotations of rat and cockroach – until one realizes that such negative connotations arise only because of the rhizomic nature and operation of such creatures. Rather than the creatures themselves, it is the rhizome that is always already detested by State thought. Necessarily uncountable, unknowable, and indestructible, the rhizome is a force of deterritorialization that crosses all the limits and limitations erected by the State. Since the State cannot counter the force of the rhizome directly, it invests creatures that exhibit rhizomic activity and interactions with negative connotations. In a return to the State process of imagecultivation, the population is encouraged to regard the properties and characteristics of such creatures with horror. In this way, it is hoped that the resulting disgust will be transferred to the operation of the rhizome itself, so much so that its deterritorializing impetus will be dissipated. Hence the great significance of the Magistrate’s reflection on the cockroach while he is incarcerated: At night when everything is still the cockroaches come out to explore. I hear, or perhaps imagine, the horny clicking of their wings, the scurry 69

Of course, this kind of enunciation is also reminiscent of the Nazis’ antisemitic rhetoric justifying the Holocaust (‘vermin’ or Ungeziefer, anticipated uncannily in Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis” / “Die Verwandlung”). Indeed, it is not at all surprising that the following discussion of the State’s response to its abhorrence of the immediacy of the rhizome should evoke this historic pathology.

98

ON REPRESENTATION



of their feet across the paved floor […]. One night I am awoken by the feather-light tread of one crossing my throat. Thereafter I often jerk awake during the night, twitching, brushing myself off, feeling the phantom probings of their antennae at my lips, my eyes. From such beginnings grow obsessions: I am warned. (87)

The Magistrate convincingly captures the horror that is caused by the speed, phantom presence, and invasiveness of the cockroach – all characteristics that are necessarily shared by the rhizome and the nomad. It is certain that the Magistrate recognizes this association, since the ‘obsession’ that is bred by these qualities describes the State’s obsession with the nomad as much as his own with the cockroach. It is an obsession born of the inability to apprehend the capacity of an ultimately phantom entity to become invasive – an obsession that always already tends to paranoia. As such, the failure of the combative organization of visibility and number, coupled with mounting paranoia about the activities of the nomad, leads to the second movement of the State in its drive towards assuming the posture of a war machine. The State relinquishes authority, and passes it into the hands of its military form, as Colonel Joll reminds the Magistrate during interrogation, “‘For the duration of the emergency, as you know […] the administration of justice is out of the hands of civilians and in the hands of the Bureau’” (124). However, while the State controls its people through the implementation of juridical forces of capture, perhaps most easily recognized in the form of the police, the machinery to which Joll belongs seems to work outside the sovereignty of the State and “prior to its law.”70 In claiming the power of final authority, and therefore being outside of State control, the war machine itself begins to destabilize the State. It is as if the State does not so much adopt the stance of a war machine as create a war machine that must always already challenge the integrity of the very State it is intended to defend. Thus, the war machine problematizes the sovereignty of the State in several ways: first, it generates violence that works against the validity of the State, so that the soldiers are invested with a capacity not only to protect a town but also to tyrannize it, as the Magistrate describes – “After the meeting the soldiers led a procession through the streets. Doors were kicked in, windows broken, a house set on fire” (143); secondly, it displays a swiftness that is more akin to the modality of the rhizome than the gravity claimed by striation, as Joll demonstrates – “ ‘I should not want to commit myself to a course beforehand. 70

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 352.



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

99

But, broadly speaking, we will locate the encampment of these nomads of yours and then proceed further as the situation dictates’” (12); and, lastly, it employs secrecy rather than courts publicity. Thus, the Magistrate asks Colonel Joll: ‘And can you tell us whether we have anything to fear? Can we rest securely at night?’ The corner of his mouth crinkles in a little smile. Then he stands up, bows, turns, and leaves. Early next morning he departs accompanied by his small escort […] My first action is to visit the prisoners. I unlock the barracks hall which has been their jail, my senses already revolting at the sickly smell of sweat and ordure, and throw the doors wide open. ‘Get them out of here!’ I shout at the halfdressed soldiers […] I last saw them five days ago […] What they have undergone in these five days I do not know. (25–26)

Here, the exteriority of the State-induced war machine is without question. And it is this position of exteriority that Pierre Clastres claims ensures that war is the surest mechanism of warding off the formation of the State.71 Indeed, just as the State must ward off war to ensure its stability, so the war machine endeavours to ward off the State in order to complete its function. While the State attempts to conserve itself through the continued management of exchange (of populations, commerce, capital), the State’s formation of the war machine cannot be considered as merely another exchange. As Deleuze explains, far from deriving from exchange, even as a sanction for its failure, war is what limits exchanges, maintains them in the framework of ‘alliances;’ it is what prevents them from becoming a State factor, from fusing groups.72

That is to say, the war machine initiates a programme by which it aims to maintain the disparity and segmentarity of marginal local groups by limiting the possibility of exchange between them. In this process of internal division and marginalization, the State war machine is revealed to be a mechanism of partition that ultimately becomes the State’s own black hole of inhibition – its

71

Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State: The Leader as Servant and the Humane Uses of Power Among the Indians of the Americas, tr. Robert Hurley, with Abe Stein (New York: Urisen, 1977). 72 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 357–58.

100

ON REPRESENTATION



own dark chamber that withholds the power associated with the State’s relatively global project of striation. Thus is the true force of the Magistrate’s becoming-nomad revealed. For the State to combat the war machine of the nomad-poet, it must invoke the war machine of the “assassin.”73 Hence, while the Magistrate threatens to destabilize the State apparatus by invoking a new revolutionary people who open onto the deterritorialized forces of the cosmos by way of his outside thought, the State makes manifest the assassin who bombards the existing people with limitations and inhibitions that have the effect of closing off all exchange and thereby also the very possibility of creating a new revolutionary people. Yet, in this project of absolute territorialization, the assassin can make no distinction between consenting and rebelling subjects. He inhibits the State apparatus as much as any other assemblage, even to the extent that it is forced to undergo a deterritorialization, since the constellation of exchange upon which it is founded is necessarily collapsed by the assassin. Ultimately, in attempting to combat the force of deterritorialization wielded by the Magistrate and the nomad, the State ultimately deterritorializes itself, and the stationary process of the nomadic war machine is again shown to possess an irresistible speed. Thus, Coetzee once again writes the becoming of a character that is initially aligned to a position of authority in the production of representation. It is a becoming-minor, premised on the Self-becoming-Other, that ensures the Magistrate’s movement away from the colonial centre and the associated inability to know the Other. It is a becoming-minor from which the Magistrate can begin to gain access to the ontological constitution of the Other. Significantly, it is a way of being that is necessarily in excess of the conditioning reach of representation; a way of being that is only understandable in terms of its dynamic composition at the hand of the non-representational forces of the earth – the haecceities formulated by the individual’s passage through a nonpersonal, yet always immanent, Life; and, a way of being that is always already hurled into combat by the organizing principles of representation. Yet, like Eugene Dawn’s exploration of his Self-as-Other, the Magistrate’s immersion in the non-representational forces of Life through his becomingnomad is nonetheless conditioned by the representational force of language. While both Dawn and the Magistrate ultimately refuse the practices of repre73

Paul Virilio, L’insécuritié du territoire (1975), quoted in Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 345.



The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians

101

sentation, they both nevertheless return (to a certain extent) to the representative mode of language. It is a recognition that strikes at the very heart of the claim that Coetzee stages the Other in his fiction by going beyond representation. However, we shall find in Foe a text that achieves this very aim – the collapse of the representational quality of language.



Chapter Three 

The Language of Foe

My letter of the 25th is returned unopened. I pray there has been some simple mistake. I enclose the same herewith. — J.M. Coetzee, Foe

C

the political condition of language. By its very nature, censorship restricts language, reducing both the possibilities of enunciation and the possibilities of transmission. As such, any literature that seeks to go beyond or make visible the edict of the censor is necessarily a literature of protest. In the context of apartheid South Africa, where a repressive State regime controlled the means of communication, the protest is doubled. Such literature is at once a specific protest against the operation of a censorship that curtails the expression of the intolerable conditions of a lived experience of State violence and social fragmentation, and a protest against the (colonial) authority that exercised power through such censorship. Yet, truly political literature must go beyond this kind of protest. It must on some level stir the ferment beneath the surface that censorship produces.1 That is to say, a truly political literature must offer resistance by rendering new connections between people and the forces and powers of a potential revolution. In an essay concerning censorship, Coetzee traces two differing models of resistance in the work of the South African artist, essayist, and novelist André

1

ENSORSHIP MOST CLEARLY DEMONSTRATES

Deleuze, Negotiations, 27.

104

ON REPRESENTATION



Brink.2 Both models are predicated on the relationship between writer and State, but where the models differ is in the nature of the dialectic. The first model is non-dialectical: the writer tells the truth about the condition of the State, and although this truth-telling cannot hope to match the power of the State in terms of pragmatic immediacy, Brink reminds us that “in the struggle between authority and artist it is always the artist, in the end, who wins. Because his voice continues to speak long after the relevant government […] have been laid to rest.”3 In the second model, this relationship is more complex, and dialectical. The writer becomes a diagnostic organ developed by a social body to “respond to its need for meaning.”4 As a product of the State, the writer functions by performing a diagnosis of the health of the society – the writing of literature. A healthy society incorporates the writer’s diagnosis and effects change accordingly, while, if it is sick – such is the perceived condition of the authoritarian-totalitarian State, for example – the society may revile the writer’s diagnosis. An act of censorship occurs, and the sick social body continues to decay. Of course, such models as this are always idealized to a certain extent, and it may be because of this idealization of the relationship between writer and State that one senses a certain absence in Brink’s models of resistance. In both models, it is clear that the power of the writer resides in the text that is produced. Thus, for example, in the first model it is the duration of the text that will outlast the conditions of any censorship; while in the second model it is the text that induces either a change or the operation of “protective mechanisms” of a State in denial of its cancerous decay. But one must note that until the text has been actualized by a reader the force of the text remains merely potential. And, indeed, it is on the triangular relationship of writer, State, and reader that Brink’s models of resistance are strangely silent. Jean–Luc Godard has suggested that what is important in the literary is not so much expression as impressions.5 This is the moment at which literature ceases to be considered as a single process, the solitary expression of an author–judge who always “occupies a position neutral between contending 2

J.M. Coetzee, “André Brink and the Censor,” Research in African Literatures 21.3 (Fall 1990): 59–74. 3 Coetzee, “André Brink and the Censor,” 60. 4 “André Brink and the Censor,” 61. 5 Cited in “On A Thousand Plateaus” (Libération, 23 October 1980), in Deleuze & Guattari, Negotiations, 26.



The Language of Foe

105

parties”6 and becomes a collective construction. The writer’s text can only offer an impression of a society, and that impression is necessarily conditioned by the expressions of a society from which the writer cannot be separated. Thus, what the writer creates is a collective literature of ideas or, more precisely, a collective literature of “social forces.”7 In this understanding of literature, the reader will release the potential force locked inside the closed book (or Susan Barton’s unopened letter that begins this chapter) in a very specific way – by bringing another collective assemblage of impressions and expressions to the text. That is to say, the reader takes a step towards becoming the author of the text, and in so doing turns the potential force of resistance in the text into the extratextual force of potential revolution. However, such social forces present in literature are not only the means of a potential revolution, but are also the means of subjectification. Much has been written on the postcolonial strategy of rewriting the European historical and literary record. At its basis is Edward Said’s discussion of the operation of a dominant and homogenizing European discourse.8 Rooted in this notion of discourse is the very proliferation of social ideas that turns literature into a collective construction. Through an operation of a complex matrix of representation informed by the many diverse domains of European society – such as the academy (the anthropologist, sociologist, historian, and philologist) and the popular (the poet, novelist, and philosopher) – a collective style of thought emerges. In the context of colonialism, this collective style of thought becomes the basis for securing an ontological and epistemological distinction between Europe and its Others. As such, a consideration of resistance to the operation of a dominant European discourse requires careful negotiation. It is never a case of simply dismantling such discursive movements of colonialism, because such discursive movements are always already forced into the collective reality of colonized subjects. Perhaps the only means of resistance is to destabilize those moments of a colonial discourse that aided Europe in imposing and maintaining its codes of domination. Now, Coetzee’s Foe is a rewriting of Daniel Defoe’s classic eighteenthcentury novel Robinson Crusoe, and as such it seems to sit quite happily within the framework of a postcolonial strategy of rewriting the European 6

Coetzee, “André Brink and the Censor,” 62. See Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1979), vol. 1: 248. 8 See Said, Orientalism. 7

106

ON REPRESENTATION



literary record. How Coetzee’s novel achieves its moments of subversion is the concern of this chapter.

The Structure-Other What is Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe about on its macrological level? Of course, it is about a trader who is marooned on a deserted island, an island that is devoid of the comfort offered by a populated land. What issues from this circumstance of Crusoe’s profound solitude is the very thesis of every Robinsonade – the man without Others. The question that necessarily accompanies this observation concerns the constitution of the Other. One is drawn to ask, ‘What is this Other that Crusoe finds himself without?’ The question is a significant one, but one that cannot be answered without first giving consideration to the effects of Others, or, more precisely, the effects of the absence of Others. Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that consideration of the effects of the Other diverts critical attention away from the inevitable discussion of Crusoe’s subjective interiority, which always searches for an original account of solitude through internal analysis, and turns it towards a discussion of exteriority that concerns the dynamic relation between subject and Other. As the postulates that condition the parameters of this discussion expand into the concepts of subject and Other – rather than simply the textual elements of Crusoe and Friday – the discussion at hand transcends the reductive contemplation of single relations. A consideration of the effects of the Other accordingly inaugurates reflection on all relations that inhabit the novel, so that one may chart in Defoe’s text, for example, the additional relationship between Crusoe and the island. Of course, in Coetzee’s Foe this set of relations is expanded by the introduction of Susan Barton and Mr Foe. But, whether the set of relations is expansive or contracted, the relations ultimately evidence a mode of connectivity that draws such individual elements into, initially, a conjunctive synthesis (…and…and…) – Crusoe and Friday; Susan Barton and Mr Foe, subject and Other. Without either of the terms ‘subject’ or ‘Other’, the conjunctive series fails and collapses into nonsense. However, the series does not degenerate because of the often-noted necessity of the Other to constitute a self – “x=x=not y (I=I=not you)”9 – but, rather, because the Other is the mode of connectivity that allows for a coherent account of the world.

9

Massumi, “Translator’s Foreword,” xiii.



The Language of Foe

107

It is not surprising, then, that Gilles Deleuze should refer to this mode of connectivity that conditions a coherent account of the world as the “structureOther.”10 For Deleuze, the very structure that the Other facilitates (the structure-Other) allows for an organization of the world that opens up to include a certain “depth,” formed by a deep recognition of the fundamental role played by the marginal and the background in the transition of objects and ideas. He writes: I regard an object, then I divert my attention, letting it fall into the background. At the same time, there comes forth from the background a new object of my attention.11

The object “emerges” and “recedes” into the perpetually unregarded and unmediated space of the background. Given this arrangement, the background remains a virtual space which the possible must transcend to enter into a condition of actuality – the moment of realization of one’s consciousness. The structure-Other becomes the relation-function of subject to object, so that an ordered regulation of potentialities of encounters is imposed on every transcendent quality, potentiality, or possibility. Yet, even when the object has been regarded, there must always be a section of the object to which the observer will remain blind. As Deleuze notes, The part of the object I do not see I posit as visible to Others, so that when I will have walked around to reach its hidden part, I will have joined the Others behind the object, and I will have totalised it in the way that I had already anticipated. As for the objects behind my back, I sense them coming together and forming a world, precisely because they are visible to, and are seen by, Others.12

Here, the continuation of a coherent world that will remain unseen by the subject is predicated on the structure-Other. The Other induces a “benevolent murmuring”13 within the world, a benevolent murmuring that guards the margins of one’s perception, ensuring an anticipated coherence of the world, and stands sentry to prevent assaults from the aspect that remains perpetually unseen – “behind my back.”

10

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 308. The Logic of Sense, 305. 12 The Logic of Sense, 305. 13 The Logic of Sense, 305. 11

108

ON REPRESENTATION



Given this already complicit arrangement of subject and Other, it is folly to try and reduce the Other to a contracted and particular object (as in the orthodox subject /object relationship) or alternate subject.14 In Deleuze’s arrangement of the Other, The Other is neither an object in the field of my perception nor a subject who perceives me: the Other is initially a structure of the perceptual field, without which the entire field could not function as it does.15

That is to say, there is a fundamental complexity in the constitution of the Other that will always already refuse the act of reduction to a simple object. Such complexity is most easily elucidated if one creates an artificial distinction within the Other – a concrete Other and an a-priori Other. The concrete Other is that which actualizes in real terms the possibility of the structureOther. Put simply, it is always the ‘someone’ that can become the subject of another perceptual field, which is to say, the someone that can gaze at an Other as object. In contrast, the a-priori Other is ‘no one’. It is the absolute structure that establishes a relation between a subject’s perceptual field and the terms that actualize the structure. Concerning the operation of desire, Deleuze writes: I desire nothing that cannot be seen, thought, or possessed by a possible Other […] In all these respects, my desire passes through Others, and through Others it receives an object […] It is always Others who relate my desire to an object.16

Thus, the Other is a relation-function between any subject and received object. Importantly, then, the Other is not just one structure among others in the field of perception, but is, rather, the structure that “conditions the entire field and its functioning.”17 Therefore, a constitutive feature of the Other is the recognition of a certain dualism. But the dualism that is to be considered – the concrete Other and the 14

Deleuze notes that even Jean–Paul Sartre’s more malleable conception of the Other follows a line of error in philosophical theory – the reduction of the Other to a simplified condition of the subject or the object. See Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 307; and Jean–Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, tr. & intro. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square, 1992). 15 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 307. 16 The Logic of Sense, 306. 17 The Logic of Sense, 309.



The Language of Foe

109

a-priori Other – only informs the complexity of the condition of the Other. That is to say, one may only think of the Other in terms of this convenient dualism if one retains the spirit of artificiality with which the initial division is made. As such, the concrete Other and the a-priori Other are indivisible. Indeed, returned to its proper unified condition, the Other is always already both transcendent (given that a condition of structures is that they are independent of the terms that actualize them) and given, as the term that actualizes the possibility of the structure. Thus, not only does the condition of the Other exhibit certain aporia, but one must also note the emergence of counter-intuitive states. For example, the structure of the a-priori Other can operate without a concrete Other to actualize the field of possibility; while, similarly, a concrete Other may be present where the structure-Other has collapsed. Nonetheless, the Other proves to be imperative to the process of a subjective synthesis that determines meaning from the world. In any case, to pronounce the Other a simple object or alternate subject is predicated on an inadequate, over-simplified, consideration of the dualism of the concrete and a-priori Other. In such circumstances, one will inevitably return to a vulgar taxonomy in which the subject and object occupy (most usually) simple oppositional categories in a binary model. Thus, when Hélène Cixous writes: There has to be some ‘other’ – no master without a slave, no economico-political power without exploration, no dominant class without cattle under the yoke, no ‘Frenchmen’ without wogs, no Nazis without Jews, no property without exclusion – an exclusion that has its limits and is part of the dialectic18

– or when Gayatri Spivak observes that Europe consolidated itself as sovereign subject by defining its colonies as ‘Others’, even as it constituted them, for purposes of administration and the expansion of markets, into programmed near-images of that very sovereign self”19

– the Other becomes a category that is produced as the negative response in a dialectic of the self-same. That is not to say that the a-priori Other has been

18

Hélène Cixous & Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, tr. Betsy Wing (La Jeune née, 1975; Manchester: Manchester U P , 1986): 70–71. 19 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak “The Rani of Sirmur,” in Europe and Its Others, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen & Diana Loxley (Colchester: U of Essex, 1985), vol. 1: 128.

110

ON REPRESENTATION



neglected in such considerations, but, rather, that the only structure which is made manifest is an impoverished taxonomy issuing from Hegel’s consideration of the master/ slave relationship. However, given the complicity between subject and Other, the Other refuses to be reduced to either an alternate subject or a particular object. Indeed, if one returns to charting the effects of the Other, as the structure which conditions the entire perceptual field and its functioning, then the Other announces a structure that compromises Hegel’s master/ slave dialectic – the structure of the possible. The Other proves to be the expression of a possible world. Consider, for example, this passage from Robinson Crusoe in which Crusoe stumbles across the footprint in the sand, one of the most enigmatic and enduring images of the novel: It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand. I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition. I listened, I looked round me, I could hear nothing, nor see anything. I went up to a rising ground, to look farther. I went up the shore, and down the shore, but it was all one; I could see no other impression but that one.20

The passage continues, tracing Crusoe’s response to the depression in the sand: How it came thither I knew not, nor could in the least imagine. But after innumerable fluttering thoughts, like a man perfectly confused and out of myself, I came home to my fortification, not feeling, as we say, the ground I went on, but terrified to the last degree, looking behind me at every two or three steps, mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man; nor is it possible to describe how many various shapes affrighted imagination represented things to me in, how many wild ideas were found every moment in my fancy, and what strange, unaccountable whimsies came into my thoughts by the way.21

If the Other determines the condition of possibility of the world, then the footprint in the sand demonstrates the moment at which a possibility is actualized for Crusoe. Such a possibility had always had the potential of being expressed. Crusoe writes that the “savages” had been visiting the island, “perhaps 20 21

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003): 122. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 122.



The Language of Foe

111

had been so for some ages.”22 Yet, it is Crusoe’s gazing at the footprint that marks a major transition in the novel. The footprint fills the void between the possibility of a frightening world and the not yet frightened Crusoe. Crusoe’s profound fright at witnessing the footprint is the expression of a frightening possible world. Of course, it is not the footprint itself that causes such fright in Crusoe but the implication that develops from what becomes an expression of the Other. Importantly, as Deleuze writes, “The self is the development and the explication of what is possible, the process of its realisation in the actual.”23 Thus, Crusoe forms a certain connection with the footprint (a line of flight) that not only develops the meaning of the footprint, moulding it from an abstract indentation into a moment of expression, but also develops Crusoe himself, so that his demeanour and modality of life on the island are affected. Therefore, Crusoe’s constitution is as much shaped by the expression of the Other as the Other is constituted by Crusoe’s gaze. Again, then, the Other is an inextricable element of a consciousness that can posit a coherent and changing world. Now, it is interesting to note that one can trace the effect of the structureOther throughout Crusoe’s narrative. From the moment he is swept ashore by the waves, the structure-Other conditions his experience of the island. Nightly, he is compelled to sleep within a “bushy tree like a fir”24 because of the possibility that the island is inhabited by wild beasts. Such a possibility, in this case the possibility of a concrete Other, motivates the retrieval of various weapons from the shipwreck. As such, the weapons that will never be far from Crusoe’s side express an understanding of a land of Others, a land in which the musket will prove useful as a means to hunt, or defend against, “any other creature.”25 That is to say, the fact that the musket remains a useful instrument for Crusoe is predicated on the continuing operation of the structure-Other during his habitation of the island, the continuing possibility of the realization of the concrete Other. Of course, the other instrument that remains of use to Crusoe is the Bible. Now, the Bible proves useful to Crusoe because it not only compounds but also ensures the continuing operation of the structure-Other that is implicit in Crusoe’s desire to hold a musket. Without the necessity of a concrete Other to 22

Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 135. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 307. 24 Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 39. 25 Robinson Crusoe, 39. 23

112

ON REPRESENTATION



actualize the field of the structure-Other, the Bible offers a chance for Crusoe to initiate a relationship with God. Indeed, before engaging with some passages from the Bible, Crusoe begins to reflect on his general situation. It is in this mood that he begins to discern an underlying structure that conditions his existence: And what am I, and all the other creatures, wild and tame, human and brutal, whence are we? Sure we are all made by some secret Power, who formed the earth and sea, the air and sky. And who is that? Then it followed most naturally, It is God that has made it all […] if God has made all these things, He guides and governs them all, and all things that concern them […]. If so, nothing can happen in the great circuit of His works, either without His knowledge or appointment. And if nothing happens without His knowledge, He knows I am here, and am in this general condition […] Why has God done this to me? What have I done to be used thus?26

One may object that this is hardly the “benevolent murmuring” of the Other; but Crusoe’s reflections necessarily position him in a relation to a divine scheme which ultimately undermines his position as a solitary being on a deserted island. With the Bible in hand, regardless of whether he is merely a passive passenger of divine will, Crusoe will always be embraced by, and have access to, a relationship with God that will reinstate the “benevolent murmuring” of the Other through a “hope founded on the encouragement of the Word of God.”27 Put simply, Crusoe’s developed relationship with God through the Bible maintains the operation of the structure-Other so that possibility (being rescued), chance (the growth of discarded barley), and order (divine will) remain constant elements of Crusoe’s time on the island.

The Collapse of the Structure-Other All I say is: What I saw, I wrote. I saw no cannibals; and if they came after nightfall and fled before dawn, they left no footprint behind.28

From the moment Susan Barton is swept ashore by the waves, the reader is aware that something different is happening in Coetzee’s Robinsonade, Foe. 26

Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 74. Robinson Crusoe, 77. 28 J.M. Coetzee, Foe (1986; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987): 54. Unless otherwise indicated, further page references are in the main text. 27



The Language of Foe

113

If a mere footprint in the sand leaves Defoe’s Crusoe “thunderstruck,” then why is Susan Barton’s arrival on the island greeted with such apathy? One cannot trace the slightest register of excitement, interest, or fright in either Cruso’s or Friday’s reaction to this castaway. The answer resides in Coetzee’s exploration of solitude. If Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is a thesis on “the man without Others,” then it is an exploration of solitude in terms of the absence of the concrete Other. Coetzee’s Foe, on the other hand, is an exploration of solitude in perhaps its most profound state, the collapse of the structure-Other. One is told by Susan Barton that Cruso has “slain the monster of solitude” (38), but one must ask: at what cost was this battle won? Again, before one can offer an answer to this question one must first consider the effects of a collapse of the structure-Other. Coetzee maintains two major themes that chart the effects of the collapse of the structure-Other. The first is the elemental condition of Cruso and Friday, and the second is the great exhaustion that defines a condition of Being for both. But it is important to remember that the division made here is artificial and, as a result, cumbersome. Rather, the two themes converge as a single effect of the collapse of the structure-Other. What does it mean to have done with the structure-Other? Susan Barton, a recent castaway who has had no reason to question an existence without the Other, cannot comprehend the collapse of this structure, and, as such, cannot comprehend the attitudes and activities of the island’s inhabitants, who survive without this structure. For example, foreign to Susan Barton’s sensibility is Cruso’s wish to remain on the island, his refusal either to build a boat or to keep a journal, his interminable toil in constructing terraces, or his refusal to engage in conversation. Similarly, Friday’s insistence on playing just six notes on his flute or his scattering of white petals upon the sea remains inexplicable and seemingly devoid of logical signification. As the effects of the collapse of the structure-Other, these acts position Susan Barton so that she almost believes herself to be “in a madhouse” (29). However, rather than being features of a “madhouse,” these acts demonstrate a private communion between Cruso, Friday, and the island to which Susan Barton has only the briefest access: I took to walking the shoreline every day, as far in either direction as I could. I told myself I was keeping watch for a sail. But too often my eyes would settle on the horizon in a kind of fixity till, lulled by the beating of the wind and the roar of the waves and the crunch of the sand under my feet, I would fall into a waking slumber. I found a

114

ON REPRESENTATION



hollow in the rocks where I could lie sheltered from the wind and gaze out to sea. (26)

This passage echoes Friday’s “mopes” (78) and Cruso’s frequent retirement to the Bluff, which belong to the practice of “losing himself in the contemplation of the wastes of water and sky” (38). In describing Cruso’s near-catatonic state, Susan Barton cannot recognize the act of communion that passes between Cruso and the elements of the island. For Susan, the “sea and sky remained sea and sky, vacant and tedious” (38). But for Cruso and Friday, the sea and sky condition the only possible encounter with history and truth upon the island. Gilles Deleuze writes: “Before the appearance of the Other, there was a reassuring world from which my consciousness could not be distinguished.”29 Now, if the Other is the expression of a possible world, then it discloses itself within a two-fold dynamic. The Other not only causes a distinction to be made between subject and object but also compels a recognition that compromises the contemporaneity of subject and object. As the expression of a possible (future) world, the Other necessarily conditions consciousness as the manifestation of a past world. Therefore, consciousness is ushered through a transgression of temporality, from past to future, by the Other. Indeed, the past world of consciousness must fall away if a future world is to be developed. Deleuze turns this curious situation into an ontological axiom: “I am a past world”30 – a past world constituted solely by the Other. Thus, the arrangement of the relationship between subject and object necessarily facilitates linear chronology. However, if the structure-Other collapses, one is returned to the moment where subject and object are nonsensical, indiscernible fluxes in a consciousness. And without the possible future world facilitated by the Other, linear chronology collapses, so that consciousness merely survives in an ‘eternal present’ that cannot even postulate the resultant impossibility of history. Indeed, it is this process of the eternal present (the indiscernible subject and object, and the loss of any future possible world) that so confounds Susan Barton’s efforts to reconcile the behaviour of Cruso and Friday on the island. “I would gladly now recount to you the history of this singular Cruso,” Susan explains, “But the stories he told me were so various, and so hard to

29 30

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 310. The Logic of Sense, 310.



The Language of Foe

115

reconcile with one another, that I was more and more driven to conclude age and isolation had taken their toll on his memory” (11–12). Susan’s comment is insightful, not because of the connotation of intellectual decrepitude that accompanies her observation but because of her willingness to settle on solitude as a determining factor in Cruso’s contradictory accounts of his history. Cruso renounces all of history and its methodology because the collapse of the structure-Other necessarily collapses the possibility of a future, hence of a reciprocal historical world. For example, Cruso does not record the passing of time, either by noting the cycles of the moon or by maintaining a journal. Rather, he replaces the concept of history with the faculty of memory. “Nothing I have forgotten is worth the remembering” (17), he states. Yet, Cruso’s memory is also compromised, since to function coherently it must create the distinction between subject and object without the structure that renders this possible. As such, Cruso’s incoherent recollections, which confuse more than elucidate, only intimate “the snares of memory”31 that cannot condition the necessary relationship between Cruso and his past. For Cruso, both history and memory have degenerated to such an extent that each faculty can only retrieve coherence from his continuing present upon the island. It is not that Cruso “wished his story to begin with his arrival on the island” (34), but, rather, that he cannot even postulate a history before his arrival on the island. Therefore, Cruso seemingly lives an eternal present, without history and without the possibility of a future. In this curious condition, his days coalesce into an indistinguishable moment of repetitive existence. Susan Barton recalls the cycle of weather on the island, “wind, rain, wind, rain: such was the pattern of the days in that place, and had been, for all I knew, since the beginning of time” (14–15). Such repetition to be found in the weather of the island is further compounded by the repetition of Cruso’s unending daily toil on the terraces. It is only when this repetition is compromised, such as during the return of Cruso’s “old fever,” that one can witness the attempt of history to reassert itself. However, what is made manifest in Cruso’s delirium is not history per se but merely the hallucinations of memory. Susan Barton recalls that during his fever Cruso “beat with his fists and shouted in Portuguese at figures he saw in the shadows” (27). Here, history is completely lost to Cruso. The loss of the structure-Other ensures an end to the transgression of consciousness, from past to future, and equally ensures an end to a secure separation between consciousness and the world. So it is that Cruso’s hallucina31

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 313.

116

ON REPRESENTATION



tions of memory designate an end of history, and condition his consciousness so that it cannot be meaningfully separated from the consciousness of the island that it finds itself in communion with. In this state, where consciousness cannot be distinguished from the world, the absence of the Other is announced. Without the Other there can be no referee in judgements of truth or falsity; equally, there can be no disclaimers or verifications of observations made. The faculty of intellectual mediation, the moment of judgement, is replaced by a becoming of consciousness that ushers in a condition of being-in-the-world that transforms Cruso and Friday into acentred forces. Such acentred forces are only understandable in relation to the forces of the island. Thus, Cruso and Friday can no longer be identified (differentiated) as distinct entities from the island they inhabit. Likewise, and in a reciprocal fashion, the island is inseparable from the bodies of Cruso and Friday. It is unsurprising, then, that the only meaningful communication on the island does not pass between the individual figures that negotiate the surface of the island. Susan Barton writes: I made a cap with flaps to tie over my ears; I wore this, and sometimes closed my ears with plugs too, to shut out the sound of the wind. So I became deaf […] what difference did it make on an island where no one spoke? (35)

What Susan Barton relates in this passage is that she becomes deaf not only to human communication but also to the continuing communion of a deep, elemental monologue conducted between Cruso, Friday, and the island itself. For example, Cruso gazes out into the setting sun, “nodding to himself as though a voice spoke privately inside him that he was listening to” (13). Similarly, Friday converts his breath into an incessant six-note pattern on his reed flute. It will be this emulation of the wind that causes Susan Barton to dash the flute from Friday’s hands, and it will be the incessant wind, a significant constitutive feature of the elemental monologue of the island, that will drive Susan to dip her head under the water “merely to know what it was to have silence” (15). Indeed, when the voice of the island – the moan of the wind and the roar of the waves – is compounded by driving torrents of rain, this “clamour of the elements” becomes the motherly lullaby in which Friday sat “under the eaves with his head on his knees and slept like a baby” (28). Such an elemental monologue necessarily precludes the necessity for a logical distinction between subject and object. Within this arrangement of subject and object there can be no space in which this monologue can expand



The Language of Foe

117

into a dialogue. Consequently, Cruso and Friday cannot disturb the island. Indeed, they can do nothing except its will, as elements of itself. And, again, in reciprocal fashion, the island can ‘do’ nothing except the will of Cruso and Friday. The becoming of consciousness that conditions Cruso and Friday as acentred forces of the island is extensible, so that Cruso, Friday, and the island become a pure process that explores the world. However, given that the loss of the structure-Other pronounces the loss of a possible future and of already realized historical worlds, what kind of world is explored by the process of Cruso, Friday, and the island? If independent judgements or observations are decomposed because they cannot be refereed, then every judgement becomes meta-stable: i.e. is both true and false simultaneously. Now, a world in which every judgement, observation, or claim is simultaneously true and false can only be known through consideration of every possible resultant. That is to say, the world can only be deciphered through consideration of its infinite (in)compossibility. The terms ‘compossibility’ and ‘incompossibility’ are borrowed from Gottfried Leibniz’s Theodicy, and are employed to denote the series of both compatible/possible (compossible) and incompatible/ impossible (incompossible) potential futures of many worlds. For Leibniz, it is God who finally makes the choice between the Ideal possible world – which will become the world as we experience it – and the other possible worlds that will remain phantasmal, in what is known as the “Ideal Game.”32 The Ideal Game predicates the transgression of time through realizing a future-possible, which consequently conditions the passing of the present into history. But Coetzee’s Cruso is without Defoe’s Bible. Following the collapse of the structure-Other, time ceases to operate chronologically, and so all possible worlds are drawn into a simultaneous realization, within what must become an eternal present. Here, all possible worlds coexist in a meta-stable state in a singular, chaotic world. Now, given that the world is experienced as a meta-stable, incompossible assemblage for Coetzee’s Cruso, any interpretation of the world will be “neither true nor false in content,” but must always be “false in its form, what Nietzsche called the creative power of the false.”33 Every observation drawn from the incompossible is tempered by its status as meta-stable, and every mode of relaying information gathered from this strange world is necessarily false because a definitive interpretation must necessarily collapse 32 33

See Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 58–65. Smith, “Introduction – ‘A Life of Pure Immanence’,” xxvii.

118

ON REPRESENTATION



either the divergent (incompatible) or convergent (compatible) series of worlds. Importantly, it is within this arrangement of the world that one can find the history that escapes Cruso as individual. So, when Foe charges Robinson Crusoe with being a masterful collage of Defoe’s imaginative musings generated from the empty elements of Susan Barton’s narrative, the veracity of the charge must be tempered by the possibility of a reversal in which Foe becomes the collage. Nonetheless, Foe inaugurates a situation in which elements of Susan Barton’s narrative stand in crucial contrast to Defoe’s novel. First, Susan refuses to confirm the existence of cannibals (which presence will become an enduring image in Defoe’s work). Secondly, in a passing comment she denies having ever seen the image of a footprint of a savage, which, as we have already discussed, marks a critical moment of transition in Robinson Crusoe. And, lastly, Susan writes of a lack of seed on Cruso’s island, the chance growth of which not only allows Crusoe to make bread but also proves to be the spiritual seed that turns him towards God. As such, Foe issues a very interesting challenge to the reader: Which history is the original history of Cruso(e)? Which book is the original book of Cruso(e)? There is a certain stubborn circularity in such questions that gravitate towards a supposed origin, which ensures that the answers to such questions remain just out of reach. For example, can we suggest that Robinson Crusoe is the original history of Cruso(e) simply because its writing pre-dates Foe? To agree with this suggestion, we would first have to reconcile all the histories of Cruso(e), and this activity must include consideration of a further two alternative histories of Cruso(e) offered by Coetzee. First, Foe posits a history of Cruso(e) in which the drowned bodies of Susan Barton and Friday are discovered by a Cruso(e) who has only just been shipwrecked.34 Secondly, in his Nobel acceptance lecture, Coetzee offers a history of Cruso(e) in which he has returned home to England with Friday (and without Susan Barton), who will eventually sever his dependency so that he may “discover the British Isles alone.”35 34

I refer, of course, to section I V of Foe. Susan Barton begins her counter-narrative of Defoe’s novel by writing, “With a sigh, making barely a splash, I slipped overboard” (1). When one encounters this very phrase in section I V , it can be read in no other way than as the introduction to an additional counter-narrative, but this time the narrative that is countered is Susan’s own (155). 35 J.M. Coetzee, “He and His Man: The 2003 Nobel Lecture,” World Literature Today 78.2 (May–August 2004): 16–20.



The Language of Foe

119

Of course, trying to develop a linear narrative out of these divergent histories is impossible. Rather, the challenge offered by Foe is to embrace these convergent, incompatible histories as coexisting realizations of Cruso(e)’s not-necessarily-true past. If we can do so, then each narrative demonstrates a possible history of Cruso(e) realized simultaneously in the space of Foe. Again, the content of the narratives remains meta-stable, neither true nor false.36 But the form in which the narratives are conveyed will remain false due to the recognition that it is the narrator who has made manifest only a single possible world, therefore necessarily collapsing all of the other convergent or divergent series of Cruso(e)’s histories. Thus, we can see that, whereas Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe collapses all possible series by ‘denying’ the existence of the other Cruso(e) narratives, Foe opens itself up to other series, and in so doing exposes the falsifying project of all narrative. Now, one can apply a reductive lens to this argument. In an incompossible world that realizes all possibilities of narrative simultaneously and regardless of whether such narratives are compatible with each other or not, all narration will remain meta-stable for Cruso and Friday. That is to say, whether the narrative is Susan Barton’s, Mr Foe’s or his own, Cruso (or Friday) can never apply any significance to the passing of such narration and with it the temporality that necessarily directs such accounts. Therefore, history will remain a simple story that lacks any correlation with its subject. When Susan Barton writes, “Cruso had no stories to tell of the life he had lived as a trader and planter before the shipwreck. He did not care how I came to be in Bahia or what I did there” (34), it is of no consequence to either Cruso or Friday whether such stories are intentionally true or false, or, indeed, whether the stories are told at all, because these narratives can only elucidate a single (hence, compromised) history. In Foe, Cruso lives through a truly holistic consideration of the possible – the world depicted by Defoe, the world depicted by Susan Barton, and the world without both Susan Barton and Friday. Although these worlds do not describe every potential world that Cruso could inhabit, they do prompt consideration of a world that subtends linear commonality. That is to say, when all of the possible worlds are made manifest 36

Compare, for example, Coetzee’s Foe – “What memories do you even now preserve of that fatal storm […] the discomforts of those first nights” (17) – with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – “I went to the tree […] I took up my lodging […] I fell asleep, and slept as comfortably as, I believe, few could have done in my condition, and found myself the most refreshed with it” (39).

120

ON REPRESENTATION



simultaneously within a single world, then the incompossible world that holds these possibilities is always already an expression of exhaustion. Given that Cruso, Friday, and the island form a pure process that functions through the incompossible world, Cruso and Friday necessarily share the condition of exhaustion. Susan Barton notes: “I had exhausted my questions to Cruso about the terraces, and the boat he would not build, and the journal he would not keep, and the tools he would not save from the wreck” (34). But this is not a description of a lazy Cruso. Indeed, at the very least, Cruso’s interminable construction of the terraces testifies against this conclusion. Rather, what Susan describes is an effect of the collapse of the structure-Other, the condition of exhaustion. In distinction to tiredness, as the exhaustion of the realization of the possible (the act of doing), exhaustion is a profound condition that announces the nullification of the very possibility that precedes realization. As Deleuze notes, where realization of the possible only proceeds by a necessary exclusion, by the choice that renders an entire series of possibilities obsolete, exhaustion operates by including all the possible sets of variables of a disjunction.37 For example, Susan Barton asks Cruso what he will be planting on the terraces following its completion. Clearly, the question she asks concerns purpose, assumes a possible realizable objective, and anticipates an end to Cruso and Friday’s project. Now, it is not inconceivable that Susan Barton expected a reply such as “we will plant barley, more specifically English barley” (as does Defoe’s Crusoe), but the condition of exhaustion invalidates such exclusive enunciations. For Cruso and Friday, such exclusive enunciations are replaced by inclusive enunciations that mark a termination of the connection between signification and the actual. Thus, although the terraces signify a logical goal, they are constructed without the realizable goal of planting. “The planting is not for us,” states Cruso, “We have nothing to plant” (33). Here, the concept of nothing becomes an inclusive principle, describing both the simultaneous creation and necessary erasure of the condition of possibility. Such a lack of signification ensures a problematical arrangement of all potential disjunctions. Therefore, the exhausted Cruso remains solemnly active, constructing the terraces day after day. However, his work is devoid of all meaning because it is conducted without any purpose. Ultimately, there is no possibility that the terraces will provide any function (a purpose) or that the construction will ever be completed (a realization). 37

Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 153.



The Language of Foe

121

As such, the preferences, needs, and goals that predicate the act of realizing the possible are renounced through the condition of exhaustion. Susan Barton asks Cruso about the possibility of fashioning candles, but this need is dismissed, not because of Cruso’s inability to fashion candles, but because of the condition of exhaustion that prevents him from realizing such a possibility. Cruso will mark this moment with a turn to the absurd: “Which is easier: to learn to see in the dark, or to kill a whale and seethe it down for the sake of a candle?” (27). Indeed, the refrain of request and failure of realization appears throughout the first section of Foe – Susan Barton’s request for shoes, which she will eventually fashion herself; her request to retrieve tools from the sunken wreck of the ship, which will also never be realized. Similarly, the exchange between Susan Barton and Cruso concerning the goal of escaping the island highlights the difference between the exhausted and the merely tired, “‘why in all these years have you not built a boat and made your escape from this island?’ ‘And where should I escape to?’ he replied, smiling to himself as though no answer were possible” (13). For Susan Barton there is always the possibility of escape or rescue. Cruso, however, smiles “as though no answer were possible,” precisely because for him there is no possible answer. The answer Susan Barton seeks is lost within Cruso’s condition of exhaustion, within the possible sets of variables of the inclusive disjunctions of rescue/ non-rescue, escape/staying, and also within the meta-stable arrangement of all possibility of which Cruso must be aware. Thus, when Susan Barton speculates that Cruso “had come to be persuaded he knew all there was to know about the world” (13), this is remarkably insightful, but an ultimately unsurprising comment about a man who exists in a process that negotiates the incompossible world.

A Missing People Daniel Smith writes that “such a universe,” conditional upon the simultaneous realization of both compatible and incompatible possible worlds, “goes beyond any lived or liveable experience; it exists only in thought and has no other result than the work of art.”38 Yet, as Deleuze notes, this moment of thought marks the very moment at which “art disturbs reality, morality, and the economy of the world.”39 That is to say, the disturbance of the ordered 38 39

Smith, “Introduction – ‘A Life of Pure Immanence’,” xxviii. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 60.

122

ON REPRESENTATION



world is a product of a concept that frees the ghostly world of the virtual from the actual. The virtual world is no longer a poor relation of the actual world; rather, it maintains its own authority and operates its own conditional powerstructure. Therefore, the virtual world no longer only announces the world of the margins or the world of possibility; it becomes an integral element of the entire field of existence. Indeed, the hierarchical distribution of the taxonomy generated by the binary of ‘reality’ and ‘virtuality’ is collapsed so that each state can only be discerned by consideration of the forces that each asserts upon the other. Such a concept that equalizes the status of the virtual and the actual marks the revolutionary potential of literature. Bill Ashcroft argues in “Constitutive Graphonomy” that meaning is to be considered as a variable substance that inhabits each of the three domains of a social situation: language, author, and reader. Describing the “gladiatorial contest over the ownership of meaning” between these domains, Ashcroft maintains that meaning can only be rendered by the “social situation” of a written text: i.e. through consideration of the forces exerted by language, author, and reader.40 It seems true that to discuss meaning one must trace its interactions through this dynamic of exchange, but one must also recognize that the space in which this interaction occurs is purely virtual. Where the virtual assumes a validity of its own, it can in no way be considered to stand in opposition to the actual; rather, the virtual conditions the actual. And, as such, one cannot trace any metatextual effect of literature without a return to this virtual space. That is to say, literature cannot effect a change in the world and thereby mark its revolutionary potential without the operational space of the virtual to condition all of the functions of exchange in the actual. The revolutionary potential of literature exists in no other state than the virtual. Accordingly, the revolutionary potential of Foe is a product of the interaction between the textual element of an incompossible world – which necessarily compromises the linear causality of history and the associated predicate of a singular truth – the author, and the reader. However, such a relationship between text, author, and reader requires closer examination. An interesting aspect of Ashcroft’s essay concerns the constitution of the reader. Ashcroft maintains that the reader is constituted in the text but it is uncertain whether 40

Bill Ashcroft, “Constitutive Graphonomy: Post-Colonial Theory of Literary Writing,” in After Europe: Critical Theory and Post-Colonial Writing, ed. Stephen Slemon & Helen Tiffin (Sydney: Dangaroo, 1989): 59.



The Language of Foe

123

such a “constitution” assumes an always already manifested reader who functions within a field of meaning. Undoubtedly, there cannot be a work of literature that does not appeal to a readership, because a need for readers informs every aspect of what the author does – the production of a text for consumption. Yet, this acknowledgement does not necessarily presuppose an always already manifested readership. Indeed, the author who wishes to effect change in the world cannot write ‘for’ or ‘on behalf of’ an already recognized readership, simply because such an act would presuppose the acceptance and ultimate reinscription of a reductionist dominant discourse that turns individuals into a docile mass of a known value. It is an observation that Gayatri Spivak has highlighted elsewhere.41 The colonized subject is knowable to the colonizer, but only because the colonizer has created the colonized subject through a set of exclusive enunciations. The effect of this is at once reductive and violent. If a condition of heterogeneity is to be retained for a colonized people, then the writer cannot appeal to the same collective fictions of the colonized that have been employed by the colonizer to construct the taxonomies that uphold such subject-positions. Equally, writers cannot produce individual expressions of invented stories or fictions that issue from their own privileged experience, because this act would necessarily separate them from the condition of the colonized and relocate them in the realm of the colonizer. On this very point, Frantz Fanon writes, “At the very moment when the native intellectual is anxiously trying to create a cultural work he fails to realise that he is utilising techniques and language which are borrowed from the stranger in his country.”42 Thus, even if the writer is only aligned with the dominant discourse by aesthetic or artistic influences, a double impossibility of the author is announced – the impossibility of “escaping from the group and the impossibility of being satisfied with it.”43 Indeed, this notion of impossibility secures the division between writer and reader. Focusing on the “native intellectual writer,” Fanon observes: Sometimes he shows no hesitation in using dialect in order to show his will to be as near as possible to the people; but the ideas he expresses and the preoccupations he is taken up with have no common yardstick 41

See Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 223. 43 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, tr. Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1989): 219. 42

124

ON REPRESENTATION



to measure the real situation which the men and women of his country know.44

That is to say, a certain landscape of realities separates the ‘work of art’ from a collective expression of an interior actuality. For the writer to become “the mouth-piece of a new reality in action,”45 a certain exchange of positions is required. Deleuze negotiates this narrow passage by describing the way in which the writer moves towards the position of the reader while the reader simultaneously moves towards the writer. What emerges is a state of double becoming that necessarily collapses the function of identity. In the pre-personal space of the virtual, the literary text draws together the writer, who can no longer return to individual experience (‘I’), and a readership who can only be recognized by their absence (beyond a dominant discourse of identification). This shared condition of becoming and non-identification encourages the emission of a collective utterance, a pure speech-act, which allows ‘missing’ people “to find their expression in and through the singularity of the writer.”46 A collective assemblage is formed through the shifting distributions of relative subjectification and assignations of individuality operating in discourse. And it is the perpetual movement of such internal forces that marks the distinctive quality of this type of discourse. Pier Paolo Pasolini, hijacking a long-established narratological term for broader ideological purposes, has termed this dynamic discourse summoned by a collective assemblage ‘free indirect discourse’.47 Attempting to unravel this complex rendering of discourse, Deleuze writes: There are many passions in a passion, all manner of voices in a voice, murmurings, speaking in tongues: that is why all discourse is indirect, and the translative movement proper to language is that of indirect discourse.48

From within the chaotic proliferation of such noise, a political literature initiates a line of flight that invokes a missing people, placing them in a condi44

Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 223. The Wretched of the Earth, 223. 46 Smith, “Introduction – ‘A Life of Pure Immanence’,” xlv. 47 See Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, ed. Louise K. Barnett, tr. Ben Lawton & Louise K. Barnett (Empirismo eretico, 1972; Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1988): 176. 48 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 77. 45



The Language of Foe

125

tion of becoming that instructs them to “invent themselves in new conditions of struggle.”49 Thus, “the task of a political literature is to contribute to the invention of this unborn people who do not yet have a language.”50

The Exhaustion of Language as a New Condition of Struggle The physiological description of exhaustion encoded in Foe cannot be separated from other descriptions of exhaustion. As long as the possible is exhausted by a relentless division informed by an appreciation of inclusive disjunctions, then every structure that has as its logical predicate a movement that charts a trajectory from possibility to realization will begin to degenerate. Language is not exempt from this condition of exhaustion. “Language names the possible”51 – a claim that concerns the connection of the word to an object. Purely and simply, language cannot ‘know’ the world except by naming its ‘contents’. The naming of objects draws the possibilia of enunciation into the realm of the actualized. Moreover, the objects of the world can only be integrated into knowledge once they enter a combinatorial series. In this way, taxonomies of knowledge are constructed through a connective synthesis that arises from a constant refinement of definitions. Thus, knowledge arises from the operation of a series informed by consideration of exclusive disjunctions. Given this, one is returned to the defining equation of rationalism, ‘x=x=not y’, as an expression of a realizable knowledge that is the result of negation and exclusion. Yet, one must consider what happens to a language that names the possible if the very possibility that precedes realization is nullified by the condition of exhaustion. In such an arrangement of language, words can no longer mark a realization of the possible but must, rather, give the possible a reality of its own. That is to say, the state in which language is indeterminate (before enunciation) must be promoted as the only accessible language. In this curious environment, the virtual condition of language is granted a validity all of its own. Here, language presents itself for segmentation into discrete states, but only in concert with the acknowledgement that such atomistic elements are regarded as possibilities. Thus, language is drawn towards revealing the tendencies of its representation through such discrete sequences of symbols. 49

Smith, “Introduction – ‘A Life of Pure Immanence’,” xlii. “Introduction – ‘A Life of Pure Immanence’,” xlii. 51 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 156. 50

126

ON REPRESENTATION



Indeed, there can be no contemporaneity informing a strong connection between word and object; hence, no logical signification can be attached to a word. Rather, as Deleuze notes, relations between objects must become identical to the relations between words.52 In this arrangement, a type of enumeration replaces propositions so that grammaticality is decomposed into a mere conjunctive series of names. That is to say, language no longer names the possible but only names. And, indeed, this is the language with which Cruso interacts with Friday. Susan Barton notes with curiosity Friday’s comprehension of English based on the specificity of naming: ‘Bring more wood, Friday.’ Friday heard me, I could have sworn, but he did not stir. So I said the word ‘wood’ again, indicating the fire; upon which he stood up but did no more. Then Cruso spoke. ‘Firewood Friday,’ he said; and Friday went off and fetched wood from the woodpile […] ‘Firewood is the word I have taught him,’ said Cruso. ‘Wood he does not know.’ (21)

Here, the language of names becomes embroiled in an operation of power. No longer does the term “firewood” designate only the object, but it necessarily incorporates the acts of fetching and applying the firewood to the fire. Thus, the term “firewood” expands to cover an entire process, and in so doing discloses the minimum condition of language. Deleuze argues that language is concerned less with the communication of information than with the transmission of the order-word (mots d’ordre).53 Referring to Oswald Spengler’s Man and Technics, Deleuze writes that the fundamental forms of speech are not the statement of a judgement or the expression of a feeling but are, rather, “the command, the expression of obedience, the assertion, the question, the affirmation or negation.”54 Such elements of language that necessarily connect acts to statements by social obligation constitute the variable reality of the order-word. It is in this context that the order-word necessarily proclaims the redundancy of the act and the statement. Susan Barton wishes to communicate her history to Cruso (“let me tell you my story,” 10), but her story is greeted with indifference because it can only state what Cruso must think, retain, or expect of Susan. The only story that Susan can tell must be conditioned by the subjectivity of communication, and ultimately return to her pres-

52

Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 156. See Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 75–110. 54 A Thousand Plateaus, 76. 53



The Language of Foe

127

ent condition on the island. Therefore, the communication of information collapses into a certain redundancy, which reveals that the imparting of information is only the minimal condition for the transmission of order-words. Indeed, the order-word conditions language so that the latter “is made not to be believed but to be obeyed.”55 The exhausted Cruso will not invoke a series of judgements in an attempt to qualify a belief in history as narrated by Susan Barton, but will, rather, return to the minimum condition of language, the transmission of order-words, and the language of names. “‘How many words of English does Friday know?’ Susan Barton asks. ‘As many as he needs,’ replied Cruso. ‘This is not England, we have no need for a great stock of words’” (21). Susan Barton’s return to the language of names while attempting to school Friday in English marks the final obeisance required by the order-word. One must respond to the order-word by means of social obligation or be subject to its operation of power. Susan Barton writes: I drew a house with a door and windows and a chimney, and beneath it wrote the letters h-o-u-s… I drew a ship in full sail, and made him write ship, and then began to teach him Africa. (145–46)

However, this account of Friday’s history formed through the conjunctive series of house + ship + Africa holds no significance for Friday. Friday will trace the words, but the act of tracing will become a game, and the game will quickly degenerate, so that “ship” will be written as “h-s-h-s-h-s…or perhaps h-f; that would have filled the whole slate had I not removed the pencil from his hand” (146). Deleuze writes: A teacher’s commands are not external or additional to what he or she teaches us. They do no flow from primary significations or results from information: an order always and already concerns prior orders, which is why ordering is redundancy. The compulsory education machine does not communicate information; it imposes […] semiotic coordinates possessing all of the dual foundations of grammar (masculine–feminine, singular–plural, noun–verb, subject of the statement– subject of enunciation, etc.).56

Therefore, Friday’s failure to trace the words upon the slate issues a challenge to the operation of power that conditions the command structure of the com55 56

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 76. A Thousand Plateaus, 75–76.

128

ON REPRESENTATION



munication of information. For language to maintain internal consistency, one must “impose semiotic coordinates” upon which its elements will form a centralized order. This project of abstract structural homogenization, however, cannot stand in distinction to a political project to formalize a dominant language of power. Thus, Friday’s failure to trace the words ‘correctly’ becomes an act of political resistance. Whether Friday’s resistance to the order-word is intentional or not – Susan Barton cannot help but question whether “somewhere in the deepest recesses of those black pupils was there a spark of mockery?” (146) – his stuttering of language elicits a series of enunciations that will announce a requital. Susan Barton will organize enunciations that will condition Friday as “stupid,” an “imbecile” incapable of speech. As such, the individual body-Friday is incorporeally transformed into a collective bodystupid or collective body-imbecile through the (literally) authoritative enunciations of Susan Barton. The authoritarian regime of subjectification intrinsic to language is not only disclosed but also acknowledged here: “I say he is a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal; I say he is a laundryman and he becomes a laundryman” (121). But Friday’s stuttering of language ultimately problematizes the function of subjectification, while his silence marks the exhaustion of a language of names. Susan Barton notes: Friday is no more in subjection than my shadow is for following me around. He is not free, but he is not in subjection. He is his own master, in law, and has been since Cruso’s death. (150)

Of course, the matter of subjection extends beyond the juridical and comes to rest in the domain of symbolic causality. Umberto Eco, discussing Georges Duby in a sceptical review of Roland Barthes’ Leçons at the Collège de France, writes that symbolic causality is a causality constructed upon the condition of social acceptance.57 That is to say, the concept of subjectification can only operate when a certain disposition of forces is accepted by the either willing or unwilling subjects of its domain (‘I am the servant – you are the master’). Friday’s stuttering language, the act of resistance to the operation of power of the order-word, reveals that such a structure is indeed reversible. Friday does not recognize the social obligation of the order-word and, as such,

57

See Umberto Eco, “Language, Power, Force” (1979), in Eco, Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality, tr. William Weaver (London: Vintage, 1998): 248–49.



The Language of Foe

129

cannot recognize the disposition of forces that wishes to cast him as a subjected entity, either within language or within society. Indeed, Friday’s existence outside of the constructed positions of subjectification reveals the collective condition of enunciation in Foe. Deleuze writes: “the statement is individuated, and enunciation subjectified, only to the extent that an impersonal collective assemblage requires it and determines it to be so.”58 Now, this is precisely the condition of enunciation that one can trace when Susan Barton makes seemingly individual observations that turn the individual body-Friday into the collective body-imbecile. Such enunciations can only operate on, and therefore can only have meaning to, a collective social body that acknowledges the concept of subjectification. However, that is not to say that the social character of enunciation is ultimately extrinsic. Indeed, Pasolini’s consideration of what he terms ‘free indirect discourse’ argues that the social character of enunciation is internal to the utterance because every enunciation implies a collective assemblage. In this context, the order-word functions as the relation of every word or every statement to the acts that are internal to speech, necessarily forming a collective assemblage. And it is the order-word, rooted in the assemblages of enunciation, that determines the instantaneous relation between statements and the incorporeal transformations they express. In this way, direct discourse is always extracted from indirect discourse. An ordered expression is always extracted from the chaotic. Deleuze states that the collective assemblage that premises indirect discourse is “like the murmur from which I take my proper name.” He continues: To write is perhaps to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call my Self (Moi). I is an order-word.59

It is this power of ‘I’ as an order-word that Susan Barton seeks to regain. She demands of the writer Mr Defoe – “‘return to me the substance I have lost, Mr Foe’” (51). It is a power that Friday has no ability to reconcile with his life. Again, Susan notes that “he barely knows his name” (149). Thus, Susan Barton’s quest for the order-word ‘I’ marks her own condition of solitude. But, again, this solitude is not a private affair; it is, rather, another 58 59

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 80. A Thousand Plateaus, 84.

130

ON REPRESENTATION



moment of the collective condition of the author. If the author and a ‘missing people’ are situated in a double becoming, then the solitude experienced by the author is not conditioned by a specific locality, by this or that society, but by the possible world expressed by the Other. Susan Barton will find a line of flight for her solitude in Mr Foe, but her desire to express the story of the island must finally be located through Friday: To tell my story and be silent on Friday’s tongue is no better than offering a book for sale with pages in it quietly left empty. (67)

Yet, no matter how close Susan Barton believes she is to knowing Friday, each revelation is followed by a proliferation of other unknowable Fridays.60 Friday fills Susan Barton’s world with possibilities, fringes, backgrounds, and transitions, but the failure of an absolute enunciation to realize this possibility only marks the impossibility of knowing all ‘Fridays’. As such, Susan’s collective enunciations can only confer a variable reality on the possible world that Friday seeks to express, an observation of which she is not ignorant. Referring to Friday’s severed tongue, she says that “the only tongue that can tell Friday’s secret is the tongue he has lost!” (67). Thus, Susan Barton is caught between two impossibilities: the impossibility of narrating the truth, and the impossibility of remaining silent. She must either necessarily falsify the historical record by engaging in a blatant act of storytelling as opposed to narrating history – which is the context of her admission to Mr Foe that “‘I am growing to understand why you wanted Cruso to have a musket and be besieged by cannibals’” (94) – or remain silent, which would consequently usher in the end of her history: i.e. her story. Of course, only Friday is truly silent in Foe, and his silence not only exposes the historical record as a regime of overtly falsified narratives, but also exhausts collective enunciations that attempt to render him knowable. Susan Barton’s stories can only speak of Friday; she can only narrate his actions or his attitudes, thereby demonstrating that literary enunciation begins “when a third person is born in us that strips us of the power to say ‘I’.”61 Indeed, it is Friday’s silence that compels such a situation. Susan introduces herself into

60

See, for example, the moment when Susan emulates Friday’s “whirling dance,” and comes to the apocryphal conclusion that it is a means of keeping warm (103). 61 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 3.



The Language of Foe

131

the very series that she is attempting to render knowable.62 However, to enter into the series is to relinquish the privilege of the first order-word – the ‘I’ that functions as an occasion, pretext, argument, or absolute limit of enunciation. Nonetheless, Susan Barton enters into a condition of becoming with Friday, forming a collective assemblage that necessarily ushers in such a collapse of the individual subject of enunciation. Following the degeneration of the individual subject of enunciation, Susan realizes that she can only speak through the collective voice of the Other. This is why her story must finally be located in Friday, and why Mr Foe will ultimately compose it. But Friday’s silence informs the collapse of the inclusive dynamic of this collective assemblage. Susan Barton’s enunciations concerning Friday are returned without signification, much like the product of a negative feed-back loop. Her enunciations are conditioned as merely self-reflexive observations that ultimately negate the very possibility of any story: If the story seems stupid, that is because it so doggedly holds it silence. The shadow whose lack you feel is there: it is the loss of Friday’s tongue […]. The story of Friday’s tongue is a story unable to be told, or unable to be told by me. (117–18)

She continues: “The true story will not be heard till by art we have found a means of giving voice to Friday” (118). Indeed, it is this language of ‘voices’, not simply the voice of Friday but the collective enunciation or assemblage of an indirect discourse, that necessarily exhausts the language of names. Naming exhausts the possibility of language by renouncing grammaticality, but the language of voices exhausts the language of names by initiating a decomposition of the validity of narration. What is left to exhaust but the language of voices? When Susan Barton notes that “There will always be a voice” in Friday “to whisper doubts, whether in words or nameless sounds or tunes or tones” (149), one must ask what kind of voice can be described by sounds or tunes or tones. Evidently, Friday’s voice is certainly not the kind that organizes sound-waves into coherent speech-events that constitute an act of communication through transmission. Rather, Friday’s ‘voice’ operates only in terms of the image. Indeed, Foe abounds with the language of images, both aural and visual – the silences of

62

The term ‘series’ is to be read here as ‘the series of Friday’: i.e. Friday as a collective assemblage – most notably his tongue and his actions, but also his demeanour, interactions, refusals, escapes, and so on.

132

ON REPRESENTATION



solitude, the moments of enigmatic images that lack any logical signification except the force of the image itself. The image can only be understood through the internal tension caused by its formation.63 With the language of names or the language of voices one is concerned only with the content of expression. That is to say, the language of names operates by insisting that the relations between objects are identical to the relations between words, and the language of voices operates by exhausting the assemblage of enunciation itself. When one asks what kind of silence Friday keeps, one necessarily turns one’s attention to the content of the silence. But the language of images reverses this practice of considering the content of expression over the form of expression. The image is formed when the moments of force that condition the other languages are removed – when reason is separated from the language of names, and when memory is disconnected from the language of voices. In this way, when the content of each mode of language is isolated, the image is made manifest by the only element of expression that is left – the form of expression. As such, the image is a moment of singularity that retains no connection with the personal, social, or rational, and thereby also the discrete. Under such circumstances, we can no longer say for certain what the image claims to be. The image is bound to the indefinite: While Foe and I spoke, Friday had settled himself on his mat with a slate. Glancing over his shoulder, I saw he was filling it with a design of, as it seemed, leaves and flowers. But when I came closer I saw the leaves were eyes, open eyes, each set upon a human foot: row upon row of eyes upon feet: walking eyes. (147)

The eyes cannot be said to be the eyes of slaves in a ship’s hold; equally, the feet cannot be said to belong to the sailors on such a slave ship who might walk above them.64 These images of the indefinite do not lend themselves to interpretation. In these images we can only read some eyes upon some feet, an eye upon a foot. As such, we cannot interpret such an image, merely chart its effect. We might hope to gain insight into the effect of such images if we treat them as points of reference to possible histories, in exactly the same way as Susan Barton hopes to elicit the truth from Friday concerning the history of

63

Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 159. This is Barbara Eckstein’s interpretation of the image in “Iconicity, Immersion and Otherness: The Hegelian Dive of J.M. Coetzee and Adrienne Rich,” Mosaic 29.1 (March 1996): 57–77. 64



The Language of Foe

133

his mutilated tongue by sketching possible histories of the event – Cruso and Friday, the Moorish slave-trader, and Friday (117–18). But, once again, the images describe only the indefinite and as such refuse interpretation. Talking of the sketches she composed for Friday, Susan Barton notes: One showed the figure of a man clad in jerkin and drawers and a conical hat, with whiskers standing out in all directions and great cateyes. Kneeling before him was the figure of a black man, naked save for drawers, holding his hands behind his back […] In his left hand the whiskered figure gripped the tongue of the other; in his right hand he held up a knife […]. ‘Master Cruso,’ I said, pointing to the whiskered figure. ‘Friday,’ I said, pointing to the kneeling figure. ‘Knife,’ I said, pointing to the knife […] Yet even as I spoke I began to doubt myself […]. (For, examining it anew, I recognised with chagrin that it might also be taken to show Cruso as a beneficent father putting a lump of fish into the mouth of child Friday). (67–68) (My emphases)

A man, a black man, a knife: the indefinite series continue. But such a lack of identification within the image results in more than the simple determination that the faculty of interpretation is redundant; it involves a force that creates a void, or bores holes, loosening the grip of words and drying up voices. The language of names cannot elucidate the image (‘Cruso’, ‘Friday’, ‘knife’), and the language of voices (memories and stories) similarly fails: the image is not made knowable by its content but by its form. The image “accumulates a fantastic potential energy,”65 and what image has more potential energy in Foe than that of Friday’s tongue? One might point to such images as Friday’s scattering of white petals on the sea, his sixnote tune on the flute, or his whirling dance, but it is the image of Friday’s tongue that drives the imagination of Susan Barton. Susan will imagine the history of Friday’s tongue, will create stories about it, will recoil from the thought of it, will relate it to the world of play, will ultimately want to know its secrets. Indeed, above all else, it is the image of Friday’s tongue that conditions the narrative of Foe. This observation marks the potential energy stored in the image of Friday’s tongue – a tongue, it must be remembered, that is necessarily apart from the world of grammar, words, memories, and stories. Given that images have a definite ‘life-span’, the question arises of what happens to the stored potential energy once the image has collapsed. “The energy

65

Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 160.

134

ON REPRESENTATION



of the image is dissipative”;66 the question that most concerns us is whether the energy is released slowly and quietly or urgently and violently. This, of course, depends on the accumulated energy of the image, which is to say the length of its duration, and the manner in which the image is brought to its conclusion. For example, the image of Friday scattering white petals on the sea is concluded by his return to shore. Its duration is brief and the energy released is minimal. Susan Barton notes: “I concluded he had been making an offering to the god of the waves to cause the fish to run plentiful” (31). The image of Friday’s whirling dance carries more energy because its duration is longer, a product of the various returns to the same image. Accordingly, following its collapse the potential energy is more forcefully released. Again, Susan recalls how “tears came to my eyes, I am ashamed to say; all the elation of my discovery that through the medium of music I might at last converse with Friday was dashed” (98). However, no image in Foe stores more potential energy than that of Friday’s tongue. The collapse of this image, which has as its duration the length of the text, is the most violent release of energy, to the extent that it announces the exhaustion of all possibility – the collapse of the novel itself. The last paragraph of Foe reads: His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face. (157)

The collapse of the image of Friday’s tongue has an impact on all of the elements that Susan Barton believed Friday’s “speaking tongue” could elucidate. The potential energy stored in the image of Friday’s tongue explodes by capturing all of the possibilities through which it can be known. Thus, the image dissipates by not only exhausting the possibilities of the cabin, the wreck, the cliffs, and the island, but also Friday himself and the unknown ‘I’. The explosion runs “northward and southward,” exhausting all possible spaces in an “unending” decomposition of the world that issues in the final certainty of the absolute conclusion of the possible.

66

Essays Critical and Clinical, 161.



The Language of Foe

135

A Minor Language and a Minor Literature It is tempting to view the exhaustion of language within a three-stage dynamic: the language of names; the language of voices; and the language of images. However, it would be erroneous to conclude that language is itself organized in such a structured way. Rather, language is built upon each stage, necessarily incorporating each of these movements of language in various amounts and arrangements. In the simplest arrangement one will note how voices congeal around the image, and names build a logical determinism around the collective utterance, which leads to a language that charts the possible, the potential, and the contingent. Equally, other analyses of language will demonstrate how the name directly interacts with the image, or how images exist outside of a double process of name and voice (and so on). Such arrangements of language are not universal. Indeed, they can only be variable. It is when a writer begins to disrupt the arrangement of language that language itself begins to stutter. But this stuttering of language is not the same as stuttering in speech, although one might think of the effects in the same way. The stutter is “no longer the affectation of the one who speaks” but is, rather, the moment at which a language becomes “affective and intensive.”67 Coetzee’s introduction of the concept of exhaustion into Foe marks exactly this moment where language becomes affective and intensive. When language is no longer satisfied with simply denoting the form of expression, such as the dialogic markers “the next day […] the next day” (47), the form of expression must be accompanied by an atmospheric quality that conditions the content of expression. Susan Barton describes Friday’s silence in a letter to Mr Foe: When I lived in your house I would sometimes lie awake upstairs listening to the pulse of blood in my ears and to the silence from Friday below, a silence that rose up the stairway like smoke, like a welling of black smoke. Before long I could not breathe, I would feel I was stifling in my bed. My lungs, my heart, my head were full of black smoke. I had to spring up and open the curtains and put my head outside and breathe fresh air and see for myself that there were still stars in the sky. (118).

This atmosphere of a thick, choking silence that infects every internal organ compounds the general silences that Susan Barton experiences in Foe – the silence of the island, Cruso’s silence, Friday’s silence, her own silence con67

Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 107.

136

ON REPRESENTATION



ditioned by the inability to compose her own story. Indeed, it is this intensive language, the atmospheric quality of silence, that becomes the object of an indirect effectuation. The silence arises from both the elements and the characters with which it is associated and survives in the capacity of the words themselves – a dissociated silence that nonetheless remains close to the context of its genesis. Therefore, it is not “Friday’s silence” that chokes Susan Barton in the above passage but simply silence, the silence that passes through Friday, Cruso, Susan Barton, and, indeed, the whole story. In this sense, silence in Foe makes an escape from a representative language that is predicated on a subject of enunciation who is in connection with sense, and the subject of the statement being directly or metaphorically connected with an object. That is to say, the silence in Foe is no longer conditioned by the logic of representative language; rather, it becomes the non-noise that nevertheless creates the story of Foe – an expressive material that operates without the requirement of an organized form. Expressive material without form, creative non-noise, indirect effectuation – these descriptions of the elements of an affective and intensive language mark the moment at which language strains at its limit, the moment at which language itself begins to stutter. Indeed, the concept of exhaustion exposes the imbalance of language. The language of names operates without the structure imposed by a consideration of grammaticality, the language of voices operates without a defined subject of enunciation, and the language of images operates without the necessity of even the word. In such circumstances, language can no longer be considered to exist in a state of equilibrium, definable through the extraction of constant terms and relations; it must be “put into a state of boom, close to a crash”:68 i.e. considered to be in a state of perpetual disequilibrium. One might begin to think about language in this state of disequilibrium through texts where different languages come into contact. In many postcolonial literatures, which necessarily negotiate a ‘cultural gap’, varying strategies have been developed to facilitate this contact between different languages. Bill Ashcroft et al. write of strategies such as glossing, untranslated words, interlanguage, and syntactic fusion.69 Each strategy carries with it a force that appropriates a standardized dominant language, so that one can “convey in a 68

Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 109. See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1998): 59–77. 69



137

The Language of Foe

language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own.”70 Thus, the force of each strategy is to facilitate interaction between a dominant language of power and a local language. The standardized homogeneity of a dominant language is subverted so that it is made to express widely differing accounts of cultural experiences. However, even though such a situation conditional on bilingualism or multilingualism encourages exchange between languages, the simple contact between languages does not allow language to be described as anything other than a homogeneous system in equilibrium. Indeed, languages that are involved in contact remain constant. Thus, although the exchange that occurs by mixing languages may produce the effects associated with putting a dominant language in disequilibrium, the introduction of ‘foreign’ elements is always reversible. Now, a project to destabilize a language simply by introducing foreign elements fails to consider the imbalance intrinsic to every language. Rather than introducing foreign elements into a language, the writer must become “like a foreigner in the language in which he expresses himself”71 and in so doing reveal a “foreign” language within language itself. But, of course, the very possibility of this act depends on how one thinks about language. Noam Chomsky, for example, prefers to segment language into discrete units for analysis. The aim of such an operation is to organize an implicitly structured arrangement of language. Chomsky plots a point of contact, fixes an order, and proceeds by binary logic; language is presented as the totality of its constitutive features. Consider, for example, Chomsky’s treatment of the sentence ‘the boy met the little girl’:72 S

NP

70

VP

Raja Rao, “Author’s Foreword” (1938) to Kanthapura (New York: New Directions, 1967): vii. 71 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 109. 72 Alan Garnham, Psycholinguistics: Central Topics (London: Methuen, 1985): 28. Here the sentence (S ) is divided by the noun phrase (N P ) and the verb phrase (V P ). These are further divided by determiners (D E T ), adjectives (A D J ), singular verbs (V ), and nouns (N ).

138

ON REPRESENTATION DET

N

V

NP

DET ADJ

the

boy

met



the

N

little girl

The “grammatical tree” has its genesis in the constants and constant relations within language. Thus, for Chomsky, the project to chart language ‘scientifically’ is performed by extracting such constants and universals. Clearly, a rational foundation of order is imposed on language here. Chomsky writes of a “homogeneous speech community” that emerges from the “ideal speaker– listener” relationship.73 However, such a community functions only by refusing the heterogeneous elements that ‘infiltrate’ all totalizing, universal systems. Chomsky relegates such heterogeneous elements – the variation, the difference, and the other-than-standard – to the margins of study, to the “wastebasket of performance.”74 One may note a certain disavowal of language in Chomsky’s work. Although he defines a homogenized structure of language that seems to function within his developed ‘ideal’ relationships, one is always mindful of the other-than-standard elements of language that frame his theses. What, then, of this wastebasket of performance? What of the elements of language that Chomsky cannot usefully appropriate? For Chomsky, language cannot be studied unless extrinsic or mixed variables are eliminated; but for Labov language cannot be studied independently of such inherent variations.75 Indeed, Labov considers variables of all kinds: the phonetic, phonological, syntactic, semantic, and stylistic. That is to say, Labov reinserts the pragmatics of language into its constitution, which Chomsky’s work does so much to dismiss as “external factors” or “extra linguistic.”

73

Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge M A : M I T Press,

1965): 3. 74

William Labov, The Social Stratification of English in New York City (Washington D C : Center for Applied Linguistics, 1969): 759. 75 See, for example, Noam Chomsky, Language and Responsibility. Based on Conversations with Mitsou Ronat, tr. John Viertel (New York: Pantheon, 1979), and William Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P , 1972).



The Language of Foe

139

The example of a performative enunciation highlights the distinction between Chomsky’s and Labov’s interpretation of language. The performative ‘I swear’ can be said to be a very different statement depending on who enunciates it. Deleuze observes, “It is a different statement depending on whether it is said by a child to his or her father, by a man in love to his loved one, or by a witness before the court.”76 Chomsky would argue that the statement remains constant in principle and its variation is a product of circumstances external to the linguistic, while Labov would argue that the statement performs a linguistic transformation that necessarily also demonstrates that language has a property of inherent variation. Deleuze, however, argues that there is a third moment that is not fully explained by either Chomsky’s or Labov’s interpretation. One might equally suggest that the statement is itself the continuum of all possible effectuations of the enunciation. In this sense, Chomsky’s determination that the statement is a constant can be revised to simply render the single form of the enunciation (only one statement among and endless possibility of statements), while the variation that the statement exhibits is not Labov’s “transformation” but an actualization of a possible variable “of a virtual line of continuous variation,”77 which is always already immanent in the enunciation. As such, the projects of Chomsky and Labov are more closely aligned than might previously have been imagined. Perhaps it is the scientificity of linguistics that draws these theorists together, but even though Labov insists that it is the variation itself that is systematic in language while Chomsky takes the opposite position, both Chomsky and Labov engage in the same practice of extracting a systematic structure of language in order to discern its principles. When Deleuze paraphrases a passage from Labov’s Sociolinguistic Patterns he demonstrates the imposition caused by thinking of language in terms of its principles. Labov observes the linguistic mobility of “a young black person who, during a short series of phrases, seems to pass from the Black English system to the standard system eighteen times.” Deleuze’s question concerning this observation is incisive: is it not the abstract distinction between the two systems that proves arbitrary and insufficient? For the majority of the forms belongs to one

76 77

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 94. Smith, “Introduction – ‘A Life of Pure Immanence’,” xlix.

140

ON REPRESENTATION



or the other [Black English / Standard English] only by virtue of the fortuities of a given sequence.78

Although Labov returns to the principle of “code-switching,” as Deleuze identifies it, this merely returns the study of language to a project of rendering uniform the variables inherent in language.79 Thus, in many respects Labov’s turn to the variables of language is a no less rigid determination of language than Chomsky’s focus on linguistic constants. Deleuze states: “language is subject to a double process, that of choices to be made and that of sequences to establish.”80 Either one subscribes to what Deleuze terms a major language, which is based on extracting a systematic structure through the organization of principles from an always already homogenized language in equilibrium, or one refuses such exclusive disjunctions and turns to a minor language, which maintains a condition of heterogeneity by charting the process of a language defined by the pragmatic use of constants in relation to an internal variation that necessarily pitches language into a state of perpetual disequilibrium. Importantly, the difference between the major and minor treatments of language is not merely linguistic but also political. Deleuze suggests that the linguistic project to chart language scientifically is inseparable from politics. For language to assume a condition of validity it must be standardized into a knowable systematic structure so that it can be used ‘correctly’. As such, the linguistic project to organize language by defining it in terms of principles must present language as a standardized, homogeneous system. However, to produce a centred systemization of language is also to imagine the unity of language, and to imagine language in such a state of equilibrium is to enable a politics of homogenization, standardization, and centralization of power. This, of course, is the ground on which one language asserts hegemony over other languages, so that one may begin to discuss, for example, the imposition of “English paradigms and the English language on an African landscape.”81 However, as Deleuze observes, it is not enough simply to say that the colonizer imposes his language on the colonized. Indeed, the mechanisms of linguistic power are more subtle and diffuse than this simple model of imposi-

78

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 93. A Thousand Plateaus, 107. 80 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 110. 81 Kossew, Pen and Power, 12. 79



The Language of Foe

141

tion suggests. For Deleuze, Henri Gobard’s conceptualization of a “tetralinguistic” model of language provides a far more exacting examination of the operation of linguistic power.82 As Deleuze shows, Gobard demonstrates that language operates in at least four different ways. These are: (1) the vehicular – languages which can be characterized as predominantly urban in production, such as commercial, diplomatic or governmental; (2) the vernacular – languages which can be characterized as predominantly rural in production, such as maternal or territorial languages; (3) the referential – national or cultural languages which operate through a recollection or reconstruction of the past; and (4) the mythic – languages of the spiritual, magical, or religiosity.83 When one language is seen to supplant another, it is never a case of simple substitution but a complex process of power-relations passing through each of these modes of language. For example, one may turn to Ismail Talib’s discussion of the impact of Latin as a colonizer’s language in England. Talib does not invoke the tetralinguistic model of language, but one can easily see how his treatment of Latin accords with Gobard’s work. Talib describes the way in which Latin inserted itself into the mode of the referential (“scholarly work”) and the mythic (“public worship until the middle of the sixteenth century”).84 Latin was doubtless also a vehicular language: i.e. the language of the imposed government and administration. But one might note here the absence of Latin in the significant mode of the vernacular; Latin never became the vernacular in the British Isles, although, of course, it infiltrated or creolized the Germanic vernacular. This goes some way towards explaining why the modes of language that Latin occupied were eventually reterritorialized by English.85 Nevertheless, Latin still retains a certain degree of power today in Britain,

82

See Henri Gobard, l’Aliénation linguistique: Analyse tétraglossique (Paris: Flammarion, 1976): 293. 83 See Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, 23. 84 Ismail Talib, The Language of Postcolonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 2002): 1. 85 Ismail Talib argues that English was introduced by invading Germanic tribes only after the Romans had left. Of course, there has been a constant exchange between Britain and other territories in Europe for thousands of years. It seems naive to conclude that “what was to become the English language” was transported by “one of the invading Germanic tribes,” and not as the result of continued interaction with many western and central territories in Europe.

142

ON REPRESENTATION



perhaps most notably through its continued presence in the mode of the referential: law, medicine, biology, and so on. This is the moment at which language exposes the “diverse centres of power”86 that are ‘folded’ into its production. A language is rarely centred in terms of power and the operation of linguistic power is never simply unidirectional. However, beyond this model of a simple disruption of a unidirectional conceptualization of the linguistic power of a dominant language is the implicit spatiotemporal structure that accompanies these modes of language. The vehicular is everywhere, the vernacular is here, the referential is over there, and the mythic is beyond.87 That is to say, each of these modes is specific to an independent domain of collective enunciation. Each mode can be considered to function as an independent language. As Deleuze notes, What can be said in one language cannot be said in another, and the tonality of what can and can’t be said varies necessarily with each language and with the connections between these languages.88

Indeed, this is the absolute condition of the vehicular, referential, vernacular, and mythic. The vehicular cannot be used as the vernacular; it can only talk of the vernacular using its own language. But this is not to say that the vehicular cannot fill a certain function of the vernacular, and another function for, say, the mythical. All one can reliably note is “a blur of languages” that collapses any possibility of considering Gobard’s tetralinguistic model as an organized system of languages. Indeed, Gobard’s model serves only to reveal the moment at which language discloses the operation of indirect discourse and the subsequent loss of a subject of enunciation. It reveals the moment at which a minor language emerges. A minor language is without any independent categories of demarcation. Indeed, a minor language can only be considered to exist when it is in relation to a major language. Thus, as Deleuze observes, such ‘dialects’ as Bantu must be evaluated “not only in relation to the mother tongue but also in relation to Afrikaans as a major language, and English as a counter-major language.”89 It is a deep recognition that Bantu cannot be linguistically isolated because it sits in such close relation to a number of major languages. Simply, Bantu can 86

Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, 23. Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, 23. 88 Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, 24. 89 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 102. 87



The Language of Foe

143

only be characterized by its condition of deflection from the major languages of Afrikaans and English; and it is such deflection that also marks Bantu, not as a dialect, but as a minor language. Now, it is important to note that it is the very possibility of variation within a language that ensures that a minor language becomes an agent of change for a major language. In elucidating this point, Deleuze argues that the more a language tends towards the major (its standardization), the more it is affected by internal variations that transpose it into a minor language. As such, all major languages exhibit as a condition of possibility a becoming-minoritarian. Indeed, one can only ever note a becoming-minoritarian of the major because the standard and homogenized quality of the major position ensures that any movement from this position is necessarily an act of variation that tends towards the minor. Significantly, there cannot be a reciprocal movement from the minor position (towards the major). Although one may argue that on a certain level a minor language may achieve constancy and homogeneity through, say, a standardized pattern of writing, such a language will necessarily generate more variants of itself. Therefore, the project of a minor language can never be to install itself as the new major. The purpose of the minor must always and only be to put the major in a state of disequilibrium through variation. Thus, a minor language implicitly compromises and resists the constants, universals, and homogenizations of the centralized structure of a major language. As such, the minor is always already an act of resistance to structures of power. In this way, the power of the minor is not conditional on its ability to enter, and make itself felt within, the majoritarian system but, rather, by its ability to “trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorialisation of the […] majority.”90 The question one is left to pose, then, is how a notion of the continuum of major and minor can translate into a consideration of literature. Undoubtedly, a minor literature involves writing such uncontrollable movements and deterritorialization of the major, but it would be wrong to conclude that a minor literature is simply a minor language scribed. Deleuze writes, “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language.”91 That is to say, writers of a minor literature must invent a minor use of a major language, a political literature that offers perpetual resistance to a dominant discourse by forcing a major language to ‘stutter’ through the very possibility of its variation. Of course, 90 91

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 106. Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, 16.

144

ON REPRESENTATION



there are numerous ways of achieving this deterritorialization of a major language. Deleuze most commonly returns to what can be called the a-function of language. If a line of variation can be drawn from any linguistic variable, then when an atypical expression is written (be that an agrammatical, asyntactical, or asemantic construction) it acts as a tensor of language that extends the orthodox grammatical, syntactical, or semantic variables so that they tend towards the limits of their intention. For example, the portmanteau words of Lewis Carroll are conditioned by the collapse of a multiple series of sense-units into a single series where the content of the portmanteau word coincides with its function. The fantastic creature “Jabberwocky” is formed through the contraction of ‘wocer’ or ‘wocor’, which means offspring or fruit, and ‘jabber’, an animated monologue that lacks significance or reason. As such, not only does “Jabberwocky” combine these terms but it also necessarily forms a single series from the multiple series of animal (the creature itself), vegetal, and edible (fruit), so that the sense of the original words is deterritorialized and then returned to the portmanteau word in a completely altered state.92 Similarly, the American poet e.e. cummings tests the limits of language not by constructing portmanteau words but by offering portmanteau-constructions of grammar – “he danced his did.” Again, one might wish to trace the orthodox expressions that seem to constitute this expression – he did his dance, he danced his dance, he danced what he did, and so on.93 However, none of these constitutive elements either individually or in a combinatorial series offers the sense of this new agrammatical expression. Rather, language is shown to be drawn to its limit by “placing grammatical variables in a state of continuous variation.”94 Antonin Artaud and Samuel Beckett push at the same limit of language with asyntactic arrangements – a pure, intensive moment in cris-souffles, “Ratara ratara ratara / Atara tatara rana / Otara otara katara,”95 and a sentence that grows from the middle in Beckett’s “Comment dire,” “que de ce, ce ceci-ci, loin là là -bas à peine quoi.”96 Thus, Carroll, cummings, Artaud, and Beckett each alter the fabric of language by disrupting its imagined equilibrium through a project to present an overtly changed form of a major language. Raymond Roussel, on 92

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 45. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 69. 94 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 99. 95 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 83. 96 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 111. 93



The Language of Foe

145

the other hand, prefers to initiate the procedure of deterritorialization by proliferating structural elements specific to writing, so that they tend towards absurdity. Deleuze notes that Roussel’s Impressions of Africa contains an intentional overdeployment of parentheses – parentheses upon parentheses; indeed, parentheses within parentheses.97 On this feature of Roussel’s fiction, Michel Foucault observes that each additional increase in the deployment of parentheses “could not fail to overwhelm the language it enriched. The invention of each verse was the destruction of the whole and stipulated its reconstitution.”98 That is to say, parentheses play the role of tensor in Roussel’s novel, drawing language towards its limit by exposing an intrinsic condition of disequilibrium (“destruction of the whole”) while simultaneously creating a minor language from within the standardized major language of French (“its reconstitution”). Coetzee prefers the procedure of deterritorialization to be initated through a less overt practice – the revolutionary concept. I have already demonstrated how the concept of exhaustion relates to other concepts in Foe to effect a deterritorialization of language, but this has been at the expense of also charting a certain historicity displayed in the concept. Indeed, the concept of exhaustion reveals its genealogy when it is used to delineate a condition of being that is substantially different from that of tiredness – where “the tired person can no longer realize, but the exhausted person can no longer possibilize.”99 One is returned to the concepts of C.S. Peirce. The exhausted person cannot even think of the possibilities (firstness) that the merely tired person cannot try to realize (secondness). Thus, where exhaustion can only be conditional on possibility one must also acknowledge the influence of Leibniz and his conceptualization of monads and possible worlds. Of course, such a genealogy of exhaustion does not run counter to the new connections that Coetzee gives it in Foe – exhaustion and the structure-Other; exhaustion and the collapse of the subject of enunciation; exhaustion and silence; exhaustion and language. The concept of exhaustion exists within a provisional temporal series of concepts that not only support the concept of exhaustion by offering specific coordinates on which it articulates its condition, but also places it in a state of be97

Essays Critical and Clinical, 111–12. Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, tr. Charles Ruas, intro. John Ashbery (Raymond Roussel, 1963; Garden City N Y : Doubleday, 1986): 129–30. 99 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 152. 98

146

ON REPRESENTATION



coming. Thus, in Foe the concept of exhaustion is constantly forging new connections with other concepts, forming lines of flight which cross the thresholds of intensity that give concepts their internal and external consistency. Indeed, exhaustion is always already becoming-impossible and becomingsilent, moving to instruct a significant deterritorialization of the major by inclining to the infinite. The concept of exhaustion is revealed to be endlessly expansive, always already acting as a tensor of language in Foe, nudging language to its limit by revealing both its excesses and its redundancy. Given this state of genesis, the last section of Foe takes on a very particular force with a very particular genealogy. Where I have argued that the preceding sections chart the operation of the concept of exhaustion, it is in the last section that one witnesses the force of its manifestation and its destabilizing effect on writing. However, it is necessary to mark the distinction between these sections before charting the effect of the concept of exhaustion. The first three sections of Foe are conditioned entirely by the narrative voice of Susan Barton. There is no voice that operates outside of what she expresses – every conversation, every thought, every action is related to the reader via Susan Barton. Therefore, Susan’s narrative survives as its own story. It even reaches a state of resolution at the close of section I I I – “ ‘It is a beginning,’ said Foe. ‘Tomorrow you must teach him a’” (152). That is to say, one can justifiably think of the first three sections of Foe as an independent story, perhaps titled The Female Castaway. Being a True Account of a Year Spent on a Desert Island. With Many Strange Circumstances Never Hitherto Related (67). Yet, the text of Foe continues. Section I V is “so utterly different”100 from the style of Susan Barton’s narrative-as-story that attention is drawn to the act of writing itself. Indeed, it is at this point that the new narrative destabilizes the equilibrium of language that is given its consistency by Susan Barton’s constant narrative. The reader is placed in a ghostly world where a new narrator floats over the scenes of Susan Barton’s previous narrative – observing the house of Daniel Defoe, Author; Friday’s mouth; Susan Barton’s manuscript. Perhaps the first question one is prompted to ask is, ‘Who is the “I” of this narration?’ But such speculations will remain meaningless if one hopes to attribute the ‘I’ to an individual body – Foe, Cruso, Coetzee (and so on). The reader is in a 100

Brian Macaskill & Jeanne Colleran, “Reading History, Writing Heresy: The Resistance of Representation and the Representation of Resistance in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe,” Contemporary Literature 33.3 (Autumn 1992): 450.



147

The Language of Foe

narrative of intensities where language is pushed to its limit; words only discharge their content through the logical silence of an asignifying vision or sound; and definable forms are dissolved in favour of flows, so that bodies and words do not “end at a precise point.”101 It is, then, only important to mark the loss of the subject of enunciation, because it announces a decomposition of the individual in a world where “bodies are their own signs” (157). Rather than ask ‘who’ the narrator is, one can more profitably consider ‘what’ the narrator is. Given that the subject of enunciation is lost, the ‘I’ functions solely as an occasion or pretext for enunciation. It does not have to invoke an individual subject. In fact, here, it conditions the narrative of section I V as a collective enunciation – perhaps the dream of Mr Foe, the actualization of Susan Barton’s anxieties, the observation of an incompossible Cruso(e). That is to say, the ‘I’ facilitates the continuum of all possible effectuations of enunciation by maintaining a condition of virtuality (neither real nor unreal) that is always already immanent in every enunciation. Therefore, the ghostly feeling of the narrative is compounded in precisely the same way as the collective enunciation of ‘I’ compounds the operations of content and form of expression. Clearly, section I V of Foe would not have the force it exhibits if it were not preceded by the narrative of Susan Barton. Similarly, as Macaskill and Colleran note, Susan Barton’s narrative-as-story “would make a most ambiguous contribution to South African literature: seeming and seeking to embrace an activism that it cannot circumscribe, it would end empty-handed, confessing a failure”102 if it were not followed by a moment of intensity that informed an absolute deterritorialization of the relative distinction between content and form of expression – the moment in which language loses its representational quality. ‘The voice of man,’ he said. I failed to understand his meaning; but he raised a finger to his lips to still me. In the dark we listened to Friday’s humming. (22)



101 102

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 109. Macaskill & Colleran, “Reading History, Writing Heresy,” 450.

Conclusion 

The Other Question

I am an explorer. My essence is to open what is closed, to bring light to what is dark. If the Hottentots comprise an immense world of delight, it is an impenetrable world, impenetrable to men like me, who must either skirt it, which is to evade our mission, or clear it out of the way. — J.M. Coetzee, Dusklands

J

A C O B U S C O E T Z E E R E M I N I S C E S T H U S about his violent act of selfdetermination against his deserted Hottentot servants at the close of his narrative. It is an articulation that mimics the only two seemingly possible means of theorizing the Other – either its avoidance or its destruction. In White Mythologies, Robert Young offers an ahistorical account of the various philosophical approaches to the Other, via an examination of the relationship between theory and history.1 Young’s discussion is eminently complex, following multiple avenues of investigation and interpretation that seem to reproduce Jacobus Coetzee’s observation – theorizations that either recede from or destroy the alterity of the Other just at the moment in which such approaches make a final grasp at the Other to draw it inside the boundaries of

1

I use the term ‘ahistorical’ in recognition of Robert Young’s claim that “The following chapters do not, however, themselves represent a history, a succession of analyses that move towards the present […]. For what we discover is that the conditions of history’s possibility are also its conditions of impossibility.” Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1999): vi.

150

ON REPRESENTATION



Western knowledge.2 Yet, as Hélène Cixous makes clear, the continuing project to render the Other comprehensible to the West is of fundamental important: Everything throughout the centuries depends on the distinction between the Selfsame, the ownself […] and that which limits it: so now what menaces my-own-good […] is the ‘other’. What is the ‘Other’? If it is truly the ‘other’, there is nothing to say; it cannot be theorised. The ‘other’ escapes me. It is elsewhere, outside: absolutely other.3

For Cixous, although the project to know the Other is crucial to the West’s self-determination, it is certain that the site of the Other must remain wholly outside of Western knowledge. It is significant, however, that Cixous thinks of the Other in terms of a binary organization of the world – the self-same and the Other, the Colonizing West and the colonized subject, the European power and the powerlessness of the subaltern. In such a context, the problem of the Other is found only in the fact that it must logically remain absent from Western knowledge, since to bring the Other into the domain of the ‘knowable’ must involve collapsing the condition of alterity that keeps the Other wholly distinct from the self-same. Thus, the ‘problem’ of the Other, as outlined by Cixous, is more a problem of reconciling competing directions of sense (logic) than it is a problem of registering the existence of the Other. Cixous’s argument, namely, rests on the notion that the formation of knowledge is predicated on the processes of homogenization and identification, as constitutive operations of representation. Therefore, the problematical theoretical apprehension of the alterity of the Other is more than associated with the operation of representation – it is the project of representation. The inability to theorize the Other, to bring it inside the boundaries of Western knowledge, quickly becomes a question of the inability to represent the Other. It would seem, then, that essential to the endeavour to ‘know’ is a methodology that rests firmly on a territory formalized by representation. It is a 2

It is certain that this economy of enquiry and understanding is specifically a problem of “Western knowledge,” as both Foucault and Derrida argue in their different contexts. See, for example, Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines, 1966; London: Tavistock, 1970), and Derrida, Of Grammatology, ed., tr. & intro. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (De la Grammatologie, 1967; Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1976). 3 Cixous & Clément, The Newly Born Woman, 70–71.



Conclusion

151

foundation that not only draws on the image of strict striation through homogenization, limitation, and possession, but must also draw a certain condition of totality from the proliferation of signification. Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf’s influential analytical work on language follows the logic of Ferdinand de Saussure’s theories to argue that it is our linguistic systems, our systems of representation, that define our total experience of the world: the background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity, for his analysis of impressions […] We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages […] the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organised by our minds – and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds […] This fact is very significant […] for it means that no individual is free to describe nature with absolute impartiality but is constrained to certain modes of interpretation even when he thinks himself most free.4

As the processes of representation undoubtedly describe the site of language, it follows that representation must also proceed, at the very least, through every kind of knowledge that uses a linguistic system; be it in terms of either a route to conceptualization or the passage of communication. Of course, the discipline of History is precisely just such a kind of knowledge. Thus, when Cixous continues her critique of the site of the Other by noting that, “in History, of course, what is called “other” is an alterity […] that falls into the dialectical circle. It is the other in a hierarchically organized relationship in which the same is what rules, names, defines, and assigns ‘its’ other,”5 it is precisely the intimate relationship between language and history, and their complicity with representation, that is her object of investigation. Cixous argues that History can only share the reductionist and totalizing mode of representation and, therefore, also its relentless drive to claim ownership over every element of the world. It is a position inherited from Emmanuel Levinas, who perhaps offers the clearest association between knowledge and possession: 4

Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality (Boston M A : M I T Press,

1956): 212–14. 5

Cixous & Clément, The Newly Born Woman, 70–71.

152

ON REPRESENTATION



The whole of Western history takes the relation with the Other as enacted in the destiny of sedentary peoples, the possessors and builders of the earth. Possession is pre-eminently the form in which the other becomes the same, by becoming mine.6

Thus, possession determines the final act of representation as one of internalization – to bring the exterior into the interior. However, it is clear that such a movement can only occur by means of a certain relativity that ensures that the self-same is maintained as the subject of all investigation. Any interrogation of the ontological specificity of the Other that issues from this environment of representation and possession necessarily leads to the kind of epistemic violence referred to by Michel Foucault and Gayatri Spivak. For Levinas, as the Other is claimed by the self-same, it can only be rendered knowable through an inherited methodological imperative that is premised on the discrete rationalism of an ethical and political discourse. That is to say, the Western episteme remains the gold standard in identifying and interpreting the alterity of the Other. For this reason, Levinas argues that the most profitable approach to the Other must be to avoid initiating a movement whereby the Other is absorbed into the self-same, and that such a situation can only arise when the approach is conducted beyond orthodox ontological enquiry. However, as Jacques Derrida notes, Levinas’s alternative approach to the Other, through an ethics of respect, seems as problematical as the ontological approach that he initially dismisses.7 While Levinas’ ethics of respect finds capital in the writings of theorists such as Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva,8 its foundation in the social practice of a dialogue that can productively employ the essentializing character of the universality of reason in order to avoid the binds of individualization, ultimately underestimates the claim to totality that language makes. Clearly, every dialogue is a product of a linguistic system, and every linguistic system, following the hypothesis of Sapir and Whorf, is invested with as much cultural and ideological capital as Levinas claims for the site of ontology. Again, the only object that is made knowable 6

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh P A : Duquesne U P , 1969): 46. 7 See Derrida, Writing and Difference, 79–153. 8 See, for example, Verena Conley, Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P , 1984): 143, and Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon Roudiez, tr. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine & Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia U P , 1980): 23–35.



Conclusion

153

is the preconceived and pre-arranged object of investigation – such is the stubborn “dialectical circle” that Cixous reveals in the operation of History. Nevertheless, it is certain that Levinas’ recognition that the Other must be placed outside of what Young aptly terms “the sphere of mastery”9 –the mechanisms of authority over representation – remains the most significant aspect of any endeavour to know the Other. As such, the importance of Levinas’ work on the complicity of ontological enquiry is not so much realized in his proposal of an alternative approach to the Other through ethics as in his disclosure of the imposition and limitation of the structure of knowledge-formation. It is a structure of totalization that is formalized through the conditioning movements of reduction, homogenization, and identification – a totalization that is “accomplished only in history.”10 It is from within such a context that Foucault writes: The project of total history is one that seeks to reconstitute the overall form of a civilisation, the principle – material or spiritual – of a society, the significance common to all the phenomena of a period […] Such a project is linked to two or three hypotheses; it is supposed that between all the events of a well-defined spatio-temporal area […] it must be possible to establish a system of homogeneous relations: a network of causality that makes it possible to derive each of them, relations of analogy that show how they symbolise one another, or how they all express one and the same central core.11

What Foucault describes here as “total history” is the orthodox style of the discipline of History, which always aims to reveal the sensible chronological causality between events and situations. It is this style of History, Foucault argues, that has dominated the study of the past. And, it is precisely this style of History that Foucault attempts to depart from in his own histories. For Foucault, total history is a history that is always already governed by the principles of organization and teleology. Indeed, implicit in the act of writing total history is the requirement to first subscribe to the organization of the historical simply because one must interrogate at least one phenomenon or event from the past. Of course, in itself this activity rests on several epistemological givens: first, that phenomena or events have an essence, an internal truth or 9

Young, White Mythologies, 17. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 55. 11 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, tr. A.M. Sheridan Smith (L’Archéologie du savoir, 1969; London: Routledge, 1995): 9–10. 10

154

ON REPRESENTATION



“central core,” as Foucault writes, which can be unveiled and written by history; secondly, that such phenomena or events are contained or containable units of the past, with, if not clearly defined borders, then clearly definable borders; and, thirdly, that such phenomena or events are always the product of smaller constitutive units of history, most usually the human in the form of either the individual or a member of the masses. From this already highly organized conceptualization of events, one can begin to discern the second necessity in the project of total history. As the common individual relates to a common event, so the common event relates to a common period. Thus, total history is, in Foucault’s words, “a network of causality” that can be reproduced almost ad infinitum throughout the extensive complexity of relations that not only constitute the phenomenon under investigation but also define its place within the consequently arranged teleological structure of History itself. Taken in concert with an overt agenda to free itself from the “rhetoric of subjective interpretation” in order to attain a scientific (‘objective’) view of the past, total history claims to arise from nothing more than “pure historical fact.”12 But, as the celebrated historian E.H. Carr notes, Facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context. It was, I think, one of Pirandello’s characters who said that a fact is like a sack – it won’t stand up till you put something in it.13

Therefore, while total history promotes itself as a value-free discipline, it is certain that it must smoothe over the irregularities and discontinuities of the impossibly complex interactions and independent movements of events; and it can only achieve this by reasserting subjective interpretation. The strict methodological genesis of total history ensures that its authoritative unitary narrative enters the world by the grace of written intention and not as the result of an unmediated encounter with historical facts. Yet, it is precisely because of

12

In seeking the designation of a “scientific discipline,” historiography in the nineteenth century attempted to exclude as much subjective interpretation as possible, as can be seen in the works of historians such as Leopold von Ranke. Hayden White claims that such suspicion of subjective interpretation manifested itself in the historical text through the steady eradication of rhetoric. See Hayden White, “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation,” Critical Inquiry 9.1 (September 1982): 113–37. 13 E.H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971): 11.



Conclusion

155

this that one must take seriously total history’s claim to attain the condition of the absolute. The primacy of the strict methodology of total history, namely, which is in turn subordinate to the activity of writing in approaching the events of the past, produces a somewhat counter-intuitive state of affairs where the methodology of total history must precede the historical, and the writing of history must in turn precede its own methodology. It is thus impossible for any element of the past to be outside of the activity of writing; consequently, if nothing can be outside of the written, then the strict methodological approach to the past can only produce an absolute narrative of the history of the world. Now, any attempt to find a distinction between the proposition of a singular truth that can be unveiled by history (knowledge) and the proposition of a singular narrative of existence (representation) can only meet with failure. Clearly, in terms of total history, knowledge of the past is inseparable from the activity of representing it. As Bill Ashcroft writes, “The story of history, as a simple representation of the continuity of events, authorized nothing less than the construction of world reality.”14 So, just as Levinas concludes, the condition of totality “is only accomplished in history,” since it is always already written in the strict representational imperative of total history that it must capture every element of the world in its urge to construct world reality. Of course, it is claimed that the site of the Other cannot be exempt from this conditioning organization of the historical record. But the question of the representation of the Other has always been less a question of the ability to render the site of the Other than of the ability to render the alterity of the Other. Certainly, in the project of total history one can trace the ability to represent the site of the Other through its divergent endeavour of simultaneous expulsion and annexation of the site of the Other, but the alterity of the Other always seems to insist on one’s return to Cixous’s prophetic observation that “if it is truly the ‘other,’ there is nothing to say.”15 However, there is something to say about the alterity of the Other, about the ambivalent constitution of the site of the Other in the discourse of history, for such ambivalence facilitates a practice of resistance by destabilizing the certainty of representation on which the European model of history is founded. The contours of the alterity of the Other are thereby revealed. Concerning the expulsion of the Other from history, Edward Said writes: 14 15

Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, 83. Cixous & Clément, The Newly Born Woman, 71.

156

ON REPRESENTATION



Arab refinement, which in its essentials corresponds to Yeats’s vision of Byzantium […] is associated with Arab perdurability, as if the Arab had not been subject to the ordinary processes of history.16

The claim to the absolute that total history makes is preserved in the sense that the Other is perceived as being apart from the processes of history and is thus irrelevant to the written historical record of the West. Yet, contrary to this process of nullification, Said also highlights a project of annexation that runs throughout the production of the historical record. He argues that where the West detects a genealogical association with the Other, it makes moves to absorb the site into European history. For example, that Egyptian civilization influenced the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome in terms of art and the natural and human sciences (Martin Bernal’s ‘Black Athena’ theory) means that the Other of Egypt is subsumed under European history. It is in this context that Said writes of the European endeavour to appropriate the “world-historical importance” of Egypt.17 Clearly, such annexation serves to collapse the alterity of the Other as it is claimed and appropriated by the selfsame of Europe. It is perhaps not surprising that Said should concludes: “The Orient, in short, existed as a set of values attached, not to its modern realities, but to a series of valorized contacts it had had with a distant European past.”18 Nevertheless, it is this process of annexation and appropriation, which necessarily collapses the alterity of the Other, that Said finds most fruitful in his discussion of the Orient, for it is the moment at which representation as the interpretation of signs decomposes its relation to similitude and turns wholly towards the reflection of signification. Since it can no longer be a case of discerning the actual Orient but, rather, is always a case of discerning the structures that claim access to the actual, Said’s discussion of the Orient departs from the methodological conditioning of the orthodox practice of total history and turns instead towards a history of the Orient as a product of the dominant discursive arrangement of the West. The colonized subject is thus revealed to be none other than the passive product of the European endeavour to represent it. Yet, while such a conclusion is clearly problematical in terms of accounting for the active practices of resistance encountered by the European colonizers, the revolutionary force of Said’s history of the Orient is to be

16

Said, Orientalism, 230. Orientalism, 84–85. 18 Orientalism, 85. 17



Conclusion

157

found in the way in which the turn towards discursive analysis necessarily problematizes the unitary form of History itself. In establishing a concept of something that chronological history would assume had no history, such as the production of the Orient, Foucault draws on the work of Georges Canguilhem in claiming that the history of a concept will have its own specific temporality. As such, “The history of madness would be the history of the Other,”19 since the concept of madness cannot participate in the schema of a universal linear history. Indeed, much like Foucault’s concept of madness, Said’s Orientalism forms its own history, its own discrete temporality constituted by the conflicting solutions and ideological values that have been invested in it. Therefore, the continuity of the grand narrative of total history is necessarily decomposed and replaced by the implicit discontinuity and irregularity of individual chronologies brought about by the multiplication of possible histories which ultimately disrupt the singular legitimization of existence represented in the global narrative of total history. However, while the implication of this style of history is dramatic, facilitating a proliferation of revisionist and counter-histories with the potential to legitimize a diversity of ontological conditions, it would seem to have to be tempered by the recognition of the ‘double bind’ of history itself. Indeed, one might say of both Foucault’s and Said’s work that while ‘madness’ and ‘Orientalism’ may be histories of the Other in the sense that they both instruct a decomposition of the monolithic condition of a linear total history, both are also always already histories of the self-same, in the sense that the very production of any kind of history is conditional on the ability to impose order on historical discontinuities and collect them “together into identities.”20 Yet the significance of such histories is not found in the manner in which they instruct a plurality in History itself but in the way in which such plurality discloses the ambivalence that must reside in a History that claims to be not only the form of knowledge but also “the fundamental mode of being for empirical phenomena.”21 It is the ambivalence inherent in writing and knowledge – of the potential return to the self-same through representation and the potential loss of the self-same at the limits of representation through a refusal of the process of reduction that is necessary in order to discern identity.

19

Foucault, The Order of Things, xxiv. The Order of Things, xxiv. 21 Young, White Mythologies, 73. 20

158

ON REPRESENTATION



While the possibility of the return to the self-same through representation is well-charted, one might begin to trace the loss of the self-same at the moment in which humanity is deemed to be ‘dehistoricized’. Foucault is certain that a proliferation of histories that authorize discrete temporalities, and subsequently facilitate the multiplication of narratives that oppose the dominant narrative of total history, ensures that humanity undergoes a forced withdrawal from history and ceases to be the sovereign subject of all possible knowledge: since he speaks, works, and lives, [man] finds himself interwoven in his own being with histories that are neither subordinate to him nor homogeneous with him.22

That is to say, humanity is dehistoricized, lifted from its position at the centre of all of history, and challenged to discover itself in the exteriority of history. For Foucault, the discovery of humanity outside of history occurs in two distinct, but linked, movements. First is the notion that humanity discovers itself through its “finitude”: i.e. by collapsing the infinite extension of the subjectas-event into the eminently knowable analytic of the finite and homogeneous subject. Second is the notion that humanity discovers itself through the preconceived arrangement of coordinates by which the identity of the subject can be rendered knowable – Foucault works with three of these throughout his writing: labour (“political economy”), life (“biology”), and language (“philology”). It would seem, then, that it is by a return to the order of representation conditioned by the construction and operation of definable identities that humanity discovers itself and makes itself knowable outside of the historical. Yet it is important to note that, in this arrangement humanity, comes to have a “doubled being.” Traversed by an essential disparity, the human is “separated from itself by its words, by its works, and by its desires.”23 The sovereignty of identity in representation is, then, necessarily collapsed as the Other that escapes Robert Young’s discussion is realized in the self – the Selfas-Other. In the attempt of humanity to discover itself, the supposed reclamation of the order of representation is merely a gesture towards the empty place in representation which humanity could, but does not, occupy. Such a void,

22

Foucault, The Order of Things, 368–69. Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, tr. Michael Taormina (L’île déserte et autres textes 1953–1974, 2002; New York: Semiotext[e], 2004): 91. 23



Conclusion

159

left by humanity’s disappearance from the centre of history and representation, Foucault writes, “is nothing more and nothing less than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think.”24 That is to say, such space guarantees a certain distance for humanity to think without the restraint of a persistent return to the authoritarian and conditioning structure of representation. It marks the loss of the certainty granted to the identity of the selfsame; it is a space of thought for the unconditioned Self-as-Other. Indeed, this space for unconditioned private thought promotes “a Cogito for the self underneath,”25 a space and practice of thought that allows Deleuze to claim that humanity “can exist in the space of knowledge,” under the condition that the “world of representation itself has collapsed under the pressure of nonrepresentable and non-representative forces.”26 However, the insistent question that accompanies Deleuze’s claim concerns how one can finally manage the collapse of the world of representation. Certainly, Coetzee offers just such a process throughout his texts by embracing the condition of Self-as-Other. While, on the one hand, the structural composition of Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Foe mimics the binary of colonial power proposed by Cixous – with the narrators of each text clearly aligned to and granted the dominant position of authority over representation – on the other hand, such structural composition of the texts is problematized by Coetzee’s insistent return to the destabilization of the sovereignty of identity.Thus, in Foe, for example, the identity of Friday and Cruso is splintered to such an extent through their shared condition of exhaustion that Susan Barton is unable to distinguish truth from fabrication and the definite from the indefinite. Similarly, in Dusklands both Eugene Dawn and Jacobus Coetzee are provided with an over-articulated identity through the prolific use of the personal pronoun ‘I’, which ultimately results in a disarticulation of their identity, to the extent that it collapses the concept of the subject by always already tending towards the limitless possibility of infinite identity. And, whereas the condition of infinite identity forces both Dawn and Jacobus into a series of delirious becomings, in Waiting for the Barbarians the Magistrate’s perpetual movement of becoming-nomad places him in a combative relationship with a State that struggles to recognize and therefore control him. In each case, the certainty and gravity claimed by representation 24

Foucault, The Order of Things, 342. Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 92. 26 Desert Islands and Other Texts, 91. 25

160

ON REPRESENTATION



through the imposition of the final designation of identity is eroded to the extent that any attempt to retrieve an essence or central core from any character is rendered impossible. In this way, the fundamental representational processes of homogenization, identification, and limitation are rendered impotent. Coetzee writes the possibility of the self-same at the limits of representation by refusing to subscribe to the reductionism that is necessary in order to produce identity. However, it is important to recognize here that one cannot therefore claim that Coetzee endeavours to represent Foucault’s “unfolding space” of alterity that is left in the wake of the demise of representation. Rather, one should say that his novels ‘merely’ stage the unfolding of such space through a prolific series where the subject is read only in terms of the complexity of the Event, which inclines towards infinite identity, identity that in turn is the product of the perpetual movement of an unlimited becoming, which finally can only survive in a circuit emerging from the dynamic relationship between the complex subjectivity proposed by the Body without Organs and the chaotic rhythms of constantly reflecting and interacting geographical and personal milieux. Indeed, it is as though Coetzee’s novels were directly exchanging homogenization for heterogeneity, identification for singularization, and limitation for proliferation, so that Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Foe are conditioned only by their potential to open out onto something else – for the totalized subject to be torn apart in order to demonstrate infinite intension as well as infinite extension. It is certain that such an environment of possibility, movement, and filiation in Coetzee’s staging of the subject tends to regard the individual as a substantive multiple – the same position that allows Deleuze to write of himself and Guattari, “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.”27 This is a sentiment dear to the philosophy of Guattari, who proposed in his own work some years earlier that “we are all groupuscles.”28 For Deleuze and Guattari, then, the subject is always already a collection of convergent and divergent subjectivities, a simultaneous exhibition of the characteristics of the self and the Other, the individual and the crowd, the named and the unnamed. It is a dynamic arrangement of subjectivity that, as Deleuze notes, “does not allow itself to be enclosed in a whole bent on reconstituting a self.”29 27

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 3. Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 193. 29 Desert Islands and Other Texts, 93. 28



Conclusion

161

However, even though one may claim that such a conceptualization of subjectivity inhabits the novels of Coetzee, the present study still seems to have been alert to the caveat with which Foucault prefaces his early histories. While I claimed at the outset to be approaching the alterity of the Other by charting Coetzee’s efforts to press at the limits of the extension and intension of representation, I was obliged to proceed in precisely the same manner as Foucault’s histories – engaging in a process of organization that must return to the ‘Western episteme’ of representation and the collapse of the alterity of the Other. It would seem, then, that a sharp distinction between knowledge and the practice of interpretation is necessary, where one must recognize the close association of interpretation with theory, and their inextricable location among the modalities of representational thought. The operations of interpretation, analysis, and logic all insist on a return to representation through a process of homogenization, organization, and identification. In this sense, no matter how revolutionary the concept, all theorization of it is bound to the limitation endemic to representation. Such is the case that Robert Young makes, “for theory, as a form of knowledge and understanding of the spectator, is constitutively unable to let the other remain outside itself, outside its representation of the panorama which it surveys, in a state of singularity or separation.”30 Now, it is important to temper Young’s assertion by noting that knowledge itself is not necessarily representational, since it can be constructed ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ representation. One might think here of Henri Bergson and intuition, Baruch Spinoza and affects, and Gilbert Simondon and individuation.31 Through such work, it is clear that every kind of experience that can be granted a-priori status exhibits a possibility of residing beyond the domain of representation, since each a-priori experience has the potential to exist beyond the subject as a non-represented force which nevertheless continues to condition existence. As such, it is certain that to have knowledge of the Other

30

Young, White Mythologies, 14. See, for example, Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. T.E. Hulme (1896; Introduction à la métaphysique, 1903; tr. 1912; Indianapolis I N : Hackett, 1999); Baruch Spinoza, “Ethics” (1677), in The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. & tr. Edwin Curley (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1985): 408–620; Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964); and Gilbert Simondon, L’Individuation psychique et collective (Paris: Aubier, 1989). 31

162

ON REPRESENTATION



is not the same as demonstrating knowledge of the Other. Put another way, while the act of analysis or the act of interpretation necessarily collapses the alterity of the Other into the self-same, knowledge does not inexorably induce this process. Therefore, it would seem that the problem of the alterity of the Other resides not so much in the possibility of its ontological constitution as in the possibility of its transmission. It is no longer a question of whether the subaltern can speak, as Gayatri Spivak asks, but whether the transmission of the voice – of the already inscribed voice of the Other – can occur without the simultaneous collapse of its alterity through representation. For it seems clear that Coetzee manages to stage the Other by endeavouring to push representation to its limits in order ultimately to transcend its field of reference and thus retain the vitality of the alterity of the Other. It is a claim that can be made of Coetzee’s novels only under specific consideration of the role of the writer in the production of literature. “To write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived experience.”32 For Deleuze, a novel can never be created solely from the ransacking of personal memory or the personal musings of the imagination, from the simple recitation of the perceptions and affections that populate the relations between children and parents, or from the tension between “the interesting character who is inevitably oneself” and “opinions that hold it all together.”33 Rather, “Writing is a question of becoming,” always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived.34

Here, the writer is always already involved in a process of becoming. As discussed earlier, it is important to understand that for a political literature to attain its revolutionary potential it must create a new people; a collective readership that cannot exist before the encounter with the newly produced text. In a pre-personal space that is outside of purely textual contact, the political text draws the writer who can no longer return to individual experience (‘I’) together with a new people who can only be recognized by their absence from the already existent conditioning discourses of identification. In this arrangement, the writer must move towards the position of the reader, while the 32

Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 1. Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy? 170. 34 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 1. 33



Conclusion

163

reader must simultaneously move towards the position of the writer, along a “line of flight” that connects both positions in the domain of the virtual. Under such conditions, a state of double becoming emerges that necessarily collapses the function of identity. It is the shared condition of becoming and non-identification that encourages the emission of a collective utterance, a pure speech-act, which allows a missing revolutionary people “to find their expression in and through the singularity of the writer.”35 Thus, Coetzee’s novels draw on an environment of collective utterances that necessarily refuse the description of a representative totality arising from the reductionist endeavour to collect discontinuities together into identity. As such, they are always already something other than a representation of lived experience – the departure from which has been the foundation of much criticism of Coetzee’s work36 – and also more than a representation of a possible livable experience. Coetzee’s writing bears testimony to a metatextual double becoming of the reader and writer, which is formalized by the collective assemblage of shifting distributions of relative subjectification and assignations of individuality, in that such a process of becoming cannot be separated from the likewise perpetual and incomplete process of re-creating the self through the movement of haecceities – which prove to be both conditioning and conditioned agents of subjectivity itself. That is to say, at every point in the composition of his novels, Coetzee willingly forgoes the finitude established by the identity of a subject in favour of the possibility of writing an experience that is necessarily beyond his own personal experience. It is a stance that can only be adopted by recognizing that relations are external and independent of their terms.37 Now, this proposition insists that relations attain their own direction and speed, in much the same manner as Georges Canguilhem asserts that a concept will

35

Smith, “Introduction – ‘A Life of Pure Immanence’,” xlv. Coetzee’s ostensible lack of commitment to the ‘reality’ of South Africa is the most common quarry of Coetzee’s critics. It is the view that Coetzee refuses to connect narratives to specific social and political issues and thereby renders his novels impotent to harbour any revolutionary potentialf. See, for example, JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory,” and Paul Rich, “Apartheid and the Decline of Civilisation Idea: An Essay on Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People and J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians,” Research in African Literatures 15.3 (Autumn 1984): 365–93. 37 Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, tr. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia U P , 1991): 100. 36

164

ON REPRESENTATION



have its own specific temporality, and in so doing cuts across both subjects and objects. It is, then, the relation itself rather than the terms of its inception that assumes primacy in the interactions of a social field populated by subjects and objects. What follows from this reappraisal of the social field is that any effect, even if it is produced in a very particular way, “can always be produced by other means.”38 The implication of such a reappraisal is that it is no longer necessary to claim association with a specific ontological position in order to interrogate a specific condition. As Ian Buchanan quite rightly concludes, “Drugs may well produce délire, but if that state is attainable by other means, then one does not have to be an addict in order to interrogate drugs.”39 The ramifications of this claim for the project of identity-politics are dramatic, sincethere can no longer be a question of the right to speak via the authenticity of a specific subjectposition granted by privileged personal experienc, but must, instead, be a question of the conditions necessary to enable everyone to speak from every conceivable position.40 Where identity-politics necessarily privilege personal experience, if one considers relations to be external and independent of their terms, then experience necessarily becomes a pre-personal force that exists beyond the subject – a non-personal and non-organic force of Life that is always already simultaneously given and transcendent in terms of the subjectivity that it constitutes. Importantly, since experience is external and independent of the individual, a person cannot claim to possess or even claim to have experiences happen to them. Thus, personal experience necessarily loses its privilege and subjectivity necessarily comes to be understood in terms of a passive synthesis of experiences, of haecceities, which constitute a non-personal Life. In such an environment, writing cannot be an activity that attains a discrete form, since it must always already be incomplete. Indeed, it can only be an activity that at best attempts to find “a zone of proximity” to the haecceities that forge the singularity of a subject. Through the task of the writer to make 38

Deleuze, Negotiations, 11. Ian Buchanan, ed. A Deleuzian Century? (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1999): 5. 40 See, for example, Minh-ha, “No Master Territories,” 18. Although Minh-ha recognizes the multiplicity of her own subject-position in this passage, it is certain that the philosophical premise of her account of shifting subject-positions rests on the invigoration of a privileged personal experience that necessarily coincides with a practice of exclusion that denies other speakers the right to comment. 39



Conclusion

165

literature connect to the non-personal forces of Life, literature itself must insistently claim to be an act of creation. In the words of Deleuze, writing must invent the possibility of Life – which is to say, “a way of existing.”41 It is no longer profitable to think of the writer as one who simply represents experience through writing, a writer for or on the behalf of a people. Rather, the writer must be considered as an inextricable singularity of the people who, in refusing to simply represent experiences, creates non-preexistent relations between multiplicities, singularities, and becomings in order to demonstrate new possibilities of Life. Thus, it is no longer a question of literature and the representation of the Other but of literature and the inscription of Life. It is the moment at which every subject is known to be wholly subordinate to the pure immanence of a life that necessarily precedes it. In other words, it is the subject who must pass through Life, and in this passage come to the recognition that “we are not in the world, we become with it.”42 Thus, it is certain that Coetzee enters into a rather complex process whereby he relinquishes the sovereignty of his identity to a state of becoming that conditions him as an inextricable singularity of a collective field of enunciation. It is a becoming-imperceptible that, in concert with his endeavour to test the boundaries of representation by refusing the return to personal experience, grants his novels the capacity to write the alterity of the Other. However, the question of whether the present study can also claim to write the alterity of the Other from outside of representation remains, since it is clear that a function of all interpretation is to collapse such alterity. Indeed, if it were the endeavour of this book to interpret a condition of the Other from the novels of Coetzee, then it would certainly have to acknowledge its inability to transmit or, one might equally say, theorize the alterity of the Other. Yet, if one subscribes to the above argument, which demonstrates how Coetzee can legitimately claim to stage the Other, then the literary work itself must be thought of as a kind of machine that generates effects – a machine that produces effects which not only affect the ideas and feelings of the reader but also flows into the extratextual practice of the text. As Bruce Baugh writes, the effect of a literary machine can be thought of in the following terms: changes in the reader’s dispositions, attitudes and behaviours that may link up with other forces affecting the reader, particularly social and political forces, and in such a way that, in the best instances, readers 41 42

Deleuze, Negotiations, 100. Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy? 169.

166

ON REPRESENTATION



are able to put these forces to work to overcome the inhibiting and restrictive effects of the dominant social forces.43

Such an extratextual proliferation of the effects of a literary machine suggests that reading a text should never be “a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier.” Rather, Deleuze continues, reading should be “a productive use of the literary machine […] that extracts from the text its revolutionary force.”44 The literary work taken as this type of machine demands an entirely different procedure from that of interpretation to be applied to it. In a dramatic departure from Edward Said’s inherited approach to the alterity of the Other via discursive analysis, the encounter between the effects of a literary machine and the reader becomes one of experimentation. It is important to note that this kind of experimentation possesses a doubled power of interrogation for Deleuze. On the one hand, experimentation retains the vitality of the newly created non-preexistent relations between multiplicities, singularities, and becomings informed by the text. On the other, it retains the vitality of an abstracted experience that is capable of producing elements which are in themselves corruptive of the process of representation. Deleuze formalizes this relationship by tracing the simultaneous process of the experience-experiment event: Thinking is always experiencing, experimenting, not interpreting but experimenting, and what we experience, experiment with, is always actuality, what’s coming into being, what’s new, what’s taking shape.45

It has, accordingly, never been the intention of my book to analyze or engage in a direct interpretation of the Other as written in the novels of Coetzee. Rather, I claim only to have engaged in experimentation with the trajectories that Coetzee presents for the reader to follow. Therefore, the emphasis of this book is not to be found in the kind of interrogation that must ask of the text, ‘what does it mean?’ since such a question is always already situated in the representational processes of limitation and interpretation. Rather, I have encountered Coetzee’s texts and the alterity of the Other with a query that 43

Bruce Baugh, “How Deleuze Can Help Us Make Literature Work,” in Deleuze and Literature, ed. Ian Buchanan & John Marks (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2000): 34. 44 Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 106. 45 Deleuze, Negotiations, 106.



Conclusion

167

avoids the inevitably closed response of the system of interrogation; I have always implicitly been asking ‘how does it function?’ It is a question that aims to elucidate how Coetzee’s novels work as literary machines, as engines that excite the emission of haecceities, which subsequently condition the novels as revolutionary texts of the Other. It is a process of experimentation that fits its subject, “providing,” as John Cage notes, “it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown.”46 In the words of Deleuze, such experimentation with literature must “try and follow rather than judge” the art of the writer in order to “see where it branches off in different directions, where it gets bogged down, moves forward, makes a breakthrough.”47 Accordingly, the first chapter of this book plugged into the machine of Dusklands by accessing the modality of the physical body. It attempted to follow the alterity of the Other in a journey that transgresses the orthodox realm of the exterior as it passes the threshold of interiority. The second chapter, by contrast, questioned the function of place in Waiting for the Barbarians. It asked: Can one think of a geography that is both interior and exterior to State power while still being a space of resistance for the Other? The third chapter engaged with Foe by way of the concepts of solitude and exhaustion. It posed the question: Can one experiment with the concepts of solitude and exhaustion in order to arrive at a practice of language that is purely revolutionary? And in this atmosphere of literary experiment, can one approach the elusive alterity of the Other? It has been a book of experimentation, then, that has posed eminently open (i.e. extensive rather than intensive) questions in order to encourage the further expansion of the novels, in opposition to any attempt to confirm their final closure by claiming absolute meaning through interpretation. Since such experimentation necessarily leads to a diverse set of conclusions, it is perhaps worth highlighting a “line of flight” that connects together the three novels that I have discussed here, and which fashions Coetzee’s staging of the Other. From experimenting with the concepts of solitude and exhaustion in Foe, language is revealed to be conditioned in terms of a required obeisance rather than belief, since it is clear that the communication of information is only the minimal condition for the transmission of order-words. As such, the pro46 47

John Cage, Silence (Middletown C T : Wesleyan U P , 1961): 13. Deleuze, Negotiations, 85.

168

ON REPRESENTATION



cedure of representation found in the signification of language is revealed to be one that demands an uninterrupted association with the actual; and, in claiming such an association with the actual, representation discloses the authoritarian regime of identification and subjectification intrinsic to itself and thus also to language. However, where the association is exposed to be at best tangential – for example, through silence (in terms of the way in which it interrupts the cyclical nature of self-assertion) or the practices of abstraction noted in agrammatical, asyntactical or asemantic constructions of language – the authoritarian regime of subjectification is forced into a stutter that ultimately decomposes the possibility of subjectification itself. Thus, immanent in a language that rests on a constructed association with the actual via identification is a law of variation that has the potential to compromise the sovereignty of identity in representation. It is this law of variation in language that connects to Dusklands; such a law, namely, has the potential to proceed in two very different ways. The sovereignty of identity in representation can either be compromised through a practice of refusal – to refuse to subscribe to the limitation of a singular identity or a series of singular identities (such as demonstrated by both Cruso and Friday in Foe) – or it can be compromised by an over-articulation of both convergent and divergent subject-positions, as demonstrated by both Eugene Dawn and Jacobus Coetzee in Dusklands. Such over-articulation leads to an excess of identity that suggests infinite identity, a multi-centred, hence noncentred, consideration of the Self. Given such a context in which non-identification forces the process of representation to lose its gravity, the body assumes authority in the production of its own undeniable power by replacing language as the means to access the actual. The pain-event of the body is therefore always already pre-linguistic. It is a return to the insistence that relations are external and independent of their terms. And it is a return to the moment at which the body can only be described by its intensive reality, by the immanence of a life that lies ‘beneath’ the determined form and functions of the organized body – the Body without Organs. Clearly, such a collapse of the authority of identification necessarily informs the process of becoming. In Dusklands, such becomings are numerous: Dawn’s becoming-imperceptible and his becoming-Moses; Jacobus’s becoming-delirious, -horse, -leather and -air, in a process that directs the literal destruction of the Self. It is the same destabilizing process undergone and, importantly, emitted by the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians. While the Magistrate’s becoming-nomad is the result of the deterritorialization of his



169

Conclusion

own-Self, it can similarly do nothing but act as a revolutionary force of deterritorialization on a State apparatus that must attempt to recondition such deterritorialization by deploying the strict methodological imperative of representation. Thus, the line of flight that draws together the various experiments waged in Coetzee’s novels manifests a practice of resistance to dominant social forces. It is a resistance that is predicated on consigning the perceived static sites of language, corporeality, and place to a state of perpetual disequilibrium – a modulation of continuous variation that compromises any certainty of representation. Ultimately, it is a form of resistance that Coetzee writes solely in terms of the haecceities that constitute a Life of pure immanence. Thus, while this book may have oriented its experimentation to the orthodox sites of body, space, and language in order to render the vitality of the alterity of the Other, at every point such sites are shown to refuse to regard experience as the guarantor of experience. As such, Coetzee’s novels ‘merely’ offer the reader a series of singularities of the Other – not individuations but singularities – which refuse to be elucidated by the process of representation. Such singularities are the forces that are immanent in Life, and it is these singularities that render visible the alterity of the Other by exposing the density and intensity of the resistance the Other exerts. Given this, there must be an inevitable conflation of subjectivity with a practice of resistance that proves to be a certain arrangement of the forces of Life. It is a conflation that recognizes that it is the practice of Life itself that constitutes the individual by conditioning the predetermined, unorganized structure of the Body without Organs; it is a conflation, therefore, that means that the colonized subject becomes able, through movement, to transcend the authority of production found in dominant colonial discourse; it is a conflation, finally, that ensures there can be no theoretical Other – only and always a practical Other. It is with this experimental practice of reading and writing the Other – the colonized subject – that this book has been engaged.





Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Artaud, Antonin. “Here Lies,” in Artaud Anthology, tr. F. Teri Wehn & Jack Hirschman (San Francisco: City Lights, 1965): 238–51. ——. “Letter to Paule Thévenin” (1948), in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, tr. Helen Weaver (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976): 584– 85. ——. “To Have Done With the Judgement of God” (1948), in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, tr. Helen Weaver (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976): 555–75. Ashcroft, Bill. “Constitutive Graphonomy: Post-Colonial Theory of Literary Writing,” in After Europe: Critical Theory and Post-Colonial Writing, ed. Stephen Slemon & Helen Tiffin (Sydney: Dangaroo, 1989): 58–73. ——. Post-Colonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2001). ——, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1998). Attridge, Derek. J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2004). ——. The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004). Attwell, David. J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley: U of California P , 1993). Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation, tr. Shelia Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1994). Baugh, Bruce. “How Deleuze Can Help Us Make Literature Work,” in Deleuze and Literature, ed. Ian Buchanan & John Marks (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2000): 34–56. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust (Oxford: Polity, 1989). Begam, Richard. “An Interview with J.M. Coetzee,” Contemporary Literature 33.3 (Fall 1992): 419–33. Bellow, Saul. Herzog (New York: Viking, 1964).

172

ON REPRESENTATION



Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, tr. Harry Zohn (Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus, posth. 1974; London: New Left Books, 1973). Bergson, Henri. An Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. T.E Hulme (1896; Introduction à la métaphysique, 1903; tr. 1912; Indianapolis I N : Hackett, 1999). Bhabha, Homi K., ed. Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). Boeri, Marcelo D. “The Stoics on Bodies and Incorporeals,” Review of Metaphysics 54.4 (June 2001): 723–52. Booth, James, Susheila Nasta, Prabhu Guptara, John Thieme & Charles Steele. “X V I I I : African, Caribbean, Indian, Australian, and Canadian Literature in English,” in The Year’s Work in English Studies, vol. 65 (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1984): 665–761. Bréhier, Émile. La Théorie des incorporels dans l’ancien stoïcisme (Paris: Vrin, 1928). Buchanan, Ian. “Introduction” to A Deleuzian Century?, ed. Buchanan (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1999): 1–36. Cage, John. Silence (Middletown C T : Wesleyan U P , 1961). Capel, Horacio. “The Imperial Dream: Geography and the Spanish Empire in the Nineteenth Century,” in Geography and Empire: Critical Studies in the History of Geography, ed. Anne Godlewska & Neil Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994): 58-73. Originally as “El vuelo de las quimeras: Marruecos y el sueño imperial español del siglo X I X . Prólogo,” in Vigilia colonial: Cartógrafos militares españoles en Marruecos (1882–1912), ed. Luis Urteaga (Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra / Ministerio de Defensa, 2006): 9–18. Carr, E.H. What is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). Cavafy, C.P. “Waiting for the Barbarians,” in The Poems of C.P. Cavafy, tr. John Mavrogordato (London: Hogarth, 1951): 28–29. Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed, 1986). Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1965). ——. Language and Responsibility: Based on Conversations with Mitsou Ronat, tr. John Viertel (New York: Pantheon, 1979). Cixous, Hélène, & Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman, tr. Betsy Wing (La Jeune née, 1975; Manchester: Manchester U P , 1986). Clastres, Pierre. Society Against the State: The Leader as Servant and the Humane Uses of Power Among the Indians of the Americas, tr. Robert Hurley, with Abe Stein (La Société contre l’état: Recherches d’anthropologie politique, 1974; New York: Urisen, 1977). Coetzee, J.M. “André Brink and the Censor,” Research in African Literatures 21.3 (Fall 1990): 59–74. ——. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1992).



Works Cited

173

——. Dusklands (1974; London: Vintage, 1998). ——. Foe (1986; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987). ——. “He and His Man: The 2003 Nobel Lecture,” World Literature Today 78.2 (May–August 2004): 16–20. ——. “Into the Dark Chamber: The Novelist and South Africa,” New York Times (12 Jan 1986), Late City Final Edition, Sec. 7: 13. ——. “The Novel Today,” Upstream 6.1 (1988): 2–5. ——. Stranger Shores: Essays, 1986–1999 (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001). ——. “Triangular Structures of Desire in Advertising,” Critical Arts: A Journal of South–North Media Studies 1.2 (June 1980): 34–41. ——. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980; London: Minerva, 1997). Conley, Verena Andermatt. Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P , 1984). Davis, Walter A. “Death’s Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche After 9-11,” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8.1 (Spring 2003): 127–32. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe (1719; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003). Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, tr. Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta (Cinéma 2: L’Image-Temps, 1985; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1989). ——. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, tr. Michael Taormina (L’île déserte et autres textes 1953–1974, 2002; New York: Semiotext[e], 2004). ——. Difference and Repetition, tr. Paul Patton (Différence et répétition, 1953; London: Athlone, 1994). ——. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, tr. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia U P , 1991). ——. Essays Critical and Clinical, tr. Daniel W. Smith & Michael Greco (Critique et clinique, 1993; London: Verso, 1998). ——. The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, tr. Mark Lester & Charles Stivale (Logique du sens, 1969; New York: Columbia U P , 1990). ——. Negotiations, 1972–1990, tr. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia U P , 1995). ——, & Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem & Helen Lane (Capitalisme et schizophrénie 1: L’Anti-Oedipe, 1972; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1983). ——. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, tr. Dana Polan (Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure, 1975; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1986). ——. “On A Thousand Plateaus” (Libération, 23 October 1980), in Deleuze & Guattari, Negotiations, 25–34. [Interview.] ——. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2, tr. Brian Massumi (Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Milles plateaux, 1980; London: Athlone, 1999). ——. What is Philosophy?, tr. Hugh Tomlinson & Graham Burchell (Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, 1991; New York: Columbia U P , 1994).

174

ON REPRESENTATION



Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, ed., tr. & intro. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (De la Grammatologie, 1967; Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1976). ——. Writing and Difference, tr. Alan Bass (L’Écriture et la différence, 1967; London: Routledge, 1978). Descartes, René. “Discourse on the Method: I V ,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. John Cottingham, tr. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff & Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1985), vol. 1: 126–30. Dovey, Teresa. The Novels of J.M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1988). Easton, T. Kai Norris. “Text and Hinterland: J.M. Coetzee and the South African Novel,” Journal of South African Studies 21.4 (December 1995): 585–99. Eckstein, Barbara. “Iconicity, Immersion and Otherness: The Hegelian Dive of J.M. Coetzee and Adrienne Rich,” Mosaic 29.1 (March 1996): 57–77. Eco, Umberto. Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, tr. Alastair McEwen (Kant e l’ornitorinco, 1997; London: Secker & Warburg, 1999). ——. “Language, Power, Force” (1979), in Eco, Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality, tr. William Weaver (Semiologio quotidiano; tr. 1986; London: Vintage, 1998): 239–55. Originally published as “La lingua, il potere, la forza” in Eco, Sette anni di desiderio: Cronache 1977–1983 (Milan: Bompiani, 1983): 183–95. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as Agent of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1979). Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean– Paul Sartre (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; tr. 1963; New York: Grove, 1968). Finter, Helga. “Antonin Artaud and the Impossible Theatre: The Legacy of the Theatre of Cruelty,” T D R : The Drama Review 41.4/T150 (Winter 1997): 15–40. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge, tr. A.M. Sheridan–Smith (L’Archéologie du savoir, 1969; London: Routledge, 1995). ——. Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, tr. Charles Ruas, intro. John Ashbery (Raymond Roussel, 1963; Garden City N Y : Doubleday, 1986). ——. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan (Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, 1975; New York: Pantheon, 1977). ——. The History of Sexuality, 1: An Introduction, tr. Robert Hurley (Histoire de la sexualité, 1: La Volonté de savoir, 1976; New York: Pantheon, 1978). ——. Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, tr. Richard Howard (Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, 1961; London: Routledge, 2002). ——. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines, 1966; London: Tavistock, 1970). Frede, Michael. “The Stoic Notion of a lekton,” in Language, ed. Stephen Everson (Companions to Ancient Thought 3; Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1994): 109–28.



Works Cited

175

Fuery, Patrick, & Nick Mansfield. Cultural Studies and Critical Theory (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2000). Gallagher, Susan VanZanten. A Story of South Africa: J.M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1991). Garnham, Alan. Psycholinguistics: Central Topics (London: Methuen, 1985). Gobard, Henri. L’aliénation linguistique: Analyse tétraglossique (Paris: Flammarion, 1976). Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999). Guha, Ranajit, ed. Subaltern Studies, vol. 1 (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1982). Hahm, David E. The Origins of Stoic Cosmology (Columbus: Ohio State U P , 1977). Hallward, Peter. Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2001). Hardt, Michael, & Antonio Negri. Empire (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2000). Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Head, Dominic. J.M. Coetzee (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1997). Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (Sein und Zeit, 1927; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962). Hobsbawm, Eric, & Terence O. Ranger. The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1983). Horkheimer, Max, & Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. John Cumming (Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente, 1944, rev. 1969; New York: Seabury, 1972). Huggan, Graham. “Decolonising the Map: Postcolonialism, Poststructuralism and the Cartographic Connection,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 20.4 (October 1989): 115–31. Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, tr. David Carr (Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, 1936; Evanston I L : Northwestern U P , 1970). Inwood, Brad, & L.P. Gerson, ed. & tr. Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings, (Indianapolis I N : Hackett, 1997). Jameson, Fredric. “The End of Temporality,” Critical Inquiry 29.4 (Summer 2003): 695–718. JanMohamed, Abdul R. “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (Autumn 1985): 59–87. Jardine, Alice. Gynesis: Configuration of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1985). Kafka, Franz. “In the Penal Colony” (1914), in Metamorphosis and Other Stories: Works Published during Kafka’s Lifetime, ed. & tr. Malcolm Pasley (tr. as The

176

ON REPRESENTATION



Transformation and Other Stories, 1992; Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000): 127–53. Kant, Immanuel. “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’,” in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, tr. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1970): 54–60. Knox–Shaw, Peter. “Dusklands: A Metaphysics of Violence” (1982), Commonwealth Novel in English 2.1 (January 1983): 65–81. Kossew, Sue. Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J.M. Coetzee and André Brink (Cross / Cultures 27; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1996). Kristeva, Julia. About Chinese Women, tr. Anita Barrows (Des Chinoises, 1974; London: Marion Boyars, 1977). ——. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon Roudiez, tr. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine & Leon S. Roudiez (sel. from Polylogue, 1977, and Sémeiótiké: Recherches pour une sémanalyse, 1969; New York: Columbia U P , 1980). Labov, William. The Social Stratification of English in New York City (Washington D C : Center for Applied Linguistics, 1969). ——. Sociolinguistic Patterns (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P , 1972). Lawrence, D.H. Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (1931; New York: Viking, 1982). Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité, 1961; Pittsburgh P A : Duquesne U P , 1969). Long, Anthony A., & David N. Sedley. The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1987). Macaskill, Brian, & Jeanne Colleran. “Reading History, Writing Heresy: The Resistance of Representation and the Representation of Resistance in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe,” Contemporary Literature 33.3 (Autumn 1992): 432–57. Maclennan, Don. “Dusklands,” in Perspectives on South African Fiction, ed. Sarah Christie, Geoffrey Hutchings & Don Maclennan (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1980): 71–82. McRobbie, Angela. “Strategies of Vigilance: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” Block 10 (1985): 9–13. Mallarmé, Stéphane. Poésies, ed. Lloyd James Austin (1899; Paris: Gallimard, 1989). Massumi, Brian. “Translator’s Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy” (1999), in Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, ix–xv. ——. “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements” (1999), in Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, xvi–xix. Mayer, Arno J. The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (London: Croom Helm, 1981).



Works Cited

177

Mercator, Hondius Janssonius. Atlas or a Geographicke Description of the World (1636), ed. R.A. Skelton, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1968). Minh-ha, Trinh T. “No Master Territories: Cotton and Iron,” in Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1991): 11–28. Moses, Michael Valdez. “The Mark of Empire: Writing, History, and Torture in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians,” Kenyon Review, New Series 15.1 (Winter 1993): 115–27. Mulhall, Stephen. Heidegger and “Being and Time” (London: Routledge, 2000). Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Anti-Christ” (1888), in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. & tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954): 565–656. ——. “Ecce Homo” (1888), excerpt in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. & tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954): 657–60. ——. On the Genealogy of Morals, tr. Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale (Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887; New York: Random House, 1967). ——. “Toward the Genealogy of Morals” (1888), excerpt in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. & tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954): 450–54. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Heretical Empiricism, ed. Louise K. Barnett, tr. Ben Lawton & Louise K. Barnett (Empirismo eretico, 1972; Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1988). Plamenatz, John. “Two Types of Nationalism,” in Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea, ed. Eugene Kamenka (Canberra: Australian National U P , 1973): 22–37. Rabasa, José. Inventing A-M-E-R-I-C-A: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentricism (Norman & London: U of Oklahoma P , 1993). Rao, Raja. “Author’s Foreword” to Kanthapura (1938; New York: New Directions, 1967): vii–viii. Rich, Paul. “Apartheid and the Decline of Civilization Idea: An Essay on Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People and J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians,” Research in African Literatures 15.3 (Autumn 1984): 365–93. Rimbaud, Arthur. “Letter to Georges Izambard” (1871), in Rimbaud, Complete Works, tr. Paul Schmidt (New York: Harper & Row, 1975): 100–101. Said, Edward W. Orientalism (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). Sartre, Jean–Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, tr. & intro. Hazel E. Barnes (L`Être et le néant, 1943; tr. 1956; New York: Washington Square, 1992). Simondon, Gilbert. L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964). ——. L’Individuation psychique et collective (1964; Paris: Aubier, 1989). Smith, Daniel W. “Introduction – ‘A Life of Pure Immanence’: Deleuze’s ‘Critique et Clinique’ Project” (1998), in Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, xi–liii.

178

ON REPRESENTATION



Spengler, Oswald. Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life, tr. Charles Francis Atkinson (Der Mensch und die Technik: Beitrag zu einer Philosophie des Lebens, 1931; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932). Spinoza, Baruch. “Ethics” (1677), in The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. & tr. Edwin Curley (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1985), vol. 1: 408–620. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams & Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia, 1994): 66–111. ——. “French Feminism in an International Frame” (1981), in Spivak, In Other Worlds (1988), 134–53. ——. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1988). ——. “The Rani of Sirmur,” in Europe and Its Others, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen & Diana Loxley (Colchester: U of Essex, 1985), vol. 1: 128–51. Talib, Ismail. The Language of Postcolonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 2002). Taylor, Mark C. Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1984). Virilio, Paul. L’insécuritié du territoire (Paris: Stock, 1975). ——. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, tr. Mark Polizzotti (Vitesse et politique: Essai de dromologie, 1977; New York: Semiotext[e], 1986). Ward, David. Chronicles of Darkness (London: Routledge, 1989). White, Hayden. “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation,” Critical Inquiry 9.1 (September 1982): 113–37. White, Patrick. Voss (1957; London: Longmans, 1965). Whorf, Benjamin Lee. Language, Thought, and Reality (Boston M A : M I T Press, 1956). Young, Robert J.C. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1999).





Index

9/11, 3 absurdity, ix, x, xiv, 144 acentred forces, in Foe, 116, 117 Aetius, 16, 17 affect, xvii, xx, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, xxxiii, 27, 28, 29, 40, 41, 44, 45, 49, 53, 57, 135, 136, 161 affection, xxv, 54 agency, xvi, xx, 40, 41 allegory, 7, 94 alterity, xxxi, xxxiv, 6, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155, 156, 160, 161, 162, 165, 166, 167, 169 American psyche, 3, 5, 11 Anderson, Benedict, xv Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze & Guattari), 42, 160, 166 anti-Platonism (Deleuze), 32 appropriation, xv, 52, 78, 156 Aristotle, ix, xiii, 91 Arius Didymus, 15, 17, 18, 19 Artaud, Antonin, xxvii, 27, 28, 29, 41, 46, 47, 144 Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, 55, 136 Ashcroft, Bill, xxi, xxii, 55, 56, 57, 76, 90, 91, 122, 136, 155 assassination, in Waiting for the Barbarians, 100 assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari), xxv, 43, 58, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 83, 84, 88,

93, 100, 105, 117, 124, 129, 130, 131, 132, 163

Attridge, Derek, xxviii, xxx, xxxi Attwell, David, xxviii, xxix, 6, 7, 37, 38 Australia, and exploration, 31 authoritarianism, xvi, xxi, xxxi, xxxiii, 2, 3, 10, 12, 13, 29, 40, 41, 46, 104, 128, 154, 159, 168 authority, 9, 30, 34, 47, 48, 49, 64, 73, 98, 100, 103, 104, 122, 153, 159, 168, 169

authorship, 10 autonomy, 39, 68, 69, 72, 77, 78, 79 autoscopia, 30 Bantu, function as language, 142 barbarity, 63, 65 Barthes, Roland, 128 Baudrillard, Jean, 33, 38, 39 Baugh, Bruce, 165, 166 Bauman, Zygmunt, 22, 23, 24 becoming, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, xxx, xxxi, xxxiii, 14, 21, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 43, 44, 49, 53, 54, 56, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 88, 92, 99, 100, 105, 116, 117, 124, 129, 131, 142, 145, 152, 159, 160, 162, 163, 165, 166, 168 — See also: Being, futurity, temporality Begam, Richard, xxix

180 Being, ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xxiii, xxiv, xxxi, 21, 113 Bellow, Saul, Herzog, 30, 31 Benjamin, Walter, 32 Bergson, Henri, 161 Bernal, Martin, 156 Bhabha, Homi K., xv Bible, 111, 112, 117 binaries, xviii, xix, xxiii, 24, 25, 26, 109, 122, 137, 150, 159 Black Athena (Bernal), 156 black hole, in Waiting for the Barbarians, 57, 73, 99 Body without Organs (Deleuze), xxvii, xxxi, xxxiii, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 160, 168, 169 body, xv, xix, xx, xxii, xxv, xxvii, xxxi, xxxii, 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 26, 27, 28, 30, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 53, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 68, 74, 75, 77, 79, 85, 86, 87, 88, 92, 104, 116, 118, 128, 129, 134, 146, 167, 168, 169 Boeri, Marcelo D., 15, 17, 18 Booth, James, xxix Bréhier, Émile, 20, 21 Brink, André, xxviii, 104, 105 Buchanan, Ian, 164, 166 Cage, John, 167 Canguilhem, Georges, 157, 163 cannibalism, 112, 118, 130 Capel, Horacio, 56 capture, xxxiii Carr, E.H., 154 Carroll, Lewis, 31, 33, 143; “Jabberwocky,” 144 — See also: nonsense cartography, xv, 53, 56, 57, 59 causality, 5, 16, 17, 19, 20, 53, 122, 128, 153

Cavafy, C.P., “Waiting for the Barbarians” (Cavafy), 51, 52, 87 censorship, 103

ON REPRESENTATION



chaos, xxii, 37, 52, 54, 56, 57, 58, 65, 71, 75, 77, 78, 85, 86, 91, 117, 124, 129, 160 Chatterjee, Partha, xv Chomsky, Noam, 137, 138, 139 Christianity, 12, 45, 46 Chrysippus, 18 Cixous, Hélène, 152; & Catherine Clément, 109, 150, 151, 153, 155, 159 Clastres, Pierre, 99 cockroach, significance in Waiting for the Barbarians, 97, 98 Coetzee, “He and His Man: The 2003 Nobel Lecture,” 118 Coetzee, and ethics, xxxi, 152, 153; and literature as event, xxx; and literature of demonstration, xxx; and the political, xxix; nature of scholarship on, xxviii, xxxi — Dusklands, xxviii, xxxii, 1–14, 21– 24, 26–31, 33–38, 40–41, 43–45, 47– 49, 54, 100, 149, 159, 160, 167, 168; enumeration in, 37; colonial eye in, 44; gun in, 35, 36; judgment in, 45– 49; knight-errant in, 14; memory in, 4; military presence in, 38; nonsense in, 31, 48; pain in, 26, 27, 28, 30, 34, 41, 43, 168; truth in, 9, 11, 12, 31, 35, 49 — Foe, xxxii, xxxiv, 101, 103, 105, 106, 112–36, 145–47, 159, 160, 167, 168; absence of history in, 115; acentred forces in, 116, 117; and stuttering in, xi, 128, 135, 136, 143, 168; elemental monologue in, 116, 144; end of history in, 116; eyes in, 132; falsity in, 116; Friday’s tongue in, 30, 44, 62, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 142; history in, 114, 117; impossibility of history in, 114; incoherence of history in, 115; island in, xxxiv, 106, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 126, 130, 134, 135; memory in, 115, 116, 132; personal history in, 115, 118, 119, 126, 130, 132; renunciation of history in, 115; silence



181

Index

in, 116, 128, 130, 131, 132, 135, 136, 145, 146, 168; truth in, 116, 130 — “He and His Man: The 2003 Nobel Lecture,” 118 — Waiting for the Barbarians, xxix, xxxii, xxxiii, 49, 51, 53–100, 159, 160, 163, 167, 168; and assassination, 100; and speed, 71, 86, 87, 88, 90, 93, 94, 97, 98, 100; and the road in, 85; and the stranger, 72; black hole in, 57, 73, 99; courtship in, 68; desert in, 11, 34, 63, 72, 74, 77, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93; end of history in, 82; loss of visibility in, 91, 92; memory in, 53, 62, 75, 88; military presence, 79, 87, 89, 95, 96, 97, 98; organized religion in, 77, 78; pain in, 62; scar in, 64, 65, 75; settlement in, 29, 51, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 74, 79, 81, 84, 88, 89, 90, 94, 95, 98; significance of cockroach in, 97, 98; significance of wooden slips in, 72, 80, 82, 83; the One Just Man in, 72, 81; truth in, 53, 61, 66, 73, 81; visibility in, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 98 collective disorder, 5, 6, 9 collective memory, 4 collective style of thought, 105 colonialism, xvi, xvii, xx, xxvii, xxxiii, xxxiv, 6, 7, 13, 14, 23, 24, 35, 36, 37, 38, 91, 100, 103, 105, 159, 169 colonization, 6, 71 compossibility, 121 Conley, Verena Andermatt, 152 connectivity, xxiii, xxiv, 106, 107 control, 2, 34, 43, 54, 57, 63, 72, 73, 76, 77, 78, 81, 82, 85, 91, 93, 95, 98, 159 corporeality, xxxii, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 26, 27, 34, 41, 46, 47, 52, 63, 169 courtship, in Waiting for the Barbarians, 68

cruelty (Artaud), 47 cummings, e.e., 144

Dasein (Heidegger), xiii, xxiv See also: Being Davis, Walter A., 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 11 Defoe, Daniel, xxxiv, 105, 106, 110, 111, 112, 113, 117, 118, 119, 120, 129, 146; Robinson Crusoe, xxxiv, 105, 106–12, 113, 118, 119 dehistoricization, 158 Deleuze, Gilles, & Félix Guattari, xii, xxii, xxiii, xxv, xxvi, xxxii, 30, 41, 42, 43, 44, 52, 57, 58, 59, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 104, 124, 126, 127, 129, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 160, 162, 164, 165, 166; and war machine, 79, 83, 84, 88, 93, 95, 98, 99, 100 — Anti-Oedipus, 42, 160, 166 — Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 64

— A Thousand Plateaus, xxii, xxiii, xxv, 30, 41, 42, 43, 44, 52, 57, 58, 59, 65, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 104, 124, 126, 127, 129, 138, 139, 142, 143, 144, 146, 160 — See also: assemblages, Body without Organs Deleuze, Gilles, xxv, xxvi, 14, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 40, 42, 46, 47, 53, 54, 59, 107, 108, 111, 114, 115, 117, 120, 121, 123, 125, 126, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136, 137, 140, 144, 145, 158, 159, 160, 162, 163 delirium-event, 35, 43 Derrida, Jacques, xiii, xvii, xix, 150, 152 Descartes, René, xii, xiii, 9, 10, 27, 28 desert, in Waiting for the Barbarians, 11, 34, 63, 72, 74, 77, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93 destabilization, 74, 88, 91, 92, 146, 155, 159, 168

182 determinism, xxiii deterritorialization, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 88, 89, 95, 97, 100, 143, 144, 145, 147, 168, 169 Diogenes, 15, 16 disconnection, 74 discourse, colonial, xvi, xvii, xxvii, xxxiv, 24, 105, 169 discourse, dominant, xxxiii disequilibrium, 136, 140, 143, 145, 169 domination, xiii, xvii, xviii, xix, xxii, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, 1, 9, 13, 24, 37, 46, 52, 67, 72, 74, 92, 93, 105, 109, 123, 124, 128, 136, 137, 141, 143, 153, 156, 158, 159, 166, 169 Dovey, Teresa, xxviii dualism, xxxiii, 18, 19, 20, 108 duality, 9, 14 Duby, Georges, 128 Dusklands (Coetzee), xxviii, xxxii, 1– 14, 21–24, 26–31, 33–38, 40–41, 43– 45, 47–49, 54, 100, 149, 159, 160, 167, 168; enumeration in, 37; colonial eye in, 44; gun in, 35, 36; judgment in, 45–49; knight-errant in, 14; memory in, 4; military presence in, 38; nonsense in, 31, 48; pain in, 26, 27, 28, 30, 34, 41, 43, 168; truth in, 9, 11, 12, 31, 35, 49 Easton, T. Kai Norris, xxix Eckstein, Barbara, 132 Eco, Umberto, ix, x, 128 economic motive, xxi, 23, 56 Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., 105 enclosure, xv, 10, 12, 28, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 66, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 81, 89, 93, 94 enigma, 13, 24, 45, 80, 84, 87, 110, 131 Enlightenment, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 23, 39, 40, 44 enumeration, in Dusklands, 37

ON REPRESENTATION



enunciation, xxi, xxvii, 43, 45, 83, 97, 103, 125, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 136, 138, 142, 145, 146, 147, 165 essentialism, x, xxviii, xxxi, 2, 3 eternal present, 114, 115, 117 ethnic cleansing, 23 eurocentrism, xvii Europe, xv, xvi, xviii, xxxiv, 7, 8, 9, 11, 23, 57, 58, 60, 90, 91, 105, 109, 122, 141, 150, 155, 156 event, causal, xx, xxv, 20; existential, 19, 20, 21; historical, 4, 153, 155; linguistic, 20, 21, 26, 131; literature as, xxx; self as, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 158, 160; statal, 26; subject as, xxxiii; traumatic, 5 exhaustion, xxxiv, 40, 41, 59, 62, 113, 120, 121, 125, 127, 128, 130, 131, 134, 136, 145, 146, 159, 167 expansionism, colonial, 6, 7, 35 experimentation, literary, 34, 44, 166, 167, 169 exploration, xxxiv, 25, 44, 100, 109, 113

exteriority, xxiii, xxv, xxvi, 31, 35, 41, 52, 55, 59, 61, 78, 80, 84, 94, 99, 106, 152, 158, 167 eye, colonial, in Dusklands, 44 eyes, in Foe, 132 falsity, xii, 18, 31, 32, 33, 69, 117, 119; in Foe, 116 Fanon, Fanon, xv, 123, 124 fascism, xxxi, 23 Faulkner, William, xxv feminism, xi Finter, Helga, 28 Foe (Coetzee), xxxii, xxxiv, 101, 103, 105, 106, 112–36, 145–47, 159, 160, 167, 168; absence of history in, 115; acentred forces in, 116, 117; and stuttering in, xi, 128, 135, 136, 143, 168; elemental monologue in, 116,



183

Index

[Foe, cont.] 144; end of history in, 116; eyes in, 132; falsity in, 116; Friday’s tongue in, 30, 44, 62, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 142; history in, 114, 117; impossibility of history in, 114; incoherence of history in, 115; island in, xxxiv, 106, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 126, 130, 134, 135; memory in, 115, 116, 132; personal history in, 115, 118, 119, 126, 130, 132; renunciation of history in, 115; silence in, 116, 128, 130, 131, 132, 135, 136, 145, 146, 168; truth in, 116, 130

Foucault, Michel, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxvii, 144, 145, 150, 152, 153, 154, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161 Frede, Michael, 16, 18 free indirect discourse, 124, 129, 131, 142

Freud, Sigmund, xiii, xxi, 43, 96 frontier, xxviii, 51, 57, 58, 59, 61, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 79, 87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 154 Fuery, Patrick, & Nick Mansfield, xx futurity, 5, 17, 18, 21, 22, 30, 61, 73, 81, 114, 115, 117 — See also: temporality Gallagher, Susan VanZanten, xxviii Garnham, Alan, 137 geo-graphism, 74 geography, xiv, xv, xxviii, xxxiii, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 68, 74, 75, 76, 85, 160, 167 Girard, René, 39 Gobard, Henri, 140, 141, 142 Godard, Jean–Luc, 104 Greene, Brian, xviii Guha, Ranajit, xx gun, in Dusklands, 35, 36 haecceities, xxvi, xxvii, xxx, xxxiii, 41, 92, 100, 163, 164, 167, 169 Hahm, David E., 15

Hallward, Peter, xxxi Hardt, Michael, & Antonio Negri, 52 Harvey, David, 56, 57 “He and His Man: The 2003 Nobel Lecture” (Coetzee), 118 Head, Dominic, xxviii health, in Nietzsche, 25, 26; of society, 104

Hegel, G.W.F., 39, 110 Heidegger, Martin, xiii, xxiv Heisenberg, Werner, xvii Herzog (Bellow), 30, 31 heterogeneity, xii, xiv, xxiii, xxviii, 37, 58, 68, 123, 138, 140, 160 Hiroshima, 3 history, xv, xviii, xxv, xxix, xxx, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 53, 56, 63, 76, 82, 83, 88, 105, 115, 117, 122, 130, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158; and colonialism, 6, 7; and fiction, xxix; and human selffashioning, xiv; and place, 55; and progress, 5; and striation, 76; and the body, 68; and the State, 76, 82; as construct, 82, 130; as discipline, xviii, 151, 153, 154, 155, 157; as guided process, 9; colonial, 63, 75; duty towards, 14; end of, 6, 7; meaning of, 7, 12; relation to theory, 149; truth-value of, 9, 10, 53, 76, 122 — Foe: 114, 117; absence in, 115; end of, 116; impossibility of, 114; incoherence of, 115; personal, 115, 118, 119, 126, 130, 132; renunciation of, 115; replaced by memory, 115 — Waiting for the Barbarians: end of, 82

— See also: total history, event Hobsbawm, Eric, & Terence O. Ranger, xv Holocaust, 22, 23, 97 homogeneity, xii, xiii, xv, xxxi, 2, 58, 69, 80, 128, 137, 138, 140, 142, 150, 151, 153, 158, 160, 161 Horkheimer, Max, & Theodor Adorno, 8

184 Hottentot, 4, 12, 45, 47, 149 Huggan, Graham, xv, 57 Hume, David, xxvi Husserl, Edmund, 7, 8, 10, 11 Ideal Game (Leibniz), 117 Ideational, the, xxxii, 9, 10, 26, 27, 31 identity-concept, xi, xii images of thought (Deleuze & Guattari), 53, 54 images as language, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136; negative State, 97; of catastrophe, 3, 41; of colonial experience, 24; photographic, 41 immanence, xxx, 41, 42, 165, 168, 169 imperialism, xv, xvii, xxix, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 13, 23, 24, 35, 36, 51, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 70, 72, 73, 75, 76, 80, 83 impression, literature as, 105 imprisonment, xix, 42, 63, 73, 74, 76, 81, 84 “In the Penal Colony” (Kafka), 64 incompossibility, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 147 incorporeality, xxxii, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 26, 34, 46, 63, 129 individualism, 13 insanity, 113 institutionalization, xxi interiority, xxi, xxiii, xxvii, 27, 31, 33, 34, 35, 41, 55, 59, 60, 78, 79, 83, 94, 106, 124, 152, 167 internalization, 1, 5, 82, 152 interrogation, 62, 64, 67, 72, 73, 80, 95, 98

invasion, xxxiii, 53, 98 Inwood, Brad, & Lloyd Gerson, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19 island, in Foe, xxxiv, 106, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 126, 130, 134, 135 “Jabberwocky” (Carroll), 144 Jameson, Fredric, 23, 24

ON REPRESENTATION



JanMohamed, Abdul R., xxix, 163 Jardine, Alice, 32 judgment, divine, 12, 46, 47, 48, 49; in Dusklands, 45–49 Kafka, Franz, xxiv, xxv, 97, 141, 142, 143; “In the Penal Colony,” 64 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Deleuze & Guattari), 64 Kant, Immanuel, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13 knight-errant, in Dusklands, 14 knowledge-formation, ix, x, xi, xxii, xxiii, xxxiv, 1, 8, 13, 32, 33, 153 Knox–Shaw, Peter, 23 Kossew, Sue, xxviii, 140 Kristeva, Julia, xi, 152 Labov, William, 138, 139 Lacan, Jacques, xxviii, 91 language, x, xxvi, xxxii, xxxiv, 21, 29, 55, 63, 70, 80, 100, 103, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 151, 152, 158, 167, 168, 169; as vernacular, 140, 141, 142

— See also: immages as language, major language, minor language Latin. function as language, 141 law, the, xiii, 64, 76 Lawrence, D.H., 46 Leibniz, xxiii, 117, 145 lekton, 16, 18, 19 Levinas, Emmanuel, xxx, 151, 152, 153, 155

linearity, xviii, xx, xxiii, 5, 53, 80, 81, 114, 119, 122, 157 Long, Anthony, & David Sedley, 19 Losey, Joseph, xxiv Macaskill, Brian, & Jeanne Colleran, 146, 147 machine, body as, 9, 28, 73; literary, 165, 166, 167 Maclennan, Don, 6



Index

madness, xviii, xxi, xxii, 157 major language, 62, 67, 90, 111, 113, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 30 map, and imperialism, 57, 60 masochism, xxxiii, 10, 13, 40, 41 Massumi, Brian, xxiii, xxv, xxvi, 106 materialism, 14 Mayer, Arno J,, 23 McRobbie, Angela, 3 Melville, Herman, xxiv, xxv memory, and literature, 162; in Dusklands, 4; in Foe, 115, 116, 132; in Waiting for the Barbarians, 53, 62, 75, 88 mercantilism, xxxiv, 79 Mercator, Hondius Janssonius, 57 meta-stability, 117, 119, 121 metropolis, 23, 24 milieu, xxvi, 43, 59, 60, 62, 63, 65, 67, 68, 72, 73, 85, 86, 88, 92 military presence, in Dusklands, 38; in Waiting for the Barbarians, 79, 87, 89, 95, 96, 97, 98 Miller, Henry, xxiv Minh-ha, Trinh T., x, xi, 164 minor language, 52, 61, 78, 79, 80, 90, 100, 140, 142, 143, 145 modernism, xxix, xxxi modernity, 13, 23, 57 monologue, elemental, in Foe, 116, 144 Moses, Michael Valdez, 83 mourning, 3 movement, xvii, xxii, xxv, xxviii, xxix, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxiv, 14, 21, 22, 24, 44, 49, 54, 56, 58, 60, 70, 71, 74, 75, 85, 86, 90, 93, 95, 124, 159, 160, 163, 169

Mulhall, Stephen, xxiv multiplicity, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxx, 2, 82, 96, 97, 143, 144, 160, 164, 165, 166 myth, 8, 10, 33, 36, 38, 58, 61, 62, 78, 141, 142 mythography, 10, 43

185 Nagasaki, 3 naming, 7, 14, 21, 22, 24, 25, 31, 125, 126, 127, 128, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 151 narrator, identity and function of, 119, 146, 147

nation, as concept, xv Nietzsche, Friedrich, xiii, 6, 8, 9, 25, 26, 45, 46, 47, 48, 117 nihilism, 36, 48 nomad, xxxiii, 53, 54, 63, 66, 69, 70, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 159, 168 nomadism, xxxiii, 74, 84, 86, 88, 89, 92, 93, 95, 100 nomadology, xxiii nomad-space, 89, 96 nomos territory, 84, 85, 88, 89 non-representation, xxxiv, 159 nonsense, in Dusklands, 31, 48 noology, 52 nuclear war, 3, 4, 5 One Just Man, the, in Waiting for the Barbarians, 72, 81 order-word, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 167 Orient, xiv, 156, 157 Orientalism (Said), xiv, xv, 105, 156–57 Other, the, xi, xv, xvi, xxvii, xxx, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxiv, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 24, 29, 35, 36, 49, 51, 52, 53, 57, 58, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 69, 100, 101, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 120, 130, 131, 145, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 165, 166, 167, 169 otherness, xxx, xxxi over-articulation, xxxiii, 43, 168 over-determination, xxxiii pain, 40, 47, 48; in Dusklands, 26, 27, 28, 30, 34, 41, 43, 168; in Waiting for the Barbarians, 62

186 pain-event, xxx, 21, 26, 27, 28, 30, 34, 43, 47, 168 paranoia, of the State, 52, 60, 61, 62, 93, 98 parody, 37 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 124, 129 Pearl Harbour, 4 Peirce, Charles Sanders, x, xxvii, 145 penetration, 5, 53, 54, 93, 94 percepts, xxvi, xxvii, xxxiii photography, 41 Plamenatz, John, xv Plutarch, 17 portmanteau phenomena in language, 143, 144 possession, xxx, 45, 76, 151, 152 postcolonialism, ix, xiv, xvii, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiv, 55, 105, 136 power, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, xxvii, xxxiv, 2, 4, 5, 23, 30, 32, 36, 38, 39, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 57, 63, 72, 73, 77, 78, 79, 81, 89, 94, 98, 100, 103, 104, 109, 117, 122, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 136, 140, 141, 143, 150, 159, 166, 167, 168 Proclus, 19 pronoun, personal, xxxiii, 159 psychiatry, xxi, 12, 21, 35 psychoanalysis, xxi, 12, 53 psychology, xxi Ptolemy, 56 punishment, 2, 47, 64, 79 Rabasa, José, xv Rao, Raja, 136 rationality, xii, xiii, xxii, xxiii, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 18, 23, 24, 30, 48, 56, 77, 81, 91, 92, 125, 132, 138, 144, 152 reader, and author / text relationship, 122, 123, 163 reader, as author of text, 105 recovery, 2, 5, 7, 11 religion, organized, in Waiting for the Barbarians, 77, 78 representation, x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xx, xxiii, xxviii, xxx, xxxi,

ON REPRESENTATION



xxxii, xxxiii, xxxiv, 1, 9, 24, 32, 33, 39, 47, 49, 54, 55, 56, 91, 100, 101, 105, 125, 147, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 168, 169 resistance, ix, xvii, xx, xxvii, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxiv, 1, 3, 13, 30, 44, 45, 47, 49, 52, 60, 72, 74, 81, 82, 94, 100, 103, 105, 128, 143, 155, 156, 167, 169 reterritorialization, 95 revolution. literature and, xx, xxix, xxxi, 79, 80, 84, 100, 105, 122, 145, 156, 161, 162, 163, 166, 167, 169 rhizome, xxii, xxiii, 53, 54, 55, 90, 96, 97, 98 Rich, Paul, 163 Rimbaud, Arthur, 28 road, in Waiting for the Barbarians, 85 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), xxxiv, 105, 106–12, 113, 118, 119 Robinsonade, 106, 112 Roussel, Raymond, 144, 145 Said, Edward W., xiv, 105, 155, 156, 157, 166; Orientalism, xiv, xv, 105, 156, 157 sanity, xx, xxi Sapir, Edward, 151, 152 Sartre, Jean–Paul, 39, 108 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 151 scar, significance in Waiting for the Barbarians, 64, 65, 75 self-as-event, 30 Self-as-Other, 2, 6, 28, 49, 100, 158, 159

self-interrogation, 3, 49 settlement, in Waiting for the Barbarians, 29, 51, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 74, 79, 81, 84, 88, 89, 90, 94, 95, 98 Sextus Empiricus, 16 silence, in Foe, 116, 128, 130, 131, 132, 135, 136, 145, 146, 168 Simondon, Gilbert, 161 Simplicius, 15



Index

simulacrum, 32, 33, 34, 36 simulation, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39 simultaneity, xvii, xxxiii, 2, 18, 21, 27, 31, 32, 52, 64, 71, 77, 87, 89, 96, 97, 117, 119, 120, 121, 124, 129, 145, 155, 160, 162, 163, 164, 166 singularity, ix, xxxi, 8, 11, 14, 16, 21, 25, 31, 37, 43, 59, 65, 70, 82, 93, 96, 114, 117, 122, 127, 155, 157, 168 Smith, Daniel W., xxv, xxvii, 42, 92, 117, 121, 124, 125, 139, 163 smooth space, xxxiii, 53, 74, 75, 76, 85, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 96 solitude, xxxiv, 44, 84, 106, 113, 115, 129, 131, 167 space, xiv, xvi, xxiv, xxvi, xxxii, xxxiii, 14, 15, 16, 17, 24, 26, 38, 39, 40, 44, 49, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 61, 67, 70, 74, 75, 76, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 107, 116, 119, 122, 124, 159, 160, 162, 167, 169 speed, in Waiting for the Barbarians, 71, 86, 87, 88, 90, 93, 94, 97, 98, 100 Spengler, Oswald, 6, 126 Spinoza, Baruch, xxv, 161 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, xi, xii, xvi, 3, 109, 123, 152, 162 State, the, xxxiii, 15, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103, 104, 159, 167, 169 states of affairs, 15, 18, 26 staticization, xxviii, xxxi, 49, 55 Stoicism, xxxii, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 27, 29 stranger, in Waiting for the Barbarians, 72

striation, xxxiii, 53, 54, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 85, 86, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98, 100, 151 structurality, ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiv, xxv, xxxi, xxxii, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14,

187 19, 20, 21, 28, 29, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 49, 51, 52, 57, 65, 75, 76, 77, 84, 86, 88, 90, 91, 96, 107, 108, 109, 114, 116, 118, 120, 121, 125, 126, 131, 134, 135, 137, 143, 144, 156, 158, 160, 169 structure-Other, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 120, 145 stuttering, in Foe, xi, 128, 135, 136, 143, 168 subaltern, xvi, xx, 150, 162

subject, colonized, ix, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, xxvii, xxviii, xxxii, 57, 105, 123, 140, 150, 156, 169 subjectification, xxi, xxxi, xxxiii, 1, 2, 3, 6, 13, 39, 46, 49, 105, 124, 128, 129, 163, 168 subjective experience, 8, 13, 28, 39, 45 subjectivity, ix, xxi, xxiv, xxvi, xxvii, xxxiii, 27, 34, 55, 59, 92, 126, 160, 161, 163, 164, 169 subject–object relation, xiii, xxiv, 35, 109, 114, 115, 116 subject-position, xi, 123, 164, 168 subjugation, 13, 46 submission, contract of, 40, 41 suffering, 4, 11, 30, 41, 48, 62, 71 See also pain, pain-event Talib, Ismail, 141 Taylor, Mark C., 8 temporality, x, xii, xviii, xxiv, xxx, 5, 6, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 28, 29, 35, 53, 75, 76, 88, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 157, 158, 164 — See also: becoming, Being, futurity terra incognita, 57 territorialization, xxxiii, 58, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 100 territory, xxii, 41, 47, 54, 57, 58, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 77, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 95, 140, 141, 150 Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze & Guattari), xxii, xxiii, xxv, 30, 41, 42, 43, 44, 52, 57, 58, 59, 65, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82,

188

ON REPRESENTATION

[A Thousand Plateaus, cont.] 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 104, 124, 126, 127, 129, 138, 139, 142, 143, 144, 146, 160 tongue, Friday’s, in Foe, 30, 44, 62, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 142 topography, 34, 53, 72 total history, 73, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158 totality, x, xii, xiv, xvii, xxiii, xxxiv, 42, 137, 151, 152, 155, 163 totalization, xxiii, xxiv, 2, 6, 8, 34, 38, 44, 57, 77, 138, 151, 160 trauma, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 49 tree, as symbol of knowledge, xxii, xxiii truth, 8, 12, 39, 153; in Dusklands, 9, 11, 12, 31, 35, 49; in Foe, 116, 130; in Waiting for the Barbarians, 53, 61, 66, 73, 81 Vico, Giambattista, xiv Vietnam War, 1, 2, 6, 9, 11, 23, 24, 36, 37, 41, 47 violence, xx, 1, 4, 10, 23, 24, 36, 38, 47, 63, 65, 70, 79, 98, 103, 123, 134, 149, 152 Virilio, Paul, 72, 94, 100 virtuality, xv, xvi, xxvi, 26, 107, 122, 124, 125, 139, 147, 163 visibility, in Waiting for the Barbarians, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 98; loss of, 91, 92

Voss (White), 30, 31



Waiting for the Barbarians (Coetzee), xxix, xxxii, xxxiii, 49, 51, 53–100, 159, 160, 163, 167, 168; and assassination, 100; and speed, 71, 86, 87, 88, 90, 93, 94, 97, 98, 100; and the road in, 85; and the stranger, 72; black hole in, 57, 73, 99; courtship in, 68; desert in, 11, 34, 63, 72, 74, 77, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93; end of history in, 82; loss of visibility in, 91, 92; memory in, 53, 62, 75, 88; military presence, 79, 87, 89, 95, 96, 97, 98; organized religion in, 77, 78; pain in, 62; scar in, 64, 65, 75; settlement in, 29, 51, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 74, 79, 81, 84, 88, 89, 90, 94, 95, 98; significance of cockroach in, 97, 98; significance of wooden slips in, 72, 80, 82, 83; the One Just Man in, 72, 81; truth in, 53, 61, 66, 73, 81; visibility in, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 98

war machine (Deleuze & Guattari), 79, 83, 84, 88, 93, 95, 98, 99, 100 Ward, David, xxviii Western Cape, 31 White, Hayden, 154 White, Patrick, 31 White, Voss, 30, 31 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 151, 152 will to nothingness, 48, 49 wooden slips, significance in Waiting for the Barbarians, 72, 80, 82, 83 World Trade Center, 3

“Waiting for the Barbarians” (Cavafy), 51

Young, Robert J.C., 149, 153, 157, 158, 161

