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DOI: 10.1177/0263276404047416 2004 21: 67Theory Culture
Society
Derek SayerIncognito Ergo Sum: Language, Memory and the
Subject
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Incognito Ergo SumLanguage, Memory and the Subject
Derek Sayer
I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.
(Jacques Lacan,2001: 183)1
I
LET ME begin with what, from a post-structuralist point of view,
mightbe regarded as commonplaces. I do so not in order to say
anythingoriginal about the theorists upon whom I am drawing, but
simply toclarify at the outset the premises upon which my own
subsequent argumentsrest. To say, then, that the subject is
constituted in language is first of all toreject any notion of an
essential human subject that exists prior to or outsidelanguage, a
subject for whom language serves merely as a vehicle of
expres-sion. If we then ask what can unify this subject what can
identify a selfas that which, in Aristotelian logic, is all that is
not not-self, and remains,moreover, the same self at different
points in space and time the answeris fraught with paradox. For all
that permits the location of the subject withinlanguage is the
existence of a vacant space, an empty signifier that me,myself, I
which is able to signal my uniqueness to the extent that the
samelinguistic space can be occupied by any and every other human
being(Barthes, 1977: 145). We may, of course, attach any number of
distinguish-ing predicates to this empty I, but what is true of the
grammatical subjectholds equally of anything that we might wish to
predicate of it. My subjec-tivity can be signified only through
that which is irreducibly not me, myself,I. Within language I share
the space that defines my uniqueness with allothers, while outside
language that uniqueness cannot be articulated at all.As
Wittgenstein famously said in the Tractatus, the limits of my
languagemean the limits of my world (1971: 115).
An alienation which Lacan argues is present in the mirror-phase
thatprecedes the infants acquisition of language, but already
entails an
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identification with and in an imago of the self (2001: 18) is
thus inherentin the very possibility of any subjectivity that is
constituted within language.Hence Derridas poignant conundrum: I
have only one language; it is notmine (1998: 1). It is entry into
this alien field, the field of language, whichalone allows the
constitution of my self. But to have ones self articulatedin and as
language, to speak and to be spoken of, is also inescapably
tosurrender oneself (or more accurately perhaps, to be surrendered)
tolanguage, in all its vicissitudes and vagaries. This primordial
estrangement,if we want to call it that, is the paradox that
grounds any subjectivity at all:I identify myself in language, but
only by losing myself in it like an object,Lacan says (2001: 94).
Not that this I, qua subject, could ever have had anychoice in the
matter: Lacans sentence, a sentence that reads oddly if whatit
states is true, is itself fissured by the same paradox. It is not
that therewas an already existent I who decided to enter language,
an original selfthat was ever there to lose. The subject is only
created in this act of objec-tification of losing oneself in
language. It is found(ed), we might say, inthis original loss.
The Cartesian subject, the unified, self-conscious ego, could
never-theless still perhaps be salvaged so long as language itself
continued to beseen as a stable system of meanings, whether meaning
was anchored in adirect relationship between signs and their
referents in the real, or at leastsecured in a rule-governed
structure that guaranteed the constancy of therelationship between
a signifier (sound, image) and a signified (idea,concept). In
either case we could regard language merely as an object
trans-parent to our intellect, a toolbox of signs of which we
remain masters andcan use as we will. But this stability is exactly
what post-structuralist theoryhas put in question. For
post-structuralism there is no transcendental signi-fied, no
concept signified in and of itself . . . independent of a
relationshipto language, in which any signifier could be anchored.
On the contrary,every signified is also in the position of a
signifier (Derrida, 1982: 1920).What is the signified in one sign
is immediately the signifier of another, sothat signification
becomes a process of endless deferral. The word for moon-light is
moonlight, says a character in Don DeLillos The Body Artist
(2001:84); but the word for moonlight is precisely not (the thing)
moonlight, andwhat the word signifies to me right now, because of a
memory of an old song,is pennies in a stream, falling leaves, a
sycamore, snowfalls in Vermont.Once we admit the capacity of the
signifier in this way to exceed the signi-fied to float free from
whatever singular reality or concept might once havebeen thought to
pin it down, and instead to gesture toward another andanother and
another signifier in an endlessly ramifying chain then
subjec-tivity, too, becomes subject to what Derrida calls diffrance
(1982: 249,1986: 129). Any predicates by which we might want
definitively to identifythe subject slip away into infinity.
Lacan clarifies why, when he likens the signifying chain to
rings of anecklace that is a ring in another necklace made of
rings. Using a differentanalogy, he writes that all discourse is
aligned along the several staves of
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a score, so that there is, in effect, no signifying chain that
does not have,as if attached to the punctuation of each of its
units, a whole articulation ofrelevant contexts suspended
vertically, as it were, from that point (2001:16970). Meaning
proliferates endlessly, and from every point. Theproblem is not its
absence but its superfluity. What we have here, inDerridas words,
is a chain of:
. . . syntheses and referrals which forbid at any moment, or in
any sense, thata simple element be present in and of itself,
referring only to itself. Whetherin the order of spoken or written
discourse, no element can function as a signwithout referring to
another element which itself is not simply present.
Thisinterweaving results in each element . . . being constituted on
the basis ofthe trace within it of the other elements of the chain.
. . . This interweaving,this textile, is the text produced only in
the transformation of another text.Nothing, neither among the
elements nor within the system, is anywhereeither simply present or
absent. There are only, everywhere, differences andtraces of
differences. (1982: 26)
Where is the I in this necklace-chain, this textile, this text,
if not every-where carried onward wherever the glissade of
signification leads andyet, essentially, nowhere?
There is thus no longer any Archimedean point, whether in the
worldoutside language, or in the presumed consistencies of the
relation betweensignifier and signified in language itself, to
anchor the subjects that areconstituted within it. The only
constant is the inevitability of diffrance. Tosay that the subject
is constituted in language, then, is above all to say that:
[t]here is no subject who is agent, author, and master of
diffrance . . . [that]the subject, and first of all the conscious
and speaking subject, depends uponthe system of differences and the
movement of diffrance, that the subject isnot present, nor above
all present to itself before diffrance, that the subjectis
constituted only in being divided from itself, in becoming space,
in tempo-rizing, in deferral . . . (Derrida, 1982: 289)
What we habitually think of as the self does not contain this
subject. AsLacan puts it, mans ego can never be reduced to his
experienced identity,for the subject goes far beyond what is
experienced subjectively by theindividual (2001: 22, 61). The
materials in and out of which the subject isfashioned are labile,
fluid, slippery and treacherous shifting markers thatare always
deferring beyond the self, always pointing somewhere else,toward
some otherness that perpetually threatens to undo who we (think
we)are. The subject is a movable feast, always gesturing, or
perhaps we shouldsay for active and passive voices slip into one
another here, as agencybecomes less than clear always gestured,
elsewhere.
IIIdentity, from this point of view, becomes an extraordinarily
problematiccategory much as it might form the intuitive basis of
our everyday
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perceptions of ourselves as individuals, and the epistemological
bedrock ofour scientific knowledge of others, whose cultures we
ethnograph, whosesocial welfare we measure, whose histories we
write. If the foregoing argu-ments hold water, then identity
whether of an individual or of a collective(a race, a class, a
gender, a nation, a society)2 cannot be what we usuallyimagine it
to be; at least, not so long as we continue to equate identity
withthe subject, and reduce the subject to his, her or its
identity.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, identity is:
1. The quality or condition of being the same in substance,
composition,nature, properties, or in particular qualities under
consideration; absolute oressential sameness; oneness. 2. The
sameness of a person or thing at all timesor in all circumstances;
the condition or fact that a person or thing is itselfand not
something else; individuality, personality.
I quote this dictionary definition not out of ignorance of the
extensive socialscientific literature on identity, but because it
neatly encapsulates therelevant point, from the point of view of
the argument I wish to advance,that much of that literature fails
to address. Very simply, if, as post-structuralists maintain, the
subject is constituted in language, then identity,in any of these
senses, is the one quality it is quite incapable of possess-ing.
The aporia that constitutes subjectivity is precisely that the
subject canbe itself, only insofar as it is something else; while
being subject to thediffrance of language, it cannot exhibit
sameness in substance, composi-tion, nature and properties, or at
all times and in all circumstances. Thesubject is never present in
and of itself, referring only to itself; absoluteor essential
sameness, oneness is something that is congenitally beyond it.To
adapt Baudelaire, the medium, in which the subject has its being,
is letransitoire, le fugitif, le contingent (1986: 36).
When Baudelaire famously used this latter formulation to
describemodernity, he was not referring, as most social theorists
who have sinceused the term do, to a supposed stage of human
thought or history. He wasdescribing any temporal present, in all
its intrinsic fleetingness, with refer-ence to the necessity for
the artist, as he saw it, to extract the eternal fromthe ephemeral.
In his own words, every old-time painter had his ownmodernity
(1986: 37). Baudelaires painter of modern life, Monsieur
G.,returning from a day of busy flnerie to record images of what he
has seen,may serve us as a provisional metaphor for the ways in
which the transitory,fugitive and contingent materials out of which
subjectivity is constituted areparlayed into (and in turn effaced
by) identity. The relation of what, for wantof a better word, we
may call the real, and the various imagos in which always after the
fact (I gesture here to Geertz, 1996: 13) we seek to(re)capture it,
to pin it down, is the crux of the matter.
By day, G. walks the streets of Paris, animated by a fatal and
irre-sistible passion for life. Baudelaire compares G.s openness to
the world,even in the apparently most trivial things, to that of a
convalescent
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recently returned from the shades of death, who delightedly
breathes inall the germs and odours of life (1986: 31).
Convalescence, Baudelaire goeson, is a sort of return to childhood:
for the child everything is new; he isalways exhilarated. He
relates a friends childhood memory of watching hisfather dressing,
as he gazed in wonderment mixed with delight, at themuscles of the
arms, the graduated shades of pink and yellow in the skin,and the
bluish network of veins (1986: 312). G. is a child-man, theperfect
spectator, an I insatiably eager for the not-I (1986: 32, 34, 33).
Hewalks the streets long into the evening, the last person
remaining whereverlight shines, poetry thunders, life teems, music
throbs (1986: 35). Only thendoes G. take up his pencil, pen and
brush, and begin to draw eager,violent, busy, says Baudelaire, as
if he feared that his images might escapehim (1986: 36).
And what does G. draw or better, how does he draw? First,
Baude-laire tells us, he draws from memory, not from a model, for
such artists,long accustomed to using their memory and to filling
it with images, find,when confronted with the model and its
multiplicity of detail, that their chieffaculty is disturbed and,
as it were, paralysed. There is a perpetual strugglebetween the
will to see everything and forget nothing, and the
memorizingfaculty, which has become accustomed actively to absorb
general colours,silhouettes, and all the arabesques of contour. G.
does not attempt to giveimpartial heed to all details (which
Baudelaire likens to an insurgentmob), but exerts, rather, a
resurrective, evocative memory, which bids everyobject: Lazarus,
arise! This acknowledges that what the artist draws hasalready
passed away. The second thing Baudelaire stresses in G.s methodis a
fiery exhilaration of the pencil and brush, almost resembling
anoutburst of mania. It is the fear of not being fast enough, of
letting thephantom escape before its essence has been distilled and
captured. . . . Thecorpse has now become a ghost, haunting the
artist until he can exorcise itby capturing its imago. Beginning
with light pencil strokes, G. adds wash-tints, vague masses of
faint colour at first, but later on retouched and loadedwith
colours successively more intense. Only at the last moment are
theoutlines of the various objects definitely marked in ink. He
finally choosesjust a few sketches, and makes greater or lesser
additions to their inten-sity, darkening the shades and
progressively brightening the highlights(1986: 414). Thus we arrive
at essence.
In a not dissimilar way, the photographer Ansel Adams, using
anaperture setting that yields a depth of field that far exceeds
the perceptualcapabilities of the human eye, and manipulating
greyscale values tomaximize contrasts, fixed the Rocky Mountains in
our minds in indelibleimages of what we could never see. Dorothea
Lange accomplished acomparable trompe loeil when she removed an
intrusive thumb, an unrulydetail that detracted from the symmetry
of the composition, from thenegative of her famous 1936 photograph
Migrant Mother, in the processcreating what is perhaps the most
iconic of all visual images of the GreatDepression (Koetzle, 2002:
2837). This so-called straight photography, as
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its proponents called it, achieves its illusion of immediate
identity withreality by expunging every trace of the real that
might clutter up the photo-graph and dilute its power to speak. The
lucidity of these images, as of anysign, is founded in diffrance:
they can represent the real, in the doublesense of standing in for
it and presenting it anew, because and to the extentthat they
depart from it.
Edward Weston gives the game away when he claims that the
cameraenables [the photographer] to reveal the essence of what lies
before his lenswith such clear insight that the beholder may find
the recreated image morereal and comprehensible than the actual
object (1980: 174). As SiegfriedKracauer remarked, Weston often
indulges in wrestling abstract composi-tions from nature (1980:
251). This diffrance also means that the imageperpetually gestures
elsewhere. Migrant Mother, for instance, evokes notonly other
photographic images of the dirty 1930s like Walker Evanss seriesLet
Us Now Praise Famous Men, but also the entire corpus of Madonna
andChild painting, coupling poverty and purity in a way that would
have beenimpossible had not the living subject, Florence Thompson,
stepped throughthe lens of Langes camera and out into the realm of
the signifier. AnselAdamss Rockies, likewise, may conjure up other
photographed landscapes,or recall other things that have come to
signify an imagined America, like,say, Edward Hoppers painting Gas,
which in turn may direct our mind toAmerican Gothic or Andrew
Wyeths painting Christinas World or not.But they will always evoke
something, which is other than the Rocky Moun-tains themselves, and
the trace of that something is integral to their abilityto
represent that landscape and in turn, to inform the way we picture
it at all.
What I wish to draw attention to here is the process of
abstractionthrough which the remembered remains of the real are
resurrected as gravenimages. We might call it a fixation, bearing
in mind both the photographicand the psychoanalytic resonances of
the term. Either way, the flux of life le transitoire, le fugitif,
le contingent is arrested, whether in a momentof temps perdu frozen
on photo-sensitive paper, or in an obsessive psycho-logical return
of the ever-same. For let us be clear that there is nothing inthe
real to which the image corresponds; it represents a reality that
hasalready passed away. The image can stand in for this reality not
because itresembles it or reproduces it, but because it has
supplanted it. Summingup Monsieur G.s extraction of the eternal
from the ephemeral, Baudelaireexpresses it like this:
And objects are reborn upon the paper, true to life and more
than true to life,beautiful and more than beautiful, strange and
endowed with an enthusiasticvitality, like the soul of their
author. Out of nature has been distilled fantasy.All the stuffs
with which memory is encumbered are classified and arrangedin
order, are harmonized and subjected to that compulsory
formalizationwhich results from a childish perceptiveness that is
to say, a perceptive-ness acute and magical by reason of its
simplicity! (1986: 36, emphasisadded)
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Nietzsche put the same idea more succinctly: To experience a
thing asbeautiful means: to experience it necessarily wrongly
(quoted in Sontag,1977: 184).
Identity, I want to suggest, is fabricated out of the diffrance
in whichthe subject has its being by an analogous magic. It is a
re(-)presentation ofthe subject, constructed wholly in the realm of
the imaginary; a represen-tation founded in every bit as violent an
abstraction, as radical a simplifi-cation, as Monsieur G., Adams,
Lange or Weston wreak on their respectivesubjects. Identity is not
the living being of the subject, but its imago, forged(in both
senses of the word) out of the memory of what once was but nolonger
is; and it is in the guise of this counterfeit that the subject
enters thesymbolic register of society.
We could express this in the simple, if enigmatic formula:
identity =being in denial.
IIIWe have a template for thinking this Alice-in-Wonderland (or
more accu-rately, perhaps, Through-the-Looking-Glass) logic of
identity, though it isnot one to which I am wholly wedded.3 This is
the familiar Freudian top-ography of the Id, the Ego and the
Superego or to use Freuds own moredown-to-earth German, whose
literal English translation I prefer here, theIt (es), the I (Ich)
and the Over-I (ber-Ich). The baroque absurdity of thistriptych
bears pondering. For the trifurcation of the subject is the
directconsequence of the fact that identity can only be achieved in
the imagin-ation. Having been expelled from the imagined I, the
diffrance that consti-tutes the subject in language returns in the
subversions of the It, which isthe place where the signifiers
continue to play, but is now no longer recog-nized by the ego as a
part of the self. It manifests the absent presence ofdiffrance in
the cryptic disturbances of the joke, the slip of the tongue,
thedream, the symptoms of an original non-identity that has been
denied, butcannot ever finally be overcome. That self, in the
meantime, has nonethe-less somehow still to be reconciled with the
symbolic order from which ithas been imaginarily severed, and this
can now be guaranteed only throughthe punitive vigilance of the
superego that stands menacingly outside andover the supposedly
self-contained I.
The joke is undoubtedly on the self, and it is a masterpiece of
Breton-ian black humour (Breton, 1997). The imaginary overcoming of
the originalestrangement if, as I said, we want to call it that
which accompaniesthe constitution of the subject in language is
purchased only at the price ofa further alienation, whose sign is
the Freudian trinity itself, in whichanother familiar mythological
triad is prefigured: the Tweedledum andTweedledee of Culture (or
Society) and Nature, the hammer and anvilbetween which the imagined
Individual must negotiate his way home likeOdysseus skirting Scylla
and Charybdis. For this synthesis of identity is notthe resolution
of a contradiction, but merely its displacement; as Derridaremarks
in another context, if there were a definition of diffrance, it
would
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be precisely the limit, the interruption, the destruction of the
Hegelian relve[Aufhebung, usually translated as sublation] wherever
it operates (1982:401). The imaginary relve that synthesizes the
self in an imago with whichit identifies (itself) effects and
conceals what is in reality a radical fissur-ing of the subject,
which makes its being in diffrance unrecognizable.Identity is
sublimation, to use Freuds term, not sublation; and it
everywhereleaves behind it the subliminal traces of the diffrance
it denies.
I long wondered why, at the beginning of Nadja, Andr Breton
answershis question Who am I? with another question, Whom do I
haunt? (1960:11) since an orthodox Freudian view of the
unconscious, as the archaicrepository of unresolved complexes,
sublimated drives and repressedinstincts, would lead us to expect
him rather to ask By whom am I haunted?But Bretons question is the
right one. For there is a departed I, of a kind,who does haunt the
ego of the Freudian triptych, in exactly the same waythat the
ghosts of the departed real haunt the images confected by
Baude-laires night-time Monsieur G. The ghost is that of the lost
subject found(ed)in language, the subject who has no identity, the
subject whose being issubject to the play of the signifier. This is
what (in Bretons words) I musthave ceased to be in order to be who
I am, and whose fixation in an imagohas the paradoxical consequence
of mak[ing] me, still alive, play a ghostlypart (1960: 11). We are
reminded here of Freuds utterance, which soimpacted on Jacques
Lacan: Wo es war, soll Ich werden where It (theunconscious) was, I
must become.4 Breton concludes that:
. . . this sense of myself . . . seems inadequate only insofar
as it presupposesmyself, arbitrarily preferring a completed image
of my mind, which need notbe reconciled with time, and insofar as
it implies within this same time an idea of irreparable loss, of
punishment, of a fall whose lack of moral basisis, as I see it,
indisputable. (1960: 12)
The convolutions of his language testify eloquently to the
complexity of thatof which he is trying to speak.
Thinking about what that irreparable loss might be in the real
timeto which Breton alludes, with which the image of the self does
not need tobe reconciled let us recall the daytime Monsieur G.,
Baudelaires irre-pressible flneur. The being of this child-man
actually consists of perpetu-ally trying to (sub)merge his self
into something else. He is an I insatiablyeager for the not-I and
it is this dissolution of identity, according toBaudelaire, that
gives G.s eye its keenness:
The masses are his domain, as the air is the birds and the sea
the fishs. Hispassion is his profession that of wedding himself to
the masses. To theperfect spectator, the impassioned observer, it
is an immense joy to make hisdomicile among numbers, amidst
fluctuation and movement, amidst thefugitive and the infinite. To
be away from home, and yet to feel at home; tobehold the world, to
be in the midst of the world, and yet to remain hiddenfrom the
world. . . .
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The observer is a prince who always rejoices in his incognito. .
. . He mayalso be compared to a mirror as huge as the masses
themselves; to a kaleido-scope endowed with awareness, which at
each of its movements reproducesthe multiplicity of life and the
restless grace of all lifes elements. (1986:334)
In the daytime, in real time, G.s being is impelled by desire,
and the objectof that desire is always what is other. He does not
want to possess that other,so much as lose himself in it; and in
that losing he finds himself mirroredin the endlessly moving
kaleidoscope of the multiplicity that surrounds him.The slogan that
defines this subjectivity would have to be incognito ergosum I am
insofar as I am not my self.
Why I think the formula identity = being in denial fortuitous,
isbecause of the duality of meanings that it condenses. It may be
taken tomean either that identity is the denial of being, or that
identity is a state ofbeing in denial, in the psychoanalytic sense
of suppressing an unaccept-able truth. I intend to convey both.
What, above all, the fixation of the fluxof being in an imago of
identity denies, but at the same time enables us tolive in denial
of, is the dispersal of the subject from which we began;
thenon-identity that follows from its original constitution in
language, of whichBaudelaires prince rejoicing in his incognito
furnishes a model. Thisspecious relve is no small accomplishment to
immobilize the diffranceof subjectivity in the singularity of
identity is a deception of breathtakingproportions. It comes,
however, at a cost. For what it requires is nothing lessthan that
we treat the flux of the real as imaginary, in order to treat the
fixityof the imaginary as real.
It should not, therefore, surprise us to discover that this self
is aprecarious construct, as anything founded in denial ultimately
must be.Identity is the flimsiest of garments, ever liable to
unravel, unpicking alongevery ill-stitched seam. Albert Camus
beautifully captures a chancemoment where it begins, for no
apparent reason, to come apart, in his novelThe Fall:
I had gone up on the Pont des Arts, deserted at that hour, to
look at the riverthat could hardly be made out now night had come.
Facing the statue of theVert-Galant, I dominated the island. I felt
rising within me a vast feeling ofpower and I dont know how to
express it of completion, which cheeredmy heart. I straightened up
and was about to light a cigarette, the cigaretteof satisfaction,
when, at that very moment, a laugh burst out behind me. Takenby
surprise, I suddenly wheeled around; there was no one there. I
stepped tothe railing; no barge or boat. I turned back toward the
island and, again, heardthe laughter behind me, a little farther
off as if it were going downstream. Istood there motionless. The
sound of the laughter was decreasing, but I couldstill hear it
distinctly behind me, come from nowhere unless from the water.At
the same time I was aware of the rapid beating of my heart. Please
dontmisunderstand me; there was nothing mysterious about that
laugh; it was agood, hearty, almost friendly laugh, which
re-established the proper pro-portions. Soon I heard nothing more,
anyway. I returned to the quays, went
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up the rue Dauphine, bought some cigarettes I didnt need at all.
I was dazedand had trouble breathing. That evening I rang up a
friend, who wasnt athome. I was hesitating about going out when,
suddenly, I heard laughter undermy windows. I opened them. On the
sidewalk, in fact, some youths wereloudly saying good night. I
shrugged my shoulders as I closed the windows;after all, I had a
brief to study. I went into the bathroom to drink a glass ofwater.
My reflection was smiling in the mirror, but it seemed to me that
mysmile was double . . . (1991: 3840)
The unexpected, a laugh coming out of nowhere, has opened up a
gapbetween the lawyer and his imago, whose identity for the first
time he beginsto doubt. He will never be able to close that gap
again.
IVI want to suggest that memory is the dimension in which, above
all, thisfixation of identity in an imago takes place; the self is
always recollected,forever being put together (again), re-membered,
after the fact. What Baude-laire calls the memorizing faculty is
pivotal to maintenance of identity. Wesay of someone who has lost
his memory that he has forgotten who he is(and not, as we should
say if we were to be logical about it, who he was).On the other
hand, because of its ineradicable dependency on diffrance,on
signifiers that float (away), memory is always also a locus of
potentialdisintegration. Lieux de mmoire (Nora et al., 1996: 120)
are thereforetreacherous places, because the condensation that
fixes them as points decapiton for the imagined I may always
unravel, displacing them to becomesignifiers of something else. A
signifier on the loose may lead us God knowswhere, and sometimes,
like that laugh on the Pont des Arts, it may take usto places where
the I is unable any longer to recognize what it sees in themirror
as itself.
At the start of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan
Kunderapresents us with a powerful image of erasure of memory. In a
photographthat circulated widely in communist Czechoslovakia, the
fur hat on Partyleader Klement Gottwalds head was the only trace
that remained of formerForeign Minister Vlado Clementis after the
censors airbrushes had done aDorothea Lange on the visual record of
the communist coup dtat ofFebruary 1948. Clementis was executed
following the Slnsky show trial inDecember 1952. The trace remains
in the photograph, fortuitously, onlybecause it had started to snow
and Clementis removed the hat from his ownhead and solicitously
placed it on Gottwalds just before the latter haranguedthe masses
from the balcony of the Kinsky Palace in Pragues Old TownSquare.
This surreal anecdote introduces what is perhaps the most quoted
and arguably the most misunderstood sentence that Kundera ever
wrote:It is 1971, and Mirek says that the struggle of man against
power is thestruggle of memory against forgetting (1986: 3).
A character in Ivan Klmas Love and Garbage is another Czech
wholaments that in our country, everything is forever being remade:
beliefs,
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buildings, and street names. Sometimes the progress of time is
concealedand at others feigned, so long as nothing remains as real
and truthful testi-mony (1993: 45). Klma confronts us with the
vertiginous terror of a perpet-ual amnesia, in which there is no
longer anything real to confirm the truthof the memories in which
identity is anchored, only an endless parade oftransparent fictions
that are imposed retrospectively and updated every day.History,
here, becomes palpably an artefact of the present, just as in
theCzech joke of the period: The future is certain, comrades! Only
the past isunpredictable. As with the repeatedly revised
back-copies of the news-papers in George Orwells Nineteen
Eighty-four (1983: 7647), successiverewritings have put the reality
of what has gone before beyond recovery. Theoriginal, if we may
speak of such a thing, is irretrievably lost. This producesa
peculiar pathos. Klmas characters know very well that they live in
a worldof simulacra, but they no longer have any means of telling
good copies frombad.
This pathos, however, is entirely dependent upon our acceptance
ofthe idea that behind the never-ending erasures there exists some
authenticprimal identity, whose truth reposes in the memory of
realities that havebeen washed away by the tide of history. It is
this same postulate of authen-ticity that makes memory so poignant
a locus of resistance for KunderasMirek, providing the firm
foundation from which he can defend his humanintegrity in the teeth
of the falsifications of power. But Kundera himself isvery much
less sentimental than his hero or than Ivan Klma. In The Artof the
Novel, he warns us against taking Mireks pronouncement as thebooks
message. The truth, he says, is more complicated and less
heroic:
. . . the originality of Mireks story lay somewhere else
entirely. This Mirekwho is struggling with all his might to make
sure he is not forgotten (he andhis friends and their political
battle) is at the same time doing his utmost tomake people forget
another person (his ex-mistress, whom hes ashamed of).(1988:
130)
In Testaments Betrayed, Kundera goes still further. Not only
does heabandon Mireks comforting equations of humanity =
remembering, andpower = forgetting. He confounds the very
opposition of memory and forget-ting from which they draw their
rhetorical force. Much more than intention,or bad faith, are at
issue here:
We are resigned to losing the concreteness of the present. We
immediatelytransform the present moment into its abstraction. We
need only recount anepisode we experienced a few hours ago: the
dialogue contracts to a briefsummary, the setting to a few general
features. This applies to even thestrongest memories, which affect
the mind deeply, like a trauma: we are sodazzled by their potency
that we dont realize how schematic and meagre theircontent is.
When we study, discuss, analyse a reality, we analyse it as it
appears in our
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mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We
do not knowit as it is in the present, in the moment when its
happening, when it is. Thepresent moment is unlike the memory of
it. Remembering is not the negativeof forgetting. Remembering is a
form of forgetting.
We can assiduously keep a diary and note every event. Rereading
the entriesone day, we will see that they cannot evoke a single
concrete image. And stillworse: that the imagination is unable to
help our memories along and recon-struct what has been forgotten.
The present the concreteness of the present as a phenomenon to
consider, as a structure, is for us an unknown planet;so that we
can neither hold on to it in our memory nor reconstruct it
throughimagination. We die without knowing what we have lived.
(1995: 1289)
This relation between the reality of the present in which we
live, and thememories in which we recollect it, is exactly the
relation of Baudelairesdaytime and night-time Monsieur G. The only
difference is Kunderasmelancholia for the temps perdu that is lost
beyond recall. Baudelairesconcern was not the truth of the reality
that was lost, so much as the beautyof the fantasy that was born
from it, fixated forever in a work of art. But asBlanchot remarks,
And artists who exile themselves in the illusion ofimages, isnt it
their task to idealize beings, to elevate them to their
disem-bodied resemblance? (1999: 419).
For those attracted to the defiant humanism expressed in
Mireksdeclaration, what Kundera has to say here is profoundly
disturbing everybit as disturbing, in fact, as we might expect of
the author of a vicious shortstory, The Hitchhiking Game, in which
the presumption of identity itselfis pitilessly deconstructed. A
young girl, having stripped naked and wiggledobscenely on a table
in a cheap hotel room, playing the two-bit whore forher boyfriend,
is left in tears, repeating over and over, as she lies besidehim
afterward in the bed, Im me, Im me . . .:
The young man was silent, he didnt move, and he was aware of the
sad empti-ness of the girls assertion, in which the unknown was
defined by the sameunknown.
And the girl soon passed from sobbing to loud crying and went on
endlesslyrepeating this pitiful tautology: Im me, Im me, Im me . .
. (1999: 1056)
This tautology ought to give us pause, in the present context.
For what itreveals is the void, the vacancy, the lack, which the
assumption of identitywith an imago of the self both denies and
enables us to live in denial of and which has unexpectedly opened
up again in the space created by whatstarted out as a titillating
game, just as it did for the lawyer in Camus TheFall at that moment
when he stopped to light his self-satisfied cigarette onthe Pont
des Arts.
Asked in an interview reproduced in The Art of the Novel about
thesignificance of this story, Kundera replied with a reference to
another of hisbooks:
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In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tereza is staring at
herself in themirror. She wonders what would happen if her nose
were to grow a millimetrelonger every day. How much time would it
take for her face to become unrec-ognizable? And if her face no
longer looked like Tereza, would Tereza stillbe Tereza? Where does
the self begin and end? You see: Not wonder at theimmeasurability
of the soul; rather, wonder at the uncertain nature of the selfand
its identity. (1988: 28)
The image of finding in a mirror a way out of the existential
tautology ofdefining an unknown by the same unknown recurs in
Lacan, Baudelaire,Camus and now Kundera. He employs the same figure
in The Art of theNovel when discussing kitsch, which he defines as
the need to gaze intothe mirror of the beautifying lie and be moved
to tears of gratification atones own reflection (1988: 135). The
archetype for such identification, ofcourse, was Narcissus, fixated
by his reflection in a pool. Might we then goso far as to say that
identity is necessarily a species of kitsch? And thatkitsch,
therefore, is the very fabric of any organized social
existence?
It is far too easy simply to read the spectre of amnesia in
modern Czechfiction politically, as an indictment of communisms
flagrant distortions ofhistory, which on one level even for Milan
Kundera (see his 1984) itplainly is. As Zdenek Nejedly,
Czechoslovakias cultural plenipotentiary fora decade after 1948,
expressed it, with greater honesty than he perhapsintended, To us,
history is not the dead past, indeed it is not the past at all,it
is an ever-living part of the present too (1958: 7). A longue dure
perspec-tive might go further, and detect in the repeated cycles of
remembering andforgetting that are so characteristic of Czech
history an instability of identityendemic to this uneasy centre of
Europe (Sayer, 1998a, 1998b). I want,however, to offer a more
radical reading here. This is that the amnesiadescribed by these
writers is not a uniquely Czech or communist aberra-tion, but
should provide an occasion for reflection on what Kundera callsan
existential situation (1988: Part 2). For when and where, we might
ask,was it ever not the case that beliefs, buildings, and street
names were beingremade with all the attendant vertigo that Klma
implies?5 When was theoriginal not always already lost at the point
where it became a memory? Theproblem, as I see it, is rather to
explain how the improbable fiction ofidentity, of an essential,
authentic identity that exists outside the metamor-phoses of time
to recall Bretons characterization of that imago whom hehaunts
could ever have been sustained in the face of the reality of le
tran-sitoire, le fugitif, le contingent at all.
It is precisely here that memory works its Baudelairean magic,
distill-ing fantasy out of the ghosts of the real. We can
experience ourselves aspossessing identity across space and time,
only because our memoryprovides us with the means of continually
recollecting ourselves in theimagined space of an ever-present
past. It is able to do so, however,precisely to the extent that
memory indeed is a form of forgetting. This isfar more than simply
a question of selectivity, partiality or repression; ofwhat we
like, or dont like, to remember though it is doubtless that as
well
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(Lacan wryly observes that the amnesia of repression is one of
the liveliestforms of memory, 2001: 57). The fundamental issue is
of the diffrancebetween all memory and what it purports to be a
memory of and what, inits decoupling of signifier and signified,
this diffrance makes possible.
Memory operates entirely in the register of the symbolic, not of
thereal. Our memories are not the things we remember (as we
habitually, andtellingly, refer to them, occluding words and things
and denying thediffrance that separates them), any more than
history is the past or the wordfor moonlight is moonlight. The
things we remember have always alreadypassed away. Like Clementis.
What we call their memory is merely a trace,existing wholly in the
realm of the signifier, be it a sound, a smell, a sightor a word,
that is capable of suggesting something else; a trace that
hasalready gone through the transformative alchemy so well
described byKundera and Baudelaire, and which may yet be transmuted
again andagain, and again. Julian Barnes describes it well:
Your first memory wasnt something like your first bra, or your
first friend, oryour first kiss, or your first fuck, or your first
marriage, or your first child, orthe death of your first parent, or
your first sudden sense of the lancing hope-lessness of the human
condition it wasnt like any of that. It wasnt a solid,seizable
thing, which time, in its plodding, humorous way might decoratedown
the years with fanciful detail a gauzy swirl of mist, a
thundercloud,a coronet but could never expunge. A memory was by
definition not a thing,it was . . . a memory. A memory now of a
memory a bit earlier of a memorybefore that of a memory way back
when. (1998: 3)
Memories stand in the same relation to the experiences that gave
rise tothem as images do to the real: they do not correspond to
reality, they repre-sent (which is to say, replace) it, and what
enables them to do so isdiffrance. Vlado Clementis could be
airbrushed out of the photograph, andwhatever that image might have
conjured up in Czech memories, onlybecause the photograph was not
identical with the reality it depicted; onlybecause Clementis
himself had already become a corpse, dangling at theend of a
hangmans rope.
Two years after Mirek made his touching pronouncement
aboutmemory, the image of Vlado Clementis was resurrected on a
60-hellerCzechoslovak postage stamp in the guise of a Fighter
against Nazism andFascism during the Occupation of 193945. His
dates of birth and deathwere given, but there was nothing to
connect the latter with the Slnsky trialof the same year. And why
should we expect there to be? This resurrectionis no less grotesque
than the original erasure. But both illustrate the samepoint. As
with all phenomena of memory, Clementis was no longer a
solid,seizable thing. His life and death had long since turned into
signs, some-thing that will not return . . . mere words, theories,
and discussions . . .lighter than feathers, frightening no one. I
quote here from Kunderasdiscussion of Nietzsches eternal return at
the beginning of The UnbearableLightness of Being. In the sunset of
dissolution, Kundera continues,
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everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the
guillotine(1991: 4).
It is because signifiers slide that it is possible to reconcile
the eternalflux of life and death with a sense of the permanence of
the self. Memorycan sustain the unity of the imagined I, not
because it is anchored in a bedof authenticity, but because it
floats upon the tide of language; not becauseit is grounded in an
original identity, but because it depends upon andprofits from the
diffrance it so insistently denies.
VThe veracity of memory its effect of truth, as Foucault would
call it (1994) is a function not of its relation with the past that
it re(-)presents, but whollyof its place within a signifying chain
in the present of language. Theairbrushing works, or not, according
to how seamlessly the retouched imagecan be reconciled with other
representations through which the event isconstructed, which are
themselves, of course, also sliding signifiers. Theimaginary
unification of the self by and in memory takes place entirely atthe
level of the signifier. Here, as elsewhere, there is no
transcendental signi-fied. It is this, I believe, that accounts for
both the resilience of the self(-image), and its ultimate
vulnerability. If signifiers did not defer, the selfcould not be
continually re(-)membered and reconciled with a reality thatchanges
all the time at all; but since they do, the same diffrance may
alwayssubvert the coherence of the narratives in which that unity
is articulated.The issue, then, is of how this imago is stabilized,
this illusion of authen-ticity sustained.
A passage I quoted earlier from Testaments Betrayed lamented
thepaucity of the contents of our memories schematic and meagre was
howKundera described them by comparison with the concreteness of
the real.Kundera is obviously correct in this. There will always be
missing piecesin the jigsaw of what we remember, holes that are
papered over, as often asnot, with inaccuracies. No memory is ever
complete. What remains, at best,are stray details, often
recollected with extreme clarity which is notnecessarily the same
thing as accuracy that lend a patina of authenticityto a picture
that, on closer inspection, proves to be mostly compounded
ofBaudelaires general colours, silhouettes, and all the arabesques
of contour(1986: 43). I believe Kundera overstates his case,
however, when he claimsthat a diary entry (for instance) cannot
evoke a single concrete image, sothat the imagination is unable to
help our memories along and reconstructwhat has been forgotten
(1995: 129).
Certainly whatever it is that the imagination reconstructs
cannot bewhat has been forgotten, for the reasons given above
concerning thediffrance between our memories and the things (we
think) we remember.But on encountering some signifier that, as we
say, triggers a memory, theimagination has no difficulty whatsoever
in reconstructing images of the pastwhich are every bit as concrete
as any other image that our minds mayconcoct for us:
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And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of
madeleine dippedin lime-blossom tea that my aunt used to give me .
. . immediately the oldgrey house on the street, where her bedroom
was, came like a stage set toattach itself to the little wing
opening on to the garden that had been builtfor my parents behind
it (that truncated section which was all I had seenbefore then);
and with the house the town, from morning to night and in
allweathers, the Square, where they sent me before lunch, the
streets where Iwent to run errands, the paths we took if the
weather was fine. And as in thatgame in which the Japanese amuse
themselves by filling a porcelain bowlwith water and steeping in it
little pieces of paper until then indistinct, which,the moment they
are immersed in it, stretch and shape themselves, colourand
differentiate, become flowers, houses, human figures, firm and
recogniz-able, so now all the flowers in our garden and in M.
Swanns park, and thewater-lilies on the Vivonne, and the good
people of the village and their littledwellings and the church and
all of Combray and its surroundings, all of thiswhich is assuming
form and substance, emerged, town and gardens alike,from my cup of
tea. (Proust, 2002: 50)
An idyllic picture, firm and recognizable, paints itself before
our eyes.It suffices only to ask, however, which flowers were in
bloom, whichweathers, which errands, which streets, which good
people and when,exactly, these things happened, to recognize that
this picture is a compos-ite, akin to one of Monsieur G.s creations
for assuredly what Marcel Proustrecollects here never actually took
place in the simultaneity in which thisfamous passage represents
it.
What interests me most here is the tactility of each signifier
in thisnostalgic chain, beginning with the taste of the madeleine
itself. So palpableare the individual elements in the picture, that
we lose sight of theabstracted character of the composition as a
whole. While the extent of whatwe remember may be pathetically
meagre, the manner in which weremember it is anything but
schematic. A large part of the reason whymemorys representation of
the past convinces us, I believe, is because itoperates through
signifiers that evoke the sensuous just like those detailsMonsieur
G. chooses to highlight. These then create their effect of
truthmetonymically, by standing in for a whole synecdochically
rather thanmimetically replicating it. Without their presence, that
whole would remainas nebulous and abstract as Kundera says it is.
Instead, they enable usalmost to taste it. But these metonyms can
create verisimilitude, preciselybecause they are few in number,
relative to the tumult of the once-livingpresents that they have
come now to signify. Baudelaire observed thatmultiplicity of detail
disturbs and even paralyses the memorizing faculty.As with Monsieur
G.s pictures, the very paucity of remembered detail theradical
simplification is what makes the finished picture more legible.
Thisclarity is achieved not by abstracting away from detail as
such, but byzooming in on exemplary detail, the detail that
signifies, and cropping outwhatever is distracting and irrelevant
like that irritating thumb in LangesMigrant Mother.
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Kundera is likewise right, when he writes in The Unbearable
Light-ness of Being that we can read Nietzsches myth of eternal
return negatively,as a device to highlight the fact that where
there is no return, existence hasno weight. There is an infinite
difference, he observes, between aRobespierre who occurs only once
in history and a Robespierre who eter-nally returns, chopping off
French heads (1991: 4). Granted, the real itselfnever returns; we
cannot step in the same river twice. But the signifiers thattake
the place of the real may return endlessly, if not always with the
samemeaning; and indeed they can do so the more readily precisely
because theyneed not always have the same meaning, but obligingly
defer to the nuancesof time, place and circumstance. French
historians can be proud ofRobespierre not (just) because, as
Kundera says, he will not return, butbecause the signifier that has
replaced him may also gesture to many thingsother than the
guillotine like Progress, the Dawn of Modernity or the Gloryof
France, for example. Kundera provides an exquisitely perverse
exampleof this kind of association himself:
Not long ago, I caught myself experiencing a most incredible
sensation.Leafing through a book on Hitler, I was touched by some
of his portraits: theyreminded me of my childhood. I grew up during
the war; several members ofmy family perished in Hitlers
concentration camps; but what were theirdeaths compared with the
memories of a lost period in my life, a period thatwould never
return? (1991: 4)
Such repetitions of the signifier itself confer a unity on
memory, whichdoes not depend and this is crucial upon there being
an equivalent repe-tition in what is signified. The Slnsky trial,
in which Vlado Clementisforfeited his life to the Czech nation, was
attended, metaphorically speaking,by 15th-century Hussite warriors,
19th-century national awakeners and themuch-loved illustrator of
the Czech Mother Goose, all of whom had beenbidden Lazarus, arise!
and co-opted for the cause of peace and progress.6These leading
players in the socialist drama had assumed many other, noless
metaphorical roles in the past. Comfortingly familiar figures, they
havereturned again and again throughout the centuries, in many and
varied(dis)guises, threading (together) Czech history and
conferring on it a coher-ence it might otherwise woefully lack.
Such repetition does much to mitigateKunderas lightness of being,
without, however, always making it any themore bearable. The weight
of such returns may be heavy indeed, as Clemen-tis discovered. Had
the entire company of our great minds7 not beenpresent in that
Prague courtroom, the verdict might have been quitedifferent. But
on the morning of his execution, 3 December 1952, the formerForeign
Minister wrote a farewell letter to his wife Lda, summoning up
thesame ghosts: I am smoking a last pipe and listening. I hear you
clearlysinging the songs of Smetana and Dvork. . . .8 He could not
escape thesymbolic order, it seems, even on death row.
Since, on Kunderas own premises, we can never know the real that
is
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always already lost to us, but only the imagined world as
constituted inlanguage, this recurrence of the signifier what might
be described as theeternal return of the never-quite-the-same may
be very much more conse-quential than that long-forgotten loss,
which is doomed to remain forever inthe realm of that whereof we
cannot speak. Lacan makes the same pointwhen he bluntly states that
the value of the image as signifier has nothingwhatsoever to do
with its signification (2001: 176). A portrait of Hitler maymake us
feel warm and cosy, an illustrator of childrens books smile downon
the gallows. In fact, I would suggest, this repetition is first and
foremostamong the devices through which language creates identity
in and throughmemory. It is recurring signifiers that are the
Lacanian points de capiton thatmetaphorically fix(ate) the imagined
subject, whether individual or collec-tive, in a floating world,
and not as the postulate of identity leads us toassume what they
signify. The latter may vary infinitely, with each changeof content
being hidden from the I by the eternal return of the
signifiersthemselves.
Once the past has been resurrected in language, all the wiles by
whichlanguage overlays meaning on the world are available for the
imaginationof a unitary identity, an imago that is not bound, as
Andr Breton realized,by any real time in which the subject has
actually lived. This applies equallyto individuals and to what
Benedict Anderson (1991) has called imaginedcommunities, like
nations. For the temps perdu of the real, which we livein but can
never know, is substituted the misplaced concreteness that
isconfected for us by and in language. It is the world of words,
Lacan says,that creates the world of things the things originally
confused in the hicet nunc of the all in the process of
coming-into-being by giving its concretebeing to their essence, and
its ubiquity to what has always been (2001: 72).And language has no
trouble, it seems, in conjuring up in memory a morethan passably
concrete facsimile of identity a whole other self, we mightsay.
This perspective also clarifies other well-known tricks of
memory itsability, for instance, to mix up times, places and
events, to convince us thatwe perfectly recall things that we never
experienced, to feel nostalgia forwhat we never left behind,
weaving them all into one seamless recollectionof self. Because
memory is borne on nothing but chains of signifiers, itmakes no
distinctions between a genuine experience, something one hasbeen
told, something one has read or something that one imagined in
thefirst place. It is a planar space in which all things are
equalized, as flat asthe two dimensions of the paper upon whose
surface Monsieur G. resur-rected his Parisian phantoms, giving them
all the perspectival illusion ofdepth. All these things may be
remembered equally concretely, becausetheir concreteness is
established by and within language alone.
VIIn memory the individual is always already linked to the
socius, for the onething a language can never be is private. The
coin of memory is the common
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currency of the language we all speak, which is also the
language in whichwe can alone be spoken (of). Every memory partakes
in and attaches itssubject to the symbolic order. It is here, I
think, that we can give somesubstance to the otherwise very
misleading notion of a collective memory.Collectives do not
remember only people do. Nevertheless memory isalways collective,
in the sense that its operations are wholly dependent uponthe
common stock of signifiers. But it is also always individual,
because alanguage presupposes a speaker. In Lacans words, only a
subject canunderstand a meaning; conversely, every phenomenon of
meaning impliesa subject (2001: 11). The signifiers that comprise
my individual memoriescarry the entire weight of my personal
history it is certainly to be foundnowhere else and yet they also
remain the speech of what is irreduciblyother, bearing all its
traces too. To insist on this rootedness in the Other thatis
language, is to take nothing away from our humanity. It is our
humanity.Which was, of course, Emile Durkheims classical response
to those whodreamed that they could ever be free of society, and
still remain men (1974:55). As Lacan puts it, man speaks, then, but
it is because the symbol hasmade him man (2001: 72).
What Durkheim calls society is the supreme extraction of the
eternalfrom the ephemeral, the ultimate beautifying lie. Insofar as
we are consti-tuted as subjects in language, we do indeed partake
of the immortal andinfinite, for language transcends the finite and
mortal confines of (the)human being. Language once and for all
removes us, or at least, that partof ourselves we can ever know as
our selves, from the transience of the real from le transitoire, le
fugitif, le contingent. We are born again in diffrance,immortalized
as denizens of the symbolic order, which everywhere exceedsus.
There is nothing mystical, as Durkheim also pointed out (1973),
aboutthe doctrine of the soul; it grasps precisely who we are, not
as corporealbeings destined to return to the dust whence we came,
nor as the self-contained Cartesian egos we like to think we are,
but as subjects oflanguage. Long before the post-structuralists
challenged the overweeninghubris of Descartes cogito, or Milan
Kundera pondered why we areobsessed with the uncertain nature of
the self and its identity rather thanthe immeasurability of the
soul, religions had equally radically decentredthe subject. In the
beginning was the word, and the word was with God,and the word was
God, begins the Gospel of St John. The only problem isthat like
Humpty Dumpty, we sometimes confuse being the subjects oflanguage
with being its masters (Carroll, 1993: 2545).
But subjects of language we remain, and for that reason our
fictionsof identity unavoidable as they are will always remain
precarious. Fora social theorist, those moments when the unified
self suddenly shows itselfup for the counterfeit it is, moments
like Albert Camus lawyer experiencedwhen he heard that laugh on the
Pont des Arts, or Kunderas hitchhikersuffered when her fun turned
sour in that hotel room, ought then to beinstructive. For they
throw into relief the entire edifice of being-in-denialupon which
our everyday social intercourse rests. Since, as a
representation,
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an imago, the unified self cannot be derailed by any direct
comparison withthe real, its complacency may be jarred only by
something that puncturesthe flow of the discourse in which its
imagined identity is endlessly reiter-ated, rehearsed, performed
(see Butler, 1990) a slip of the tongue, a doubleentendre, a
disturbing dream or, as in this case, a rude interruption. In
usingthe word puncture here, I have in mind that punctum of which
RolandBarthes speaks in Camera Lucida, when he distinguishes what
he callsstudium and punctum as elements of a photograph.
Barthes studium may be summarized as what makes an image
intel-ligible within the cultural preoccupations of a particular
time and place(Barthes, 2000: 26). Not so with punctum, which is
altogether more Proust-ian (Proust, 2002: 47), depending, as it
does, on the objectivity of purechance:
The second element will break (or punctuate) the studium. This
time it is notI who seek it out (as I invest the field of the
studium with my sovereignconsciousness), it is this element which
rises from the scene, shoots out of itlike an arrow, and pierces
me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound,this prick, this
mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all thebetter
in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because
thephotographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes
evenspeckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks,
these wounds,are so many points. This second element which will
disturb the studium Ishall therefore call punctum; for punctum is
also: sting, cut, little hole andalso a cast of the dice. A
photographers punctum is that accident which pricksme (but also
bruises me, is poignant to me). (Barthes, 2000: 267)
A punctum will be a chance detail that stands out from its
surrounding(con)text, irritating its smoothness, confounding its
easy legibility a trace,the footprint of an absence, that points
elsewhere. The punctum is Freudssymptom, Bretons found object.
Might that errant thumb Dorothea Langecropped out of Migrant Mother
have been the punctum of that photograph the point at which it
could have slipped from being a conventional, ifpowerful,
representation of poverty to a human portrait of the mortalFlorence
Thompson, the blemish that might have saved it from becomingkitsch?
Maybe but this is not the main reason why I am citing RolandBarthes
here.
Later in the book, Barthes applies the same term to the freezing
of aninstant of time in an image that takes place in any
photograph, which isthus always, he says, an intimation of a death
to come, because what thephotograph portrays has always already
passed away. This new punctum,which is no longer of form but of
intensity, he writes, is Time, the lacerat-ing emphasis of the
noeme (that-has-been) of pure representation (2000:956). If, as I
have argued, the (remembered) self is an imago, an image,then
Barthes remarks may appropriately be applied to it in both senses
ofthe term punctum. The laugh on the Pont des Arts punctuates the
studium,the discursive register in which that self is routinely
made culturally
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intelligible to itself and others; it is the stray detail that
does not fit, thesignifier on the loose, which disturbs that ready
(or should we say, self-evident) legibility. It pricks, it stings,
it cuts, it wounds, it bruises be itever so trivial. And in so
doing, it opens up a gap the gap Camus lawyerapprehended later that
night when he gazed into the mirror of what wouldnormally be the
beautifying lie, and for the first time saw the smile therenot as
his own, but as that of his reflection.
This is the gap through which time, and the intimation of death,
floodsin, because whatimago, as other; bered I that-hasperceptively
recoimage, the imagtinual efforts of undone. And thrthe ineffable
Lacwhich we once fimpregnable fortof the unadornedthan the
imaginein the mirror t
Notes
1. The present arconcludes my boo2004). I am gratef& Society
for facil2. The argumentsas to individual id3. My reservationwith
those express4. My translationcome to the place5. It may be that
wish to historicize6. During the per1948, a determinenational
revival 1998a: ch. 7; see 7. As the artist MPrague, in which since
the mid-19t1939 (see Sayer, 18. Quoted (and orDvork are quinte
Sayer Incognito Ergo Sum 87
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self has now been recognized as anbecause the identity of the I who
is present with the remem--been is fractured. The timelessness that
Andr Breton sognized in Nadja as essential to the maintenance of
his self-
e of that I whom he haunts, is momentarily lost. The con-memory
to reconcile past and present, then and now, areough this gap in
the defences of the ego we can see, if notanian real, then at least
the shifting sands of signification,
ondly imagined to be solid rock, on which those
seeminglyifications were built. Beyond the imago we catch a glimpse
subject, who is both a good deal more and very much lessd I, the
remembered self, that we are so used to admiringhe subject who is
never and can never be complete.
ticle is a reduced and revised version of a longer essay thatk
Going Down for Air: A Memoir in Search of a Subject (Sayer,ul to
both Paradigm Publishers and the editors of Theory, Cultureitating
publication of these two different versions of the text. developed
throughout this article apply as much to collectiveentities (see
Sayer, 1998a, 1998b, 2004).s about Freuds own treatment of the
unconscious are consistented by Lacan (1998: 24) and Derrida (1986:
201). of Freuds German is literal here. Lacan renders it as I
must
where that was (2001: 189).modernity speeds up this turnover,
and to that degree we might this remark (see, for example, Berman,
1982).iod that followed the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia
ind effort was made to resuscitate the discourse of the
19th-centuryto legitimate the new regime (I discuss this at length
in Sayer,also Sayer, 1998b).ax Svabinsky described the occupants of
Vysehrad cemetery inleading Czech artists, writers and composers
had been buriedh century, at the funeral of the artist Alfons Mucha
on 19 July998a: 1921).iginal Czech source given) in Sayer (1998a:
239). Smetana andssentially Czech composers.
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