CABINET

A quarterly magazine of art and culture US $8 Canada $0 UK 4.50 Japan 880 France FFr42 Issue  Winter 2000

Cabinet Immaterial Incorporated 181 Wyckoff Street Brooklyn NY 11217 USA tel + 1 718 222 8434 fax + 1 718 222 3700 email cabinet@immaterial.net www.immaterial.net/cabinet Cabinet (ISSN 1531-1430) is published four times a year by Immaterial Incorporated. Immaterial is a non-profit art and culture organization incorporated in the state of New York. Contributions to Immaterial Incorporated and Cabinet magazine are tax-deductible and may be sent to our address above, in return for which we will send you a framed letter of thanks bearing Immaterials imitable corporate seal. Cabinet is in part supported by generous grants from the Flora Foundation and the Frankel Foundation.

Thank you for opening Cabinet

In the British science fiction TV series Dr. Who, the protagonist traveled around the universe in an emergency telephone booth. From the outside, it looked like a gray, unassuming little box. Barely large enough for one person, it seemed an unlikely vehicle for exploring the universe. But the inside of the booth was different. Inside was a vast space with enough room for many people. In fact, an entire alternate universe fit inside the booth. This is what we want Cabinet to be: a magazine that feels much larger inside than might have seemed possible from the outside, an alternate universe A partial map of the interior of Cabinet might be welcome at this point. Each issue will feature a small section that addresses one particular theme. In this issue, we explore languages that are fictitious or invented as opposed to those that have evolved organically over time. Contributions to this section include an article on Swiss psychic Hlne Smith's Martian languages, an interview with an Esperantist about the fate of the worlds bestknown planned language, and an essay by Christian Bk about the alien language he was asked to invent for a Gene Roddenberry television series. The related audio CD inside this issue contains sound pieces based on invented words that exist in no language other than the one constructed by the piece. A regular series of columns opens each issue. "The Clean Room" is a column on science and technology, and "Ingestion" is on food as a cultural practice with a philosophical dimension. For our "Colors" column, we ask a different guest writer each issue to respond to a specific color assigned by us. Different writers will also be invited to write on the cultural implications of various forms of detritus and garbage for our "Leftovers" column. Unrelated to the theme, but occupying important space inside, the magazine features articles and projects ranging from Friedrich Jrgensen's reel-to-reel recordings of the voices of the dead to an interview with Columbia Law professor Eben Moglen on the cultural implications of the recent legal cases around Napster and DVD decryption. Welcome to our first issue. Come inside. The editors

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Editors-in-chief Brian Conley and Sina Najafi Editors Saul Anton and Gregory Williams Art Director Richard Massey Editor-at-large Allen S. Weiss Contributing Editors Joe Amrhein (New York), Mats Bigert (Stockholm), Molly Bleiden (New York), Eric Bunge (New York), Christoph Cox (Amherst), Cletus Dalglish-Schommer (Los Angeles), Pip Day (Mexico City), Steve Fishman (New York), Carl Michael von Hausswolff (Stockholm), Dejan Krsic (Zagreb), Ilisa Lam (New York), Jesse Lerner (Los Angeles), Tan Lin (Los Angeles), Roxana Marcoci (New York), Ricardo de Oliveira (New York), Phillip Scher (Washington, D.C.), Rachel Schreiber (Baltimore), David Serlin (Washington, D.C.), Lytle Shaw (New York), Debra Singer (New York), Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss (New York), Jay Worthington (New York) Website Luke Murphy and Kristofer Widholm Copy Editing and Proofreading Sara Cameron Intern Kristen Dodge Subscriptions One-Year Subscriptions United States/Canada (US $24) Europe/Other (US $ 34 Airmail) Please call + 1 718 222 8434 or fax + 1 718 222 3700 or email subscriptions@immaterial.net with credit card details, or send a check in U.S. dollars made out to Cabinet to 181 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217, USA. We strongly prefer checks. Online subscriptions at www.immaterial.net/cabinet. If you have email, include your address in all correspondence. Advertising email advertising@immaterial.net or call + 1 718 222 8434 We accept and welcome unsolicited manuscripts. Please send all proposals and manuscripts to our office or by email to proposals@immaterial.net. We cannot be responsible for returning manuscripts or unsolicited original artworks. The views published in Cabinet are not necessarily those of the writers, let alone the publishers of Cabinet. Contents 2000 the authors and Immaterial Incorporated. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction of any material here is forbidden without prior permission. Hey Master Postmaster: Send address changes to Cabinet, 181 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217, USA.

Cover: page from yvind Fahlstrms notes for generating his hybrid language Whammo, 1962. Courtesy Sharon Avery-Fahlstrm

Contributors

Jonathan Ames is the author of two novels, I Pass Like Night and The Extra Man, and the memoir, Whats Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer. David Batchelor is a London-based artist who exhibits at Anthony Wilkinson Gallery. He is also an author whose books include Minimalism and Chromophobia. Charles Bernstein is the author of My Way: Speeches and Poems and Log Rhythms, with pictures by Susan Bee. His home page is among the authors at http://epc.buffalo.edu. He is Director of the Poetics Program at SUNY-Buffalo. Mats Bigert is one half of Bigert & Bergstrm, a Swedish artist collaborative team whose work has been shown at the Venice and Kawngju Biennials. Bigert is a contributing editor to Cabinet.

ment of pure mathematics. His forthcoming books include The Math Circle (with Ellen Kaplan), Accessible Mysteries (with Ellen Kaplan), and Inspired Guessing. Nina Katchadourian is an artist based in New York. Vladimir Kulic is an architect living in Belgrade. He is the co-editor of the forthcoming guide Belgrade Architecture. Laura Kurgan teaches in the School of Architecture at Princeton University. Her work with digital information technolgies has been exhibited internationally. Justine Kurland is a New York-based photographer who last showed at Patrick Callery Gallery. Jesse Lerner is a critic and documentary filmmaker.

Dan Rosenberg is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Oregon. His most recent publications include works on Denis Diderot and the Hoover Dam. Renata Salecl is a researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her latest book is (Per)versions of Love and Hate. Salecl is a contributing editor to Cabinet. David Scher is a pencil holder, member of Subvoyant, founder of the Dept. of Lettering, and a clarinetist with Frank Noise. David Serlin is a contributing editor to Cabinet. His forthcoming books include Artificial Parts and Practical Lives: Histories of Modern Prosthetics and Not Who We Used to Be: Remaking the American Body in Postwar Culture.

Naomi Ben-Shahar is an artist living in New York. A.S. Bessa is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. He is co-editor of poetry for fahlstrm.com and is also writing a book on concretism in the work of yvind Fahlstrm.

His documentaries Ruins, Frontierland, and Natives have screened at festivals internationally. He teaches media studies at the Claremont Colleges in California. Lerner is a contributing editor to Cabinet. Tan Lin is a poet and cultural critic. His latest book of poetry

Sabira Sthlberg has served as vice president of the World Organization of Young Esperantists from 1991-1993 and currently serves as editor-in-chief of the online Esperanto magazine Kontakto. Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss is an architect from Belgrade living in New York City. He is a co-founder of Normal Group for Architecture, a critical office for architectural theory and practice. He has taught advanced studios in architecture at the Columbia University together with Homa Farjadi and he is one of the authors of the upcoming book Harvard Guide to Shopping with Rem Koolhaas and a group of thesis students. Jovanovic Weiss is a contributing editor of Cabinet. Allen S. Weiss teaches at the Performance Studies and Cinema Studies Departments at New York University. He is the author of numerous books, including Phantasmic Radio. He is Cabinets editor-at-large. Gregory Whitehead is a playwright for the theater of the invisibles. His research into the bone trade is the subject of a forthcoming film Death and the Market. He is the co-editor of Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde.

Xu Bing is a Chinese-American artist living in Brooklyn, NY. Christian Bk is the author of Crystallography: Book I of Information Theory, a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award (Best Poetic Debut, 1994). Bk has also written an academic treatise, entitled Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science. Jon Dryden is a freelance musician and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. He is currently working on an opera based on Albert Camuss The Stranger.

Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe was published by Sun and Moon Press and his writings have appeared in Artbyte and Purple Prose. Lin is a contributing editor to Cabinet. Steve McCaffery was a member of the sound text ensemble The Four Horsemen for nearly twenty years. He is co-editor of Imagining Language and the forthcoming book Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics. He is Associate Professor of English at York University in Toronto. Eben Moglen is a professor of law at Columbia University

Carl Michael Von Hausswolff is an artist based in Stockholm. His work has been exhibited in many international events, including documenta X, the Istanbul Binennial, and Site Santa Fe. Von Hausswolff and Leif Elggren are the double monarchs of the Royal Kingdoms of ElgalandVargaland. For more information on the kingdom, see www.it.kth.se/KREV/. Von Hausswolff is a contributing editor to Cabinet. Louisa Kamps was a 1999-2000 fellow at the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University. She has published in The New Yorker, Elle, and Mirabella, among other places.

and general counsel to the Free Software Foundation. Luke Murphy is a New York-based artist who last showed at Wynnick-Tuck Gallery in Toronto. Sina Najafi is co-editor in chief of Cabinet. Frank Oudeman is a photographer based in New York.

Gregory Williams is an art critic and historian living Frances Richard is a writer who lives in Brooklyn. She is a frequent contributor to Artforum and the non-ficiton editor of the literary journal Fence. John Roberts is the author of The Art of Interruption: Robert Kaplan teaches at the Mathematics Department at Harvard University and is the author of the book The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero. In 1994, with his wife Ellen, Robert Kaplan founded the Math Circle, a program open to the public for the enjoyRealism, Photography and the Everyday and has written for a wide number of journals and magazines, including New Left Review, Radical Philosophy and the Oxford Art Journal. He is currently finishing his first novel. in New York. He is an editor of Cabinet.

Contents

Columns 10 11 13 15 Random 17 21 22 25 26 28 32 36 39 42 44 51 52 57 61 Invented Languages 62 70 71 72 74 77 War 80 84 89 90 Etc. 0 9 96

Leftovers Gregory Whitehead The clean room David Serlin Colors Jonathan Ames Ingestion Allen S. Weiss

Is chance possible? An interview with Robert Kaplan by Sina Najafi Not just for silver foxes Louisa Kamps Bingo in Swedish is bingo Mats Bigert 21 aphorisms John Roberts Marilyn Monroe and I -Jesse Lerner Marilyn Monroe y yo Fernando Sampietro Trickster eye Frances Richard Stalk photography Gregory Williams Whitescapes David Batchelor The city Justine Kurland The encryption wars An interview with Eben Moglen by Jay Worthington The love-bug Luke Murphy Anachronistic modernism Tan Lin 1485.0 kHz Carl Michael von Hausswolff My mother, my medium Jon Dryden

Speaking Martian Daniel Rosenberg The alien argot of the avant-garde Christian Bk abs TruCt heh GarBagt Special CD insert Himalayan journal Xu Bing yvind Fahlstrms aviary A.S. Bessa Esperanto An interview with Sabira Sthlberg by Nina Katchadourian

Inadvertent memory Laura Kurgan NATO as architectural critic Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss Belgrade architecture and the war 2 Vladimir Kulic On war and anxiety Renata Salecl

Postcard project Luke Murphy Flies David Scher Face David Scher

David Scher Flies, 2000

Columns

Leftovers

The bone trade

Gregory Whitehead Author Gregory Whitehead poses some questions to Walter Sculley, a selfdescribed dealer in corporeal collectibles. So. The bone trade.

number of outstanding eyes bought from the estate of a deceased client. Along the top shelf, up there, there are single eyes from Charlie Chaplin, Charles Dickens, and Charles LindbergI call them the three Charliesand an unauthenticated (but highly possible) complete set from Edgar Allan Poe. Worth a fortune and a half, if the tests come back positive. Tests?

Thats correct. I suppose the more formal designation would be something like the international market for corporeal collect-ibles, but dealers usually just say the bone trade, even though we deal with much more than bones. The key word here is market thats where the material comes from, and, ultimately, thats where its going. How do you respond to those who condemn the bone trade as a rationalized form of grave robbery, or body snatching, selling human remains for profit? I field such accusations all the time. What can I say? Such materials exert a powerful fascination. That fascination creates a market. Im just here to serve the market. I havent been anywhere near a graveyard in years! Living history from dead remains. Thats what Im selling, and thats what people want. Contact with a dead person through a living artifact that happens to have once been part of the dead person. The only thing more democratic than the free market is death, right? So heres a business where the two go hand-in-hand. Can you say a word or two about how the trade is organized? Pretty much along the same lines as most other collectibles markets, though each dealer may have his own reference system. I organize my offerings first by physical categoryfingers, skulls, brain matter, blood samples, eyes, whateverand then by historical or cultural categories American presidents, movie stars, Nazis, outlaws, and so on. As in any market, the quality material pretty much sells itself, and the rest, as we say, is best left to the birds. I wasnt aware that eyes were part of the trade. Oh yes. Eyes are a very substantial market. In the case over here, for example, I have a 10 Columns

The usual forensic processing, but in our case, we scrutinize not only the item itself, but its career path, its provenance, so to speak. Obviously, absolute authentification is often hard to establish, especially for the flood of material coming in these days from Russia. I mean, I had a guy in the other day who says he used to be KGB, walks in here with a bag full of bones of bigtime Bolsheviks, Czars and what-not. Now, how am I going to check his story? In the end, its the market that makes the final decision of whether a story is good enough. We never try to hide the question marks. We have a saying in the trade: Never twist an arm to sell a finger. So how does the trade break down, in terms of proportional sales? Skulls, then eyes and fingers, then brain matter and bloodthe Big Five I call themunless its really something unusual, a famous tumor or something like that. All other materials would fall into the category of miscellany, and appeal only to very specialized collectors. Hearts are having a bit of a run right now since the genetic testing of Louis XVII came back positive. I mean, every sleazy pseudo-aristocrat on both sides of the Atlantic wants a slice of that little blueblood muscle. People often ask, what about genitalia? Well, I wont tell you theyre not out there, but for my part, I consider it in bad taste. But dealing Nazi blood and bones is not in bad taste? The Nazi trade is a tough one. A week doesnt go by where we dont have some skinhead strutting in wanting to buy a skull or two for the sake of nostalgia. Usually the price of the stuff screens them out. But anyway, I really cant get into the meaning of the material. I can control the material, but not the meaning. So what, then, would you say drives your

market? Obviously more than a simple interest in history. True. If the interest were only historical, they would probably stick with documents, autographs, icons, and the like. I dont know, it would certainly be easy to entertain cheap psychoanalysis, and a lot of people say, oh right, its just necrophilia or what not. I can only tell you the kinds of things my clients say when they contact me. Now, these are very often menand many women, I might addof considerable wealth but not a whole lot of cultural visibility or celebrity. Not much glamour. So for the right price they can have a little osteomemento from the body of Marilyn Monroe squirreled away in the safe, together, maybe, with a slide of Winston Churchills blood, or a slice off the presidential polyp. Some form of post-facto access to celebrities they could never have in real life. I mean, look how excited people get about an autograph, say an autographed picture of Judy Garland, so imagine the excitement if you could buy the hand that wrote the autograph! You mean to tell me that Judy Garlands hand is for sale? I cant say that it is or it isntit was only an example. There has been a lot of Garland material floating about recently, though. And what about the so-called presidential polyp? Well, yes, as you can imagine, at the time of Reagans intestinal surgery, there were more slivers of polyp floating about than chips off the Old Cross. And the prices! I mean, even dirty latex gloves used during the surgery were going for serious dollars. I still dont really understand the Ronald Reagan end of the market. The only American President who competes in price is JFK, and you have to remember there was a lot more Reagan material available. Lincoln is a distant third, and thats mostly because of Civil War buffs. On the international front, there are a lot of people waiting for Pinochet to hit the market. I get a lot of advance sales on Pinochet. What is there currently available from JFK? Oh, endless tissue slides, usually of brain matter, most of dubious origin. I never touch the stuff. When clients express interest, I tell them, sure they can have a 11

Kennedy brain slide, but if all the brain samples in circulation were put back together into a unified organ, you would need a tow truck to transport the damn thing. And, of course, we get regular inquiries about the, uh [gestures vaguely towards his waist]... but my research indicates fairly conclusively that he took that particular bit of his anatomy with him. Right. Well, I suppose you come into contact with all kinds of cults. [Laughs] Beyond belief. And more than enough counterfeiters to meet even the most kinky demands. By my last estimate, there were close to a thousand Hitler fingers on the shopping block. And you can imagine the number of people claiming to own the one and only Pelvis of Elvis. But these arent really serious collectors. What they are pursuing is something much closer to religion. I mean,the Lady Di stuff out there is through the roof. And Argentina! Argentina really takes the cake for weirdness: Ive seen thousands of those tiny little glass vials sometimes used for pharmaceuticals, full of murky liquid and marked Sangre dEvita. Cult of Pern, I guess. Most of this kind of stuff just gets wholesaled to the specialty medicine market in China. Specialty medicine? You must be joking. No, Im not joking. Im not one to indulge in China bashing. Its a huge market for me, but they do have some pretty unusual ideas about medicine. And theres always talk about what parts work best as aphrodisiacs, with different techniques for mashing them all up. That market exists just about everywhere. A lot of interesting items just end up in somebodys digestive tract. To me, thats depressing. And now, with all the speculation in human genomics stocks, all kinds of choice items are starting to be sucked out of circulation by the big bio-tech firms. Who knows where that material will end up? I mean the whole bottom will drop out of the market if you can start to grow duplicate organs out of soybeans or what-not. Scary. In the meantime, you seem very much at home in the trade, despite having to operate more or less underground. Hah! Ill have to remember that one. Look. The bone trade is unavoidably controversial, intrinsically a little bit strange, and political by definition. Bones are loaded, no matter where theyve been, or where theyre

headed, and the stories they tell are full of surprises, not always what people want to hear. Think of the case of Vietnam MIAs. Up until a few years ago, various speculators were buying up all kinds of bones, no questions asked. The hustlers had a field day. Then the forensic anthropologists would come in and tell some grieving widow whos just been given a small box full of remains supposed to be from her husband: Sorry, but these are the bones of a mediumsized quadruped, probably a dog. Im not sure I understand what youre getting at. My point is that whats legal is so often at odds with what people need to fill the holes in their private lives, whatever their motivations. Thats where pornography comes in. Now, is what Im doing pornographic? Whos to say? If people can find more meaning in the skull of a movie star than in their own flesh and bone, who am I to judge?.
Leftovers is a column in which a guest writer is invited to discuss notions of waste and detritus from a cultural perspective.

tHe CLeAN room

Producing surgery on the internet: is the rectum a cinema?

David Serlin In Richard Fleischers 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, an elite crew of medical techniciansincluding the buxom but brainy Cora Peterson (Racquel Welch)is shrunken down to microscopic size and climbs aboard the Proteus, a nano-sized submarine. The crews mission: to use a modified laser to destroy a blood clot on the brain of a dying scientist who holds important Cold War military secrets. Navigating their way through the dark, dangerous world of multicellular marauders and bacterial invaders, the crew of the Proteus spends a good amount of time on-screen peering out the windows in awe of the human bodys oceanic interior. Just after completing their assignment, and with valuable seconds ticking away, the crew of the Proteus is attacked by white blood cells. The survivors exit the body by riding out through a tear duct, cushioned in the saline safety of a single teardrop. For all its retrospective camp value, Fantastic Voyage is also a fascinating cultural hybrid,
w

the talented offspring of postwar American cinema and postwar American science. By the mid-1960s, the distinction between cinematic representations of the bodys interior, and representations of the body generated by a new repertoire of visualizing medical technologies, was an increasingly arbitrary one. In 1965, the year before Fantastic Voyage was released, Lennart Nilsson published the first microphotographs of fetuses in utero in Life magazine. These interior shots of fetuses were medically accurate; yet, seen floating in soft and dramatic lighting, they seemed both transcendent and inhuman, not unlike the images of the r-infant that would close Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey a few years later. Fleischers film also tapped into widespread enthusiasms during the late 1950s and early 1960s for new diagnostic technologies such as ultrasound, echocardiography, electroencephalography, and computer-assisted x-ray scanning techniques, which paved the way for computer-aided tomography (CAT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technologies in the 1970s and 1980s. Fleischer was fearless about his artistic vision. The films opening credits offer a utopian manifesto, couched in the futuristic lingo of Cold War scientific prowess, which predicts a time when travel through both outer and inner space would be commonplace: This film will take you where no one has ever been before; no eye witness has actually seen what you are about to see. But in this world of ours where going to the moon will soon be upon us and where the most incredible things are happening all around us, someday, perhaps tomorrow, the fantastic events you are about to see can and will take place. It was not that Fleischer and his colleagues believed that they were depicting the real body. Instead, they believed that their film served as a state-of-the-art cinematic dress rehearsal for visualizing technologies and medical advances that lay just around the corner. The rhetorical lure of medical realism was such that it affirmed sciences abilityconsequences be damnedto penetrate the unfathomable depths of the human body. Yet, even in 1960s cinema, special effects like those in Fleischers film were still artful creations of imperfect human animators, and not the cold digital products offered by industrial light and magic. As a result, Fantastic Voyage is a highly theatri12 Columns

cal presentation of a human-created inner world: a final frontier, the dreamy stage sets and evocative props of which trump even the most realistic depictions of the body generated by modern medical media. The films aesthetic sense bears a charming naivet, not unlike Georges Mliss beautiful images of the man in the moon made some 60 years earlier. Fantastic Voyage had clearly imbibed a broad range of cultural influences: from Soviet-inspired espionage narratives, to the radical body manipulation found in Weird Science tales of the 1950s, to the militaryindustrial fetish for high-tech gadgetry featured in the early James Bond films. But by the mid-1960s, the increased blurring of realistic and symbolic representations of the body in medical and cultural media suggested that there was no longer any concrete division between these two worlds. In this sense, Fleischers wide-eyed optimism was neither nave nor unfounded; Fantastic Voyage operated in an public environment where hyper-realistic medicalized images were used increasingly in everyday contexts, from cinema to television to the avant-garde. Artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s as diverse as Marina Abramovic, Chris Burden, and Carolee Schneeman staged performances that mirrored this rapid diffusion of cinematic/medical images, offering violent public acts on their own bodies that were both highly realistic (as well as graphic) as well as highly symbolic. Such performances ultimately inspired a generation of artists to make profound and disturbing statements about the subjective usesand institutional abuses committed against the physical body in often quasi-medicalized contexts. In the case of Annie Sprinkle, even low-tech medical equipment such as a vaginal speculum unveiled and collapsed altogether the artificial distinctions between medical practice and artistic practice. Thirty years later, one would be hard pressed to find medical media that offer a vision of the body that is dramatically different from, or superior to, that rendered in Fantastic Voyage. The widespread use on the Internet of sophisticated imaging technologiesin tandem with super-fast computer servers, web browsers, and Real Player viewersconfirms what Fleischer already knew: in the future, medicine and entertainment will be one and the same. In contemporary medical media, what passes for realism no longer borrows from the

cinematic but from the much-vaunted (but unpersuasive) realm of digital realism. The National Institutes of Healths celebrated Visible Human Projectin which the bodies of two anonymous male and female donors (one a doomed prisoner) have been cut into thousands of thin horizontal slices which have been scanned and digitized for public accessprovides a compelling view of the bodys interior. But such digital images, while physiologically accurate, have lost their artfulness in favor of digital realism, which gives us something that approximates the human but is, like jazz on a compact disc, not quite human at all. Computerenhanced medical imaging technologies may appear to offer a precise method for capturing a Kodak moment in the interior life of the body. But even these precise images require sensitive technicians who are able to interpret, critique, and challenge every mysterious shadow or pixilated peculiarity that passes across the sterile surface of the camera eye. For all its technical advances, digital medical realism pales in comparison to Fleischers vision, an anthropomorphic world of luminous blood platelets and puffy lung tissue resembling the costume shop of a Busby Berkeley production. One area where the cinematic has not entirely disappeared is in the fast-growing medical sub-genre of on-line surgery. Many surgical broadcasts on the Internet are not computer-enhanced digital products but are actual analogue videotapes that have been converted for convenience to a digital archive. Because of their modest origins, these films come closest to Fleischers vision of a realistic yet cinematically complex inner world. At adoctorinyourhouse.com, viewers can watch archival footage of the gastric bypass operation (originally broadcast live) performed on pop star and former talk show host Carnie Wilson. Wilsons surgery, promoted as The Solution for chronic obesity, was captured for posterity in August 1999 with the help of a tiny, flexible laparoscopic video camera the aperture of which is no larger than the hollow of a drinking straw. When attached to a thin, microfiber cable, the laparoscopic camera enables the surgeon to push the spaghetti-like apparatus through tiny slits made in the skin surface in order both to see the bodys interior and to avoid traumatizing the body through full exploratory surgery. The premier web site devoted to this technology, laparoscopy.com, bills itself as a professional arena for students and physicians who want to catch up on the latest advances. More often than not, however,

the site traffics in a kind of competitive oneupmanship where one can witness spectacular feats of surgical derring-do. Like their prime-time equivalents RealTV or Americas Funniest Home Videos, the site invites surgeons to send examples of their work and provides detailed instructions on how to convert photographs or films into jpeg or RealPlayer files. The most cinematically inventive of those laparoscopic operations broadcast on the internet are, surprisingly enough, proctologic in nature, if not in spirit. Perhaps this preponderance of films to watch a nuses by is largely due to the design of the camera itself, which travels well through the bodys more familiar entrances and exits. In laparoscopy.coms video gallery, for example, viewers move at breakneck speed through the lower intestinal tract in a 3-D colono-scopy. Whether due to tech nological constraints, or because they bow to the perceived objectivity of medical realism implicit in diagnostic technologies, such films on laparoscopy.coms roster prefer authentic, unmediated action to smoke and mirrors. Yet the eight second, 3-D journey along the smooth, gray-brown lining of the colon walls is clearly modeled on Alices descent into the rabbit hole, and not unlike the trip through the secret portal to celebrity consciousness in Being John Malkovich. Such laparoscopic feats are less like Fleischers futuristic vision of life under the microscope, and are more like the early cinema, such as the films of Mlis and the Lumire Brothers, as well as other popular visual entertainments from the late 19th century. These predominantly silent spectacles were meant to stun the senses, amaze the eye, and transport the viewer to a different world. Like early cinema, these laparoscopic broadcasts force the viewer to supply his or her own audio soundtrack, often only the sound of ones own gasping. The RealPlayer movie of endoscopic rectal repair, for example, splices together internal images of the rectum with external shots of the anonymous patient whose exposed lower body is draped in green cotton sheets. In an instructional moment, the external camera records a male surgeon shoving a long, black camera tube through the patients colostomy opening (attractively described as a mucus fistula) as if he was putting a gasoline pump nozzle directly into his Jaguars fuel tank. Watching the penetrative power of the colonoscope reminded me, oddly enough, 13

of neither early cinema nor the medical gaze but of the expansive physical exchanges that routinely occur in S/M videos. I thought immediately of Pat Califias description of her first experience in the 1970s handballing (i.e. fisting) a gay man of her acquaintance. I got into him easily, I cant remember how deep, she recalls in an essay originally published in The Advocate in 1983. It seemed like miles. The walls of his gut hugged my hand and forearm, smoother and softer and more fragile than anything Id ever experienced. I think I cried. Califias narrative, both for its tactile and emotional resonances, colored my reaction as I watched laparoscopy.coms un-ironic 90-second film, Foreign Body in the Rectum, which must be seen to be believed. The laparoscopic camera focuses on the action of a tentacle-like hook device that the surgeon manipulates to grasp at a round, greenish-orange object stuck literally in mid-rectum. Like a silent Jacques Cousteau film that savors the aquatic struggle between a squid and a sea urchin, the film keeps the viewer at a remove from the action, though marveling constantly at the why and how of the protagonists. The last twenty seconds of the video are blurred and abstract, like a garbled message transmitted from the lunar surface, which transforms the scene into a wild, neo-psychedelic tumult like that experienced by the crew in Fantastic Voyage. The camera jostles violently as the hook device fights to capture the elusive object. Finally, we see how the hook seizes the obstruction and pulls it expertly from the dark rectal tunnel and into the cold light of day. Without any warning, the on-screen image shifts from the laparoscopic interior to an exterior shot of the hook withdrawing an enormous green and orange dildo from someones moderately hairy ass. The video ends, perhaps as the patients doctor visit ended, with a heaving sigh of relief. But whatever explicit story of struggle and fortitude is told by that final exterior shot stands in bold contrast to the highly cinematic images provided by the laparoscopic camera. The close proximity of the tiny camera inside the living body denaturalizes the content of the image and instead creates something amorphous and beautiful, like a Milton Avery landscape. Unlike late 19th century cinematic spectacles of oncoming trains or late 20th century CAT scans of the brain, however, this ass-drama tempts us to bring contemporary

questions about social practice and sexual identity to an otherwise abstract visual image. Whose ass is this, we wonder, and in what erotic reverie did heand it is almost certainly a helodge the (huge) object of his affection so deep inside of himself? In this sense, Foreign Body in the Rectum eschews the universal body typically ascribed to the patients medical case history by on-line surgical broadcasts. The films final image demands implicitly that we make a judgment about the patients erotic desires that other laparoscopic images simply do not make on the viewer. Clearly, until we can find a model of representing the body that is free of social context, the beautiful inner world imagined in Fleischers Fantastic Voyage will have to stay on hold indefinitely. But there never can be a body free of social context, despite the best intentions of on-line surgeons, medical imaging technicians, web designers, and universal humanists. Perhaps this is what was so fantastic about the voyage of the Proteus in the first place..
David serlin's column on science and technology appears in each issue of Cabinet.

CoLors

Bice
Jonathan Ames When I was a little boy, I liked to pick my nose. In fact, Ive enjoyed picking my nose for most of my life. This is not something to be proud of, but telling you about my nosepicking brings me to the word bice. Perhaps its not clear how this brings me to bice, but I will try to explain. The good and clever editors at Cabinet asked me to write about a color. I said I would do this. I am a writer and writers usually say yes when editors offer them work. So the idea was that they would choose the color for me and I was to respond. But they didnt give me the color right away, they told me they would call me back in a few days. Fine, I said, and I looked forward to this. I saw it as a version of that classic word association gamethe pschia-trist says to you, Just tell me the first thing that comes to your mind after I give you a word. Then he says, for example, Cereal and you say, Morning, and then he says, Picnic, and you say, Apples, nocopulation, and nobody fig
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ures anything out, but the game is fun to play. So I waited for my color, to which I was going to respond to with immediate firstthought, first-feeling sensitivity and clarity and enthusiasm. I did find myself, though, cheating and mentally preparing my essay in advance, hoping for blue, about which I could write about my grandfathers eyes, or red, the color of my hair, my sons hair, my great-aunts hair, my grandmothers hair, numerous uncles and cousins hair, and I envisioned an essay with the winning title A Family of Red Heads, or just Red Heads. Then the phone call came. The Cabinet editor said, Your color is bice. I was silent, mildly ashamed at a deficient vocabulary, as well as a deficient knowledge of colors. Blue and red were striking me as quite pedestrian now. Do you need to look it up? asked the editor. Dont worry if you do. I didnt know it either. It was my colleagues idea... Do you want something easier? Like yellow? I felt tempted to say yes. My eyes are often yellow because of a dysfunctional liver, and I immediately thought about how I could write about my liver and about the bodys humors. But steeling myself, showing a flinty courage, I said, No, bice is fine. I have a good dictionary. Im on it. You can count on a thousand words on bice from me. We rang off. I opened my dictionaryits an OED for the field, so to speak; its about the size of the Bible, as opposed to the colossus numerousvolume regular OED. I found bice, though, out of curiosity, I checked my American Heritage Dictionary, and there was no bice. Good thing I have my Junior OED. What I encountered in the dictionary was this: pigments made from blue, green, hydrocarbonate of copper; similar pigment made from smalt, etc.; dull shades of blue & green given by these. Well, my immediate response to bice was straight out of the ethers of my long ago childhood; it was Proustian; it was tactile; it was visual; it was beautiful, sad, and lonely. It was better than blue or red or yellow. What I saw in my minds eye, my souls heart, was the standing, tube-like copper lamp, which used to be beside the couch in the living room of the house I grew up in. And every night, I would sit on this couch 14 Columns

in the darkness, alongside this unlighted lamp, and I would watch television all by my very young (six, seven, eight; this went on for years), lonesome, yet happy self. I felt a solitary contentment in the darkness watching my programs before dinner, my mother cooking in the kitchen beside the living room, and all the while as I absorbed the stories from the TV and soaked up the radiation from that ancient, large contraption (TVs, like cars, were made uniformly big back then), I would pick and pick my nose and then wipe my small treasures in the tubing and grooves of that long lamp. And no one saw me doing this because I was in the darkness. And the effect of my salty mucouslike sea air on a statuewas that the copper lamp slowly, in streaky spots, turned greenish-blue. To everyone but me this was a mystery. Why is this lamp eroding? my father would sometimes ponder. On occasion, showing largesse, I would put my snotty treasures on the underside of the wooden coffee table in front of the couch and our dog Toto, named by my older sister after Toto in the Wizard of Oz, would come and bend his red and brown Welsh Terrier neck and happily and aggressively lick up the snots. I can still see him in my mind, craning to get under the table. And my parents and relatives would notice this and everyone thought that he must like the taste of wood. I was clandestine in my actions, but I didnt feel too much shame about any of this nose picking was too much something I had to do. But as I got older, the lamp was looking more and more terrible, and there was talk of throwing it out. I secretly tried to clean it, but the blue-green streaks would not go away. But I didnt want this lamp to be forsaken by my family; things back then, objects, were nearly animate to me, dear even, and to lose a thing from the living room, my special room of TV and darkness, would be terrible. I wanted everything to stay the same forever; and, too, I felt horribly guilty that I was killing this lamp. So I pleaded with my parents on its behalf, told them I loved the lamp, and it wasnt thrown away. With this reprieve, I tried not to wipe my snots on it anymore, to only coat the bottom of the coffee table and feed my beautiful dog, but sometimes I would weaken, and Id find a new unstreaked spotI could feel them with my fingersand so Id make my mark, my hydrocarbonated snotthere must be hydrogen and carbon in my mu-

cous, all the elements of the world must be in me, in everyonewould mingle with the copper and make a union, a new thing, alchemically, chemically, pigmentally. And that thing was the color bice, a good color, I think, because it has brought back to me that TV and darkened living room and childhood and lamp and coffee table and beloved dogall things gone a long time ago. All things that didnt last forever..
Colors is a column in which a guest writer is asked to respond to a specific color assigned by the editors of Cabinet.

anced the communality, seduction, and mythology of gastronomy. In order to reveal the discursive basis for their evaluations, food critics should therefore be required to submit such a culinary alphabet. A Aversion would seem to indicate the antithesis of gastronomy. As a small child I did not want to eat at all, except for a very few favorite dishes. The favorites or nothing. As my culinary field expanded, certain foods incited conscious aversion, establishing personal taste, protected by a borderline of rejection. (Of course, many things edible in certain cultures and contexts are unimaginable in others. There was no question about even thinking of eating locusts, for example, thus no rejection. I had yet to learn the joys of asceticism.) The major instance of such aversion was my profound disquietude, indeed anguished repulsion, at seeing beef tongue. For years I had innocently enjoyed this cold cut, even calling it by name, but, in a strange feat of dissociation, I never managed to relate word and object. When I finally saw one, a whole one, in the butcher shop, recognition coincided with the crushing weight of retrospection, and I almost fainted. Afterwards, the very thought of eating tongue gave me the chills, and triggered a choking reflex. This disgust certainly had multiple psychological roots, probably not without interest concerning my subsequent career as a writer and public speaker. Aversion, like passion, is the very guarantor of taste, marking its limits and establishing the borders of the personal gastronomic field through hyperbole and inversion. Taste is simultaneously subjective, objective, and qualificative. According to context, taste variously signifies: the sense by which we distinguish flavors; the flavors themselves; an appetite for certain preferred flavors; the discriminative activity according to which an individual either likes or dislikes certain sensations; the sublimation of such value judgements as they pertain to art, and ultimately to all experience; and, by extension and ellipsis, taste implies good taste and style, established by means of an intuitive faculty of judgement. Taste is a dynamic principlenot a static qualification or attributethe origins of which are lost in pure contingency. Ultimately, the most satisfying means of estimating gastronomic values, of considering the question of taste, is through a Proustian digression: lengthy, sensual, detailed, eloquent,

seductive, and most especially contingent. Gilles Deleuze claimed that his preferred foods were brain, tongue, and marrow. This, coming from a philosopher, seems too perfect. There is no need to seek a rational, coherent structure to taste; what is crucial is to identify such boundaries, and establish techniques for exploring culinary immanence and transcendence. B Blanc dAbymes. White of the Abyss. This oenological entry is here for its name alone, irresistible in all that it evokes, a veritable epigraph to the authors philosophical project. C Cookbooks. Given the fact that they are read far more for pleasure than for practical reasons, may certainly be considered to constitute a literary genre, however minor. Therefore, all hermeneutic techniques should be applied in their analysis (semiology, deconstruction, reader response, etc.) D Decoration. Probably the most visible new style of culinary decoration during the past decade was the dusting of all sorts of powdered spices across very large, very white platespaprika, chili powder, chopped nuts, sea salt, exotic pepper, dried crushed herbs, powdered crystallized citrus peel, cocoa, flavored sugar, etc. If one were to trace modern culinary decoration from the epoch of Antonin Carme through to the present, the comparison between a (maximal) nineteenth-century decorative pice monte and such (minimal) fine dusting would perhaps be equivalent to comparing art pompier to modernist abstraction, white background (wall, plate) and all. Even admitting that there is much bad abstraction, it is difficult to understand why this dusting technique has raised the ire of so many food critiques; and it is even more difficult to understand the general lack of comprehension of its vast practical benefits. Many food professionals to whom I have spoken see this as pure decoration, and never imagined that these dustings may simply be used as a less rigid means of seasoning. For one of the most delicate gustatory thresholds relates to salt and spices. Whether a chef might wish to utilize subtle nuances or to foreground the flavor of a certain spice, the optimal dosage differs from person to person, due to differences of taste (physiological,
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iNgestioN

A personal gastronomic alphabet

Allen S. Weiss The publication of M.F.K. Fishers An Alphabet for Gourmets in 1949the postwar moment when an increasing number of Americans were discovering the subtle but sure joys of French cookingwas a gastronomic landmark, since for perhaps the first time in the English language a popular and talented writer dealt with cuisine in the full range of its interrelated literary, historic, aesthetic, and autobiographical contexts. Given the state of theory at the beginning of this millennium, an argument for the role of personal voice within critical discourse no longer implies a radical epistemological position. As many of the major crises in the humanities have been articulated in works written, fully or partially, in the first-person singular (Nietzsche, Freud, Artaud, Bataille, Barthes, Geertz), the rhetoric of the intimate has become an integral part of contemporary hermeneutics. The reason that this is crucial in the gastronomic sphere is that it permits us to situate and express that most elusive of qualities, taste, with all of its psychological, symbolic, and sociological implications. Only then can a common ground be established for gastronomic discourse, and, more immediately, only then can we match our taste against anothers, and establish some meaning in our praise and disputes. For taste constitutes a sign of individual style, a mode of constituting the self, a mark of social position, an aesthetic gesture. While inaugurating the most intimate pleasure, cuisine simultaneously offers an incontrovertible cultural faade. Hence, against the solipsism, narcissism, and phantasms of what would be the incommunicable idiosyncrasy of pure subjective taste, must be counterbal15

psychological, sociological). The salt and pepper shakers that are nearly ubiquitous in European and American restaurants take into account this very small realm of culinary virtuality. The field is often expanded, however slightly, with paprika shakers in Hungarian restaurants, jars of chicken fat in Eastern European Jewish establishments, bottles of nuac mam in Vietnamese restaurants, salsa in Mexican luncheonettes, etc. The dusting technique simply expands such virtuality. E Eloquence. Consider the following qualifications: flavor-packed, rich, lusty, a showstopper, a flamboyant statement, an earthy enchantress, a tangy succulent delight, lip-smacking, more refined but equally appealing. The stylistic paucity of much, even most, food criticism suffers from an overdose of hyperbole mixed with an occasional zest of irony (for the negative moments) and a plethora of clichs. The rhetoric of this discourse is highly dependent upon adjectives, which are most often facile substitutes for knowledge. The above quotations, quite typical in both tone and vocabulary, come from a single review! Though the but in more refined but equally appealing gives a sense of the reviewers populist sensibility, this should not be taken as a marker of class, for the adjectival riot is typical of all levels of restaurant reviewing. A very modest proposal: either limit the number of adjectives in food reviews, or eliminate them altogether. This practice has been of inestimable help to modernist poets. In both Kantian metaphysics and everyday discourse, the ellipsis taste always implies good taste, never bad taste. The ques tion of taste therefore entails the existence of a discursive community motivated by an aesthetic imperative, and not the sheer negation of value (couched in a naive relativism) so often imposed by the tasteless. Taste demands engagement, not disengagement. It is precisely at the intersection of rhetoric, poetics and philosophy that a new sort of culinary expression defamiliarizing and destablizing will reveal unexpected depths and possibilities of taste. In The Critique of Judgement, Kant proposes a solution to the problematic of taste (i.e., the antinomy of the judgement of taste), most useful in an attempt to answer the frustrating commonplaces posed by the tasteless: each to his own taste and there is no 16 Columns

disputing taste, or I dont know if its good, but I know what I like, and it pleases me, therefore it is good. Kants theory is based on the notion of a subjective universality: the claim that beauty functions in a rhetorical mode as a demand, establishing a universal validity which is nevertheless without any regulating concept. Taste thus becomes a universal voice speaking in the imperative mode, implying the possibility of communicating private sensations, representations, and judgements; it proffers the seemingly paradoxical universality of a singular judgement. Yet Kants examination of judgements of taste, while being logically subtle, is rhetorically and lexically impoverished: the question of taste is in fact considerably more complex, admitting the intricacies of monologue and dialogue, theory and poetry, explication and seduction, obscurity and contradiction. Kantian aesthetics must be supplemented by a historicized rhetoric, in order to integrate the singularities of enunciation and situation into aesthetic judgment, all the while weighing the structures of the aesthetic (culinary) object and its variegated history. Subjective universality must be counterbalanced by an existential historicity; taste must indeed be discussed and disputed, as it is a profoundly dialogical form of experience. F Fire. One evening I received a bill at Quiltys, an excellent upscale-downtown Manhattan restaurant, on which the first item was: 1 Fire$0.00. Computer error or Nabokovian joke on the chefs name, Katy Sparks? G Gardens were the sites of the first veritable Gesamtkunstwerk, the great courtly festivals in which all the arts were staged in complex interaction. In this context, a history of the great garden feasts and famed picnics is yet to be written. Such a study would transform both the history of gardens and that of gastronomy. Consider, for example, one of the most celebrated meals in courtly history, that offered by Louis XIV at Versailles on 18 July 1668, where during the course of an entire night his guests were entertained by promenades, theater, ballet, waterworks, fireworks, and a sumptuous feast. This baroque intermingling of the arts (described by Andr Flibien, the court historiographer, in Relation de la fte de Versailles) implied an aesthetic logic revealing the synaesthetic essence of all art,

thus suggesting a reordering of the relations between the five senses, and consequently a more noble role for the arts of the table. H Herbs. In the U.S., one recent change in food presentation is emblematic. For decades, the most common culinary decoration was that infuriating, inedible sprig of parsley set alongside the main dish. In recent years, this herb is often presented deep-fried (a Southern touch), transmuting scant decoration into delightful food. This transformation of the commonplace reveals a vast range of possibilities. There exists the exotic in space and the exotic in time. During the Renaissance, spices constituted the point at which rare, exotic ingredients entered French cuisine, to a great extent as a sign of ostentation, given their exceedingly high cost: they tended to be used flauntingly and in complex mixtures. As spices became more readily available at the time of the Enlightenment, their role diminished, only to recently reappear, either in more simple uses designed to foreground their distinctive qualities, or in multicultural postmodern mlange. Today, herbs, flowers, and rare species of wild vegetables play a similar role, in which the symbolic register of ecological exoticism is not without a certain influence. (Bras, Marcon, Roellinger, Veyrat, Vongerichten...) What is wrong with the preceding paragraph? Quite simply, that it serves as a culinary screen memory. One should remember that the first Spring menu of The Four Seasons, which opened in New York in 1959, offered nasturtium leaves, dandelions, primrose beignets, and rose petal parfaitall written (more or less) in English!.
Allen s. Weiss's gastronomic alphabet will continue over the next two issues of Cabinet.

Random

Is chance possible?
An interview with Robert Kaplan

Robert Kaplan teaches at the Mathematics Department at Harvard University and is the author of the best-selling book The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero. Sina Najafi talked with him over the phone to find out how a mathematician approaches games of chance, numbers stations,1 and other apparently random phenomena.

What is a random number and how does mathematics define randomness? The most important point is this: we havent even a good definition of random numbers. And there is no such thing at this point as a random number generator because however one tries to generate random numbers there is no guarantee that you will not find a pattern in the sequences. Does seeing patterns that would allow you to predict the next number in a sequence offer any useful definition? Is that predictive ability different from the ability to find a pattern after a series has been finished? The latter is so much easier, but both are difficult problems. But here is an interesting way of approaching the question. Im going to give you a number, which is neither zero nor not zero. Ready, here it is. Zero point zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zerobored yet?zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. Eventually youll say, Are they all zeros? and Ill say I dont know. Ive only gotten to the fifty-eighth decimal place. Maybe after the ten-thousandth decimal place, it will turn out that the number isnt zero after all but at this point this number has a weird status. Its neither zero nor not zero. And this bears on the whole issue of an incomplete string of numbers. Because it is incomplete, you cant look back on it and say Ah, I see. This is the position of people who think mathematics and numbers exist in timethat they are not timelessthat if I want to tell you one-half in decimal form, I cant just say point five and all zeros. Ive actually got to go through it and tell you all the zeros. How do I do that? I dont have the time.

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The best thing you can do faced with a given string of numbers is to try every single pattern you know on it. There are a lot of patterns around, but a point comes when for all intents and purposes, you say I cant find a pattern there. But of course there might be one. Our definition of randomness is basically negative. Random means no discernible pattern as far as Im concerned.

Relatively recently, the attempt to make a random number generator has been shifted to using the background radiation of the universe to produce pure randomness. But there too, if you hook up your computer to this radiation, we will find a Gaussian curve. They are waves; theres nothing we can do about it. A Gaussian distribution is a bellshaped curve where the peak of the curve shows us what will most often happen and the ends show us the rare and infrequent. I think this speaks to something very deep in the human mindour obsession with pattern. We are creatures who survive by seeing, making, and thinking pattern. In a perfectly random distribution, we would have a straight line as opposed to a Gaussian curve because every single point would receive the same number of hits. When you say that there is no such thing as randomness, are you saying that when we throw a die 15 million times, we will not get a perfect straight line? If its a fair die, of course you would get a straight line. It is not the beginning of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, where 89 throws of a coin have come up heads because Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are dead. In pure randomness, one would get the odds so arranged that, yes, something would not happen more often than something else because of a preponderance built into the system. But in heredity, for example, if A and B are mating, each with his or her plus and minus. Youre going to get a plus and minus, and a minus and plus, which will outweigh the two pluses, on the one hand, and the two minuses on the other. You get a 1-2-1 distribution. Thats the Gaussian curve. The Gaussian distribution is a sign of a kind of ruled randomness. So the problem would then be that no throw of the dice is random; its just that we dont have enough data about the exact position where the dice are released, the force it was thrown with, etc. If we did, we could predict accurately where the dice would end up every time. This is an optimists view of the world.

Of course. Im an optimist by default. One cannot help but think causality. Kant describes this perfectly. Causality isnt something we think about; its something we think with. Just because I have not been able to find a pattern, or even if no living human has found one, it does not mean that some incredibly clever, malign figure in the universe hasnt hidden a pattern in there. So in that sense, Im also a pessimist. But its also an essentially paranoid view of the world, where beyond every event is a hidden guiding hand orchestrating all of it toward one specific end. There are two aspects to that paranoia; one is teleology and the other is Missouri. Let me give you an example. Do you hear the sounds in the background over the phone? I think it would be very hard for you to guess what the cause of the sounds is, and if there is a pattern to them. It is in fact the sound of the mailman dropping in the mail through the slot. I can predict them because I can see whats going on, but you cant. As far as you know, these are random sounds of the universe but in fact theres definitely a pattern to them. Thats why we are compelled to find a teleology. Now I see there is a letter from Cabinet here for me. It must be from you. Actually, thats no coincidence. Ive coordinated everything with the mailman so youd get it in the middle of our talk. If you open the envelope, youll find my next question in it. You see, theres nothing random in the world! The other thing is people from Missouri, who say you have to prove it to me. The feeling there is that despite my best feelings that there is a cause, Im not going to believe it until you prove it to me. Both components are strongly at work in us.

Theres a website (www.fourmilab.ch/ hotbits) that claims to produce completely random numbers based on a random decay box. I understand that computers are incapable of producing random numbers since they are operating according to an algorithm, albeit a complicated one. But has the idea of a random decay box also been discredited? Quantum mechanics predicts, a strange word to use here, behavior well. So did a lot of medieval theories, as did the theory that the sun goes around the earth. If you only add enough epicycles to it, you can get the right prediction. Quantum theory has two basic positions: either Heisenbergs, where he says there may be no randomness there but that every time we look, our looking makes it unpredictable; or Bohrs position, which is that there is randomness. After all, why should we, with our puny, causal minds, reflect the way things are, especially at the quantum mechanical level. But any definition of randomness is still one we make with our causality-drenched minds. Its a wonderfully paradoxical position. One wants to feign utter chaos. When Einstein says to Bohr that God does not play dice, hes responding to precisely these questions. There could be two versions of your position also. Is your argument that there is randomness in the universe but we cannot see it because of the human desire to see structure, or the stronger claim that there simply is no randomness in the universe? I would not even use the word desire. I would put it in Kantian terms. Kant says just as space and time are not out there but are our ways of making jigsaw puzzle pieces that our perception can put together, so too causality is our way of taking those space-time pieces and fitting them together. These causal chains have neither beginning nor end, so arguments for a first cause or a God will always fail. To think of randomness is terrifying to us; the difference between structure and randomness corresponds to the Kantian difference between the beautiful and the sublime.

18 Random

When does mathematics first begin to take randomness as a formal problem? It begins with Pascal. He comes up with Pascals triangle, which indicates how things will fall out given a distribution of chances. Buffon, the French naturalist, found that if you take a needle (its called Buffons needle problem) of, say, one unit and draw a series of parallel lines on a board that are just a little more than one unit apart, and throw the needle down on the board and count the number of times it lands across a line, as opposed to the number of times it doesnt, you get a remarkable ratio which is a fraction of pi. It turns out to have to do with the radius of a circle. After this, theories of randomness are developed in England by nineteenth-century scientists and mathematicians interested in statistical behavior and hoping that if you cant see how individuals are behaving, at least you can see rules to the mass. The best examples in mathematics of randomness are prime numbers, which are the building blocks of our numbers, and have defied our understanding. We simply dont know the pattern of the primes. Given one, we simply cant predict the next. Its been a problem for two thousand years. When I say, we dont know the pattern, Im assuming there is one, but there might be none. We do know something statistically, something which Gauss discovered in the early nineteenth century. As you go out into higher and higher numbers, the number of primes gets closer and closer to n over log n, the natural logarithm of the number. That gives a statistical grasp of what we still have to understand individually. But if you ask a mathematician about primes, hell probably say, We just havent found the pattern yet. Do you know about the Chudnovsky brothers who are counting pi to enormous lengths? They converted their home in New York into a giant computer lab and their only purpose is to find the next decimal place of pi. Pi is an irrational number, which means that it not only goes on forever but that it does not have a repeating pattern. They now have billions of decimal places.2

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Thomas Ruff Stern 17h 51m - 22,1990 Courtesy Zwirner + Wirth, New York

I know youve been researching the anonymous number stations on shortwave radio. Is there a method to their madness? These arent random numbers. There are many conjectures as to their purposes: that they are for spies communicating (These transmissions continue before, during, and after the so-called Cold War.); that these are smugglers communicating information; that its diplomatic traffic. It is conjectured that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) may be responsible, as are the National Communications Agency and the KKN, which is apparently part of the State Department. There are hundreds of them; some of them are live voices, and some of them are generated voices. Apparently, if you find countries in which the Voice of America is broadcast, there are sometimes number stations on a frequency close to the Voice of America frequency, or sometimes, as in the case of Liberia, they will be packaged in on the same frequency. Without actually deciphering the code, how can you be sure that they are not random numbers? For a number of reasons. They are expensive to produce, and expensive means probably government support, which means purpose. There are also certain stations that broadcast single letters again and again. They are called SLHM, Single Letter High-Frequency Monitoring. One conjecture is that they are keeping the channel open for possible later transmission of code, because there are apparently occasional bursts of code. A second conjecture is that they are navigational markers. Another conjecture is that they are weather data transmitters, or measurements of water levels. So you would wager on a pattern being there because you think theres an author behind the stations. It reminds me of the film Pi. Did you see it? No, I was told to avoid it..

1 Numbers stations are shortwave stations which consist solely of apparently random strings of numbers being read out. There are hundreds of such stations in many different languages. No one is certain as to who is responsible for these stations or what their function is, but most listeners agree that they are related to espionage. A four-CD set of recordings is available from Irdial under the name The Conet Project. Their very informative website at www.ibmpcug.co.uk/~irdial/conet.htm also has some sample recordings posted. Simon Masons book Secret Signals, The Euronumbers Mystery is now out of print but is available at www.btinternet.com/~simon.mason/page30. html. Donald Schimmels book The Underground Frequency Guide: A Directory of Unusual, Illegal, and Covert Radio Communications (Solano Beach, CA: Hightext, 1994) is in print and can be ordered through the web. 2 The current record is held by Yasumasa Kanada and Daisuke Takahashi from the University of Tokyo with 51 billion digits of pi. An article called The Mountains of Pi on the Chudnovsky brothers appeared in The New Yorker issue of March 2, 1992.

20 Random

Not just for silver foxes

Louisa Kamps

If bingo still conjures the image of some twenty-odd snowbirds, huddled around rickety card tables in the church basement or Elks Club on Tuesday afternoon, perhaps you dont get out as often as you should. Small-scale games are stronger than ever, and bingo has even reached the big time, in Vegas, Atlantic City, and, most dramatically, Mashantucket, Connecticut, home of the Foxwoods casino and Americas largest bingo hall. Seating up to 3,200 players at a time, Foxwoods bingo parlor is jumbo-jethangar. It is both vast and equipped, as one of the halls managers points out, with such amenities as a new, state of the art smokesucking system (When you used to have 3,000 people out there, and 1,000 of them were smoking, it would look like a cloud across the room. ); waitresses serving coffee, tea, and choice of soft drinks; and very clean, comfortable cushioned seats. The extra padding might be a positive incentive for senior citizens, who flock to Foxwoods on buses from all over the Northeast, but, as officials at the casino are proud to report, the bingo halls latest improvementa video arcade where players can mark their cards by touching a computer screenis even luring young technophiliacs to the game. Given that ancestors of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, which owns Foxwoods, were once violently driven from the land around the casino by colonists (the Indian population in the area dropped from approximately 8,000 in 1600 to 151 by 1774), its tough to begrudge the Tribe the voluminousness of their present-day gambling operation, which, having expanded exponentially since it opened in 1992, now looms like a shimmering mini-Monte Carlo over the green fields of eastern Connecticut. Still, the vigorous bingo boosterism I encounter when I call up to speak to casino employees about the game suggests that Foxwoods must always do a tricky dance to distract from the fact that it has built its multibillion dollar success on slowlyor not so

slowlyand steadily draining the pockets of its 40,000 daily patrons. Mike Holder, V.P . of bingo operations, waxes enthusiastically about the financial and social value of playing bingo at Foxwoods: You can sit at a slot machine, drop all your money in half an hour. But with bingo, you can buy in at $10 to $500, sit there for four hours and have a good time with your friends. (When I ask if Im detecting a little friendly rivalry with Foxwoods brisk slot business, Bruce MacDonald, the head of P for the Tribe, whos .R. listening in on my call, cant help laughing nervously, Thats fair! Thats fair! He seems relieved when Holder explains that the relationship between bingo and slots at the casino is actually symbiotic. There was a concern at one time that slot machines would kill bingo, but its had the opposite effect, Holder says. Slot players sit down to play the slots, and they see the bingo and become interested in it. Bingo drives the slot business, and vice versa. ) Robin Oddo, a former waitress in the bingo hall whos worked as a bingo caller for the last six years, expresses similar excitement about the game. The variety of games played at Foxwoods, she tells me, is virtually limited by the imagination. Theres Full Card; Double Bingo, where youve got two rows side by side; Hard Way, where you can use the middle free space. Theres Small Picture Frame, Triple Bingo, and Four Corners, as well as letter patterns, like T, L, and X. Then there are the quickie games, where you call the numbers fastthey get the blood flowing! Though she says she occasionally has to soothe the frayed nerves of players who think theyve won when they havent, Oddo says the atmosphere in the room is generally genial. Patrons, many of whom bring along Beanie Babies and troll dolls (you knowthe little ones with purple hair) for good luck, cheer each other on. (Here MacDonald, listening in, again pipes up: As soon as the caller

says the first number, it goes dead quiet in the hall, like a library, he says. Then when someone calls out Bingo!shoosh! The sound goes right back up. ) For Oddo, the biggest thrill is calling the annual Firecracker Bingo game on July 1, the anniversary of the opening of the casino, when the prize payout is a million dollars. Whenever the prize is $5000 or higher, Oddo tries to interview the winner, inviting them up onto her podium. You try to ask the patron their name, where theyre from, what theyre going to do with the money. Maybe theyll say pay the bills, buy a new car, or go gamble. With the Firecracker, though, you usually cant interview the winner, because theyre so stunned theyre just off in their own world. Because she watches bingo day in and day out, I have to ask Oddo the obvious question, Does she ever takes a busmans holiday and play bingo herself? Oddo cant help laughing, In a blue moon! Then she takes a second to think how to put it diplomatically. Its something that just doesnt grab me. I guess Im protective of my dollars; me, my child, and my granddaughter come first. Im just a cautious person by nature. .

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Bingo in Swedish is bingo

Mats Bigert

On my way down to the bingo hall, I ran into a little armada of walkers parked beside the entrance. How the owners of these vehicles had managed to get down the remaining steps is a mystery: these ancient clients are worthy of archaeological research. If you want to do some time-travel back to the 60s, this is the place to visit. Only the staff belongs to a younger generation, and they look like they were born right there and then, in the bingo cradle of the utopian Swedish welfare state. The staff move between tables full of fossilized people. The scene calls for the kind of whispering usually reserved for churches. In here, you talk quietly. The only thing shattering the oppressive- silence is ecstatic screams of BINGO!!! which occur about every three minutes. I am guided to a seat beside an old lady, and I sit down and scan the room. The first and most striking impression is of the smokeeveryone here is puffing away. At a time of anti-smoking fascism, the bingo hall turns out to be a natural preserve for the worst ravages of nicotine. On my left I notice a glass-enclosed chamber to which non-smokers are banished. They seem disconnected from the rest, and its not often that you hear a bingo scream from in there. I buy a bingo card for about three dollars. Its made of thin, pink paper with the word BINGO printed horizontally and a series of five-by-five squares with numbers between one and seventy-five running vertically. Across the other side of the smoking chamber is a raised platform where a bingo caller is sitting behind a microphone. His voice is the bingo players North Star that guides the lucky winner toward a crossed-out line of numbers. The voice is monotonous and nearly hypnotic as the caller shouts outdated Swedish mens names to indicate which letter column the number is in: Gustav 12, a one and a two. Ivar 27 two, seven , Nils 33, double 3..Oskar 60, a six and an O To get a bingo you have to fill in a horizontal row, and then there are more prizes for two, three, and four filled rows. Filling in the whole card is our final destination, and the largest prize goes to anyone who can do that before the bingo caller has shouted out 59 numbers. Only crosses and circles are allowed for marking the numbers; 22 Random

any other geometric excesses mean immediate disqualification. You can rent a pencil for about a quarter. I wait until an older mans orgiastic scream brings the game to a finish and I focus on the next rounds virgin numbers. When the caller announces the new game, and the first number hacks its way through the smoke to me, I disappear into complete and total concentration. It turns out that I need all my faculties as a sentient being to keep up with listening and checking to see if the ephemeral numbers being droned have any relevance for my little card. The physical environment disappears and I enter the abstract kingdom of real numbers. I listen and cross out, listen and cross out. For a millisecond I contemplate whether circles are a more efficient way of marking, if the added length of the strokes of the cross are longer than the circumference of the circle. Plus, you dont need to lift your pen from the paper, which is clearly a waste of time. But the cross does feel more aggressive and better suited to the tense mood thats suddenly overtaken me, and I quickly give up my side thoughts. This subliminal digression is enough for me to miss a number. Desperate to catch up, I turn to my table companion who turns out to be a quintessential example of programmable humanity. Without lifting her glance, she gives me the last five numbers in rapid succession. She seems to have noticed how flustered I am and has pegged me as a beginner. Dont start playing this game, she says, still with-out letting her own bingo card out of her field of vision. Ive been here since ten in the morning without getting a single row. See that envelope over there? I was on my way to the bank to pay the rent but I made the mistake of passing by the bingo hall. I thought Id come in for a couple of games but Ive been sitting here, whats the time? Jesus, 4 oclock for six hours now and I only have half the rent left. Now I need to win big to get out of this hole! Nevertheless, Im surprised about how long it takes to gamble away all your money through bingo. In most modern games of chance, this can happen pretty quickly, but here whole days could pass before youre completely wiped out. It seems to go with

the territory: the slowness, the monotony, and the control that comes with pitching in 23 dollars per game. You cant trump your way out of this swampy existence by suddenly raising the stakes. Everything in this bingo hall seems to be a relic from the golden age of social democracy and solidarity, where everyone was supposed to have the same conditions and the same right to a slice of the big social pie, for better or worse. And if for some reason you end up doing so badly that you get caught in the number loops and lose all your hard-earned retirement savings and social security money, its for a good cause anyway. Ninety-five per cent of all the money accumulated by the Swedish government through bingo goes directly to the good fairies running communal athletic organizations. If we look for the roots of bingo, we end up going back a long time, to Italy. Gioco del Loto, a game of lots, which eventually became bingo, was invented in 1576 by a nobleman in Geneva by the name of Benedetto Gentile. He developed a game with five numbers between 1 and 90 which is still played in Italy today. The game spread all over Europe, gave birth to many variants, and eventually ended up in the US. In 1929, the American gaming company E.S. Lowe launched the version of bingo that we know today. The word bingo is of unknown origin, but according to one story is a mutation of beano, which in turn is supposed to come from the beans used to mark the cards. During the Depression, the low-cost game spread like wildfire over the American continent, only to be hurled back at Europe in its new form during World War II. I get in touch with the director of the bingo hall, Krister Fredriksson, who has run bingo halls since the early 60s, and ask him how the game ended up in Sweden. At the entrance to the bingo hall where Fredriksson has his office, there are two doors side-byside. It turns out that one is for smokers and one for non-smokers, another example of the nicotine segregation that runs so deep in the world of bingo. So how did bingo end up in this long, skinny Nordic country saturated with Lutheran morality? 23
Photographs: Mats Bigert

In the 60s, the game was imported to Sweden by a small communal athletic organization in Gunnarstorp, in the south of Sweden. They were in England on a factfinding trip, and they discovered the games potential for scraping together money for the new Swedish athletics movement that shorter work hours and newly won leisure time had given rise to. Raffles and yard sales were given up for bingo halls, the new poison. Since being introduced, the number of game halls has multiplied like rabbits. In 1974 the turnover was around 100 million dollars. Today, its almost 300 million dollars. And what about the technical side? What did bingo hardware look like in the beginning? At first, there was a set of balls in a bag that you shook, and took out a number that you called. Then came whats called the bingo cage, where you put the numbers in what looks like a large hamster wheel. We have one here in case the computers crash, or if we have to play without electricity. I envision a dark cellar where ghost-like figures lit by candles play bingo the oldfashioned way, while bombs are falling outside. After the drum came a variant where table tennis balls were put in a plastic container with a vacuum cleaner motor attached to it, which makes the balls shoot up one at a time into a tube. And in the 80s the Swedish Lottery Commission finally decided to computerize the whole thing because of cheating. But they still use people to call out the numbers, which is nice. Its really interesting to listen to how different callers sound. Some of them sing out the numbers, for example. Are there trends within this field? I think I can assure you that no one in our hall sings. But every hall usually develops its own character where the callers take after one another. If you go to Gothenburg, theres a really huge difference between how they sound compared to Stockholm. 24 Random

Take the letters for example. In Uppsala, they say Olle instead of Oskar for the O! I go out into the hall and listen to the caller to see if I can tune in to her distinctive character. Unlike other halls, here the caller sits at a podium with no glass, which gives the shout a familiar ring. The shout is clear and measured, but soon becomes too perfect. I decide that in a real bingo hall the call has to come from a hermetically sealed box from which no false sense of familiarity can leak out. I go to Las Vegas Bingo in downtown Stockholm and find what Ive been looking for: a real hardcore bingo hall. This is where the professionals come. When I speak with Pia Carlstedt, who has worked in the hall as a caller for twelve years, she keeps talking about the big players. The big players come here every day, seven days a week. We open at ten in the morning and close at twelve at night. Some of the big players sit here all day; they even bring their own chairs. We know most of them well and they dont hold back from shouting and screaming if one of the personnel makes a blunder or calls too quickly. Is it important then to mind your step? It cant be easy rattling off numbers forever. Someone like me whos been working here for so long can now manage the numbers nearly perfectly for about half an hour, but when I step downits like Ive beenIve beensomewhere else. It sounds like a kind of meditation, as if youre detaching your consciousness. Of course it can be relaxing, but then you have to be really used to it. You do have the satellite halls to keep an eye on as well. The calls from the city center are transmitted to five unmanned halls out in the suburbs of Stockholm. You hear those other halls in your earphones all the time. And then you have your own

hall to look after, if someone has bingo, which prize it is, and so on. I heard that you and your colleagues use numbers as names. Do you ever use your real names? No, just numbers that are changed every day. But actually we have talked about sticking to specific numbers. Today my name is 5 and tomorrow maybe itll be 2. Weve now gone a few more steps up the ladder of abstraction and I begin to wonder quietly if this bombardment by numbers can be good for anyone. In one pro-bingo article I read, the writer claims that the game prevents senility, but only if you play three cards at once. However, the pace of the numbers makes anything more than four cards a mental impossibility, he says. OK, but what good does a mathematically alert mind do against heart attacks, lung cancer, and thrombosis? On closer examination, bingo turns out to be one dangerous occupation. Yup, a few people have died here. Gotten heart attacks or strokes and fallen off their perches. We also have problems with junkies who come down and go berserk, break chairs, and then all of the old women end up in huge fistfights. Its busy around here alright. .

21 aphorisms
John Roberts

1 There are no errors in art, only various forms of corrigibility. 2 There are only errors in art, only they are disguised as various forms of incorrigibility. 3 In art we should not confuse errors with mistakes. Just as mistakes are not accidents, accidents are not failures, and failure is not incompetence. 4 To fail in art is to be neither incompetent nor in error, but to fail in art is no excuse for incompetence or error. 5 Some accidents in art demand the undivided attention of the artist; this is because the best accidents are the result of ambition, the worst of incuriousness. 6 Authentic accidents in art are found not made, but what is found is always made. 7 For the artist to recognize an unintended consequence as meaningful is to bring back into reflection the force of the artists critical powers. To recognize an unintended consequence, therefore, is to already have taken value from it. 8 Assimilating the unintended consequence is what drives the risk of meaning. 9 Fashion a coin from every mistake, said Wittgenstein; but this is only worthwhile if you have something in the bank already. 10 In psychoanalysis, to talk of mistakes is to give the inconscient speech; in art, to talk of mistakes is to give the inconscient work to do. 11 The pleasures of recognizing the accidental are not to be confused with the pleasures of interpretation. Rather, they are a recognition of the point where power convulses itself. 12 To grasp the meaning of an error is to grasp the instructiveness of failure, but there can be no instructive failures without the desire to avoid errors. 13 Accidents are what reason leaves unguarded, not what makes reason lose face. 14 Artists cannot make mistakes; however, they can mistake what they think is unmistakable. 15 Acting on errors in philosophy allows thought to reestablish its critical responsibility; acting on accidents in art allows art to recover its future. 16 To know the truth of the accidental is indivisible from self-will. 17 To admit ones errors from a position of power is to give moral authority to intellectual ambition. To transform ones errors into an aesthetic is to lose all intellectual ambition. 18 For the philosopher the threat of incompetence is a crisis continually stalled. For the artist the threat of incompetence is a crisis continually performed. 19 The artist wants to resist what is taken for competence, but does not want to be taken to be incompetent. 20 To know the truth of incompetence is to know that art cannot speak from where it is most knowledgeable. 21 The performance of incompetence is the victory of failing over the failure of beauty..

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Marilyn Monroe and I

Jesse Lerner

In the fall of 1999, a major retrospective of Andy Warhols art filled Mexicos Palacio de Bellas Artes, the countrys most important art space. Facing the deco-Maya masks by Federico Mariscal that adorn the building, Warhols Cow Wallpaper (1966) stared blankly across the buildings marble rotunda. It might well have been a scene out of the late experimental filmmaker and painter Fernando Sampietros book-length 1983 poem Marilyn Monroe y yo [Marilyn Monroe and I]. In that poem, an excerpt of which is reprinted here, the narrator and the actress wander through a hyper-Mexican landscape crossing paths with the likes of Dali, Warhol, and Duchamp. Together, the Mexican artist and the Hollywood screen goddess attend meetings of the Communist International, grope each other on the stairs of Chichn Itzs observatory, and struggle to overcome the language barrier that separates them. More than simply a paean to frustrated male desire, the poem functions as an allegory of the conflicted relationship between US mass culture and a generation of avant-garde artists of the Latin American left, and anticipates much of contemporary Mexican culture. A marginal figure within a marginal cinema, with Marilyn Monroe y yo, Sampietro emerges from obscurity with a witty tale of globalization and longing in the postmodern age. Earlier generations of Latin American leftists did not share Sampietros fascination with the goddesses of Hollywoods Olympus. The Frankfurt Schools hostility to the culture industry combined with cultural nationalism to make for a damning perspective on this sort of import. Emerging from the decade-long civil war that was the Mexican Revolution, the prevailing leftist perspective frankly admired the technological accomplishments of the industrial north, but viewed the cultural context that produced such great wealth with more caution. The aesthetic project emerging from the Revolution promised to reconcile the mechanization of mass production with the cultural traditions of indigenous America. For example, in his grand mural for the 1940 Golden Gate International Exhibition in San Francisco, Pan American Unity, also known as Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and South of This Continent, Diego Rivera 26 Random

painted a steel press from an auto assembly plant merging seamlessly with a stone idol of the Aztec deity Coatlicue. The culture of the industrial age is merged with an older, stronger Pre-Columbian tradition, creating a new synthesis. The technology of the capitalist oppressors is salvaged and reoriented toward worthier goals, but their arts go into the dustbin of history. In fact, the culture of the North is often depicted as bearing reactionary values antithetical to the revolutionary process. Consider Josep Renaus embittered series of collages entitled The American Way ofLife. A Spanish Communist exiled in Mexico, Renau gathered images from Life and Fortune magazines, which he would then reassemble into a damning critique of capitalisms inner mechanisms. Fragments lifted from the free markets propaganda machine are deployed to critique the system that created them. In The American Way of Life, Marilyn appears juxtaposed with piles of decaying corpses of war dead, capitalists shitting gold coins, nuclear weapons, and the sanitized, sunny images of fifties American advertisements. Owing more than a little to photocollagist John Heartfield, whose work for AIZ first awakened Renaus interest in collage, The American Way of Life redirects the seductive gloss of the original ads toward ends that are diametrically opposed to it. Renaus attitude toward Marilyn could not contrast more dramatically with Sampietros. Her close-up in the photocollage Hollywood Moloch makes it clear that for Renau she is unequivocally part of the bread and circuses designed to distract the proletariat from the contradictions of capitalism. Sampietros crude animations, also employing appropriated images taken from mass circulation periodicals, send Marilyn careening through scenes from the Cuban Revolution and Coca-Cola ads, creating juxtapositions reminiscent of those in his poem. However, in the generation separating Renau and Sampietro, the meaning of US pop culture for the youth of the Latin American middle-class changed dramatically. Imported styles and systems of signification became the preferred language of rebellion. The prime example of this is, of course, rock

and roll, so recurrent in Sampietros poem, an import that was nationalized at the level of both consumption and local production. Contrary to the criticisms of more orthodox Marxists, this imported style represents not the triumph of cultural imperialism but a reflection of youthful dissatisfaction with a repressive state, especially in the aftermath of the 1968 government massacre of student demonstrators in Tlatelolco Square. The discourse of cultural imperialism only served to reinscribe the boundaries of the nation-state in its moment of gravest crisis. Sampietros poetry begs for an understanding of culture as process, in which signifiers can change meanings in anarchic, unpredictable ways. Rather than an annihilation of the local in the face of the bombardment of imports, the foreign becomes indigenous in the moment of consumption. Any lingering sense of an authentic point of origin is lost. Sampietros films similarly exemplify a relationship to imported mass culture more ambivalent and complex than that of Renau and Rivera, one that reveals much about the contradictions negotiated by his generation of small-gauge experimental filmmakers in the 1970s and early 1980s. Known as the superocheros, because of their preference for super-8 film, this part of the national cinema relates less to the contemporaneous nuevo cine mexicano, and its preoccupation with feature-length narratives, than it does to the experimentation going on elsewhere in the visual arts. A part of Sampietros interest in cinema clearly stems from a Warholian fascination with celebrity. Standing in front of posters of Humphrey Bogart and Charlie Chaplin, he addresses the camera directly in one untitled short, stating: I want to be an actor, but thats just a fantasy, a fantasy that I am fulfilling at this very moment. Just as Warhol could elevate his troubled coterie to celebrity status with the designation superstar, Sampietro inserts himself into the inner circles of Hollywood by sheer force of will. In his short, unadorned, nearly structuralist films, he presents himself as a postmodern flneur wandering through public spaces with a head full of anarchist notions. Though at one point he collaborated with the pioneering conceptualist Felipe Ehremberg on a film performance (which was interrupted

by a police arrest), for the most part he worked alone, independent of movements and groups. It is perhaps why today, years after Sampietros death, many of his films read as private rituals, defying attempts to impose meaning on them. His films are filled with ambiguous images: beer bottles that arc into the frame and smash against a wall; long, deadpan takes of national petroleum industry facilities; and Magritte-like allegories of landscape and its representation. Marilyn Monroe y yo, however, offers a rich set of clues that reveal much about his preoccupations. Travel forward in time eleven years after the publication of Marilyn Monroe y yo, to a Chiapas coffee plantation not far from the Chamula, Tzeltal, and Tzotzil villages where Sampietro obsessively filmed all the Coke and Pepsi signs. In a 1994 photograph by Oscar Meneses, we see four Warhol silkscreened portraits of Marilyn in a revoutionary scenario unimaginable for Sampietro or Renau. Menesess documentary image records the take-over of a Chiapaneco coffee plantation owners dining room by Zapatista rebels. Here, Pop enters the Mayan world, like the Coca-Cola bottles that so impressed Sampietro in San Cristobal de las Casas. Here, Marilyn becomes a trophy, a symbol of surplus value, expropriated by the landowners and then reclaimed by armed revolutionaries. The silkscreen, like the soft drink or Monroe herself, is once again recast and reinterpreted by active consumers with their own agendas. Perhaps the superficiality of celebrity interests these indigenous socialists less than the staking of a proprietary claim. Marilyn functions as stage prop for the photo-op of mediaconscious native revolutionaries. The older model of cultural imperialism is eclipsed by a more dynamic process that refashions cultural content according to specific historical contexts, and Marilyn Monroe is liberated from the dogmatic interpretations offered at the international meeting of communists that she attends in the poem. Free at last, she reinvents herself, along with Fernando Sampietro, as a Mexican anarchist..

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Fina Liquidambar, Angel Albino Corso, Chiapas, 1994. Photo by Omar Meneses / La Jornada

Marilyn Monroe y yo
An excerpt from a new English translation of Fernando Sampietros poem

To all the clochards of the world and also for those who believe they know more than I do. In the future there will be no more private property! I see Marilyn Monroe, she is on sale, she is on a poster, I buy it without thinking twice about it. One night I dreamt that she and I were sitting on the sand on a calm beach by the calm sea, illuminated by artificial light, in a bright blue swimsuit she smiled. When I awake Marilyn is no longer in the bed, nor in the house, I look through the window, Marilyn Monroe is outside, I run out to see her. How fun it is when we throw the bathing suits onto the ground and go in to swim naked! To embrace and kiss the naked Marilyn Monroe in the water is something unimaginable. While we dry ourselves in the sun lying on the sands I recite two poems to her: Sensation by Arthur Rimbaud and Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan, she smiles again. We met Pablo Picasso, when painting one must get sparks out of ice this was his painting, this is his painting, this will be his painting. We also met Duchamp, his name was Marcel, he was called Marcel Duchamp, he died on October the second nineteen sixty eight, he died in his sleep, he had worked that day. To understand all Marcel Duchamps work one must have thought beforehand in the air.

Surviving is whats important, surviving to be able to live in this chaotic world, we change our ideology, What does it matter if youre an anarchist? What does it matter if youre a communist? What does it matter if youre a fascist? What does it matter if youre a nihilist? Thats our ideology, to adapt to reality. To adapt to the surroundings as chameleons do. To be a good anarchist is a great responsibility. One strange day we arrived, Marilyn Monroe and I, like the birds that fly south in winter to a meeting of anarchists. I didnt know that anarchists met on strange days. We talked about the mess the world is in, we left at dawn. The following year we didnt return, neither the year after, we never went back. Tobacco kills us if we smoke more than we can take, we like tobacco. We dont know why we were in a magnificent international meeting of communists, we felt as if we were international anti-communists, we who at that time were international communists, thats what always happens to us when this happens to us. We dont know why we were in a magnificent international meeting of fascists, we felt as if we were international anti-fascists, we who at that time were international fascists, that is what always happens to us when this happens to us.

28 Random

One of the greatest pyramids in Chichen Itza and in the whole world is the observatory pyramid, going up the narrow staircase behind her, I couldnt resist the temptation of sliding my hand between her legs, she didnt stop, we reached the top as if we hadnt gone up, the landscape is dull, the sky covers everything, there are no stars to be seen, time went by without our realizing until the sky was covered with stars, the moon appeared and we returned quickly by motorcycle. Without wanting to we arrived at a meeting of pacifists, first we told them that what was important was to take an almost non-existent decision: Peace for all men, and also for all women. Then we didnt say anything and they didnt talk either, we arrived as we left, we left as we had arrived, thinking about peace, wishing only for peace, though this means war with ourselves. Marilyn went to a meeting of feminist women, to tell them that meetings are useless to liberate women, that they should stop having meetings, because each woman is able to liberate herself without the help of others, and so liberated them from having meetings. San Cristobal Las Casas, is another place in Mexico where they keep up native traditions while drinking Coca-Cola. We went up a hill near this folkloric town, only the wind in the trees could be heard, we got there because we must always be somewhere, we dont infringe on the landscape, one can be here, we forgot the others, we remembered the Martians that dont exist, without our realizing a couple of natives go by, he is carrying a machete, she doesnt see us, when we went down the hill we didnt remember that we had seen them from up close, we didnt remember until we remembered them.

Andy Warhol came to our house one Sunday, he brought along his Polaroid camera, he took a few pictures of us, we served him a whisky without ice but cold, as he knows he likes, we drank purified water, we brought out the papers where we had written the poems, he kept one or we gave it to him, he wanted to make an airplane and we told him how, he is going to launch it from the top of the Empire State Building, he told us that he wont forget us, we had a lot of fun with his newly taken photos, he left without saying good-bye. Luis Bunuel knocked on the door one night, we didnt know if we were in the house only he found out. At the end of the long inside staircase one level below the base of the pyramid of the Temple of Inscriptions, this is in Palenque, there is the most spectacular burial crypt in pre-Hispanic America in colors, outside the pyramid we ate some mushrooms, we felt like angels, we felt we were flying, a man was sweeping the steps of the pyramid when we were leaving and we had gone. We dont believe in God, both of us are atheists, Marilyn is the worst, Im the worst.

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No God created us, we created the Gods, mankind has created all its Gods in search of an absurd refuge. We understood classical music after hearing rock and roll, Get Off My Cloud by the Rolling Stones impressed us as much as the unique Ninth Symphony by Ludwig Van Beethoven, one mustnt confuse one type of music with another, every single piece has its time to be listened to or not. To the pyramids of Teotihuacan she didnt want to go, Marilyn told me shed already seen them on a postcard. We dont believe in God, we are both atheists, Marilyn is the best, I am the best. Each has created himself and herself, as he or she is. We are used to reading newspapers, the red criminal section of yellow tabloids makes us black with anger. Christopher Columbus discovered America, Hernan Cortes conquered Mexico, Hidalgo made Mexico independent, I was born in Mexico. Mexico is in America, America is on Earth and Earth is in the solar system and in the Universe, and the Universe is unknown; if it has a limit, we dont know where it is.

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Josep Renau Hollywood Moloch, 1965

Salvador Dali doesnt want to be in this book, but we want him to be here. We are still that type of person who when we hear the sound of an airplane, we look up to see it. Karl Marx was a Marxist, Lenin studied Marx, Mao was a Chinese, Che Guevara lived. Its strange that Marilyn was also a little girl, its strange that I was also a little boy.

She bursts out laughing. That laugh sounds strange in the dark room. We remain silent for a moment. Night has fallen, I barely make out the pale mark of her face. Her black dress blends in with the shadow which invades the room. I take the cup where there is still a little tea and bring it to my lips. The tea is cold. I feel like smoking, but darent. I have the painful impression that we dont have anything to say to each other. Still the day before yesterday I could think of so many questions: where she had been, what she had done, whom she had met. It interested me only to the extent in which Marilyn had given herself with all her soul. I was no longer curious: all the countries and all the cities where she had been and all the men who have courted her and whom maybe she has loved, dont matter, deep down all that is indifferent to her: sparkles of sun on the surface of a dark and cold sea. She is before me, I cant recall when we last met and now we dont have anything to say to each other. For the first time I feel lonely and Marilyn is lonely like me and there is no solution because there is no problem.. Translated by Jesse Lerner and Isabelle Marmasse
Special thanks to Carlos Sampietro, Jaime Sampietro, Rubn Ortiz Torres, and Rita Gonzlez. The poem in its entirety can be found at www.immaterial.net/cabinet.

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Trickster eye: some thoughts on ocular prostheses

Frances Richard

Grandiosity and depression are inversions of each other. Fantasies of extraordinary potency and sensations of nagging lack are linked phenomena in the psyche, and so it follows that a similar polarity might arise in the somatic imagination, between extrasensory ability and sensory wounding. In this light, consider the glass eye. Or rather, the artificial eye, for contemporary versions are rarely made of glass. Merging intimate bodily function with highly artificial fabrication; representing both use-value and decoration; versions of which have been made for thousands of years although science continues to experiment with radical technologies: the ocular prosthesis, obviously, originates in response to injury. Its presence denotes an irreparable damage to the sense most privileged in Western phenomenological tradition. But as a screen or decoy for lost sight, the unseeing, removable eye becomes a node around which paradoxical ideas about vision crystallize. A false eye is not prosthetic in the way a wooden leg isit cannot replace lost function. That is, it cannot replace it for the wearer. A false eye does remedy harm done to vision, but it is other peoples vision of the wearer that gets corrected. The appearance of the world is not preserved for the one whose sight has been impaired, but that persons appearance is restored in the eyes of the world. And so on. Contemporary ophthalmic prosthetics achieve a high degree of naturalistic illusion, so much so that after photos in the brochures of ocularists are themselves rebuses for tricks played by appearance. Following the circular narrative of these medical information sites1 (which look as much as is professionally seemly like ads for contact lenses those transparent, innocently functional cousins of the false eye) we understand that a wound to vision can be made invisible, and furthermore, that we are looking at a picture offering visual proof of that invisibility. Such shimmering oscillations in meaning are the bailiwick of cultural tricksters, and they seem endemic to thoughts about the disembodied or unseeing eye. Vision/blindness, body/object, concealment/display: the false eye is trompe loeil to the nth degree, 32 Random
Naomi Ben-Shahar Fragmented Photo 1, 2000

a profound cosmetic, a meta-corporeal trick. Of course, to the person using one, the prosthesis is a fact of life, not a criticocultural bibelot. But in navigating trauma and reconstruction, in learning to compensate for lost binocular vision and depth perception, and to carry off the artificial as natural, perhaps the wearer2 becomes as much a trickstera player in the realm of interpretation, appearance, and desire as the ocularist who moulds, fits, and paints the eye. Coyote was going along and as he came over the brow of a hill he saw a man taking his eyes out of his head and throwing them up into a cottonwood tree. There they would hang until he cried out Eyes come back! Then his eyes would return to his head. Coyote wanted very much to learn this trick and begged and begged until the man taught him. But be careful, Coyote, the man said. Dont do this more than four times in one day. Of course not. Why would I do that? said Coyote. When the man left, Coyote took his eyes out and threw them into the cottonwood tree. He could see for miles then, see over the low hills, see where the stream went, see the shape of things. When he had done this four times, he thought, That mans rule is made for his country. I dont think it applies here. This is my country. For a fifth time he threw his eyes into the tree and for a fifth time he cried Eyes come back! But they didnt come back. Poor Coyote stumbled about the grove, bumping into trees and crying. He couldnt think what to do, and lay down to sleep. Before too long, some mice came by and, thinking Coyote was dead, began to clip his hair to make a nest. Feeling the mice at work, Coyote let his mouth hang open until he caught one by the tail. Look up in that tree, Brother Mouse, said Coyote, talking from the side of his mouth. Do you see my eyes up there? Yes, said the mouse. They are all swollen from the sun. Theyre oozing a little. Flies have gathered on them. The mouse offered to retrieve the eyes, but Coyote didnt trust him. Give me one of your eyes, he said. The mouse did so, and Coyote put the little

black ball into the back of his eye socket. He could see a little now, but had to hold his head at an odd angle to keep the eye in place. He stumbled from the cottonwood grove and came upon Buffalo Bull. Whats the matter, Coyote? asked the Bull. The Buffalo took pity on him when he heard the story, and offered one of his own eyes. Coyote took it and squeezed it into his left eye socket. Part of it hung out. It bent him down to one side. Thus he went on his way. 3 As told by mythographer Lewis Hyde, this Navajo story contains both the promise of fantastic sight and the trauma of ocular injury. Removable eyes, injured eyes, and prosthetic eyes all appear here. Such tales, according to Hyde, are meant to be funny. But they are also a kind of medicine. Eyejuggler is not just a critique of Coyotes egotism; its telling plays a role in any healing ritual intended to cure diseases of the eye... As entertainment, the story stirs up a fantasy of amusing disorder; as medicine, it knits things together again after disorder has left a wound. 4 The ethereal medicine of storytelling administers itself via imagination, and the artificial eye is an imaginative object twice over. On some level, all prostheses require the as if belief that enlivens surrogates, butas Elaine Scarry describesvision is uniquely linked to imaginative powers. Imagination, like the replacement eye, intrudes upon the bodys borders, because through vision one seems to become disembodied, either because one seems to have been transported hundreds of feet beyond the edges of the body out into the external world, or instead because the images of objects from the external world have themselves been carried into the interior of the body as perceptual content, and seem to reside there, displacing the dense matter of the body itself. 5 In the surrogate eye, the line between perceptual content and material existence blurs. Thus Coyote can see the shape of things only because he has scattered himself, disarranged his perception by 33

dissolving his bodily borders. Because he is a trickster, he recuperates some vision, although his own matter remains displaced. Absence is not erased, but an image/object from the external world is brought to reside within it. The wound is decorated, filled, adjusted, soothed. This basic craving to imagine ways of knitting together and embellishing the bandage has generated millennia of ocular disassembly-and-replacement. As early as the fifth century B.C., Egyptian and Roman physicians devised painted clay plaques to be worn on a string over the closed eyelid; ancient prostheses were also made in gold and colored enamel. By the sixteenth century, they were made of Venetian glass, and by the eighteenth, Bohemian glassblowers had established dynastic monopolies that remain palpable in the industry to this day. Immigrant German artisans brought their craft to the US in the 1850s, founding firms like Mager & Gougelmann and Richard Danz, Inc., which still operate in New York City. Established on Van Dam Street in 1851, Peter Gougelmann touted himself as the first American ocularist to fabricate custom prostheses rather than fitting his patients with stock eyes from drawers organized by color and size. Peters great-grandson Andrew Gougelmann now manages the business in partnership with siblings David and Laura, all of whom learned their craft from their father Henry, who was taught by his father Pierre. Stock or custom, nineteenth-century glass eyes required considerable skill to make and to use. They were full orbs, hollow, and so fragile that they were known to implode if the wearer progressed too quickly from hot rooms to freezing weather. (And yet: what other body part could conceivably be substituted in glass?) It was not until after W.W. II, when German exports were either unavailable or under boycott, that American and British army researchers developed acrylic eyes.6 In terms of durability, acrylic represented a great leap forward. But the essential design concept has not changed since the 1890s: artificial eyes consist of a two-part system, globe and shell.7 A globe fills

the socket; a shell covers the globes surface. The shell signifies importantly, but has no physiological impact. Globes, however, are medically necessary. An empty socket causes facial muscles to sag, and the patient often suffers from headaches; eyelashes can become ingrown, and the tear ducts, which lubricate the conjunctiva tissue of the eye region, may atrophy. There are two ways of introducing a globe into the body. In the more radical procedure, called enucleation, the eyeball is entirely removed. If the sclera (or white of the eye) is relatively undamaged, the eyeball may be left but hollowed out, with the implant inserted inside the slip-case of natural tissue. This is called evisceration, and its advantage is that ocular muscles remain attached to the sclera, allowing the artificial eye to move naturally in the socket. To achieve similar range of motion for enucleated patients, the surgeon must attach the muscles to the implant. Shells can also be attached with titanium pegs to the conjunctiva tissue, which allows even more naturalistic eyeball control. The pupil and iris, of course, can only move in the manner observed in all painted portrait eyes. Ophthalmic surgeons perform the enucleation or evisceration, but the ocularist exclusively makes shells. As Andrew Gougelmann explains, patients arrive in his office perhaps one month after surgery. Gougelmann takes an impression of the socket with a malleable alginate material, and fashions a trial eye. Using this model in a positive/positive casting process, he forms the prosthesis in methacrylic resin; on subsequent visits the blank is tried, fitted, and polished. Finally the patient sits to have his or her iris and pupil painted from life. What makes a convincing eye? Attention to average pupil dilation, sunbursts or striations in the iris, odd flecks of color, reflection patterns, and the scleras distinctive tint (yellow, pink, blue, or green). Strands of red silk are laid into the surface to represent the patients individual veining pattern, and the whole is lacquered to achieve a translucent wet look. Maintenance is low, and the patient is encouraged to forget its there. Shells

must be removed for cleaning and repolishing twice a year, and the National Examining Board of Ocularists recommends a new one approximately every five years though some patients have made shopping for ocular parts a more frequent pastime. Gougelmann has filled orders for multiple prostheses in assorted colors; he once fixed a cubic zirconium into a false iris, to make it sparkle. (I thought it looked weird. Not that natural. ) He has made smiley-face and 8-ball shells; one man, after a golfing accident, requested a golf-ball eye, presumably not for everyday wear. (Had the Titleist logo across the center and everything. ) These exuberant people, like Coyote, are enjoying trickster opportunities. In their play between impairment and exaggeration, they occupy a boundary-zone between shock and revelation, a trickster-realm in which imaginative transgressions lead to creative progress. The art these people make of their misfortunes might be called abstract in relation to the realist work preferred by patients with mimetic shells. But in both instances the wearer collaborating with the ocularistenacts an elaborate ruse. Swapping his or her organic-but-dead eye with a nonsentientbut-dynamic piece of plastic, the user activates a potent little sculpture, a sort of fake readymade signifying visuality and resemblance. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else...Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used to tell at all.8 False eyes tell about vision in a way normal eyes cannot; their woundedness and

34 Random

Photograph by Frank Oudeman (2000)

artificiality become necessary conditions for understanding what it means to see. Usually such telling circulates metaphorically, in a familiar panoply of literary and pop-culture tropes. There is the blind sage, possessor of inner visions, whose avatars range from Sophocless Tiresias in Oedipus Rex to Stevie Wonder. There are Cyclopes, yogis with third eye-consciousness, the All-Seeing Eye of God on dollar bills. Coyotes magic eye reappears frequentlyin cartoons, for example, when the characters eyes zoom out on strings of muscle, to demonstrate how far ahead of reality his lust takes him or in The Terminator, where the invincible Schwarzenegger calmly sits down with an Xacto-knife to eject, repair, and reinsert his own palpitating organ. All virtual vision technologiesfrom infrared scopes and surveillance apparatus to magnetic resonance imaging and x-raysare metaphoric eyes, as are more mundane inventions like mirrors, eyeglasses, and of course, cameras. In each of these, however, the split between sensory ability and extrasensory insight is mediated by immateriality. Oedipus and Tiresias have the Delphic Oracle to clue them in; Stevie Wonder expresses vision musically. The Terminator perceives via computer. But the prosthetic eye remains particular in its overwhelming, simple materiality. It is not a metaphorsemiotic agility notwithstanding, its relationship to the seeing individual is absolutely direct and literal. It is not a story or a machine, but a solid object, a chip of the exterior world brought into and housed by the body. Because it is opaque because the brain cannot look through itthe false eye becomes a lens traversed exclusively by the imagination. In this sense, it manifests an essential aspect of creativity: a sensualizing of the inorganic. Thus, the reversal of inside and outside surfaces ultimately suggests that by

transporting the external object world into the sentient interior, that interior gains some small share of the blissful immunity of inert, inanimate objecthood; and conversely, by transporting pain out onto the external world, that external environment is deprived of its immunity to, its unmindfulness of, and indifference to the problems of sentience... It is part of the work of creating to deprive the external world of the privilege of being inanimate.9 When the power of imagination incorporates and sees through the artificial eye, the scary/delicious implicationcommon, probably, to all prosthetic situations is that flesh has achieved symbiosis with inanimate stuff. The body is made deathless through a fantasy of union, an omnivorous engagement with the universe of matter. I am glass, I am plastic, I am metal, I am wood, I am electricity: I am endless, boundless, incalculable, one. And what happens after this plenitude, this chaotic Everything, appears? Only discernment, interpretation, insightthe tricksters giftscan make sense of such promiscuous possibility. The revelation of plenitude calls for a revelation of mind. 10 .

1 See www.ocularist.org, an all-purpose information site for the industry. 2 The firm of Mager & Gougelmann list in their promotional literature a few prominent patients : Alfred I. DuPont, Jay Vanderbilt, Joseph Pulitzer, Hellen Keller, Paul Muni, Sammy Davis, Jr., Peter Falk, Hume Cronyn, Senator Thomas Gore, and Jose Feliciano. 3 Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), pp. 3-4 4 Hyde, p. 12 5 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 165. 6 Due in part to the power of the glassmakers lobby, glass prostheses are still made in Germany. 7 State-of-the-art eye-replacement includes something called the Bio-Eyean implant made of hydroxyapatite, a mineral derived from coral whose chemical structure mimics that of human boneand experiments with electronic sight. Researchers at Johns Hopkins opine that such retinal prostheses or intraocular chips may become available by the numerologically appropriate year 2020. 8 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, quoted in Hyde, p. 60. Italics are Hydes. 9 Scarry, p. 285. Italics in the original. 10 Hyde, p. 295.

35

Stalk photography
Gregory Williams

Hes all face and no name and hes been the bane of my existence for over a year now. A full-frontal square-jawed yuppie with a bulbous forefinger jutting out over the street, this human cipher sucks in all the winds of anxiety that blow down Seventh Avenue and sends them through my window. With his holier-than-thou expression, tasteful black turtleneck and air of financial stability, I have thought of him as Vance. But today is a day for rejoicing. The construction workers just lifted Vance from his perch, revealing him to be nothing more than a plywood-and-plastic cutout of a man, mere billboard ornamentation. And he wasnt alone. For far too long the scaffolding across the street from my apartment has supported a heterogeneous cast of characters, including a friendly AsianAmerican woman on the corner, a Dalmatian dog, a cat, two or three couples of various ages and ethnicities, an African-American woman, and a white man who presided over the corner of Seventh Avenue and 25th Street until today. Their home has been the Chelsea Mercantile, just one of countless luxury condominiums to spring up in Manhattan in recent years. Products of our obscenely fast-paced economy, these buildings representat least to those of us with more moderate incomesa constant reminder of our tenuous status as island dwellers. Vance has been a constant companion since last summer, when construction went into full swing. My desk faces windows that look out onto Seventh Avenue and any time I looked up from my computer screen I was met by his withering gaze. Having stared into Vances eyes for so long (like the Mona Lisa, they follow you around the room), he became something of a barometer of my sense of self-worth. In certain moments of triumphafter finishing an essay or meeting a deadlinehe made me feel like the man. I could almost picture him reaching across the divide of the street to give me a high-five. At other times, howeverwhile experiencing writers block or procrastinatinghis aggressive pointing gesture might be read as outright condemnation and/or taunting disapproval. Yet of course no matter how deeply Vance has 36 Random

insinuated himself into my life, I hardly know him at all. This comes as no great surprise since Vance belongs to that ever-growing segment of the population: the stock photograph model. We see them everywhere, from billboard advertisements to magazine illustrations and web-site thumbnails. Typically they are so generic in their poses, so utterly banal with their standardized facial expressions, that we hardly take note of their presence. They are meant to look familiar and, at the same time, to disappear behind the significance of whatever product they are promoting. Indeed they are so unremarkable that the term stock photography does not appear in a single index of any of the major photography history books I consulted. This is a terrain that reeks of obviousness and would hardly seem to warrant serious scholarly consideration. Yet the very ubiquity of stock photographs at least begs reflection on the way that they clutter up the visual field and subtly stimulate desire. Or sometimes not so subtly. The particular gesture of Vance, also known as the Pointing Man, is openly assertive, even aggressive. The model that plays Vance has a pronounced forehead and chiseled features that suggest a man who means business. His upraised right arm is bent at the elbow and held in tight to the body, so that his clenched fingers form a muscular ball out of which the offending digit protrudes. Staring daily into his eyes, I began to wonder what kind of message the Rockrose Development Corporation intended to get across. Obviously they wanted to project financial stability and give a signal to other professional types that the Chelsea Mercantile was a hot ticket in the world of condominium living. But were there other motivating factors that might explain the low-grade hostility emanating from this sign? My unwanted proximity to Vance clearly called for a little investigative journalism. The first call I made was to Cantor and Pecorella, Inc., the sales agents exclusively representing the developers. Agent Kathleen Scott confirmed that the images on the scaffolding were chosen based on demographics; they wanted to have as diverse a

group as possible. Asked what Vances role in the line-up might be, she claimed that he was there to present a hip, downtown look. This gave me pause. What is particu larly downtown about him? Okay, hes wearing a black turtleneck, but the beatnik era is long since over and black turtlenecks are worn across the country. No, it had to be something else. It had to be his hair. Cut stylishly above the ears with just the right amount of teasing, Vance looked like a brunette whod been given a frost job. Yet what really set him apart were his eyebrows. In the black-and-white photograph their blond coloring merged with his skin tone to make them appear to be shaved off. The effect was disconcerting: the more I looked at him the more he seemed a cross between a Goth and an alien, both of which might, in fact, qualify for hip and downtown. Next on the list of contacts was Lanny Lambert, co-owner of Chavin and Lambert, a New York-based ad agency. They had conceived the project to decorate the Mercantiles shed, (the trade name given to the construction of scaffolding, wood planks and electric lighting that protects pedestrians walking next to a building site) and so I figured theyd have some insight into Vances origins. Mr. Lambert had little patience for my line of questioning, though he did put a different spin on the gesture. He explained that they were looking for stock images with implied motion, a suggestion of the three-dimensional, as if the figure were pointing out the features of the apartment. This interpretation backed up Ms. Scotts claim that in tracking the number of walk-in visitors, they found that the highest percentage entered the building in response to the sign. Vances forceful finger-jabbing now needed to be thought of as cheerful beckoning. While pondering this new angle on my neighbor, the ugly side of the shed zoomed back into focus. It was an extremely blustery day in mid-January, with the winds howling down the street and office workers struggling to hang onto their briefcases. Speaking on the phone with a friend, I was absentmindedly gazing out the window when a massive gust of wind unhinged the friendly Asian-American woman from her

corner post and flung her far out over the intersection. Had someone been standing in the wrong place in the crosswalk, he or she would have been brained by a flying stock photographa most unglamorous death. The Mercantiles workers quickly hustled her off to the side of the building and all lawsuits were averted. Four months later I saw a pair of pliers drop through the shed planks onto the sidewalk, narrowly missing a man who barely stopped long enough to acknowledge his good fortune. I can only imagine how many other near-disasters took place while I wasnt looking. But a more happy coincidence soon followed. A graphic designer friend who had seen Vance from my apartment, called one day to say that she had found his image on a CD-ROM full of stock photographs of people. Within minutes she had e-mailed me his picture along with a series of thumbnail shots of him in different poses. And here I saw even more sides of Mean Man, Sarahs moniker for Vance. Far more than a confrontational jerk, he could be alternately coy, puzzled, pensive and bored, among several other comparatively positive traits. Why did I get stuck with a years worth of aggression? Which forced me to pose another question: Was there not something to be gained from the prolonged encounter with Vance? What is it exactly about him that made me feel intimidated and threatened? The shed at the Chelsea Mercantile was designed to speak to two seemingly contrasting impulses: a desire for domestic comfort and a determination to conquer the world. These needs are opposite sides of the same coin that has formed the currency of life in Manhattan at all points in its history, but especially at the present moment. When fused properly, high-end domesticity and global-economy profiteering can produce a thoroughly shrill expression of self-entitlement. The LED sign that greeted southbound drivers on Seventh Avenue left no ambiguity regarding the success of the Mercantiles clients; one message that scrolled across periodically stated something along the lines of, Were installing state-of-the-art gourmet ovens, not that youll ever use them. To have ones supper 37

at, for example, Pastis, the heart of MeatPacking District hipness, while dreaming about ones unused, but always shiny and available, kitchen unit, is to know that one has made it. The construction sheds serve the valuable purpose of separating the losers from the winners in the battle over property rights. The condition of being powerless over real estate in New York might at first be thought of as analogous to the lack of authorial control possessed by the stock photographer. Whether entirely dependent on the needs of the marketplace or giving up royalty rights to image suppliers, the producer of stock photographs is unlikely to become

pictures to all corners of the world and onto the Internet. Paul Norlen, a kind staff member, explained that they were not the actual image-makers and put me in touch with CMCD, the client that had created Vance. Founded in 1993 by Clement Mok, a graphic designer in San Francisco, CMCD was among the pioneers of the latest revolution in a not-so-revolutionary field: the royalty-free stock photograph. The scourge of the industry, these images cost the same amount whether they are used for a freeway billboard or on a web site that gets ten hits per month. Furthermore, once buyers purchase either a single photograph or an entire CD-ROM, they can use them as many times and in as many contexts as they choose, all for one fee. CMCD and its competitors are despised by the legions of stock photographers who have long relied on years of residuals flowing in from old work. As the enormously helpful Carrie ONeill described it, they were one of the first companies to remove the photographs background and leave spaces open within the picture (newspapers and books, for instance) in order to better accommodate the insertion of their images into carefully chosen scenes or to facilitate the inclusion of other elements in their own pictures. In other words, they were established to take full advantage of digital culture. Stock photography had always been perceived as the embarrassing relative of fineart photography, as the form whose name should not be spoken. Then along comes digital technology and the trade attains another level of hyper-reproducibility. With cheap images in high demand for web sites and home pages, the Internet made it more lucrative for a company to sell pictures singly and in CD-ROM collections for multiple applications without needing to pay royalties or renegotiate usage fees. This lead stock agencies to seek out less expensive models in order to lower their production costs. As is common today, Vance was given a reasonable one-time payment for posing before the camera, with no option to receive royalties and, of course, no control over the placement of his face. Ms. ONeill explained that her models were all found either on the street or by asking friends for recommendations. Once deemed photo

a household name.Yet this is scarcely the goal in the first place. As the experts Ann and Carl Purcell write, It is important that you sell your pictures to make a profit and not for the satisfaction of seeing them in print.1 Here they are writing about the traditional stock photographer, the person who one day shouts Eureka! while looking through old snapshots: Pictures that stay in your files or on your shelf in yellow boxes may be worth thousands upon thousands of dollars.5 Thus the importance of authorship becomes a non-issue as monetary gain outweighs the benefits of attaching ones identity to an image. I began to wonder how the system really works. Who was responsible for the first step in Vances journey to my neighborhood? I called Photodisc, the Seattle-based company that distributes heaps of such
Vance as he appears in Photodiscs catalogue of stock photographs. Courtesy Photodisc

genic, they had to fill out humongous release forms before entering the studio. This was the first time I properly considered the fact that Vance may not have even been aware of the Chelsea Mercantile or his role in promoting its development. While recovering from this rather obvious revelation, the saga took a new twist that forever altered my relationship with Vance. Imagining the prospect of meeting my nemesis, I asked Ms. ONeill if she could put me in touch with the model. Before she attempted to contact him, however, she gave me enough information to completely undermine my conception of the Mean Man. At the time of the original photo shoot, Vance had never modeled and was working as an oyster farmer in Tomales Bay, California, a mere two-hour drive from my own hometown. Besides being one of the nicest people they had ever worked with, she described how he had sung a beautiful rendition of Day-O while they had applied makeup to his attractive face. Naturally it was a little disappointing to find out that he was not the CEO of an Internet startup or an executive film producer. How could I possibly hate a singing oyster farmer? I finally reached him yesterday. He is actually called James and we had a completely un-Vance-like, half-hour phone conversation. James told me the story of his work with CMCD. Two years ago, having had no serious modeling experience, a photographer friend called him at the last minute to participate in a photo shoot in San Francisco. James barely made it through the heavy Bay Area traffic in time for his turn. Arriving somewhat agitated, the staff responded to his energy and the session went wellperhaps the stress he felt found its expression in the Pointing Man shot. Other details had been provided by Ms. ONeill: his hair color is natural, he has very striking features and he is a joy to be around. Today James no longer trolls the waters of Tomales Bay; he has gotten into other lines of work, including a fledgling modeling career with an agency and a portfolio (Im sending him shots of the shed to supplement it). He and his wife work extremely hard to support their young daughter and neither of them benefit from 38 Random

the vast wealth that permeates much of the Northern California coast. James is skeptical, though not pessimistic, about the prospect of making a living from his looks. His involvement with stock photography has simply opened a door to one possible career option; he has no illusions about the odds of becoming the next big thing. During my chat with James it became clear that in spite of its cheap artificiality and shameless commercialism, stock photography is one of the purest forms of realism. By this I mean that its reception is intimately attached to everyday, lived experience; one almost never voluntarily views a stock image as one would a painting in a museum. We happen upon them and they help to define the parameters of daily existence in a way that is rarely matched by acknowledged works of art. Indeed, it seems almost pointless to discuss these ubiquitous pictures in any other form than through the telling of an anecdote. Of course one can elaborate on the mechanisms of the marketplace, the means by which the stock photograph participates in the system of commodified desire and, most recently, how digital technology has a single, but glaring, flaw: lack of exclusivity. 3 But what really matters is how Vance affects my trip to pick up the laundry or my reading about current events in the newspaper. If the traditional discussion of realism within visual culture centers on the construction of the image, on examining the artists attempt to avoid worn-out, formal clichs and say something relevant about contemporary social conditions, I would propose reading the stock photograph as always-already-constructed. The interesting thing about these pictures has less to do with how they came into being than the fact that they are such powerful empty vessels. Once in circulation, they are infinitely capable of taking on the wealth of meanings ascribed to them by the passerby or reader. As much as the advertising agency endeavors to project a particular message about the product of its client, the stock photographs proximity to all aspects of turn-of-the-millennium life guarantees that they will be interpreted in a highly unpredictable manner.

James has had relatives and friends from around the globe tell him theyve encountered his image in all kinds of random places. The more his portraits proliferate, the more versions of James there will be to describe. As any short stroll through any city will demonstrate, the world is full of fake characters like Vance who get in the way of real people like James. Which is not to say that Vance does not actually exist and wont continue to haunt my dreams. But at least now Vance has a competitor: his name is James and Im sure he would make a very nice neighbor..
1 Ann and Carl Purcell, Stock Photography: The Complete Guide (Cincinnati, Ohio: Writers Digest Books, 1993), p. 2. 2 Ibid., p. 1. 3 Joe Farace, Stock Photo Smart: How to Choose and Use Digital Stock Photography (Gloucester, Massachusetts: Rockport Publishers, 1998), p. 18.

Whitescapes

David Batchelor

This is roughly how it began: sometime one summer during the early 1990s, I was invited to a party. The host was an AngloAmerican art collector, and the party was in the collectors private house, which was in a city at the southern end of a northern European country. First impressions on arrival at this house: it was big (but then so were the houses around it, so it didnt appear that big). It was the kind of area, a wealthy area of a rich city, where only small or shabby things looked strange or out of place. The house looked ordinary enough from the outside: red brick, nineteenth century or early twentieth, substantial but not ostentatious. So, there was the outside, big but fairly ordinary; and there was the front door, which was just ordinary; and then there was inside. Inside was different. That was the point. Inside was something else. Inside was on its own. Inside seemed to have no connection with outside. Inside was, in one sense, inside out, but I only realized that much later. At first, inside looked endless. Endless like an egg must look endless from the inside; endless because seamless, continuous, empty, uninterrupted. Or rather: uninterruptable. There is a difference: uninterrupted might mean overlooked, passed-by, inconspicuous, insignificant. Uninterruptable passes by you, renders you inconspicuous and insignificant. The uninterruptable endless emptiness of inside was impressive, elegant, and glamorous in a spare and reductive kind of way, but it was also assertive, emphatic, and ostentatious. This was assertive silence, emphatic blankness, the kind of ostentatious emptiness which only the very wealthy and the utterly sophisticated can

afford. It was a strategic emptiness, but it was also accusatory. Inside this house was a whole world, and it was a very particular kind of world, a very clean and very clear and very orderly universe. But it was also a very paradoxical, inside-out world, a world where open was also closed, where simplicity was also complication, and where clarity was also confusion. It was a world that didnt readily admit the existence of other worlds. Or it did so grudgingly and resentfully, and absolutely without compassion. In particular it was a world that would remind you, there and then, in an instant, of everything you were not, everything you had failed to become, everything you had not gotten around to doing, everything you might as well never bother to get around to doing because everything was made to seem somehow beyond reach, like it is when you look through the wrong end of a telescope. This wasnt just first impressions, this wasnt just the pulling back of the curtain to reveal the unexpected stage set, although there was that too, of course. This was longer lasting. Inside was a flash that continued. Inside was: WHITE.

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There is a kind of white which is more than white and this was that kind of white. There is a kind of white that repels everything that is inferior to it and that is almost everything. This was that kind of white. There is a kind of white which is not made by bleach, but which itself is bleach. This was that kind of white. This white was aggressively white. It did its work on everything around it, and nothing escaped. Some would hold the architect responsible. He was a man, it is said, who put it about that his work was minimalist; that his mission was to strip bare and to make pure, architecturally speaking; that his spaces were very direct and very clear, and in them there was no possibility of lying because they are just what they are. He was lying of course, ly ing big white lies, but we will let that pass for the moment. Some would hold this man responsible for the accusatory whiteness that was this great hollow interior, but I suspect it was the other way around: I suspect that the whiteness was responsible for this architect and for all his hollow words. This great white interior was empty even when it was full, because most of what was in it didnt belong in it and would soon be purged from it. This was people, mainly, and what they brought with them from outside. Inside this great white interior, few things looked settled and even fewer looked at home, and those that did look settled also looked like they had been prepared: approved, trained, disciplined, marshaled. Those things that looked at home looked like they had already been purged from within. In a nutshell: those things that stayed had themselves been made either quite white, or quite black, or quite gray. This world was entirely purged of color. Specifically: all the walls and the ceilings and the floors and the fittings were, of course, white; all the furniture was black; and all the works of art were gray. Its true. Not all whites are as tyrannical as this one was, and this one was less tyrannical than some: Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way?1 Next to the white that was 40 Random

Herman Melvilles great Albino Whale, this white paled. Or next to the deathly obsessive white that insinuated its way into the dark heart of Joseph Conrads Captain Marlow, this white was almost innocent. Admittedly there was some Conradian residue in this shallower white: Minimalism, it seemed to say, is something you arrive at, a development of the sensitivity of the brain. Civilization started with ornamentation. Look at all that bright color. The minimal sensitivity is not the peak of civilization, but it is at a high level between the earth and the sky. But this wasnt spoken with the voice of a Marlow, it contained no irony, no terror born of the recognition that whatever appeared before you now had always seen you before it a thousand times already. Rather this was the voice of one of Conrads Empire functionaries, one of those stiff and starched figures whose certainties always protect them from, and thus always propel them remorselessly towards, the certain oblivion that lies just a page or two ahead. What is it that motivates this fixation with white? First of all lets get the term minimalism and its careless association with whiteness out of the way. In reality it didnt happen very often at all, at least in the minimalism which was the three-dimensional works of art made during the 1960s, mostly in New York. Certainly there are a good many skeletal white structures by Sol LeWitt. And Robert Morris was suspicious of color so he painted his early work gray, but not white. Dan Flavin used tubes of white lightor rather daylight, or cool white which is to say whites, not whitebut his work was more often than not made in pools of intermingling colored light: red, blue, green, yellow, orange, and white. Carl Andre: intrinsic colors, the specific colors of specific materialswoods and metals in particularno whites there to speak of. And Donald Judd: sometimes intrinsic colors, sometimes applied, sometimes both together, sometimes shiny, sometimes transparent, sometimes polished, sometimes matte. Dozens of colors on dozens of surfaces, often in strange combinations: polished copper with shiny purple Plexiglas, or brushed aluminum with a glow-

ing translucent red, or spray-painted enamels with galvanized steel, or whatever there was. In truth the colors of minimal art were often far closer to that of its exact contemporary, Pop Art, than anything else. Which is to say, found colors, commercial colors, industrial colors; and often bright, vulgar, modern colors in bright, vulgar, modern collisions with other bright, vulgar modern colors. To mistake the colorful for the colorless or white is nothing new. However, it is one thing not to have known that Greek statues were once brilliantly painted, it is another thing not to see the color when it is still there. This seems to speak of a different psychological state, of a different level of denial. Not perceiving what is visibly there: psychoanalysts call it negative hallucination. But we have to tread carefully here, and we should be especially careful not to get drawn into seeing color and white as opposites. White was sometimes used in Minimalism, but it was mostly used as a color and amongst many other colors. Sometimes it was used in combination with other colors and sometimes it was used alone, but even when used alone it remained a color; it did not result, except perhaps in LeWitts structures, in a generalized whiteness. In these works, white remained a material quality, a specific color on a specific surface, just as it always has done in the paintings of Robert Ryman. Rymans whites are always just that: whites. His whites are colors; his paintings do not involve or imply the suppression of color. His whites are empirical whites. Above all, his whites are plural. And, in being plural, they are, therefore, not pure. Here is the problem: not white; not whites; but generalized white, because generalized white, whiteness, is abstract, detached, and open to contamination by terms like pure. Pure white: this problem is certainly a Western problem, and theres no getting away from it. Conrad and Melville were both ruthless analysts of the metaphysics of whiteness. For both, annihilation and death lurked behind the shroud of purity. But the virtuous whiteness of the West also conceals other less mystical terrors. These terrors are more local and altogether more palpable; they are terrors, mainly, of the flesh.

Melvilles great white whale is, conceivably, a monstrous corruption of the great Western ideal of the classical body. This body, at least in its remodeled neo-classical version, was of course a pure, polished, unembellished, untouched, and untouchable white. For Walter Pater, writing on the neo-classical scholar Winkelmann and classical sculpture sometime between the publication of Moby Dick and Heart of Darkness, this white light, purged from the angry, bloodlike stains of action and passion, reveals, not what is accidental in man, but the tranquil godship in him, as opposed to the restless accidents of life.2 A few pages on, this light loses its whiteness and re-emerges as this colorless, unclassified purity of life which is the highest expression of the indifference which lies beyond all that is relative and partial. In his elision of whiteness with colorlessness and transparency and purity, Pater is at least following the logic of the great neo-classical scholar Winkelmann, for whom the ideal beauty of the classical form is like the purest water taken from the source of a spring...the less taste it has, the more healthy it is seen to be, because it is cleansed of all foreign elements. 3 And Winkelmann, in his turn, is following the example of Plato for whom truth, embodied in the Idea, was, as Martin Jay has put it, like a visible form blanched of its color.4 It was this classical body, further purified and further corrupted in Stalinist realism, that Mikhail Bakhtin counterpoised with the altogether more fleshy and visceral grotesque realism of the medieval body. For Bakhtin, the classical form is above all a self-contained unity, an entirely finished, completed, strictly limited body, which is shown from the outside as something individual. That which protrudes, bulges, sprouts, or branches off [...] is eliminated, hidden or moderated. All orifices of the body are closed. The basis of the image is the individual, strictly limited mass, the impenetrable faade. The opaque surface of the bodys valleys acquire an essential meaning as the border of a closed individuality that does not merge with other bodies and with the world. All attributes of the unfinished world are carefully removed, as well as all signs of its inner life. 5 41

Bakhtins description of the classical body also describes with uncanny accuracy the art collectors minimalist interior, where everything was finished, completed, and strictly limited in a closed individuality that was not allowed to merge with the world outside. The idea that anything might protrude, bulge, sprout, or branch off from this sheer whiteness was inconceivable. The inner life of this world was entirely hidden: nothing was allowed to spill out from its allotted space; all circuitry, all conduits, all the accumulated stuff which attaches itself to an everyday life remained concealed, held in, snapped shut. Every surface was a closed impenetrable faade: cupboards were disguised as walls, there were no clues or handles or anything to distinguish one surface from another; just as there were no protrusions, neither was there a single visible aperture. In this way openness really was an illusion maintained by closure, simplicity was ridiculously over-complicated, and unadorned clarity was made hopelessly confusing. You really could become lost in this apparently blank and apparently empty white space. In its need to differentiate itself from that which was without, nothing could be differentiated within. This space was clearly a model for how a body ought to be: enclosed, contained, sealed. The ideal body: without flesh of any kind, old or young, beautiful or battered, scented or smelly; without movement, external or internal; without appetites. (That is why the kitchen was such a disturbing placebut not nearly as disturbing as the toilet.) But perhaps it was more perverse than that; perhaps this was a model of what the body should be like from within. Not a place of fluids and organs and muscles and tendons and bones all in a constant and precarious and living tension with each other; but a vacant, hollow, whited chamber, scraped clean, cleared of any evidence of the grotesque embarrassments of an actual life. No smells, no noises, no color; no changing from one state to another and the uncertainty that comes with it; no exchanges with the outside world and the doubt and the dirt that goes with that; no eating, no drinking, no pissing, no shitting, no sucking, no fucking, no nothing. But still it wont go away. Whiteness always returns. Whiteness is woven into the fabric

of Culture. The Bible, again: Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. 6 We cant escape, but, as Conrad and Melville have shown, sometimes it is possible to unweave whiteness from within. Henri Michaux, artist, poet, and acid head, writing in With Mescaline: And white appears. Absolute white. White beyond all whiteness. White of the coming of white. White without compromise, through exclusion, through total eradication of non-white. Insane, enraged white, screaming with whiteness. Fanatical, furious, riddling the victim. Horrible electric white, implacable, murderous. White in bursts of white. God of white. No, not a god, a howler monkey. (Lets hope my cells dont blow apart.) End of white. I have the feeling that for a long time to come white is going to have something excessive for me. 7.

1 Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or, The Whale (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 212. 2 Walter Pater, The Renaissance (London: MacMillan, 1961), p. 205. 3 Quoted in Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 164. 4 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1994), p. 26. 5 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 320 6 Isaiah, ch. 1, v. 18. 7 Henri Michaux, With Mescaline , in Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology 1927-1984, trans. D. Ball (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1994), p. 198.

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Justine Kurland The City, 2000

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The encryption wars

An interview with Eben Moglen

In just the past few months, online secrecy and security have gone through several upheavals. After ten years of trying to use arms export laws to regulate the spread of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), the most commonly available form of personal, highgrade encryption, at the end of 1999 the U.S. government abandoned its efforts. At the same time, the DVD Copy Control Association, an organization representing Hollywoods major studios, filed a lawsuit against Internet providers offering links to DeCSS, a freeware program which allows viewers to break the encryption on DVDs and copy them on their home computers. One of the lawyers representing the web sites in the DVD case, Eben Moglen, has been thinking and writing about these issues for many years. General counsel to the Free Software Foundation (developer and distributor of GNU, the core of the Linux operating system) and a professor at Columbia Law School, he has written numerous articles about the Internet (many are available at http://old.law.columbia.edu), and he is at work on a book, The Invisible Barbecue, analyzing the political and legal forces at play in the evolution of information technologies. Jay Worthington met him at Columbia University in early May for a conversation on the deep implications of these technologies for the cultural and social fabric of todays world.

Theres a tone of exhortation that seems to run through your writing on encryption. Do you see some civic obligation to encrypt? I guess. This was particularly true during the state of affairs in the fall of 1998, when I gave a talk at NYU called So Much For Savages. There was a feeling then that the United States government might actually continue export controls, so it was peoples civic responsibility to take advantage of the fact that the controls no longer rested on a technical basis, and the American secret world and other secret police no longer had any actual control over end-to-end encryption of the net. The hypothesis of So Much For Savages was essentially that the determination of whether to make an end-to-end encrypted Internet now belonged to the members of the Internet community. The encryption export controls were lifted in the fall of 1999? Thats right. Do you think thats a battle the government has given up on? Well, I dont think their answer is, Theres nothing were going to be able to do about it, but rather, We are no longer attempt ing to delay the adoption of strong encryption technology by United States export controls. Youll notice that they took the error out of the Global Positioning System. So Iraq is now going to be able to target its cruise missiles precisely on top of the Washington Monument and not 50 meters away? Yes. The military says they will continue to provide wrong information in just those places that are absolutely important, but I dont think that means the White House or the Washington Monument. It means missile silos in Montana.

Do you think ten years from now well see maps published showing the version of the United States thats being released now, with these abrupt transitions from crystal clarity to fog? Mapmaking is a very interesting subject in general, because when everybody in the country is carrying GPS equipment, one kind of mapmaking that will be absolutely possible consists of the whole structure of what we think of as free data. That is to say, people voluntarily walking around with GPSequipped cell phones donating the stream of their information to a mapping database which will be a very accurate map of everywhere all the time. Have you heard of any project like this today? Im not aware of any. But you can see that it will happen. Data streams will exist, and there will be a kind of decentralized geographic information service structure. But like a lot of free-software activity, this will self-organize as people perceive the need or the possibility. It wont organize ahead of that perception. In our movement, we get accustomed to the idea that what people think is neat or needed, theyll do. As the net makes various kinds of collaborations possible that have never been possible before, people will do things collaboratively in new ways. Part of what Im trying to do myself is to understand the political economy of a world full of that kind of content sharing.

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But lets return to encryption. Yes, its correct, the United States government effectively resigned from certain kinds of control activities in the past year. That represents the end of Phase I of the crypto wars, which was a public law controversy about government control over cryptography. Phase II of the crypto wars began with the DVD case at the end of last December. This is a private law controversy over cryptanalysis in which people are now attempting to control other peoples ability to understand encrypted material. So we have now moved quite sharply from one stage to another stage over the controversy about encryption in society. In phase one, we fought over constitutional and other public law rights to encrypt things ourselves. The leading forces against encryption and cryptography were policemen and spooks. Over the past decade, from the moment that PGP was distributed on the net until the governments change in regulations late last year, the question was: Were people going to be allowed to keep secrets or were cops and spooks going to be able to control the development of the technology? That question has now been answered. If the NSA can develop quantum computersif somebody figures out a way to factor very large numbersthings like that might destabilize this new environment in a deep way, but as things now stand, cryptography wins over cryptanalysis in civil society for one set of applications, which is the maintenance of privacy in personal communications, and that will have a series of social consequences.

Whats your quick list of these consequences, good and bad? When you do the social accounting, you cant treat it as though we all live in Lake Forest, Illinois. Some of us live in Baghdad or Beijing or various other places. In those places, the balance of power between civil society and government is quite different from what it is in the United States. The Iraqi or the Russian gulag will be more difficult to erect in the twenty-first century. You can still have an empire of fear, but you have to base that empire of fear more on networks of personal surveillance and informers than on the interception of communication. And domestically? People are beginning to see they might have a stake in the right to anonymity and in what we now call privacy, the control over personal information. Both depend upon encryption-based solutions. If we are going to have the ability to read what we want without being surveilled, it will be because we are using agents to do our reading which are unidentifiable and which restore content to us in an encrypted stream. Thats how we get around people who establish surveillance blockages or interception points to find out what were reading and whether were paying for it, doing something seditious because of it, just looking at naked people, or whatever.

At the same time, encryption is at the heart of current mechanisms for extracting revenue from copyrighted streams of information on the net. Thats precisely why we now find ourselves in disputes over whether cryptanalysis can be controlled by intellectual property law as cryptography was controlled by arms-export law. Rather than thinking about government control over whether we can encrypt, were now thinking about private power control over whether we can decrypt without permission, and thats a different war, with a very different legal feeling to it. The eight largest movie studios in the United States can, paradoxically, spend a whole lot more money litigating these questions than the United States government ever could spend litigating export control regulations. Do you think the lines here are as clearly drawn? No. Here we have two different structures of the distribution of cultural products. You have a set of people who believe cultural products are best distributed when they are owned, and they are attempting to construct a leak-proof pipe from production studio to eardrum or eyeball of the consumer. Their goal is to construct a piping system that allows them to distribute completely dephysicalized cultural entities, which have zero marginal cost and which in a competitive economy would therefore be priced at zero, but they wish to distribute them at non-zero prices. They are prepared to give on price, but at every turn, as with the VCR at the beginning of the last epoch, their principle is that any ability of this content to escape their control will bring about the end of civilization. This is an absurd claim. Nobody it but studio executives.

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There is, of course, an alternative economy trying to grow up. With respect to software, its happened already. Its been demonstrated that zero-marginal cost products collaboratively developed on the net have measurable functional characteristics so that one can say in an objective way this is better or worse and is better produced anarchistically than they are in a proprietary mode. This is what GNU and Linux are about. You can have more people doing more work, contributing more rapidly, fixing more bugs at the point of discovery, and you have Lamarckian evolution of software so that all favorable characteristics are inherited and you get very rapid development. Thats why the development curve on free software products has been so staggering to commercial producers who didnt know how these things could have roared up out of nowhere. This is the hypothesis of Anarchism Triumphant, and part of what Im writing about in a book called The Invisible Barbecue. Were going to have a competition in certain sectors of the economy between property and non-property production, and non-property production is going to win. But the same cant be said when the goods are not functional and there is not an objective evaluation of good or bad, and where the level of collaboration in production is lower. With such goods, theres no inherent reason why non-property production drives out property production. However, non-property distribution drives out property distribution, and the reason is simply that non-property distribution propagates at the speed of personal recommendation. Assuming decryption Absolutely. Non-property distribution assumes music you can copy as many times as you please and give to whomever you want, changing it however you like.

And how are producers compensated? Through the kinds of informal systems and prestige that commentators have observed in the free software movement? They may very well be, and we have to ask how the producer gets paid, but at the moment we can understand that the distributor who wants to do the same thing in a property way will fail. The market will saturate with non-property distribution. Unless people are willing to pay for certain proprietary content that can be defended Absolutely. The point is only that the distribution structures have an advantage when it is free. But free production structure has no advantage, so theres nothing to prevent Warner Brothers from producing better music than a garage band that gives it away for free. So, if there were no attempt to make what I would call monopolistic decisions, theres no end in sight to the coexistence of the free cultural properties market and the fee-based proprietary cultural properties market. They would exist independently of each other for the foreseeable future. What is happening now in the lawsuits against MP3.com and Napster is that the content industries are saying that youre not allowed to have a non-property distribution structure. The reason youre not allowed to do this, theyre saying, is that even if you have non-property goods to distribute, the mere fact that you could also be distributing proprietary goods through such a structure means that the whole structure is contributory copyright infringement and should be suppressed. What do you think will be the long-term outcome of that particular struggle? Youd have to put every teenager in the world in jail, and you cant do it.

What if Disney targets not its customers, but the programmers who make Napster possible? But, in the end, of course, that turns out to be the customers. The problem here is that the people who have made free distribution systems have not used free software to do it, and this is the difference between Napster and Gnutella. Once the free distribution structure is free throughout and the software is free, there is no centralized server anymore, and no point of contact between Disney and the distribution system it is attempting to suppress. The consumers then constitute the distribution system. And the people who write the free software that makes this distributed network of relationships possible? Absolutely. All of this depends upon that. Are there ways for the proprietary distribution camp to approach or attack this system? What we are going to see is a strong effort on the part of the content industry to attack free software centrally. In the pipelines theyre trying to build the switch between their pipe and your eyes and ears; your computer is the weakest link in the chain. You control the operating system kernel of that computer, and if you control that operating system, then you can say, Hey. On the way to the sound card, drop this where I want it put. So the real civic obligation is to download Linux? The real civic obligation is to use free software. Thats correct. How do you proselytize that? If youre a capitalist and you have the best goods and theyre free, you dont have to proselytize, you just have to wait.

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How long would you say Linux has been the best operating system? Five years? It seems like theres a whole world of con sumers out there who dont feel them selves capable of judging whether Linux is a better good at all. There are two possible ways of thinking about this question. One is, how long does it take the current user base to get to free software, and the other is how long does it take the current user base to be replaced by another user base? Its a transitional issue. In 1979, when I was working at IBM, I wrote an internal memo lambasting Apples Lisa, its first attempt to adapt Xerox PARC technology, the graphical user interface, into a desktop PC. I was then working on the development of APL2, a nested array, algorithmic, symbolic language, and was committed to the idea of making languages that were better than natural for procedural thought. The idea was to do for whole ranges of human thinking what mathematics has been doing for thousands of years in the quantitative arrangement of knowledge, and to help people think in more precise and clear ways. What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface: you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language in order to address the technological nervousness of the user. Users wanted to be infantilized, to return to a pre-linguistic condition in the using of computers, and the Xerox PARC technologys primary advantage was that it allowed users to address computers in a pre-linguistic way. This was to my mind a terribly socially retrograde thing to do, and I have not changed my mind about that.

Dont you think its increasingly difficult to resist Windows? Well, maybe. But when my two-and-a-half year old nephew is fifteen, is he going to want to use an operating system he cant change? After a whole decade-and-a-half of life with computers, hes just got to accept computers as formlessly, seamlessly, totally incorporated, like his fathers Oldsmobile? Thats just not the way society is going to exist. The number of people who are going to demand control over their environment is going to be very large. You mean demanding to have access to source code, to tinker with it, and share it with others? Is that how youre defining controlling their environment? Absolutely. In the same way, kids wanted the engines of automobiles to be malleable. What fraction of Americans actually knew how to tinker with the insides of their cars? The answer would be an interesting one. I dont know, but its an important question in the historical sociology of the American relationship to the automobile. After World War II, when a high-school-to-factory attitude prevailed about where the good working class life was, what proportion of those kids, mainly boy kids, grew up messing with automobiles? What civic obligations do we have today? The digital divide is a serious issue today. If we made a list of the eight or the ten most important political issues in this society, my guess is that three or four of them would be issues that you cant understand, let alone have a good opinion about, unless you know a good deal about technology. In these, people are getting rushed out of the issues, because the guys who know are racing to lock it up before everybody else figures out whats going on.

Civic duty is, therefore, to learn what you need to learn in order to make decisions in a democratic society in a grown-up way. Thats the same civic duty that Thomas Jefferson or George Washington believed in. Most importantly, we have a duty to look at our educational system to find out if it teaches people what they need to know in our society. I made a proposal to the Israeli government a year ago that went like this: Take every computer that you threw away in the state last year, just the ones you scrapped, and put free software on them. They are now the routers, bridges, switches, and email servers for an entire free broadband network for all of Israel. The only thing you dont have is the cable. But you have required annual military reserve duty. Take one cycle and say everybody not performing militarily essential service is laying fiber, for one year. You are now done. Free software, scrapped computers, one year of conscripted labor, plus the physical cost of the fiber and youre done. You have a broadband network in a little, demographically-concentrated country with a highly educated population. And when I talk about building a network I mean on the West Bank and Gaza too, and then you say, This is a gift. Were leaving this here. This is a little bit of what we need to do, two states, one network. And you know what, nobody will ever bomb that network, tear it up or throw it away, because thats how, if youre in Gaza or the West Bank, you get out to the world. Thats how you free the people you have been chaining up all these years. But the truth is that what the digital divide means, what inequality of access means now, primarily, is a series of decisions about the allocation of hardware and software coming home to roost. We have all the computers we need. We have more computers than we need. Giving every kid in the country a computer? Thats nothing. Were scrapping the stuff. And software? We can provide free software to everybody. Thats no problem. Our movement is built for that.

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What we dont have is a telecommunications infrastructure that is free. What we dont have is the time, the online hours. This is why we need to use the spectrum to create a free netan uncharged, birthright-bandwidth system. I propose a simple, birthright-bandwidth structure, using just the current analog television frequencies broadcasters have already promised to give up under the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Its good spectrum. It goes through walls very nicely. It does all the things we need. We could give everybody who is here 400 megabits of bi-directional bandwidth.Maybe we could go to 600. Youre not a television broadcaster, but youre a radio station, and if you and your friends get together, two or three of you, you can be a television station. My proposal is that bandwidth is personal to you. Its in a box like your cell phone. You take it to work in the morning and contribute that bandwidth to your employer. You take it to church, to your clubs, your bowling league, wherever you go. The idea is that civil society is constituted around the notion of an equality of access to communications. We should be living in an environment in which the recognition is that the building of the public infrastructure allows us to render connection as completely and obviously a personal right as driving on the street or walking in the park or drinking the water or breathing the air. What do you see as the immediate cultural and political roadblocks in the way of that kind of a birthright re-conception of bandwidth? The answer is the invisible barbecue, the way our politics is owned. Thats the problem. Thats why I am writing about a threecornered entity: technology, law, and politics in this age of corruption. Thats what we have. Were making land rushes. Were trying to turn everything into property. Thats the conceptualization. The relevance of encryption is that encryption is a device for turning bitstreams into property by creating the power to exclude. In order to have the right to exclude from bitstreams you need encryption.

Our whole political structure and legal structure is making this possible: the ease of getting patents, the giving away of spectrum in the 1996 Act to people who already had spectrum in order to build an HDTV system that theyre not building. The Federal Communications Commissions fundamental strategy is to permit duopolies in whole areas of their traditional regulated fields so long as these duopolies then go out and compete against other duopolies. All these structures are for sale because our politics is for sale. The laws power to create property is now in use in a very heavy way. Alan Greenspan says we should beware of government regulation and interference in the market, and that government should limit itself to creating and protecting property, real and intellectual, as though there werent regulation and intervention in the market already. We have massive market intervention by legislators who have the power to create property rights through law and who are selling that power for bribes we call campaign contributions. We cant create a free anything, because it is ideologically and politically ineffective for things to be free. Making things free doesnt bring in campaign contributions. And yet you seem to feel that, ultimately, free software and free cultural distribution will simply happen as a result of the increasing ease of communication, and of creating cooperative, information-sharing communities.

At the end of Anarchism Triumphant I say that this is the big political issue of our time, and aristocracy looks set to win. I mean, they are in control. They have all the money; they have the politics; they have the shape of things to come in their own view. The force is with them. When I say there are these reasons why things ought to be different, Im talking in the way people were talking in European rathskellers in 1848. There ought to be democracy; there ought to be liberalism; there ought to be freedom; aristocracy ought to go; the ancien rgime ought to disappear. I end with Chou En-Lai talking to Oriana Fallaci: Whats the meaning of the French Revolution? she says; Too soon to tell, he says. This is a long-term question. Are Rupert Murdoch and Michael Eisner going to prevail in the short term? Yes. Are they going to prevail fifty years from now? I dont know. But what kills ancien rgimes is not that they are reactionary. What makes the ancien rgime fall is that it is modernizing. This is the problem of the French in the 1780s; this is the problem of the Iranians in the 1970s; this will be the problem of the Chinese in the next decade. When you modernize, you begin the process of change and enable new forms of human growth and expression. Its difficult to keep those processes under control. The processes now being lit as humanity comes into a new relationship with itself, a world where everybody is connected to everybody else without intermediaries, that social structure, that condition of massive interconnection that we call the Internet, changes everything in profound ways. They are modernizing this regime. They think they are going to control it, that property relations, legal relations, technology, Lawrence Lessigs code doing the work of law kind of idea, that all of this is going to make them stable. But it is not going to do that, in my opinion. It is going to produce the hunger for the various kinds of freedom and liberation that the net makes possible. If they stand between the people and that freedom, they are going to be pushed aside. Now, they have money; they have power; they have thought; they have influence. It does not have to happen to them.

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What if it turns out that people are content with the level of freedom that Windows 2010 provides them? What if some minimal level of the kind of freedom youre talking about is enough to create satisfaction? Of course, in the meantime, in that world of 2010, weve moved towards being a pay-per-use society for culture. The book publishing industry hasnt stood still. Its selling e-books per read. The music industry is trying to sell you songs per listen. What you have in mind is a bargain in which we sort of stay the same as we migrate technologically. When we look at how it really functionstechnologically, politically, economicallywe find ourselves moving in a world in which we can have many different things, but staying the same is really hard. From the point of view of the copyright industries, the culture manufacturers, the limited term of copyright is unacceptable. What Disney went through to keep the mouse from expiring is just the beginning of that issue. Limited term is not acceptable. The first sale doctrine is not acceptable. Fair use rights are not acceptable. In the world of the electronic, absolutely free, frictionless copy, they need to move more and more towards a controlled environment. The logic of the situation compels them to all or nothing solutions, and I think theyre going to get nothing instead of all. But they are groping. I dont think all of this is going to be done in a ham-fisted and thoughtless way. Jack Valenti has to die. You cant go into the twenty-first century with Jack Valenti as the only face you have, because nineteen-year-olds are not going to accept that. Theres going to have to be a different way to do it. They need somebody as good as Chuck D, and they dont have that yet. But there will be an attempt, there will be lots of attempts to find a way.

Wont some kinds of cultural production simply fall by the wayside in a world of free distribution? Of course, but look, the same is true with respect to pyramids. Without hydraulic despotism and the divine right kingship of the pharaoh, we will underproduce pyramids. Now, weve been underproducing pyramids for three thousand years, and pyramids are beautiful but it isnt hurting us that we dont make them anymore. Sure, the structure of art and expression is related to the material understructure of society. You dont have to be a Marxist to think that. In a world of really free stuff, I think there would be a lot fewer Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, but I think $100 million movies dont represent a particularly good form of free stuff. Any sort of high initial-capital-cost cultural production would seem hard to justify. Blade Runner probably doesnt get made either. Absolutely. On the other hand, were going to have a golden age of poetry such as the world has not seen in a thousand years. Even traditional art forms may do very well. The literature for two pianos is due for an enormous revival. Fifteen years from now the dominant form of two pianos literature is going to consist of one live and one dead pianist. The whole ability for us to engage in jamming with Sidney Bechet, for instance, has only begun to be discussed. What Bill Evans did in Conversations With Myself is going to become conversations with everybody. The only problem will be that if I want to jam with Sidney Bechet I cant, because somebody owns Sidney Bechets music. There are ranges of collaboration, new forms of art, new ways of making and delivering everything, including dramatic video, that will come up, and there are art forms whose names we dont know yet that are going to happen. You meet people who say, If there werent property, then nobody would make the Flintstones. To that, you have to say, Well, what do we get on the other side? Whats the name of all those art forms that we cant have now and that we will have then? The social accounting is done in a funny way.

Of course technological change changes the forms of art. Theres no question about it. And the social environment too. Americans listen to music today. They dont make music. Thats a whole profound change in one generation in the history of music in the world. Music was a thing people made; now its a thing we hear. I am a non-maker, just a listener to music. I have an enormous privilege, as I see it, to live at the beginning of the digital era, when music from all over the world is available, before it has all been homogenized and paved over. Necessarily homogenized? There are a zillion different things that could happen. The next great oud virtuoso may be a fifteen-year-old Vietnamese girl who has never seen an oud and who has never been in the Middle East, but who is listening to one of the great oud virtuosi from the Sudan or from Iraq, and decides to play that thing herself. I can now listen to a choral musician from Senegal playing with a Norwegian vocalist and a mouth harp player. It isnt necessarily homogenizing, but there are forces for homogeneity doing very well at the moment. It is their activity that we are primarily talking about. They are the people who want to encrypt and to own. Musicians all over the world looking for an audience dont show as their primary concern that they want to encrypt their music and keep it away from people. Ownership and homogenization have a relationship to one another. Theyre not just casually, contextually found in the same places. The goal of reaching the mass audience and getting paid for each and every eardrum is also the goal of homogenization.

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What kind of penetration does free software need to have before competing processes start to organize themselves? It has it now. Under the skin of the beast, free software is everywhere. The real question is: Whats the difference between the technologically clued-in and the technologically checked-out? The answer is: what they use. How big does the technologically clued-in population have to be before new ways of thinking about politics and economics and society take hold? Quite large. But were going there. Were going to a society which is not this one. We are standing in the middle of a tidal wave and trying to figure out how wet we are around the ankles. It just doesnt matter very much. One of the many lessons Ive learned from Richard Stallman over my years of working with him is that I have strategic views, and I would say, Richard, we need to have this. We need to have that. We need to do this or this to meet the current situation. And Richard would say, What needs doing will get done. What people need, what people want, theyll make. That seems to be GNUs organizing principle. Thats an important lesson. We will get where we are going when the people who need to be there are around. I dont know how long that takes. I dont know exactly what the numbers are. I dont worry that they wont show up, and maybe the question How many? is really How do you know theyre all going to show up sooner or later?

Or the question might be, how do you know theres not going to simply be a permanent 10%, or whatever percentage, of the deeply technologically literate, and everybody else? I believe that kids growing up with computers are going to want to know how to change them. I hope thats true. But youve expressed some doubt about that and thats the experiment we are conducting. We will find out which of us is right about that in another ten or fifteen years. A lot rides on it. The whole point of free is freedom to change, not low cost. In the world we are moving towards, the primary power distinction, the class line, is between people who know how to change the behavior of computers and those who dont. Because that kind of knowledge, in particular the ability to interact with complex technological systems to alter their behavior, is power over ordinary daily life in a profound way.

But money is also a real problem. There are billions of people all over the world who need computers and software and some way to connect. This is a major issue of economic resources. How can free software not win? Wheres the money going to come from to buy all those Windows licenses? We are, after all, engaged in a capitalist enterprise on a bad business model. If they want everybody to use it, at a minimum the price has to be zero. At a minimumI dont know whether it takes fifteen or twenty years to do Microsoft in, theyre eventually going down. You cant make inferior stuff and sell it at high prices indefinitely when the good stuff is free. For different users there are different answers to these questions, But an awful lot of people all over the world need software. They are not going to pay $90 for an operating system which doesnt work but is compatible with all the other non-working operating systems all over the planet. Instead, theyll produce something else, and it will be free. And then theyll have an investment in free. Sooner or later, somebody somewhere will begin to recognize that societies pay pretty heavily for Windows too. Well see. We should have this conversation twenty years from now. Oh, well all be having this conversation constantly..
The full text of this interview and an update on developments in these areas is available at www.immaterial.net/cabinet.

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The love-bug
Luke Murphy

Two of the biggest computer stories this year are the Microsoft anti-trust suit and the advent of highly malicious viruses spread by email. These are related much more closely than might first appear. Microsoft has become the most pervasive software supplier in the world with the unique position of supplying not only the operating system for most computers manufactured today, but supplying the key business software to run on those same machines. The pervasive use of Microsoft products and the demands we have for software has directed development of much more tightly integrated programs. In order for us to fully manipulate files and jump from program to program and flow our data, Microsoft had to open the barriers between programs and the operating system. This combination of tightly integrated software with a ubiquitous operating system has left our critical and personal information susceptible. The I-Love-You and Melissa viruses have highlighted this new condition. The embedding of pictures in email is no different from the embedding of scripts in other programs. The scripts, like the programs they run on, can have access to global properties of your computer. Scripts are small pieces of computer code that instruct other programs to perform certain tasks or to automate certain functions. MS Word Macros, which generate windows that pop open during web surfing, are scripts. The sorting of file views in Windows use scripts. Some of these scripts have become very sophisticated languages, and are key to the fluid automation and integration that is found in such groups of programs as MS Office Suite. They also enable sophisticated interaction of online content and services. Playing music or automatically installing the files necessary to do this are all script-driven. The I-Love-You virus took advantage of this integration and exposed how this has extended to critical parts of the operating system as a whole. When the virus was clicked on, it booted up a piece of software called Windows Scripting Host, which allowed Visual Basic Scripts (VBS) to run. The virus is able to run independently of such related programs as Internet Explorer. Because the virus was written in VBS, it had access to the email and address book of 51

MS Outlook and also the Windows Registry. The Registry is that particular file that Windows uses to keep track of what programs are installed, where they are on the hard drive, and critically, what particular types of files are associated with those programs. Because of VBS permissions, the LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.vbs virus was able to mail a copy of itself to the Outlook mail list, alter the registry, and replicate itself by replacing every file with the extensions .jpg, .mps, and .js (as well as files with the .css, .js, .vbs extensions and others in variants of the virus) with a copy of itself. Now this could only occur in an environment where scripts that normally have very few permissible activities have been enabled with extensive control over other programs and the operating system software itself. In other words, to accommodate the fluid installation of plug-ins, games, downloadable upgrades, and certain programs through the browser, scripts such as VBS have been given the ability to directly instruct the operating system to perform critical tasks and affect key parts of the system. The I-LOVE-YOU virus exploited all those open doors between the internet, the browser, Outlook, and the operating system. The VBS of the love bug highlights what is going to happen more and more. When the technology is perfect for having a little icon of a Visa card on your desktop that you merely drop on a web page to buy a product, a porous operating system is needed to allow programs to talk to each other in a fluid way. Quick and clean integration is a solutionbut the trade off is security. The love bug augurs just one of the most obvious holes right now. Currently, our systems are very exposed. This precarious situation is directly the result of our impulse to connect as much as possible with each other and to make our systems as integrated as possible. It is our demand for convenience, flexibility, integration, and automation that drives commercial developers to make highly integrated software suites. Of course, it is also a big payoff for these companies because the more pervasive and extensive their product, the more we are committed to their world..

Anachronistic modernism: numbers stations, static, and the Cold War of poetry
Tan Lin

Like radio and telegraph mediumsas well as digital transmission formats and pulse code modulations that were developed to ensure the secrecy of transmitted messagesnumber stations are an archaic survivor of espionage practices dating from WWI and continuing in the post-Cold War era. As such, numbers stations broadcasts bear an uncanny resemblance to another anachronism: modernist literature, or what might be more aptly deemed the Literature of Information, itself conditioned by early technological developments in radio transmission and encryption. In 1939 Ernest Vincent Wright published a 267-page novel, Gadsby, where the letter E was completely eliminated: Upon this basis I am going to show you how a bunch of bright young folks did find a champion.... The following was produced by feeding words from a biography of John Cage into a language-generating program that replicates what Clyde Shannon calls second-order word approximation: Automatic some of which is a method for arriving at the summer of 1949. His sixtieth the image without looking. He songs disjunction the wife. Some of which its theatre eliminates. Some of which are its other concerts. And reawakened retrospective upon which it is drawn. Like much recent experimental poetry, numbers channels emphasize concealment and high information compression. Both mediums tend to disguise a conservative heritage and a romantic ideology behind 70s bell-bottoms, mirror balls, Jimi Hendrix riffs and outrageous hair. Literature is nothing but the residue of an old technology in the process of reinventing itself as static. Such static comprehends the (defeated) lyricism of the Cold War, with its suggestions of meaningful and private messages (encrypted), i.e., voice. It alone constitutes, even as it cloaks, the attack of the psyche by an outside party (squelch factor) or by those in control of the channels of transmission (broadcast and print media, generally). In John Ashberys poetry, the noise created by eavesdropping, code cracking, and other forms of electronic surveillance have been coded as a very late form of four-on-the floor disco-romanticism, which is to say, all Cold War political undertones have been squelched and transmuted into the insidious laugh track from a gay television sitcom. It really get to me. It do something to me. This is a glove or a book from a book club

No filter. Highly inefficient encoding (which becomes its opposite (valorized) in a poetic (outdated) medium). Maximum attenuation of signal. Maximum phase shift. Hence a technology biased towards noise over a linear channel. Most recent experimental poetry is political ideology reconfigured as disco party with no noise. Noise is random. A filtered signal suggests where it is going and what is coming next. How can we represent or encode messages so as to obtain the fastest possible transmission over the noisy channel? (Shannon) One of the speakers is dead. One of our presidents is being shot. The specter of JFK haunts Ashberys poetry more than any other contemporary poet with the exception of certain of Warhols factory goers, and other poets glued to that aura. Let me pretend for a minute to be Gertrude Stein, who is no longer living or thus speaking to you but exists now like a former president, i.e., an endless sound recording, a transgendered or homoerotic gramophone of herself speaking to herself, especially in her monstrously long book called The Making of Americans, which Edmund Wilson said was very queer and very boring and confessed to having not read. The book should be mandatory reading for presidential hopefuls. The best kind of writing creates a similar deeply repressed sound track of layered and transexual voicings. The greatest poems are psychotropic poems that cannot be read but only listened to. Tennyson was the first to transform his voice into a live mechanical recording instrument in In Memoriam and to induce a trance state of automatic listening. Unfortunately, no one has studied the relation of twentieth-century literature to the repetitive drone of mid-70s disco music or its logical antecedent, the gramophone, along with the pre-recorded and mechanical music pressed into wax cylinders (1891) and the early Edison discs, whose invention in 1912 coincides with T.S. Eliots promulgation of a timeless and impersonal modernism, one marked by the disintegration of voices into background music or sound, a peculiar recording of voicelessness that one hears in both The Waste Land and Four Quartets as well as in much electronica. . . . . .. .. . . .. . . . . . . . . .. .. . .. .. . .. .. . . . . .. . Most experimental literature of the twentieth century was beset by noise, i.e., a form of preserving uncertainty vis--vis a (weak) signal source and a signals lost meaning. Not surprisingly, in the twentieth century an entire body of literature has emerged out of social and technological practices considered outmoded: the uncrackable code, a.k.a. noise, secret telepathic communications, the trance communiqu (usually via a medium and originating with thedead). Numerous poetic works provide a corollary to the numbers stations broadcasts. All were premised on receiving signals or messages from a distance, or transcribing voices into the present in a disguised

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technological form perceived as moribund. Hence the presence of ghostly or quasi-spiritual voices interjected into the corpse of poet or tradition: Jack Spicers radio broadcasts/receptions wherein the poet functions as a damaged radio; Bob Browns reading machines designed to transfigure the master tapes into new visual (twittering) forms of poetry; T.S. Eliots cryptogram of disguised (indistinguishable, hence voiceless) voices known as The Waste Land; Steins repetitive sentence patterns; John Cages vertical hieroglyphs and lectures on nothing; and more recently the machine-based protocol-languages of Michael Palmer and John Ashbery, where information networks and neural-processing systems are subject to compression and overload. .... .. .. . . ... . . ..... . . . .. . . ... . .. ... .

information (recycling) should be kept relatively constant, which is to say it approaches the limit imposed by nature: the due sum of all sound signals sent to the ear. At this point all sorts of mistakes occur and it is hard to tell if they are occurring in the signal source or in the receptor. Such mistakes ought to be manifested as jerks of the eye on the page, otherwise known as saccadic movements. At the center of the eyes vision there is clarity but beyond a one-degree angle from this foeva centralis everything else is in linguistic blur. For example, John Ashberys finest works suggest that a poem ought to be written in discrete 8-track production. Because of that, it constantly exceeds Mullers magic number seven. In such cases, poetry is on the verge of becoming linguistic noise, just beyond the fringes of memory (hence consciousness). In a very fast poem, and John Ashbery has written the fastest poems of the century, one is reading ahead of oneself to get ones bearings, reading through the blur of musical strains (late Romantic TV, made-for-movie soundtracks) and dull 70s reportage (chronicler of suburban angst, parking lots, and blow jobs, picnics, recycled airforce photos, etc.) That is why his work sounds like very fast French to an American ear. Thus, one reads peripherally if one reads at all: non-reading, a look-nohands skimming rapidly over material without having read it; words are not read they are seen as they are flipped through. The only way to read is acrobatically, fast and with lots of background noise (disco music or television), for that encourages more speed and more rapid processing of the information that cannot be processed except as a function of peripheral seeing and distracted absorption. One reads rapidly from one point of fixation (visual) to another, and what conditions the speed or shift of visual focus (the saccade) is predicated on the movement from the last visual focus. One is a magician or a charlatan in this respect, or one is moving at the speed of chatter and gossip, realms where processing information instinctively and quickly is essential. To read poetry carefully and slowly is to miss the point, which is the blur. The blur makes Romanticism possible again. But one wishes for more blur and less Romanticism. That is why many recent experimental poets are Romantics at heart or modernists who still pursue notions of aesthetic autonomy. As usual, the poet struggles to blur his own worst impulses, which he or she regards as his or her best. Unlike Stein, where reading backwards is enforced continually in a grand predecession of American English becoming a monolithic rest-stop, in Ashbery and other experimental writers, there is not enough time to turn back. To turn back would mean to be caught by ones own act of reading. To be comprehended by ones own act of reading would mean the death of ones volubility and suburbanite lyricism, i.e., the perceptual rate of information intake has been

Most experimental writers, like proponents of information theory such as Clyde Shannon, stress the production and reproduction of non-systemic, phenomenal or extra-literary material, material that verges on linguistic noise and that exists just beyond the fringes of memory (hence consciousness). It is a saw of information theory that the meaning of the message is fundamentally irrelevant to any scientific study of information flow or capacity. So, too, with much modern experimental writing, where the content of the message, i.e., the meaning, is virtually impossible to nail down. This brings us to a second idea that underlies most theories of information: information is only valuable if it conveys something new. What was a poem for Marinetti? A poem that made the noises of war. How To Write, by Gertrude Stein, is best understood as an attempt at coding and uncoding a linguistic message wherein a pattern or code of meaningful utterances is suggested, but without ever uttering the meaningful message itself. All linguistic utterance was beset by such unresolvable tensions between sender and recipient. Much of Steins writing functions as a partially encrypted and hence infinitely suggestive message text between language (sender) and its user (recipient). No longer is language, in Stein, a clear case of one person using language to communicate with another, but rather it was an instance of language sending a message, via writing, to a listener incapable of reading. Noise (plagiarization) Text . .... . .. .. . . ..... .. ... ..... .. .. ....... ... . . . . .. . . . .

Pater was wrong. Baudrillard came too late. All poetry (repetition of numbers) aspires to the condition of static. The rate of intake of

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pushed to its outer limits and one reaches a point where the receptors discriminatory powers of selection have been virtually turned off. This too is a binary system with nearly every switch thrown off, and progress controlled barely by some feedback response in which the preceding jerks in the eyes movement condition the next series of visual leaps. The average television receiver carries signals of about 200 million bits per second capacity. The eye is capable of 4.3 million bits per second, which explains why watching TV is so relaxing from a visual standpoint .
O N LY P O E TRY C A N B E T R U LY M O R E R E L A X I N G T H A N T V

. .... . . .. .. . . . ...... . ...

. . .. .. ... .. . .. . . . . ... .. . ...

Truly great poems, like Steins, contain sentences that allow a 1 bitper-second retrieval rate, i.e., the slowest in the century. Ashberys poems (they are to be gulped down in one sitting) allow a 900 million rate, probably the highest in the century. Once one gets past the noise one enters a state of deep relaxation. What is redundant in Ashberys signal source? Unlike Stein there is paradoxically very little redundancy and that should lead to slower (French) reading but paradoxically it doesnt. Everything is redundant in Stein and this leads to a clotting of the visual sense and a retardation of reading itself. In Stein, ones reading turns to mud. This is known as mind or rather language in mind to be distinguished from language had in mind. No language has a mind. I repeat: no language no mind. So Stein not only created genre-less writing (a major accomplishment) she also created language-less writing (a miracle) and she created the generic sound of all previous and future written languages (more than a miracle.) These three accomplishments are even greater to the extent that they cancel one another out. They are all, like numbers station broadcasts, forms of interference transformed into coding, and what is interfered with is the practice of writing. To diagram that electrical circuit will be the main task of poetry readers (listeners) who are future writers. For it is ultimately the practice of writing near, and not writing itself, that Stein is critiquing. The practice of fever in writing is a professional and a male thing. The writing and unwriting of writing unwriting is an amateurish and female thing. It is a leap and fuss. Stein preferred the latter even when she pretended the former, which is today a way that Stein was ventriloquising sex in her writing. Why she pretended sex is a very great mystery to which we will never know the answer because Stein herself did not know the answer. [CONTINUE FROM A AT THIS POINT B IN THE TEXT]: Once we understand [that], language becomes infinitely easy to listen to but infinitely harder to [write]. [That] is why

writing causes so much pain, and listening so much pleasure. That again is why listening is more important than writing. [CONTINUE BEFORE A] That is why playback is primary and recording mode sticks to the unimportant. [That is why sound] is superior to language and talking. When conversation becomes [sound as it does] in Stein it becomes [valuable] [In the shopping mall where I am sitting B-C] it helps to BEGIN HERE: with [Listening always] recedes [before writing] and never the other (way around). That interruption is what makes some writers more interesting than others. A good poem is an elision of typos. A great poem interrupts itself constantly and it does so by entering the listeners head mechanically and all pauses are typos of sorts. The great poem is a very short poem that pretends to be very long or a very long poem that pretends to be very short. It is likely that the poems that need to be written today are the short ones, or at least the ones that appear to be short. In this sense not only must the words be short today, but the poem, if it is long, must be divided into smaller units. This unit today is the couplet and it is unlikely that anything written in anything but the couplet will be truly forgotten. The couplet is the most versatile and fluid of forms. It contains language without ever containing it. It recedes from view the minute one fills it with words. It is far easier than the sonnet. It is easier than any number of fixed forms such as the sestina and the pantoum, though those forms offer particularly severe breathing exercises that are useful in the composition of poetry, and can train the poet for a difficult ride. It resembles the news byte and the binary constructions of computing language. It correlates with an attention span that favors brevity and monotony over all else. It reinforces true multiculturalism and not its various and sundry false platitudes. It is the most American of forms. It pretends to nothing except what it is not. In so doing it frees the negative mathematics in all of us. The following exemplifies a stochastic process, i.e., a series of words or letters where each new entry is determined by the signs immediately preceding it: A sentence is made by coupling meanwhile ride around to be a couple there makes greatful dubeity named atlas coin in a loan. Unlike Ashbery, this is a very slow message transmission, where redundancy (i.e. a function of probability) does not, paradoxically, work to reduce errors in transmission but rather increases them. With a Morse code transmission, maximum occurrence (redundancy) = little information. In sharp contrast to a Morse code transmission wherein the most frequent letters are transmitted with the shortest dot-dash symbols, here we get slow transmission, maximum redundancy, and maximum information/compression. This suggests early twentieth-century speculation on telegraphy, which suggested to some a spiritual transmission of information over a distance. Unlike television broadcasts, such a transmission

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(like numbers broadcasts) suggests mass amounts of information transmitted at enormously slow speeds over an antiquated medium (crowded channel, i.e., low channel capacity). The following could be said to function like a very primitive version of an image distribution device known as television. What image? In order to transmit a specified amount of information, a definite entity [bandwidth + time] is mandated.
3 P H O T O G R A P H S O F T H I N G S I H AV E B E E N T H I N K I N G A B O U T T H E H U M A N B O D Y C O N TA I N S A N U N L I M I T E D N U M B E R O F E M O T I O N S EVERY PERSONS STRUCTURE OR PICTURE CAN EVOKE A DIFFERENT FEELING IN TWO DIFFERENT PEOPLE

. . . .... .....

..

. ..

.. .. ....... ... . ... .. . . . .

Style is only poorly communicated in writing compared with speech, so it must be replaced by quantification and counting. Style should be the census of the words I have used. Particular words are less important than how they are counted by the sentence that contains them. In America, the counting of speech (American speech) is decidedly non-specialized, one-on-one, pioneering, down-to-earth, pragmatic even as a distinct form of literary speech. It obeys certain quaint laws of averages, that is why it repeats so many words which we speak. The great American poem should be hopelessly redundant. It erases styles as easily as it disposes of conventional genres. All accents of American speech become simply abstract parts of speech. Emphasis and affective logic which gives rise to it comprise the underlying code or meaning, and rarely is that affective logic made to extend beyond the length of a sentence, which is to say it manifests itself not as logic but as occurrence. As Gertrude Stein remarked, sentences are not emotional, paragraphs are. In such a way, all genres should be multifarious and virtually unrecognizable. A genre is a truth masquerading as a lie and what one wants is the opposite. This is a lie: repetitions should not extend beyond the microscopic level of the books that contain them. This is a lie: I want to write a poem like a box or like The Making of Americans which cannot really be read, just as an oeuvre (Steins body) of writing ought to be something that cannot be read. The time for reading and especially for reading individual works is over. Individual works can only be sampled, and subjected to statistical analysis. A massively parallel computing system could have a field day with the collected writings now being assembled within this computing device or poem..
Cabinets website at www.immaterial.net/cabinet offers a recording of numbers stations made by Peter Lew in the early 70s.

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David Scher Untitled (1996)

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1485.0 kHz
Carl Michael von Hausswolff assisted by MSC Harding

Both Guglielmo Marconi and Thomas Edison believed in the possibility of using new recording devices to contact the dead, or the living impaired, to use Edisons un canny twenty-first century term. Sir William Crooks, President of the Royal Society and inventor of the cathode ray tube, and Sir Oliver Lodge, one of the leading contributors to radio technology, believed the other world to be a wavelength into which we pass when we die. In the 1950s, Friedrich Jrgensen, a painter, archaeologist, and former opera singer living in Sweden, found traces of extra voices on tapes with which he was trying to record birdsongs. Over the years, Jrgensen made thousands of recordings of the voices of the dead, ranging from his family and friends to people such as Vincent van Gogh and Himmlers masseur. These are claimed to be the worlds first recordings of Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP), the paranormal appearance of strange voices on magnetic tape. The following is a sketch of Jrgensons life and his remarkable and persistent audioscopic research into contacting the dead. Some of the recordings from Jrgensons vast archive have recently become available on the CD Friedrich Jrgensen: From the Studio for Audioscopic Research (Ash International).1 Sample tracks are available at www.immaterial.net/cabinet. 1903 1938 Friedrich Jrgenson was born in Odessa on 8 February 1903. His mother was Swedish and his father was of Danish descent, practicing as a physician in Odessa where the family had moved from Estonia. After living through World War I and the Russian Revolution as a child, Jrgenson trained as a painter at the Art Academy, and as a singer and musician at the Odessa Conservatory, where he was a contemporary of the concert pianist Svjatoslav Richter. In 1925 the family was allowed to move back to Estonia where Friedrich continued his training as a singer

and painter, and shortly afterward he moved to Berlin for more studies. Here his tutor was the bass singer Tito Scipa. Scipa, a Jew, fled to Palestine in 1932 and Jrgenson accompanied him, staying for six years. During this period, while still studying, he made a living as a singer and painter, and some predicted a successful career for him in opera. 1938 1957 In 1938 Jrgenson left Palestine for Milan for more studying and performances. In 1943, when he went to visit his parents, the colder climate caused him serious health problems and his voice was partially damaged. Jrgenson decided to give up his professional opera career to concentrate entirely on painting. He was a realist painter, mostly doing portraits, landscapes, and still lives. Driven out by war in that year he moved to Sweden. Located in Stockholm, he married and became a Swedish citizen. Here he also learnt his tenth language. During the following years he painted portraits of wealthy Swedes and of the town of Stockholm. In 1949 he visited Pompeii in Italy and in order to get easier access to the buried city he showed some of his work to the Vatican. A few days later he received a proposal: the Vatican recognized his talents and asked him to catalogue their archaeological works buried beneath the Holy City. He returned the following year and for four months sat in this damp underworld, painted, and contracted pneumonia. The Vatican medics cured him and when Pope Pius XII saw the results of his work he asked Jrgenson to paint a portrait of him. In all, Jrgenson produced four portraits of the Pope. Now he had full access to Pompeii as well, and he returned there many times to paint. 1957 1987 In 1957 Jrgenson bought a tape recorder to record his own singing, and he started to

notice at this time some quite strange phenomena; inexplicable fade-ins and fadeouts on the tapes; abstract visions and telepathic messages. Jrgenson understood that these events were produced by his highly developed aural and visual senses caused by his artistic prowess. In the following year Jrgenson had his first major exhibition amidst the ruins of Pompeii. Back in Stockholm his telepathic contacts continued: I sat by the table, clearly awake and relaxed. I sensed that soon something was going to happen. Following an inner pleasurable calmness, long sentences in English appeared in my consciousness. I did not perceive these sentences acoustically but they formed themselves as long phonetic sentences and after a closer study I couldnt conceive the words as correct English but in a disfigured almost alphabetical waycompletely deformed. I did not hear a voice, a sound, or a whisper. It was all soundless. Later he also recalled that in the spring of 1959 he got a message about a Central Investigation Station in space where they conducted profound observations of Mankind. [] My friends spoke about certain electro-magnetic screens or radars, that were frequently transmitted, day and night, in batches of thousands to our three-dimensional life levels and, like living beings, had a mission as mental messengers. Undoubtedly one could see these radars as half-living robots that, remote controlled, had the ability like an oversensitive television or radio to correctly register and transmit all our conscious and unconscious impulses, feelings, and thoughts. Jrgenson knew that these fantastic facts really belonged to science fiction but he continued hoping to capture these messages on tape.

57

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Friedrich Jrgenson at an international press conference, Mlnbo, Sweden, June 1963

On 12 June 1959, Jrgenson and his wife Monica went to visit their country house to enjoy the warm summer. Jrgenson brought his tape recorder to record the singing of wild birds, especially the chaffinch. Listening to the tape he heard a noise, vibrating like a storm, where you could only remotely hear the chirping of the birds. My first thought was that maybe some of the tubes had been damaged. In spite of this I switched on the machine again and let the tape roll. Again I heard this peculiar noise and the distant chirping. Then I heard a trumpet solo, a kind of a signal for attention. Stunned, I continued to listen when suddenly a mans voice began to speak in Norwegian. Even though the voice was quite low I could clearly hear and understand the words. The man spoke about nightly bird voices and I perceived a row of piping, splashing, and rattling sounds. Suddenly the choir of birds and the vibrating noise stopped. In the next moment the chirping of a chaffinch was heard and you could hear the tits singing at a distance the machine worked perfectly! From this point Jrgenson continued to investigate these phenomena and at first he thought it was his friends from outer space, but very soon he began to believe that these voices were from the other side, or the Voices of the Dead. Was he close to solving one of the fundamental mysteries of death? At this moment Jrgenson experienced a remarkable event that would change his life: I was outside with a tape recorder, recording bird songs. When I listened through the tape, a voice was heard to say Friedel, can you hear me. Its mammy. ... It was my dead mothers voice. Friedel was her special nickname for me.

At this point Jrgenson abandoned painting for his audio recordings and in 1964 he published Rsterna Frn Rymden (The Voices From Space, published by Saxon & Lindstrm Frlag in Stockholm). My love for the arts was still alive now as ever, and I asked myself if it was the right thing for me to abandon the art of paintinga creative occupation to which I had dedicated my whole life. Later, he writes Instead, I was sitting here with an enormous jigsaw puzzle brooding in despair over the problem of whether one could assemble a more complete picture from all these fragments. And, likewise... I had never before been so touched and captured by any other urgencies than by these mystical connections, literally floating in the ether. Now located in Mlnbo, south of Stockholm, Jrgenson held his first press conference.The Swedish press was stunned by Jrgensons scientific approach to these matters, and was understandingly critical. The International Paranormal Societies, as well as the Max Planck Institute, the University of Freiburg, and the Parapsychological Association in the USA, also took a keen interest. Others, like Konstantin Raudive and Claude Thorlin, came to visit and began to work with tape recorders. At first Jrgenson only used a microphone and a tape recorder. He simply set up the microphone, set the recorder on record, and spoke clearly into the room, leaving space for voices to respond. This was a bit tricky for Jrgenson, since he always had to play back the tape, sometimes at a lower speed, to hear the voices. These voices spoke in a combination of various languages Swedish, German, Russian, English, Italianall languages that Jrgenson knew and could speak. He called this new mixture of languages polyglot, or, many tongues.

In spring 1960 one of the voices told him to use the radio as a medium and this was the technique he used until his death. He connected a microphone and a radio receiver to the tape recorder and in this way he could have a real-time conversation with his friends. Usually he set the radio recep tion in between frequencies where there is generally a variation of noises. Later, he fixed the receiving frequencies to around 14451500 kHz (1485.0 kHz is now called the Jrgenson Frequency). In 1965 Jrgenson took up painting again but recording remained his main activity. At this time he also revisited Pompeii and found that the site was being mistreated. Sponsored by Swedish National Television, he made the documentary film Pompeii: A Cultural Relic That Must Be Preserved, in 1966. A vast output followed in the ensuing years from this highly energetic and creative figure. In 1967 his book on EVP Sprechfunk Mit , Verstorbenen, was published by Freiburgs Verlag Hermann Bauer KG. In 1968 Jrgenson made four documentaries: The Temples at Paestum and the City of Temples and Graves, a film on the ancient Greek city south of Salerno; The Death of Birds In Italy, about the purposeless killing of birds in Italy; The Miracle of the Blood of St. Gennaro, about the famous blood phenomenon in Naples; and a film documenting Jrgensons own archaeological diggings at Pompeii. In 1968 his third book was published in Swedish: Radio och Mikrofonkontakt med de Dda (Radio and Microphone Contact with the Dead, published by Nybloms in Uppsala). Rome was impressed with Jrgensons documentary output. The result of his work at Pompeii was another mission for the Vatican, and in 1969 his documentary The Fisherman from Gallilee: On the Grave and Stool of Peter was finished. For this, Jrgenson received the Order of

60 Random

My mother, my medium
Jon Dryden

Commendatore Gregorio Magno from the hand of Pope Paul VI. Shortly after, he also made a film about the life of the Pope, and Paul VIs high regard for this film prompted him to contact Jrgenson again. Jrgenson then painted three portraits of his second Pope. Around this time he was also permitted to conduct his own archaeological diggings in Pompeii and he dug out the large house of the governor in Pompeii. In the 1970s, Jrgenson continued to record and paint. Moving from Mlnbo to Hr in Skne, southern Sweden, he found a more peaceful place for his work. Age began to take its toll and Jrgenson spent more time with his recordings at home, making an occasional trip to Italy. There was also serious talk about founding an EVP research institute in Italy. In 1978 he held his third press conference and gave a large number of lectures. Here he predicted that we will soon be able to receive messages through television as well. He labeled the work Audioscopic Research. His German book was translated into Dutch, Italian, and Portuguese at the beginning of the 80s. In 1985 he held his last press conference in conjunction with a nationwide television appearance. Friedrich Jrgenson died in October 1987 and left several hundred tapes of recorded material..
1 Ash International and the Parapsychic Acoustic Research Cooperative (PARC) have also released The Ghost Orchid: An Introduction to EVP, which draws heavily on the work of Raymond Cass. For more information about both CDs, see Ashs website at www.touch.demon.co.uk/ash.htm. PARCs website can be found at http://parc.web.fm.

I never met my grandmother, who died when I was three, but my father has given me a fairly good idea of what it was like to have a mother who doubled as a spiritualist medium. In the late 1930s, when Grandmas powers were at their peak, the publics interest in spiritualism had waned considerably. Still, this didnt stop her from renting nighttime space from the Niagara Falls Unitarian Church and proclaiming her spiritualist sect The White Rose of the Free Psychic Truth. My grandfather acted as church manager and sang duets with Grandma, accompanying her on piano or organ. Cryptic titles aside, she gathered multitudes of friends and family who sought to connect to their dead loved ones in the supernatural world. Through the wisdom of the spirits, it was thought that questions or problems in the corporeal world could be answered. Entering a mild trance, she gained access to the spiritual realm, basically acting as a modem-cum-portal to the World Wide Web of the paranormal. A piece of clothing would be handed to her and she would be told who among the recently departed had owned it. The cloth acted as a sort of URL for the spirit in question, and various questions would be answered. Interpretation was key on Grandmas part, as the thoughts, feelings, or images she received from the spirit would have to be depicted in terms the material world could understand. There didnt seem to be any grand ceremony assisting her logging on and off to the various sites of the undead. Somehow my father, then a young boy, perused comic books in the balcony,

oblivious to any unearthly happenings taking place below. He now claims he had no real interest in the ghostly proceedings going on below, nor had he reason to doubt the authenticity of Grandmas communications. People were often affected by the interaction with their dear dead ones and altered their lives if they felt that the spirits wished it. Dad was just assuming that all families had some maternal figure that drenched herself in the preternatural. Grandma ceased her psychic actions some time in the early 1940s, citing a distrust of her power and its source as her reason for abandoning her contacts with the dead. Still, Grandma would read peoples tea leaves on occasion, pronouncing the future of the tea drinkers, sometimes to their great dismay. The family joined the Presbyterian Church and lived out the rest of their lives as otherwise normal, first-generation immigrants in a rapidly changing physical world..

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Invented Languages

Speaking Martian
Daniel Rosenberg

Monday, November 2, 1896. After various characteristic symptoms of the departure for MarsHlne went in a deep sleep. [Lopold] informs us that she is en route towards Mars; that once arrived up there she understands the Martian spoken around her, although she has never learned it; that it is not he, Lopold, who will translate the Martian for usnot because he does not wish to do so, but because he cannot; that this translation is the performance of Esenale, who is actually disincarnate in space, but who has recently lived upon Mars, and also upon the earth, which permits him to act as interpreter.1 This passage is drawn from notes taken by the psychologist Thodore Flournoy during a sance held in his study at 9 rue de Florissant in Geneva and later described in his book From India to the Planet Mars: A Study of a Case of Somnambulism with Glossolalia. Hlne is Hlne Smith, pseudonym for Catherine-Elise Muller, a young medium who, from 1894 to 1901, gave sances for a group that included Flournoy and several other academics interested in spiritual phenomena. Lopold is a reincarnation of Joseph Balsamo, physician and lover to Marie Antoinette and Hlne Smiths primary spirit-guide. Esenale is a reincarnation of Alexis Mirbel, deceased son of one of the sitters in Smiths circle and primary interpreter of the Martian language. The scene introduced by the passage above is typical of what Flournoy referred to as the Martian cycle, those sances in which Smiths trances took her to the planet Mars. First there was vertigo and affection of the heart, symptoms of the arrival of the trance. Then, following a method worked out over the course of two years of sances, Flournoy touched Smiths forehead, in order to call forth Lopold, who functioned as a kind of gate-keeper to the worlds of Smiths trances (what Flournoy called romans). At this point, Lopold signaled sternly by Smiths left hand that the proper time was not yet upon them. Speaking now, he directed the sitters to move Smith from her usual wooden chair to an easy chair across the room. 62

For half an hour, the sitters waited as Smiths calm sleep gave way to agitationwith sighs, rhythmic movements of the head and hands, then grotesque Martian gestures2 Smith murmured softly in French to Lopold, describing to him the scene arrayed before her. Then suddenly Lopold gestured with Smiths arm, indicating to Flournoy that the time had arrived to place his hand once again on Smiths forehead. This time, Flournoy uttered the name of Esenale, to which Smith responded in a soft, feeble, somewhat melancholy voice, Esenale has gone awayhe has left me alonebut he will return,he will soon returnHe has taken me by the hand and made me enter the house. I do not know where Esenale is leading me, but he has said to me, Dode ne haudan te meche metiche Astane ke de me veche.3 There was a pause in the sance and then new movements signaling Esenales return. This time, he went more slowly, translating each word as he proceeded. He said, dode, this; ne, is; ce, the; haudan, house; te, of the; meche, great; metiche, man; Astane, Astane; ke, whom; de, thou; me, hast; veche, seen.4 With Smiths left middle finger, Lopold directed Flournoy to remove his hand from Hlnes forehead. After a period of agitated muscular contractions and several lapses in and out of the trance state, Smith returned to consciousness confused and unaware of the events of the previous scene. The careful ritual worked out by Flournoy and Lopold, the strange cataleptic behavior of Smith in her trances, and the narrative of Mars and its various characters together frame the most remarkable fact of all, Smiths ability to speak and to write the Martian language. Of course, not everyone who heard her believed that she was speaking an actual extraterrestrial language, and Flournoy himself was among the skeptics on this point. Nonetheless, the medium seemed sane, well adjusted, and genuine. The transformation of her personality during

the sances was astonishing. And her trance tongues, strange as they were, truly did sound like language. It is also the case that Smith was sought out by the psychologists and the linguists and not the reverse. She did not come to Flournoy with a problem to be solved. And, although he disagreed with the medium about the meaning and source of her otherworldly tongues, Flournoy made no concerted attempt to change her mind about what she was experiencing, nor did he prescribe a therapeutic correction. Instead, he sought to understand her trance behaviors in a broader psychological and historical light. As he indicated in the subtitle of his study, Flournoy regarded Smiths Martian as a kind of glossolalia. In this category, he also included her Hindu, Ultra-Martian, and the other extrater restrial tongues that she would later speak. Glossolalia (or speaking in tongues) is a term used by Paul in First Corinthians to name speech that is spiritually inspired but unrecognizable as human language. 5 In Western literature, it has been described countless times and places from Corinth to Loudun to Los Angeles, often during religious revivals. 6 The nineteenth century saw its share of these. Among the most spectacular was the sudden explosion of tongues that rocked the city of Topeka, Kansas on December 31, 1899 and that served to inaugurate the modern Pentecostal movement. 7 The fin de sicle also saw the first systematic studies of the subject, of which Flournoys From India to the Planet Mars was among the most influential. It was widely discussed in both professional and popular arenas. And it produced such a stir that it was quickly translated into English and Italian. Soon after, Carl Jung wrote to Flournoy for permission to translate the work into German, but was disappointed to learn that a translation had been contracted and was already underway. 8 The story of the case is as follows: in 1894, Auguste Lematre, professor of psychology at the College de Genve, introduced Thodore Flournoy who was professor of psychology at the Universit de Genve to Hlne Smiths spiritual circle. Smith had been giving sances for about two 63

years, since her first introduction to spiritism and the discovery of her talent for precognition and her remarkable spiritual sensitivity. Over the course of those two years, her main contact was the spirit of Victor Hugo who often composed verse for the group.9 Shortly before Lematre and Flournoy joined the circle, Victor Hugo lost his dominance in Smiths trance communications to a spirit named Lopold, who, over the course of several months, struggled actively with other trance personalities, chasing some away entirely. One September evening in a poor humor, Lopold even went so far as to unilaterally terminate a sance by pulling the chair out from under the seated Mlle. Smith.10 But by the time of Flournoys arrival, Lopold had grown comfortable with the group and with his role in it. His relationships with Smiths other trance contacts mellowed, and he had gradually begun to reveal more about himself. Lopold, it turned out, was another name for Joseph Balsamo, the late Count de Cagliostro. His connection with the medium thus spanned more than one century: he had been her lover in a previous life when she herself had been incarnate as Marie Antoinette.11 In addition to speaking in the voices of the fated queen and her lover, Smith produced letters (via automatic writing) in distinctive handwriting attributed to each of them. Flournoy referred to this group of characters and stories as the Royal cycle or roman. Smith soon revealed that hundreds of years prior to her incarnation as Marie Antoinette, she had walked the earth as the Princess Simandini, eleventh wife of Prince Sivrouka Nayaka of India. It was in these sessions that the special character of Smiths capabilities became clear. While sometimes Lopold was able to describe what Smith was feeling when she was overtaken by the spirit of Simandini, typically, Simandini would announce herself directly, speaking through Smith in a language that Lopold identified as Ancient Hindu. While Flournoy considered it improbable that a young woman from the working class neighborhood of Plainpalais might actually be speaking Sanskrit, as he was no Sanskrit scholar himself, he reserved judgement

until he could get a more learned opinion on the matter. For this, he called in, among others, Ferdinand de Saussure who was the Oriental language specialist at the Universit de Genve at the time. Flournoy referred to this set of stories and personae as the Hindu or Oriental cycle. Finally, and most spectacularly, there was the Martian cycle in which Smith described the environment and inhabitants of the red planet and communicated on their behalf. In her visions, Mars appeared as a world populated by humanoids of roughly Asian physiognomy, who used various futuristic devices such as self-powered vehicles and aircraft. Other interesting features of Mars included dog-like creatures with heads that looked like cabbages that not only fetched objects for their masters but also took dictation. The Martian cycle eventually gave way to a related roman that occurred in a place called Ultra-Mars, perhaps another part of the planet. UltraMartians resembled trolls more than they did human beings. They had a language different from that of the Martians and employed an ideographic rather than a phonetic script. In late 1899, Flournoy published his study From India to the Planet Mars and managed to alienate Smith entirely. In it, he argued that Smiths trance personalities and tongues were the product of subconscious fantasies and represented a variety of regressive behaviors. He argued further that, far from indicating their truth, the very complexity and foreignness of the trance narratives demonstrated the mediums subconscious desire to satisfy the imagination of her auditors.12 From this point on, Smith refused to admit Flournoy to her sances. Nonetheless, throughout the next year, Flournoy received reports of continuing developments in the seance room. In an article he wrote in response to his critics a year after his book was published, he describes the advent of still more extraterrestrial romans (Uranian, Lunar and others), each bringing with it a completely new language and system of writing.13 In the years that followed, Smith received a generous sponsorship from an American

Detail 64 from Ultra-Martian landscape painted by Hlne Smith. Courtesy Olivier Flournoy.

65

spiritualist and turned toward a Christian spiritualism with extraterrestrial elements. During this period, her estrangement from Flournoy was intensified by a sometimes public struggle over rights to proceeds from the sale of From India to the Planet Mars, which Smith insisted was as much the result of her work as it was of his. For a time, she considered writing a sequel to Flournoys book giving her side of the story. Over the course of the next two decades, Smith gave fewer sances and devoted much of her time to painting. Eventually, this work too attracted significant attention, including that of Andr Breton and the Surrealists. At her death in 1929, nine years after Flournoys own passing, the Geneva Art Museum sponsored a retrospective of her work.14 In some ways, the shift away from a verbal and toward a visual medium itself constituted a new language for Smith and a further repudiation and a distancing from Flournoy. On the other hand, neither move was total. In important ways, by 1901, Catherine-Elise Muller had become Hlne Smith, and while she disagreed with Flournoys book, she also recognized its value as a testament to all of her accomplishments. And, although she continued to use the name Muller, to the end of her life she also used the name that Flournoy gave to her.15 The drama of the psychologist and the medium begins with the appearance of Hindu and with Flournoys rapture at the beauty of this strange psychological artifact. Hindu was Smiths first trance tongue. And, as Flournoy recounts, it proved quite difficult to decipher. While one could usually count on Lopold to give a gloss of a Hindu passage, to his frustration, Flournoy discovered that these interpretations were nearly always given in general terms. They were, in Flournoys words, free translations. 16 This is not to suggest that Smiths Hindu utterances conveyed no meaning, but rather, that they participated in an expression that was not easily confined to statements. The sance was a scene of gesture, physical contact, and play, and very often the sense of a session was most clearly conveyed through these other means, through what Flournoy called the pantomime. 17 66 Invented Languages

In the mediums own terms, there was a straightforward reason for this: Lopold could not speak Hindu. And so, when Princess Simandini would speak through Smith, Lopold himself could not understand the words. His interpretations were based on the innermost feelings of Mlle. Smith with which he was perfectly familiar in moments of shared possession such as those occasioned by Simandinis arrival.18 Moreover, it was Simandinis spiritual message and not the language of its transmission that was Lopolds first concern. In this respect, Flournoys interest diverged sharply from that of the spectral gatekeeper. And his method diverged as well. While Lopold employed an empathetic technique for understanding Simandini, Flournoy engaged the most modern methods of linguistic analysis. And he did so with remarkable persistence. He began by sending transcripts of Smiths Hindu to a number of eminent specialists in Oriental languages, including Auguste Barth and Charles Michel, in hope of learning more about its nature and its origins. He eventually went so far as to bring Ferdinand de Saussure into the sance room itself in order to observe and to listen first hand.19 There is a dreamlike character to the responses that Flournoy received: academic language peppered with phrases channeled by the psychic; as-if languages described as if they were languages, annotated and etymologized by the august faculty of Europes great institutions of learning. What is more, the analyses made by the linguists were themselves strangely ambiguous. On the one hand, they asserted that Smith was not speaking Sanskrit, or any other recognizable language. On the other hand, they argued that whatever Smith was speaking resembled a language to a remarkable extent. They pursued analyses of Smiths Hindu in almost delirious detail, combing the transcripts for linguistic evidence. Saussure, in particular, argued that the words that Smith articulated were constructed in some inexplicable manner, but not necessarily false. Indeed, he would even go so far as to say that Smiths tongue never had an anti-Sanskrit character. 20 That is to say, while her vocal production turned out not actually to be Sanskrit, whether by accident

or by subconscious design, some Sanskrit elements were consistently present. Some of this could be explained by the predominance of certain vowel sounds in Sanskrit and in Hindu which vastly increased the chance of the sounds of Hindu coalescing fortuitously into actual Sanskrit words. Some other aspects were much more difficult to explain. Strangest was the total absence of the sound f in either tongue. This feature of Hindu seemed to argue strongly in favor of a deeper relationship, and it occasioned a number of arguments among the scientists. Perhaps Smith had once read a book containing a transliteration of a Sanskrit passage and this regularity had sunk in. Perhaps there was something about the f sound that was antipathetic to the glossolalic process. The linguist Victor Henry offered the following suggestion: If one general thought completely preoccupies Mlle Smiths subconscious at the time she is assembling the sounds of Sanskritoid or Martian, it is surely that French must be entirely avoided. Now the word French begins with an f, for this reason, f must appear to her as the French letter par excellence, and thus she avoids it as much as she can. 21 As the critic Mireille Cifali has pointed out, f was also the first sound of the name Flournoy. 22 With time, Flournoys fascination with the specifically linguistic character of Smiths Hindu contributed to the development of a new dynamic in the sittings. In his correspondence with Saussure, he dwelled at length on linguistic issues, and the sittings came to reflect his obsession.23 These were, after all, sances and not psychoanalytic treatments. And Flournoys approach, in contrast to the method of free association developed during the same period by Breuer and Freud, was to engage the medium on her own ground. Flournoy conversed freely with Smiths trance personae and frequently pursued avenues of conversation even against the resistance of his immaterial interlocutors. For Flournoy, the key question was how to understand the languages of the trance. But how could Hlne Smiths somnambulistic vocalizations have been heard as

language in the first place? After the initial possibility of true xenoglossia (speaking in unlearned foreign tongues) in the case of Hindu had been dispatched, the concept that Flournoy invoked in order to systematize Smiths utterances was that of infantile or primitive language, that general function, common to all human beings, which is at the root of language and manifests itself with more spontaneity and vigor as we mount higher towards the birth of peoples and individuals. 24 To Flournoy, Smith was a poet, in the original, the most extended, acceptation of the term. She was a language-maker.25 If this was not entirely clear in the case of Hindu, when it came to Martian, Flournoy argued, this was not in doubt. Martian had all of the characteristics of a language. Moreover, over the course of seven years of seances, it remained strikingly stable and structurally consistent. But while its structural characteristics closely followed those of the French language, its vocabulary proved something of a mystery. On the one hand, as a dictionary of Martian words began to come together, it became clear that Martian had a close correspondence with French. On the other hand, Flournoy found it difficult to find any grounds on which to link its lexicon with that of the speakers native tongue. The Martian vocabulary resisted Flournoys best attempts at decryption. 26 In his reconsideration of the case, Victor Henry claimed to fare better. By admitting the influence of several languages other than French upon the Martian vocabulary, he was able to produce plausible terrestrial etymologies for nearly every Martian word. Flournoy accepted the breakthrough and used Henrys observations to confirm his own suspicion that the sub-personality responsible for Smiths trance languages was a regressed version of her own personality around the ages of ten or twelve, a period in which he hypothesized that Smith was exposed to some spoken Hungarian as well as to Latin and Greek.27 Drawing upon Henrys etymological decryption of Smiths tongues, Flournoy speculated that the very syllables of Smiths glossolalic utterances could be assigned dates and provenance. 67

Flournoy thus sought to map the history of Smiths trance tongues onto a history of psychic events. At several points, he even attempted directly to use Smiths autohypnotic states in order to evoke clues as to the occulted origins of the trance narratives, in order, as he put it, to obtain a confession from Hlnes subconscious memory, and persuade it to disclose the secret. 28 But at each attempt, he was repulsed by Lopold who refused to relinquish his own position as interpreter. This early conflict between Flournoy and Lopold over the authority to interpret laid the foundation for a dynamic that characterized the sances thenceforth, a dynamic in which the problematic of translation belonged as much within the drama of the seance as without it. If the task of the translator was fundamental even to Hlne Smiths early glossolalia, it was to become still more central as the sances proceeded. Along with word-forword correspondence with French, Martian brought with it Esenale, a character specifically fit for the role of translator of languages. A Swiss reincarnate on Mars, Esenale spoke both Martian and French. Indeed, he was tri-lingual, since he was also fluent in the Ultra-Martian language. His appearance marked the completion of a shift in the structure of the sances. Not only were his translations linguistic in the mundane sense, at their limit, they were nothing but translation. The ritual by which Ultra-Martian would be interpreted, it turned out, always involved an intermediary translation into Martian, thus converting the role of the latter into that of a linguistic go-between. In a way, nothing could have suited Flournoy better. After years of work with the medium, the glossolalists secret appeared to be coming clear: analyses had been made, correspondences found, and vocabularies translated. And Flournoy was employing these linguistic observations in order to draw up a kind of index to Smiths psychic history. But in another way, this turn in the seances complicated things. As the seances went on, Smiths tongues continued to grow in number and in the complexity of their relations to one another. And while Smith continued to occupy the accustomed role of the medium, the role itself began to

change: as much as the spirit behind the language, in her trances, Smith was coming to incarnate the spirit of language itself. Flournoy recognized that what he had called glossolalia was perhaps a mixed phenomenon, and that for some reason over time Smiths vocal performances had come to sound less and less like poetry and more and more like grammar. The cause that he identified was what he called suggestibilty. According to Flournoy, the premise of the entire Martian narrative arose from Smiths subconscious desire to address a fancy that one of the sitters had expressed fleetingly some months before when he had mused aloud about the possibility of life on other planets. Suggestibility also accounted for the appearance of Mme. Mirbels son, Alexis, on Mars in the person of Esenale; and it explained the identity of Lopold and Joseph Balsamo, a response to the persistent questions of a sitter interested in the life of Marie Antoinette.29 In this instance, suggestibility explained the growing linguistic content of the sances given in the presence of the psychologists and linguists. But there was more at work here than just suggestion. The sances were scenes of dialogue and reciprocal influence. And, indeed, the larger organization of Smiths trance narratives foregrounds the interaction of speakers from different worlds and

Above right and following page: From the seven-part series The Materialization of the Girl of Jairus by Hlne Smith.

illustrates the many ways in which influence may pass from one sphere to another. Not only was there a permeability among trance narratives, the sances involved complex passages into and out from the world of the trance itself. On the one hand, it was possible for a character from the world of the sitters to enter the trance narrative, as did Alexis Mirbel. On the other hand, it was possible for trance personae to enter the material world, as one of the Arab slaves from the Hindu narrative did when he attached himself to the body of a sitter named Seippel, and as Prince Sivrouka often did when, according to Smith, he incarnated in the body of Flournoy himself. Flournoy writes, It is difficult to understand why the hypnoid imagination of Mlle. Smith gave itself up to such pranks, and distributed as it did the roles of this comedy. M. Seippelhas nothing about him of the Arab, and still less of the slave, neither in outward appearance nor in character; and as to myself, let us say here, M.F.if I may be permitted to substitute harmless initials for the always odious Ias for M.F., there is generally to be met with in him, under some diffidence, a certain mildness of manner and disposition which would scarcely seem to predestinate him to the energetic and wild role of a violent,

whimsical, capricious, and jealous Oriental despot.30 It is interesting to note that Flournoys openness to Smiths performances ended exactly here. While he normally referred to the sance narratives as romances, this turn was strictly low comedy. And, while the trance tongues were serious business, this was merely a prank. 31 It is doubly interesting to observe the evacuation of the I in Flournoys own language, a process that resembles the fragmentation of the speaking subject characteristic of the language of possession.32 While Flournoy focused his critical attention on the psychological mechanisms of suggestion, Smiths performances continually emphasized the possibility of translations between worlds and of passages open in two directions. After all, it was not an accident that, even very early on, the crucial figure in Smiths romans was a translator. Nor was it an accident that as the sances proceeded, the styles and mechanisms of translation present became both more sophisticated and more pivotal in the narrative of the romans themselves. Translation in the Hindu mode was not precisely linguistic. Lopold translated on the basis of meaning conveyed by the feelings of Mlle. Smith, which he knew perfectly well. That eventu ally the Martian cycle produced translation of the more usual linguistic sort is testament to Smiths translation of the interests of Flournoy, Lematre, Saussure, and the others into the terms of the roman. As it turns out, the Martian-French dictionary so coveted by Flournoy was developing in two different registers.33 On the one hand, an actual written dictionary was emerging from the continuing series of seances: eventually there were even sessions devoted almost exclusively to trans-lation. And, over the course of seven years, hundreds of words were catalogued and substantial progress was achieved. On the other hand, a drama of translation was being enacted within the roman itself. It was more and more the subject of the trance communications rather than merely their means. Do not worry, Esenale reassured Flournoy one difficult day, soon you will ...

possess . . . the signs of our language. 34 The linguists offered Smith a metaphor, language with a determinate, lowercase l. In her glossolalia, it came to embody an entire drama of foreignness and understanding. The story of Hlne Smith is in ways an old one, a romance and a struggle between mysticism and reason with the medium and the professor playing the expected roles: she who speaks and he who writes and interprets. It is a story that has been repeated many times over centuries of confrontation between mystics and their (friendly or unfriendly) interpreters. And, whether in order to vindicate Smith or Flournoy, their relationship has very often been understood in this light. For the historian Michel de Certeau, for example, the story of Smith and Flournoy is that of glossolalia itself in miniature. It is the story of an original misrecognition, of speech taken for language.35 For de Certeau, the very identification of a vocal practice as glossolalia constitutes a powerful step in this direction. Although the term enforces a distinction between tongues and languages, at the same time, it locates the vocal act in relation to a positive field of linguistic understanding. And, in doing so, it calls into play the force of the various social and intellectual institutions (theology, psychology, hermeneutics, etc.) that ground linguistic meaning. According to de Certeau, it calls into play forces that militate against the originary joys of the expressive vocal act. Certainly, there is something of this dynamic at work in the drama of interpretation that Smiths tongues inspired. In the case of Hindu, for example, it is clear that while Smith and Lopold concerned themselves principally with the innermost feelings that they were charged with expressing, Flournoy and his associates concerned themselves with the means by which these expressions took place. But the questions do not always divide so neatly. And in the case of Hlne Smiths extraterrestrial languages the distinctions are particularly hard to make, for here, it is clear that Smiths trance personalities assented at least in part to the ideas of the scientists. For Esenale, as much as for Flournoy, the truth of tongues lay in an understanding of the

68 Invented Languages

Top: Samples of Martian writing produced by Hlne Smith during one of her sances: (left to right) Traveler, Lodger, Runner, Dowser, Guide, Hole Digger (continues on p. 69)

plurality and the specificity of languages. And foreignness itself, even in its greatest generality, owed not to the obscurity of the transcendent but to that of language itself in its density, materiality, and autonomy.36 From this point of view, Smith and her interpreters look less like antagonists than uneasy collaborators. It may be true that in ways Flournoy and company constrained the medium, forcing her into routes that she would not otherwise have taken, and emphasizing the linguistic as opposed to the vocal character of the tongues. At the same time, it is certain that Smiths own understanding of language influenced and constrained them in turn. Above all, it is clear that the desire that Smith manifested in the later sances was not an unfettered desire to speak but rather a desire to speak languages, and that the transgressiveness of her performances lay not in their trajectory out of language and toward pure vocalization but in their repeated competence at producing convincing simulacra of language outside of the legitimate places where language ought to have been. If, as de Certeau argues, there are joys in the pure vocality of glossolalia, Smiths speech embodies something different: a joy in translation and in the position of the intermediary, a joy in the foreignness that is language itself..

1 Thodore Flournoy, From India to the Planet Mars: A Study of a Case of Somnambulism with Glossolalia, trans. Daniel B. Vermilye (New York: Harper & Bros., 1900), pp. 165-6. English translations taken from Vermilye with minor modifications. 2 Flournoy, 1900, p.166. 3 Ibid., p.166. 4 Ibid., p.166. 5 Emile Lombard, De la glossolalie chez les premiers chrtiens et des phenomnes similaires. Etude dexegse et de psychologie, (Lausanne: Imprimeries Runies, 1910), pp. 1-48. 6 On the historical functions of glossolalia, see the introduction to Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, vol. 1, tr. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1982]). Antoine Compagnon argues that the reason why there is no record of glossolalia among the ancient Greeks is that their notion of logos admitted no gap between the language of people and the language of gods. Without the possibility of conceptualizing a lost Ursprache, glossolalia fades into the indifference of barbarian language. Antoine Compagnon, La Glossolalie: Une affaire sans histoire? Critique 35:387-8 (August/September, 1979), pp. 824-38. 7 To believers, the very strangeness of tongue speaking bespeaks its truth. Glossolalia is by its very nature incomprehensible, wrote Edward Irving, founder of the revivalist Irvingite movement, otherwise nothing would indicate that it is the Spirit that speaks and not a man. Lombard, 1910, p. 16. 8 See Carl Jung, Preface, in Flournoy, 1995. 9 On Lematre, see Cifali, 1994. 10 Flournoy, 1900, p. 83. 11 See Terry Castle, Marie Antoinette Obsession, Representations 38 (Spring 1992), pp. 1-38. 12 Flournoy, 1900, pp. 266-7. 13 Thodore Flournoy, Nouvelles observations sur un cas de somnambulisme avec glossolalie, Archives de Psychologie I (December 1901), pp. 101-255. 14 See Waldemar Deonna, De la plante mars en terre sainte: Art et subconscient, Un mdium peintre: Hlne Smith (Paris: De Boccard, 1932). 15 On the names of Hlne Smith, see Une glossolale et ses savants: Elise Muller, alias Hlne Smith, in La Linguistique fantastique, ed. Sylvain Auroux (Paris: Denoel, 1985). 16 Flournoy, 1900, pp. 330-1. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., pp. 317-8. 19 See Flournoy, 1900, pp. 314-36 and idem., 1901, pp. 211-16. See also O. Flournoy, 1985 which includes letters between T. Flournoy and Saussure, Barth, and Michel. 20 Flournoy, 1900, pp. 316, 326. 21 See Henry, 1901, pp. 21-5. 22 Cifali, 1994, p. 286.

23 See their correspondence in O. Flournoy, 1985, pp. 175211. Such was the extent of his obsession that we even find Flournoy correcting the spelling in a piece of Smiths automatic writing. Flournoy, 1900, p. 210. 24 Flournoy, 1900, pp. 258-9. 25 Ibid., pp. 258-9. 26 Ibid., 1900, p. 252. 27 Henry, 1901, pp. 6-7, and Flournoy, 1901, pp. 144-6. 28 Flournoy, 1900, p. 295. 29 Outside of the principals, all of the names given here are the pseudonyms given by Flournoy in From India to the Planet Mars. 30 Flournoy, 1900, pp. 337-8. 31 Ibid. 32 We can find a common trait by isolating the texts reporting the speech uttered by the possessed, the discourses in I. They all affirm, Je est un autre. . . . The exorcist or doctor engages in determining who this other is by placing him in a topography of proper names and by normalizing once again the connection of the speech act with a social system of statements. De Certeau, 1988, p.255. 33 Flournoy, 1900, p. 167. 34 Ibid., p. 218. 35 Michel de Certeau, Vocal Utopias: Glossolalias, tr. Daniel Rosenberg, Representations 56 (Fall 1996), p. 33. See also idem., Discourse Disturbed: The Sorcerers Speech, in The Writing of History, tr. Tom Conley, (New York: Columbia, 1988 [1975]. 36 See Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Sicle (Princeton: Princeton University, 1986), p. xiii, and Michel Pierssens, The Power of Babel: A Study of Logophilia, tr. Carl R. Lovitt (London: Routledge, 1980 [1976]). Extra references and resources for this article are available at www.immaterial.net/cabinet. Drawings by Hlne Smith reproduced in Waldemar Deonna, De la plante mars en terre sainte: Art et subconscient, Un mdium peintre: Hlne Smith (Paris: De Boccard, 1932). Samples of Martian writing reproduced in Thodore Flournoy, Nouvelles observations sur un cas de somnambulisme avec glossolalie, Archives de Psychologie I (December 1901).

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Top: Samples of Martian writing produced by Hlne Smith during one of her sances: (Continued from p. 68) Town Crier, Bearer of Sacred Water, Dog Breeder, Guardian, Virgin Girl, Fiance.

The alien argot of the avant-garde

Christian Bk

Atlantis Productions commissioned me in 1997 to design a credible language to be spoken by the extraterrestrials on the new, sci-fi TV show, Earth: The Final Conflict (the latest series of programs imagined by Gene Roddenberry). The Hollywood producers wanted me to create an ethereal language that would be spoken by a race of electroplasmic superorganismsaliens who embodied an inhuman science of enlightened tranquility. I was bemused by the fact that years of both academic experience (as a doctorate) and artistic experience (as a soundpoet) had now finally made me uniquely qualified to be a linguistic consultant in the world of science-fiction, creating a successor to Klingon. Earth: The Final Conflict presumes that, in the near future, Earth has been visited by the Taelons, a race of celestial Buddhists, who alleviate our social misery, although their motives for saving our planet seem esoteric, if not inimical, and thus a distrustful billionaire, Jonathan Doors, forms a rebel group of humans who vow to resist the seductive despotism of these benign aliens. Shot in Toronto (a futuristic metropolis by any American standard), the show has enjoyed modest success in the States, where TV Guide has mentioned my involvement, describing me as the noted linguist, Christian Bk (even though this linguistic reputation has only been earned by virtue of my being noted in TV Guide). Klingon represents the most successful invented language in history, since more people now speak the alien argot than speak Esperanto. Darren Wershler-Henry in his book Nicholodeon has even gone so far as to translate a poem by bp Nichol into Klingon, producing a lautgedichte as nonsensical as any Dada poem by Hugo Ball. Wershler-Henry reports that he has had to make some allowances for poetic usage: Since Klingon contains no equivalent for the word car, [...] this text reads primitive shuttlecraft. Klingon is, however, nothing more than a simple cipher for English with a reverse grammar and a Germanic emphasis. Since fans of Star Trek are unlikely to learn another language so similar to one already learned, I have tried to imagine a truly alien argot with no earthly cognate. The Taelons speak a whispery language that often seems nonsensical when translated into English, largely because the alien argot lacks many of our own grammatical constraints: for example, there are no nominative nouns, no transitive verbs, etc.moreover, every word is ambiguous and polysemic, with subtle nuances of meaning that often seem contradictory. The language abounds in poetic notions that are concocted and dissolved in a moment, according to aesthetic necessity. The aliens do not even believe that they use their language; instead, they say that the language uses them. It is, for them, an entity with a life of its own. It is not a tool used to express ideas; instead, they see it as an ideal virus that uses their own minds as a means for replicating itself through the act communication. The Taelons subscribe to a Philosophie des Als Ob, in which reality is more exigent than existent: there is never only one possible state of the as is; there are only many potential states of the as if. The Taelons have no cognate for the word reality, except a gerund that roughly translates as thinking or dreaming. The language does 70 Invented Languages

not describe a universe that exists beyond the character of language itself: there are no things that endure (no states); there are only traits in action (only events)no existing, only becoming. The aliens have no concept of representation. For them, things do not imitate each other; instead, they connect with each other. The painting of a rose does not depict a flower; instead, the aliens say that the painting strives to become a flower. The alien argot is defined in part by the following qualities: Predicates are not composed of nouns and verbs; instead, every sentence is reducible to a word that synthesizes noun and verb into a kind of adjectival infinitive (not unlike a gerund in English: for example, thinking, dreaming, etc.). Such a nounverb is a trait in action, referring simultaneously to a quality and its conduct. The language has no notion of a complete sentence: there are only intran-sitives modified by various affixes that inflect some quality, according to a logic that at first seems more associative than designative. Predicates do not index a temporal relation. Sentences, for example, have no tense, except the present tense. There is thus no way to express an action that takes place in a yesterday or a tomorrow. Instead, the aliens express the passage of time in terms that evoke a state of mind, like a mood: the future tense is expectant (the present act of hoping for an event to happen); the past tense is nostalgic (the present act of pining for an event to return). Time, for the aliens, is defined not through a sequence of causalities, but through rhizomes of coincidence. Predicates do not index a contrary relation. There are no antonyms that designate an opposition between one concept and its other extreme: no words for non-, anti-, etc., only inflections of an idiom that translates (inadequately) as and/or or eitherboth. Taelons make no distinction, for example, between subject and object, between cause and effect, etc., since they use only one word to designate both terms at the same time. There are few anthropic analogues for this principle of synthesis, except maybe for the Tao of Buddhism or the Advaita of Hinduism. Predicates do not imply a singular relation. Whereas English presumes by default that a noun is singular, unless modified by a plural suffix, the alien argot presumes by default that a nounverb is multiple, unless modified by an affix that denotes a singular, the one among many. The Taelons consider the plurality of cases before they consider the specialty of one case: the word for an event is thus always plural (unless modified) since the aliens regard each event in terms of all its cases: e.g., the table as it has become, as it might become, etc. Premises such as these can provide the basis for an alien idiom with its own grammar and lexicon: for example, the sentence We come in peace can be translated into the phrase sinai uhura (pronounced: shee-nha-wheeee, yhoo-hurrr-rha, with the letter R trilled, and the vowels aspirated at the back of the throat). The expression translates very literally into the phrase arriving as if fierce and/or serene. The aliens draw no distinction between

abs TruCt heh GarBagt

CD insert with works by Charles Bernstein, Christian Bk, and Steve McCaffery

antonyms; hence, their idiom for making peace is the same as their idiom for making war. In both cases, the two possible mean ings are always presumed to be implied in the statement itself, as if to suggest the multiplicitous possibilities of every initiated encounter. Working on a dictionary plus a grammar text for the show, I edited all Taelon speech in English and translated dialogue into the alien argot, creating other neologisms whenever necessary (such as the skril, a symbiotic laser; and the synod, an alien judiciary, etc.); moreover, I wrote riddles and prayers in the language, plus an alien fable, entitled las amali (pronounced: lah-shammah-lee). Based upon the story by Aesop about the race between the turtle and the rabbit (except that the two characters, las and mali, can be functiona ally interchanged in order to convey more than one moral point), the fable refers to the act of transcending oneself through struggle an act that fuses riskiness and discipline: las amali. The two characters satirize a pair of pets owned by my friend Natalee Caple. Earth: The Final Conflict aspires to be an intelligent contribution to the genre of science-fiction (although the show does liberally mix its merits with its faultsmuch like the premiere episodes of Star Trek). Poets wishing to learn more about the alien argot are encouraged to consult the web site at www.taelons.com, where they might find a more extensive monograph about the language, plus an exhaustive vocabulary, including examples of Taelon speech. Like the poet Jackson Mac Low (who has performed vocals for the aliens in the movie Men In Black), the avant-garde has had to make a modest living in the oddest venuesalmost as if poetry itself has become so heteroclite in the modern milieu that it is now nothing more than an alien idiom that has no real home except in the world of science-fiction. las amali : A Taelon Fable omr uvala las qiloi mali a viloi z ava las viloi a s oloa mali viloi s oloa las a eve ne-evama mali eve ne-evama las ulumi a tolova tee tolova mali meneli las a mali tolova e-evama tee tolova

Each of the pieces on this audio CD reinvents poetry by making works of words that exist in no language other than the one constructed by the poem. For the twentieth century, the inaugural work of this type is Kurt Schwitterss sound poetry masterpiece, The Ursonate (1922-1932), the full text of which is available in pppppp: poems performance pieces proses plays poetics, edited and translated by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (Temple University Press, 1993). Starting unexpectedly with a prelude that begins: Fumms b w taa zaa Uu, p giff, kwi Ee, the work is composed, like a traditional sonata, in four movements. Christian Bks dynamic performance of the work is twice as fast as Schwitterss own version, discovered only after Bk had begun to perform the work. (Schwitterss performance was first released as a Wergo CD in 1993.) Azoot DPuund was written by Charles Bernstein in the late 1970s, appearing as part of a collection called Poetics Justice, which was reprinted in Republics of Reality: Poems 1975 -1995 (Sun and Moon Press, 2000). While the poem uses no English words, English speakers will likely hear it as quasi-English, since it resonates with various kinds of accents and slangs, taking off on its own sonic riffs, but always staying close to the intonational and grammatical patterns of the American. The final five pieces are by Steve McCaffery. Shamrock, Mr. White in Panama, The Multiples, and Natural Histories 6 and 7 all date from 1981, while First Random Chance Poem dates from 1982. All five pieces are taken from a sound/text project The Body Without Writing. McCafferys interest in sonic renditions of imaginary lan guage is to work the threshold that demarks the difference between sound and meaningful sound. He notes that St. Augustine recorded that his own experience of hearing a dead language stirred in him the desire for the will to know the meaning. Imaginary languages are similar purveyors of virtual significations.
The CD was mastered by Scott Konzelmann at Chop Shop.

once upon, what if... nimbly, daring, gently by comparing nimbly, faring as if fast gently, faring as if slow nimbly early, free of caring gently later, full of caring nimbly, languishing as though finishing without finishing gently, vanquishing, nimbly thus gently, finishing moral: to cherish thereby to finish.

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Xu Bing From The Himalayan Journal, 1999

The a bit of the

I more

wor the write,

peak is

in sight.

Right now,

Once again, something pokes out of the clouds. fog fog fog fog fog in fog. covered was

My writing gets worse.

fog fog

f fog There, the thick fog covers it all up.

Here the fog lightens. A snowpeak is visible, but not clearly.

A little mo A little peak

ridge this before, Moments

Beneath here, all colors darken. Ridge Ridge White fog

white cloud sharp. and is there, ridge, That The brown of the mountainside is sharp and full a silhouette. rock rock A cloud bunch white cloud clear

Another cloud

Dense white fog

Ridge do not know what. A distant hill in fog. A distant hill

White snow brown

There is something

here but I A

rock A patch of brown

brown brown

Beneath here, green begins to appear. But only a little.

White snow rising

This hill is brown and red There are snow clouds. white because it lies above Here is a snow cloud. the treeline. almost line white cloud There is a snow cloud. chicken But rolling hills are because dark, that in sight. Brown, Chinese I yellow, and a is ordered havent it What? little bit shiny. I resembles Here eaten way. Treeless. yesterday. meat a Chinese just in a shower in waterfall cliff three food days. warm Misty clou cliff prepares a I Green tree cook find did, cliff There is a clearing up, but it clouds over again. It changes so swiftly. I want better language to describe it. But, now, I forget so many characters.

Couldnt write /draw this.

long Yes

It lodge. White snow rising Nepali this within Green tree from out gaze Green tree We Green tree

the however, that seems Green tree Green tree

They move to th

A white cloud and a green tree

A white cloud and a green tree

fog

fog my rse writing becomes.

fog fog fog fog fog fog fog

fog snow

snow The mountain shows itself once again.

Now, the view is clear. Nothing can be done.

fog

Ridge Snowy mountaintop pokes out of the clouds. Too much change. Hard to capture in words. And so beautiful that characters do not capture it. What can be done? up up, up, Rising Fog rising. Fog distinguished. Fog

The ridge shows itself once again. Limited Peak Ridge Ridge No need to draw it. Only sight will do. Writing, too, cannot describe it. Peak Foggy mountain Ridge Capped once again. Now nothing can Ridge be seen.

ountain can be seen.

Ridge

After lunch this ink has darkened. Fog Cannot see clearly. Black peak capped by fog

in a cloud

black,

be cannot there It changes so fast, lies I cannot catch it what in words. Cant catch it. and It is entirely covered again.

There, alone, lies a little shadow. So little.

uds move to the right.

he right

yvind Fahlstrms aviary

A.S. Bessa

Monster languages is the expression Swedish artist yvind Fahlstrm (19281976) used to refer to his experiments in creating new languages: birdo, based on American bird sounds; fglo, based on Swedish bird sounds; and whammo, based on onomatopoeic expressions in comic books. Of the few works that Fahlstrm produced employing monster languages, the 1963 radio play Fglar i Sverige [Birds in Sweden]1 is the most ambitious. The first thing that might strike the listener about Fglar i Sverige is how lovely it sounds. This is partly a result of its operatic structure, which allows the work to unravel an entire web of references. Opera played a significant role in the work of Fahlstrm, either because of its combination of words, music, and imagery, the use of dramatic conventions to address historical events, or simply because of its extravagant explorations of language. Its combination of language and music provided Fahlstrm with a highly complex organizing principle that allowed him to fully explore the perplexity of language and its conflicting elements. Fglar i Sevrige mimics opera at the same time that it reflects on the genre and expands its vocabulary. The fact that Fahlstrm needed an organizing principle in order to elaborate his work is evident in the many essays that he wrote on art. It is most clearly outlined in his influential Manifesto for Concrete Poetry2 (1953), the first attempt to adapt Pierre Schaeffers3 ideas on musique concrte to the realm of poetry.

Although Fglar i Sverige was performed by Fahlstrm in the radio studio with the aid of a sound technician, it still comprises several voices. These voices are mainly recordings (of Basil Rathbone, Jan Lindblad, and a sample from Puccinis Suor Angelica) that complement Fahlstrms narration. They add color by contrasting with the flatness of Fahlstrms narrative and are thus the equivalent of arias, duets, and recitatives. While Fglar i Sverige also makes two clear references to operas (Suor Angelica and Wagners Siegfried ), it is impossible to read a coherent story into this work. The action jumps back and forth between places that are only suggested, and the characters, if we can accept them as such, are equally obscurely defined. One gets the sense that in Fglar i Sverige Fahlstrm grasped a concept too huge for him to communicate in an orderly way, that the syntax available to him was inadequate to address his subject, hence the recourse to a collage of sound. The principle of collage (splicing, sampling, quoting) will then become the very syntax of this work as well as part of its subject matter. Thus, everything in Fglar i Sverige is borrowed from other sources. Within this structure of collage in Fglar i Sverige, there are hints of birds becoming machines, of machines as extensions of natural organisms, and, ultimately, of nature being superseded by technology. This mimicry becomes particularly disturbing during The Raven section due to the encoded meaning that Fahlstrm extracts

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Birdo >

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Esperanto: still alive and kicking

An interview with Sabina Sthlberg

from a specific group of words. This operation is twofold: In the first part Fahlstrm isolates a cluster of words from Edgar Allen Poes The Raven and translates it into one whammo. Whammo, like its sister monster languages, is basically the trans lation of each syllable of a word into its onomatopoeic simile. For instance the word Re-mem-ber becomes ring-munchbrru(p). In this process each word is then distorted and morphed into an entirely new word through the mere mimicry of its sound:
remember December ember floor morrow borrow sorrow Lenore evermore ringmunchbrru(p) dringsmekbrru(p) hm-brru(p) f(e)h-oww mmmrrrowroww brr(p)rrowroww zzzrrrowroww kli(p)unghoww wham-moo-oww

engender misreading, decontextualizing, and hybridization. The general structure is primarily related to opera, but it also draws from radio dramatization in the tradition of Orson Welless War of the Worlds, and from documentary styles. From the start, Fahlstrm borrows studio technical devices such as sound effects and sampling to create atmosphere, and real information in the form of reportage. To complicate things further, he distorts these elements with complete disregard for the conventions of each style. Fglar i Sverige is a highly allegorical work that performs its narrative while linking our cultural past to our contemporaneous technological environment. The replacements and displacements performed on The Raven are carried out in order to illustrate the process through which words mutate. On the other hand, they also are the technique by which Fglar i Sverige is constructed. In the double mirror that is Fglar i Sverige, not even the image of the poet is left out of the frame. Hence Fahlstrms image emerges as the operator, camouflaged as a DJ in a studio of the Swedish Radio performing, sampling, cutting, splicing, scratching, mimicking in bird language the major works of other poets..
1 A bilingual book-plus-CD edition of Fglar i Sverige has

The Esperanto language was created in 1887 by the Polish linguist and doctor L.L. Zamenhof (1859 -1917). During the third week of July 2000, the week-long Esperanto Cultural Festival took place in Helsinki, Finland. Sabira Sthlberg (originally from Helsinki and now living in Bulgaria) has spoken Esperanto the better part of her life. She has also been heavily involved in the Esperanto community, serving as the vice president of the World Organization of Young Esperantists from 1991-1993 and currently as editor-in-chief of the online magazine Kontakto. Nina Katchadourian met her to find out about the Esperanto community and the problems and misperceptions facing it. How did you come to be involved with Esperanto? Sabira Sthlberg: When I was 13 or 14, my mother bought a book. We were very interested in languages and I had seen some films about Esperanto. My mother went out to buy a book about Saami (the Lappish people) and came back with a book about Esperanto instead! Did the whole family learn Esperanto together? YesWe used to sit in the car on our way to the countryside and practice Esperanto. Last night, I noticed that various accents sometimes came through in the way some people spoke Esperanto. Is there a particular correct pronunciation? Zamenhof established the correct pronunciation using phonetic indications. But I think it depends how much you travel with Esperanto, because the more you travel, the more you learn an international pronunciation. Are there sound recordings of him speaking? Yes, there are, from 1905. And he speaks very clearly, very fluently, and very beautifully.

However, new words are not allowed to remain meaningless indefinitely. The next phase strives to restore their signification. Each new word is translated again, but this time into sounds recognized by the listener, with each word corresponding to a composite of two or three natural sounds, one for each syllable:
ringmunchbrru(p) dringsmekbrru(p) hm-brru(p) f(e)h-oww mmmrrrowroww brr(p)rrowroww zzzrrrowroww kli(p)unghoww wham-moo-oww telephone-munching-machine gun telephone-smacking-machine gun humming-machine gun snow shoveling-elephant kissing-cat-elephant machine gun-cat-elephant snoring/sniffing-cat-elephant bowling-groan-elephant car crash-cow-elephant

recently been released in conjunction with excerpts from another radio-play, Den Helige Torsten Nilssen. See Teddy Hultberg, yvind Fahlstrm i eternManipulera vrlden / yvind Fahlstrm on the AirManipulating the World (Stockholm: Sveriges Radios Frlag & Fylkingen, 1999). 2 An English translation of the Manifesto for Concrete Poetry is available at www.fahlstrom.com. The term concrete poetry was coined simultaneously and independently in the early fifties by Eugen Gomringer in Switzerland and by Fahlstrm. 3 Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995) was the inventor of musique concrte, which he first performed publicly in 1950 in Paris. Samples of Fglar i Sverige are available at www.immaterial.net/cabinet. Pages from yvind Fahlstrms notes for generating his hybrid languages Whammo (cover), Birdo (p.75), and Fglo (p. 76), 1962. Courtesy Sharon Avery-Fahlstrm.

Although Fglar i Sverige delivers no specific message, it does reveal the operation of a system of messages that is hilarious and touching, half intuitive and half constructed, part natural and part historical. The lack of one unequivocal message in the piece does not imply that there is nothing in it for the listener. Once past the disorienting sheen of its initial impression, the listener is suddenly drawn into a sphere where language operates in an almost purely mechanical way where repetition, sampling, and quoting 77
< Fglo

Did the Esperanto he spoke then sound like an older Esperanto compared to today? Yes, not so much phonetically, but in the words he uses. We use other words now for certain things, and new words have come into use as well. How do words get added to the language? In the same way as in every other language. People start to use some form of a word, and then there are people who think of how to make new words in accordance to the rules of Esperanto, and figure out how we can establish a word thats easy to use. Is there an official body that approves new words? There is an academy, and its based in the countries where the academicians live. Officially I think its based in Switzerland, but the President of this academy is in Brazil, the Vice President is in Sweden, and the Secretary is in Italy! They usually talk over the net. Im curious if anything like an Esperanto national anthem exists, for example, or a national poet? There is a song by Zamenhofits a poem he wrote which was set to musicwhich is the official anthem. There have also been jazz and blues versions of it! Mostly its played during the international meetings. How many speakers are there worldwide? Its very difficult to say because theres no state body to count them. Some people say its a few million, some people say 10 million. Id guess a few million. Is there a sense of where people are clustered? At the moment, the countries where the numbers are growing are Brazil South America in general is growing fast. Another part of the world where its growing is Vietnam and also Korea. They are teaching it at universities there. There was a Minister of Education in China in 1912 who wanted to 78 Invented Laguages

introduce Esperanto as the official first language in schools in China. But there were political problems and it didnt work out. Esperanto has a European language base; is it easiest to learn it coming from any particular language? Mostly people who speak some Italian, or Spanish or Portuguese get into it the fastest but they also have the worst time sorting out which words belong to which language! How did Zamenhof go about making Esperanto? He started as a ten year old boy, making a language, but then this father burned the papers since he thought it was a waste of time. Zamenhof said afterwards that this was good, because he had to start from scratch. So for 10 years or so he worked on this, and found that it was easiest to skip all the genders and the indefinite articles. This makes it very easy. He spoke Polish, Russian, and Yiddish himself, but he put all the languages he had learned and a few others together, and made huge lists of languages and checked to see where words overlapped. He worked the language out statistically, in a sense. Within his lifetime, how far had Esperanto managed to go? Zamenhof died in 1917; he managed to participate in a few conferences, and he also saw the growth of a huge literature. He did a lot of writing and translation himself. It had developed pretty farplus, the first couple had married in 1899 because of Esperanto! Did Zamenhof speak it at home? Yes, his children spoke Esperanto and his daughter Lydia wrote a lot in Esperanto. But then World War Two came and the family was Jewish. Lydia died in Treblinka. Lydias brother wife was saved and her son is now active in the movement.

Has there been a steady curve up in number of speakers, or have there been periods of greater and lesser interest? Yes, there have been many highs and lows. There was a peak in the 1890s, and lots of people who learned went on to become intellectuals. Then the World War One came, and the Esperantists did a lot of work obtaining information about people in camps and in prisons, like a kind of Red Cross. The Red Cross got a lot of ideas from the Esperanto movement of this time. The low points came after the Second World War because Hitler used to send Esperantists to camps from the 30s on. They were really suppressed in the 40s. But there are stories about German soldiers not telling their bosses that they speak Esperanto and saving French soldiers. And of course there was a split in the Esperanto movement during the Cold War. The people in the East could not communicate, although in Eastern Europe Esperanto used to be state-supported. So I would say that the Esperanto movement is very dependent on what is going on in the world. And I would say that this is quite normal, because Esperantists are just ordinary people who live in one more world, or one more dimension. Would simply being an Esperanto speaker be enough to be sent to a camp? Yes. Esperantists used to have a lot of friends all over the place and having contact with foreign countries was not legal after 1935, I think. Alexander Solzhenitsyn says inGulag Archipelago that the first to be sent to Siberia were the Esperantists and the Tartars because they had contacts and friends. There were lots of Esperantists in Russia. But the interesting thing is that they started teaching Esperanto in Siberia, so lots of people came back from the camps speaking it.

Are there places in the world now where there are political consequences for speaking it? North Korea. I was in China in May, and they used to send Esperanto magazines from China in unmarked envelopes and they are being returned. They dont know if these people have died or if theyre being controlled. Some Arab countries are sometimes difficult because they think its some kind of Jewish idea to overthrow the world, and so on, but the International Congress is in Israel this year, and right now they are meeting in Jordan with various academics and politicians. What do you think are some of the most common misperceptions of the community or the movement? One thing, for example, that I may have been wrong about is that it was meant to become the worlds language. Zamenhof said he wanted to make a language which would be easy to learn which he didand he wanted to have a tool for direct communication. He saw too much ethnic violence and he wanted people to have a common language to speak. This is very much in line with the nineteenth century, with everyone looking for a utopian solution. But he was very concrete about this. He spoke Latin and Greek and so on, but he didnt think people should learn themthey were too difficult, and you cant speak them. I think one misconception that one encounters is, Why didnt it become the world language? The thing is, the world language was a utopia from the previous century. Maybe that will happen some day, maybe there will be a common language for the world But was that really one of his goals? Not a political one. He did want it to be the International language, or an International language, if not the first language people spoke then perhaps a second language. He did not specify ways that it should be implemented politically, however. First and foremost, he wanted people to speak it, 79

to have it to use. He was, I think, very disappointed in politics. Poland was part of Russia and his father was a censor. What Zamenhof wanted to do was to give a tool to ordinary people to be able to communicate. There was a period in France at the beginning of the twentieth century where they said Esperanto would be everyones second language, and would be the world language. But this did not come from Zamenhof; it was from the French connection, and these ideas are still part of the outside perception of Esperanto. Some Esperantists also still believe this, but I think most are pretty realistic. Some people use it for their own personal pleasure, others are satisfied just writing letters once in a while, and then there are people who want to consume culture and literature who see it as a challenge. Now there is a growing consciousness about having the same quality in Esperanto culture and literature as in any other language. And this is good because it used to lag behind in the 50s and 60s. So Zamenhof had an idea, that people speaking this common language would communicate better, and that this might engender peace, But there are plenty of people who do speak the same language who are fighting all the time. Is Esperanto different because people who choose to learn Esperanto do so in a spirit of goodwill to begin with? I think people who learn Esperanto, already have some idea of mutual comprehension and internationalism and so on. Of course there are also people who learn Esperanto who have racist ideas or something, but there are fewer of themEsperantists are usually very tolerant, and this shows in the fact for example that there are many blind people who speak Esperanto. They have their own movement. Some peoples perception of the world changes internally, especially those who learn it in their teens and travel to sing songs with people from, like, 60 different countries and your. The Esperantists are helping each other in Kosovo now, the Albanians and the Yugoslavians. The Koreans and the Japanese are doing similar things.

And other misconceptions? Its probably the question of artificiality. Someone made the point that every language is artificialit just depends how many people create it. Bahasa Indonesia is also invented but by a group. Esperanto was created by one guy. This concept of an artificial language has now been changed into planned languages. There have been other planned languages too, one based on a more Germanic root. Yes, its called Volapk. But this language has died outit was too difficult, and the founder began changing it himself. Zamenhof was very good about this; he said, OK Ive published the book, Ive made the Fundamento. Now its your turn. and he gave it to the speakers to do what they wanted. There is a small offspring of Esperanto called Ido and there are a few hundred people who speak it. Mostly, they are Esperantists! The base is more Romanic. It was a French group again. It sounds like really funny Esperanto. Edo means offspring. If you have children will you speak Esperanto at home with them? Yes, of course. In my family, we all speak Esperanto, so its the natural choice. But our children will probably be multi-lingual..
Esperantos world organization, The Universal Esperanto Association, has a website at www.uea.org. To hear a song in Esperanto by Jomart kaj Natasa, a duo originally from Uzbekistan and now living in Stockholm, visit Cabinets website at www.immaterial.net/cabinet. For more music in Esperanto by other bands, see www.sciuro.demon.co.uk/rokgazet/.

War

Inadvertent memory
Laura Kurgan

Between March 22 and June 11, 1999, the commercial French SPOT satellites aimed their sensors at this site 42 times, collecting data on the ground from an altitude of 822 kilometers above it. Thousands of megabytes of data about war, displacement, and destruction, becausenot by accidentthe satellites were passing over Kosovo. Their 10- and 20-meter resolution data were immediately stored and made available publicly, directly from an active war zone, on almost every day of the NATO air campaign. Permanent digital records, created at the speed of light: across sixty square kilometers, in a matter of seconds, the satellites recorded what was happening in the scene below, gathering information on the landscape of ethnic cleansing and war. Kosovo names, among other things, the conflict in which classified NATO overhead images were finally released to the public. And they were not simply pictures of the conduct of the war but of its ostensible reasons. This time, in addition to footage of bombs and missiles, the public could see ethnic cleansing in progress: high-resolution imagery of mass graves, refugees in the mountains, burning mosques and villages and organized deportations. It was the war in which satellite images were used as a way of forming public opinion. The manner in which they were released, howeveras picturesshowed less the facts-on-theground than the ability of the technology to record, in minute detail, these facts. No data, strictly speaking, were forthcoming at press briefings, and certainly not the raw data available commercially. I wont talk about what kind of imagery that is, said the Pentagon spokesman. This past decade has been one in which satellite data have become more and more accessible to a general public, at higher and higher resolutions. As of January 2000, we can purchase images covering nine square

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miles at one meter per pixel resolution from the Ikonos satellite for $1000 (if the territory is in the United States) or $2000 (if its somewhere else), and more satellites will soon be launched by governments and corporations eager to compete. During the war over Kosovo, however, aside from the copies of satellite imagery released at the NATO and Pentagon briefings, and archived on their websites, images from the SPOT satellites were the highest resolution (ten meter) data available to the public. SPOT scene 083-264, pictured here, sixty square kilometers of Kosovo, roughly centered on Pristina: this is just one scene from the vast quantity of images which the satellites record daily and store in databases, ready to be browsed and bought. Every three days, the whole globe is pictured again by the four French satellites. And SPOT is just one of the satellite systems Landsat, Sovinformsputnik, and Ikonos (Space Imaging), to name only threewhich are continuously orbiting the globe, sensing and recording and transmitting and archiving. Millions and millions of pixels, stored in memory, waiting in databases. For a little more than eleven weeks, this area was examined with almost every technology available to the military, governments, civil society, and the news media. Here is a graphical snapshot of a tiny part of the SPOT database, counting the passage of the satellites over one particular piece of ground which during the NATO air campaign came into broader focus: a place to watch over for some, a target for others.. Eighty-one days, forty-two images, most of them were cloudy.
Excerpted from a larger project investigating satellite imagery of Kosovo during the war. To view the project in more detail go to www.virtualmanifesta.com.

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NATO as architectural critic

Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss

Destruction as Classification Is it possible to recover a historically inflected reading of the Serbian government buildings destroyed during NATOs 78-day bombing for peace? Part of any effort to do so would have to provide evidence that this nations role in modern history is not entirely nefarious, as it may seem today. A large part of that history is strictly architectural. In contrast to other communist nations like the Soviet Union, which under Stalin chose a Neo-classicist style over Constructivism to represent the state, Yugoslavia constructed its post-war image through experimenting in modernism. Devoid of national symbols and representations of power, architecture in Yugoslavia went through a process of programmatic yet intuitive, and at times metaphorical, appropriations of the Western avant-garde. This style is evident in institutional buildings ranging from government offices to museums, hospitals and schools. The construction of an architectural identity in Yugoslavia had to follow an ideological shift away from the centralist Eastern bloc toward liberal Western democracies. National architects learned how to suppress expressionism deriving from their pre-war educations and previous experiments in national styles. Cubist and Expressionist buildingsfor many a true national sensibilitywere dressed to look functionalist and international. This process marked the post-war boom in construction all around Yugoslavia. Variations on the curtain wall as seen in the Seagram building by Mies van der Rohe and Phillip Johnson in New York, on the repetitive mullions of the Pan-Am building by Walter Gropius, on rows of horizontal windows, and on patternless stone replaced pre-war decorative academicism and its classical look. In war, the time of destruction is also the time of classification. In its role as a bomber targeting a selection of urban artifacts, NATO

faced a problem of identification: how to read architecture that neither looked Stalinist nor had the classical aspirations of the Third Reich. The empty administration buildings in downtown Belgrade in the vicinity of hospitals and schools, the empty Federal Ministry of Internal Affairs and the empty Army Headquarters built by a recipient of the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, all bombed by NATO, were important examples of Serbian post-war modernism.1 The result was that during the air campaign NATO unwittingly demonstrated excellent taste in placing architectural landmarks from this century on its target list.2 As part of a new struggle against fascism, NATO selected to destroy the very buildings constructed in the post-war period to symbolize the struggle of a stubborn nation against fascism. 3 While modernism that came from the West was bombed, some conservative examples were preserved. Beli Dvor for example, or the White Palace, an eclectic Palladian-type villa built in the 30s, where Milosevic, like Tito before him, normally greets guests but does not live, was considered off-limits as a target because of a Rembrandt canvas kept on its first floor.4 In history books, Fascist architecture such as the Third Reichs is always understood in relation to its conditions of creation. The architecture used by the current state in Serbia was built before the world found the Serbian state to be nationalist, but in bombing Serbia, NATO also branded examples of Serbian post-war modernism as Fascist. Once caught in the fire of the global media, this architecture, built under a proWestern liberal influence, is now in danger of being branded as Fascist, of being remembered in relation to its conditions of destruction. There is, however, a complication in laying sole responsibility for the bombing of these particular buildings on NATO. On the streets

of Belgrade particular buildings were anticipated to be likely targets. Most people believe that the urban centers will be cruised, and official propaganda does as much as possible to support this belief. Indeed, civilian casualties would be a tremendous boost for the Serbian governments propaganda war against the rest of the world. 5 This is a sentiment that could be read in an analysis published on the Internet in October 1998, half a year before NATO bombing began. The governments position was possible in part because it has not expressed any ambition to create its own architectural rhetoric. Fully appropriating the previous communist buildings and infrastructure, in its ten-year rule the government has neither built nor commissioned a single piece of architecture, except for a recent Neo-classicist monument which celebrates the one-year anniversary of the end of NATO bombing. Therefore the current regime had no difficulties sacrificing these buildings to NATO. Army Headquarters: The Void as National Identity Had NATO wished to destroy a building with more Western influences, it could not have found a better target than the Army Headquarters, also known as the Ministry of National Defense. The leveling of Vukovar, the siege of Sarajevo, and the random bombardment of Dubrovnik were believed to have been ordered from this Army Headquarters in Belgrade. In the press briefing by NATO the morning after the night attack, this remarkable post-war modernist building is referred to as the heart of the war machine. Given this characterization by NATO, will this building now be remembered in relation to its creation or to its destruction? The building of the Army Headquarters coincided with the construction of the postwar national identity in Yugoslavia shortly

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after the break from Stalin in 1948. During the spring of 1954 the Yugoslav Army invited nine Yugoslav architects to compete for a new building complex. Already quite old, Josip Plecnik, an established academic from Ljubljana, was also asked to elaborate a solution outside of the competition and advise on the questions of urban analysis and composition. The others were asked to participate anonymously. One of them was Nikola Dobrovic, already known in leftist circles of the European intellectual avant-garde for his modernist work. Even before the competition, Theo van Doesburg, the Dutch modernist, had singled out the work of these two architects in explaining the construction of Yugoslav national identity. His view was that both architects had developed their styles thanks to conflicting influences mainly arriving from Western Europe. Both were pioneers in resisting the influence of tradition.6 These two architects had nevertheless developed entirely different, if not opposite, vocabularies of formal expression. Van Doesburg described Plecniks approach to constructing identity as the practice of an honest Neo-classicist. On the other hand, even though he criticized Dobrovic for being a true academic [not capable] in his work of formulating the constructive system of a building, the Dutch painter praised him as one of the first voices to be liberated from the limiting ties of Yugoslav tradition and to reach out toward mutual innovation in the art and architecture of Middle and Western Europe. 7 Plecnik, the honest Neo-classicist, was there in order to legitimize the governments project of reconfiguring this important part of the city, and Dobrovic, an academic with a liberating voice, was there to serve as proof of the recent shift in Yugoslav politics towards a pro-liberal image endorsed by the West.

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Army Headquarters in Belgrade after NATO bombing. Courtesy City Assembly of Belgrade

Plecnik submitted three different schemes for the site, which measured 270 by 100 meters and was divided in two by a large street. Plecnik derived his schemes from an earlier design for a Slovenian Parliament in Ljubljana in 1947, a polemical yet wellknown Neo-classical proposal. In spite of the jury of generals in Belgrade praising his efforts as the best urban concept, they decided to find the winner among the anonymous entries. The pro-liberal experiment that was Yugoslavia after the break with the Eastern Bloc was unlikely to favor Plecniks Neo-classicist variations on national identity, especially since Stalin had already appropriated the Neo-classicist image for the communist state. The undesired proximity of Plecniks use of the vertical column and a classical volume to the triumphalistic style of, for example, Ivan Zholtovsky, one of Stalins favorite architects, was perhaps too unappealing in the eyes of the pro-liberal Yugoslav jury. Yugoslavia was about to choose a new image for its Army Headquarters and Nikola Dobrovic knew that very well. His idea of symbolizing the Army within such a transitional society was not to be literal, by, for example, placing tanks on top of Neo-classical buildings, like his counterpart in Russia Lev Rudnev had proposed for the Army Headquarters in Moscow.8 In contrast, Dobrovic won with a scheme stripped of any classical representations of power. Not even a single modernist round column survived his very personal concept of engaged volumetric shaping and his painterly methods of achieving visual dynamics. The changes and the liberalization of a transitional state such as Yugoslavia were to be shaped into a volume, not expressed as a narrative. The street front across the site had already been filled with pre-war representational buildings in a variety of academic and Neo-classical styles. Dobrovics proposal

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Top Dobrovics Bergsonian drawing for the Army Headquarters.

Bottom The Army Headquarters. Photograph by Vladimir Kulic.

connected the two divided areas of the site by proposing a long and narrow volume from one end of the site to the other with a full length of 250 meters, thus keeping a space open for the street coming up the hill from the main railway station to the city. By setting this volume back from the line of the crossing street, Dobrovic created a 270-meter wide field open for experiments in elevation. The void in that elevation evoked a canyon and Dobrovic imagined the void as an integral part of his new image of national identity. Visual, mobile, and transitional was Dobrovics description of the new individual capable of negotiating this new form of architecture. As an academic, he attempted to translate a philosophical speculation into form. For the 270-meter elevation plane, he created a series of diagrams that he called Bergsons diagrams, referring to the French philosopher Henri Bergson. The focus of all the diagrams was the void, somewhere in the middle of the elevation plane. In the circles of Belgrade intellectuals these, by now mythic, Bergson diagrams defining the visual dynamism and tension in the main elevation of the complex were used to construct the visual identity of a winning nation from World War II. Dobrovic characterized these diagrams as the depicting the engagement of space, that new visual order, that new, powerful fluid architectonics of the formally created environment. 9 The diagrams formalized the idea of the visual dynamics of a building complex built to be visually experienced by a contemporary citizen always on the moveHomo spatiosus was his name for this person conscious of his continuous motion. Dobrovics contemporary individual could not stand still. Dobrovic based his idea of engaged space through motion on the presence of the void. Changing perspectives, visual depths and visual layering

were to be triggered by movement through the void of the proposed building complex. The character of the void keeps it visually inseparable from the two parts of the building. The diagrams depicted four variations on visual engagement: symmetrical, asymmetrical, and two labeled as extravagant. The jury was fond of the symmetrical one. These diagrams demonstrated the shift in the role of architectonics when the task at hand was to represent a state. For Dobrovic, the architectonics of his engaged space was analogous to a musical score being played continuously by the listener.10 A viewer for Dobrovic is someone who finds an imprint of his or her self in the voids [that] acquire their visual existence and belonging through this very act. There are no records of diagrams of spatial conditions in the works of the French philosopher. Bergson died in 1941. It is possible that Dobrovic, led by intuition and an unrestricted desire to absorb and work from Western ideas, created and named the Bergson diagrams himself. A possible justification for him doing so can be found in a book about Bergson written by Gilles Deleuze.11 This book called Bergsonism was published in 1966, only two years after the completion of Dobrovics Army Headquarters building. The thesis of Deleuzes book is that Bergsonism is an intuitive but rigorous practice of appropriation as a valid kind of discovery. This speculative claim may uncover, but also justify, Dobrovics lavish appropriation of Western architecture as actually being his discovery. His intuitive takeover of and the transfor-mation of Bergsons ideas on space and mobility may place the Army Headquarters building among the rare examples of this appropriative tradition, if not the only such example.

The Army Headquarters, The Heart of the War Machine If Josip Plecnik had won the competition for the Army Headquarters with his honest Neo-classical proposal, would NATO have had the audacity to destroy it? Would it have been spared from destruction on grounds of cultural preservation, in order to pre serve national culture and identity as seen from the sky? Would Plecniks columns, spanning from the base to the cornice and thus defining the height of the building, his large circular tower with the cone-shaped roof, and the generous public colonnades surrounding the public squares in front of his building have been enough to remind NATOs cultural advisers of the possibility that it belongs to Culture? To the press, NATO explained its five-step target selection procedure as follows: 1.Targets are suggested at NATOs headquarters in Brussels as well as in Germany and Italy. 2. A cell in Pentagon called J-2T studies feasibility of the target. 3. The planners measure the strategic value of a target against the drawbacks. 4. Lawyers at the Pentagon and at NATOs headquarters work on justifying the targets. 5. Presidents of major NATO countries review the target list.12 Since it was already anticipated as a target by Belgrades citizens, it would be a surprise if the Army Headquarters did not appear early on the list in Brussels. The feasibility of targeting a large building in the heart of the city was itself not enough for the decision, however. The critical moment arrives with the strategic evaluation of the target and of its importance within the war machine. It is also the moment of testing the extent to which the target can be justified through the creation of public support in the media. NATO had to present the war machine to a public that identified the targets

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as the organs of an anthropomorphic enemy. The combined rhetoric of heart and brain freed NATO from having to deal with the specificity of the architectural targets. Projecting the effects of destruction, the classification of good or bad nominees on the list of bombing targets liberated NATO from responsibility for creating a system of values that was essentially opposed to culture. During the bombing NATO continually presented the procedure behind its choice of targets. In the international press, General Wesley Clark divided the targets into strategic and tactical. Besides air defense, military forces, supply roads, and command and control objects, strategic targets included sustaining infrastructure and resources. 13 This comprised not only urban targets, infrastructure, bridges, electrical plants, oil refineries, but also administrative buildings. But what can be the strategic value of a highly visible large building in the center of the city, especially after being emptied of its personnel and equipment? Physically, its strategic value is zero. The only possible strategic justification for the destruction of this building was its symbolic disappearance from the skyline. But national symbolism was precisely what could not to be found in the Army Headquarters. NATOs late decision to bomb the building, more than a month after the air attacks had started, may have been the effect of this low level of symbolism: no exposed columns, no ornamental narration of history, as might have been present in Stalinist architecture. For NATO it may have been easier to classify the Army Headquarters if the symbol of power had been a physical entity attached to the building rather than the void between the two parts of the complex. Evocative of the Sutjeska canyon, the place of one of the greatest battles against the Fascist occupation in

World War II, it was in fact the result of an academic architectural operationthe intuitive and speculative transformation of the philosophy of Henri Bergson into dynamic diagrams that shaped the void, the only recognizable symbol in the complex. The identity of the nation was to be found in the void, in non-matter, and in the action of the individual moving through the void. The circumstances that made it possible to destroy architecture born in the struggle against Fascism in the name of the global policing of Fascism have yet to be studied. In the meantime architects from Belgrade, including Tanja Damljanovic and Vladimir Kulic, have faced the current situation and are adapting the content of their forthcoming guide to the architecture of Belgrade to include the images of the new ruins. This guide juxtaposes the original building and the ruin, and thereby merges opposite methods of architectural classification, one historically critical and based on the creation of the building, and the other realistic and post-critical based on its destruction. In the case of the Army Headquarters, both methods, however, are relevant. That is because trying to understand the future condition of Yugoslavias national identity now asks that we think of two voids in relation to each other: one created by Nikola Dobrovic within his Army Headquarters and the new one created by NATOs bombs falling on the building. The answer seems like a delayed dilemma about which void to identify with, which void to remember..

1 The massive and monotonous Federal Ministry of Internal Affairs, one of the few built examples of Social Realism in Belgrade, was built by Slovenian architect Ludvik Tomori. The Ministry of National Defense in was built between 1954 -1963 by architect Nikola Dobrovic. 2 Vladimir Kulic, Balkan War Reports, April 3, 1999, Ctheory (www.ctheory.com/e77). 3 Quotes by Tanja Damljanovic from Belgrade Architecture, eds. Vladimir Kulic, Mirjana Roter Blagojevic, Aleksandar Ignjatovic, Tanja Damljanovic, Renata Jadresin and Ana Radivojevic, scheduled for publication in winter 2000. 4 Steve Erlanger, The Targets; NATO Strikes Serbian TV; Casualties Seen, The New York Times, April 23, 1999. 5 Aleksandar Boskovic, Belgrade Burning? Report from Belgrade, October 12, 1998, Ctheory. 6 Theo van Doesburg, Jugoslavija: Suprostavljeni uticaji: Nikola Dobrovic i Srpska tradicija (Yugoslavia: Conflicting Influences: Nikola Dobrovic and the Serbian Tradition) in Milos R. Perovic and Spasoje Krunic, eds., Nikola Dobrovic: Eseji, projekti, kritike (Belgrade: Arhitektonski fakultet Univerziteta u Beogradu & Muzej arhitekture, 1998), pp. 214-216. 7 van Doesburg, ibid., p. 215. 8 Dobrovic refers to Frunze Military Academy in Moscow by Lev Rudnev, a project from 1932-37. See Nikola Dobrovic, Pokrenutost prostoraBergsonove Dinamicke sheme: Nova likovna sredina, in Eseji, projekti, kritike, op. cit. 9 Dobrovic, p. 116. 10 Dobrovic, p. 131. 11 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, tr. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988). 12 Eric Schmitt and Steven Lee Myers, Crisis in the Balkans: The Bombing. NATO Said to Focus Raids on Serb Elites Property, The New York Times, April 19, 1999. 13 Article by General Wesley K. Clark, SACEUR, Effectiveness and Determination, published in the international press, June 2, 1999. The article is also available on NATOs website at www.nato.int/kosovo/articles/a990602a.htm. Nikola Dobrovic, Bergsonian Drawings for the Army Headquarters. Reproduced in Nikola Dobrovic: Eseji, projekti, kritike (Belgrade: Arhitektonski fakultet Univerziteta u Beogradu & Muzej arhitekture, 1998)

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Belgrade architecture and the war 2

Vladimir Kulic

On June 12, the president of Serbia, Milan Milutinovic, inaugurated a monument in New Belgrades Park of Peace and Friendship commemorating the end of last years NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The 27-meter high white, concrete obelisk supports a gas torch with an eternal flame whose effect is reinforced at night by four powerful spot lights directed upwards. The inscription on the monument was conceived by Mirjana Markovic, the leader of the small but very influential neo-communist Yugoslav Left and the wife of Yugoslavias president Slobodan Milosevic. Set among the trees in the flatland of New Belgrade, the monument is not very present in the cityscape, either through its location or its design. However, what makes it interesting are its contextual references. Its style, in particular, is reminiscent of Socialist Realism, a totalitarian version of Neoclassicism imported from the USSR and imposed by the Yugoslav state during its short period in the Eastern block. The obelisk is situated between the complex of the Federal Government of Yugoslavia and the bombed tower of the Central Committee two buildings that exemplify the abandonment of Socialist Realism after the break-up with the Soviets. They were both initially designed in 1947 in a monumental Socialist Realist style, but were later re-designed to look as modernist as possible in step with the new vision of progress propagated by the state. Thus the current monument completes a full circle from Socialist Realism to modernism and back. Another reference is to one of Belgrades symbols, the statue of The Victor by Ivan Mestrovic (1928) in the castle grounds overlooking the city from across the Sava river. The obelisks shape is evocative of the column on which The Victor stands, but the tiny flame, which by night looks like any orange streetlight, is not a sufficient counterpart to Mestrovics sculpture. The monument thus resembles a victory without a victor which is a perfect description of the victory that the state propaganda machine claims Yugoslavia won against NATO last year.. 89
Monument recently erected in Belgrade to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the victory of Serbia over NATO. Photograph: Vladimir Kulic

Something where there should be nothing: on war and anxiety

Renata Salecl

We live in an age of anxiety but a particular problem of anxiety applies to modern military warfare. The media often reports on cases of soldiers psychological breakdowns on the front and their continued traumas after the war. These breakdowns have had different names through history. After World War I, for example, which was fought primarily with artillery, psychologists referred to the trauma as shell shock. The Vietnam War introduced the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder, still in wide use in the categorization of depression, anxiety attacks, and nightmares suffered by soldiers after experience in combat. This term was invented in an attempt to rid the soldier of guilthis condition was no longer caused by his psychological predisposition but by external circumstances. For decades, military psychiatrists have tried to understand what incites such breakdowns in the middle of combat and why many veterans continue to have nightmares, depression, or panic attacks for years. How do breakdowns in war usually occur? A soldier is often able to engage in combat for a considerable time, under conditions of extreme danger and discomfort, until an event takes place that the soldiers defenses cannot encompass. As one psychiatrist explains: The actual events varied tremendously, ranging from things as simple as a friendly gesture from the enemy or an unexpected change in orders, to the death of a leader or a buddy. 1 In all of these cases, the soldiers were faced with a situation in which their perception of the situation radically changed and they were unable to continue fighting. These soldiers did not suddenly become cowardly; rather, they experienced a special state of anxiety that is radically different from fear. The usual perception is that we fear something that we can see or hear; i.e., something that can be discerned as an object or a situation. Fear concerns that which can be articulated; that about which we have the ability to say, for example, I have a fear of darkness, or, I fear barking dogs. In con trast, we often perceive anxiety as a state of fear that is objectless, which means that we cannot easily say what makes us anxious. Anxiety would thus be an uncomfortable 90 War

affect, more horrible than fear precisely because it is unclear to us what provokes it. This definition of the difference between anxiety and fear corresponds to what we think we experience in our daily lives. Psychoanalysis, however, gives a more complicated view of this difference. Freud pointed out that anxiety is a state of affect that has been provoked by excitation. He had two theories of anxiety: one which links anxiety to an excess of libidinal energy that has not been discharged, and another which takes anxiety as a feeling of an immanent danger to the ego, thus pushing the subject into a state of panic. He also pointed out that anxiety is linked to a special state of preparedness: it looks as if the subject is defending himself against some horror with the help of anxiety. When French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan speaks about anxiety, he first introduces the problem of castration and the subjects relation with what he calls the Other.2 However, it is not that the subject has some kind of a castration anxiety in regard to the Other, i.e., that he or she takes the Other as someone who might take something precious from him or her. Lacan points out that the neurotic does not retreat from the castrating Other, but from making of his own castration what is lacking in the Other. What does this mean? When psychoanalysis claims that the subject undergoes symbolic castration by entering language, this must be understand as the fact that the subject per se is empty, nothing by him- or herself. All of the subjects power comes from the symbolic insignia that he or she temporarily takes on. Here we can take the example of a policeman, who might be a nobodya boring, insignificant manuntil he puts on his uniform and becomes a person with power. The subject is therefore castrated, i.e., powerless by himself, and only by occupying a certain place in the symbolic order does he or she temporarily acquire some power or status. The subject is also always disturbed by the fact that the Other is inconsistent, that the Other is split and non-whole, which means that, for example, one cannot say what the Others desire is or how one appears in the desire of the Other. The only thing that can guarantee the meaning of the Other (and

provide an answer to the question of the desire of the Other) is a signifier. Since such a signifier is lacking, the missing place is occupied by a sign of the subjects own castration. To the lack in the Other, the subject can only answer with his or her own lack. And in dealing with his or her lack, as well as with the lack in the Other, the subject encounters anxiety. However, anxiety is provoked in the subject not by the lack, but because of the absence of the lack, by the fact that where there is supposed to be lack, some object is in fact present. One of the ways the individual manages his or her anxiety is to create a fantasy. Fantasy is a way of covering up the fundamental lack by creating a scenario, a story that gives his or her life a perception of consistency and stability, while he also perceives the social order as being coherent and not marked by antagonisms. Fantasy and anxiety present two different ways for the subject to deal with the lack that marks him as well as the Other, i.e., the symbolic order. If fantasy provides a certain comfort to the subject, anxiety incites the feeling of discomfort. However, anxiety does not simply have a paralyzing effect. The power of anxiety is that it creates a state of preparedness so that the subject might be less paralyzed and surprised by the events that might radically shatter his or her fantasy and thus cause the subjects breakdown or an emergence of a trauma. Fantasy, however, also helps prevent the emergence of anxiety, i.e., the emergence of the horrible object at the place of the lack. Here we can take the example of the Israeli soldier Ami, who had served both in the Yom Kippur and in the Lebanon Wars. Ami had been an avid filmgoer in his youth and during the Yom Kippur War he felt as if he was playing the part of a soldier in a war movie. This fantasy sustained him throughout the war: said to myself, it is not so terrible. ...I Its like a war movie. Theyre actors, and Im just some soldier. I dont have an important role. Naturally, there are all the weapons that are in a war movie. All sorts of helicopters, all sorts of tanks, and theres shooting. ...[But] basically, I felt that I wasnt there. That is, all I had to do was finish the filming and go home. 3 Later, in the Lebanon 91

War, Ami felt as if he was a tourist observing pretty villages, mountains, women, etc. But at some point, the fantasy of being on a tour or in a movie collapsed. This happened when Ami witnessed massive destruction in the Lebanon War and was involved in heavy face-to-face fighting. The scene that triggered his breakdown happened in Beirut when he saw stables piled with corpses of Arabian racehorses mingled with corpses of people. The scene filled him with a sense of apocalyptic destruction, and he collapsed: I went into a state of apathy, and I was not functioning. Ami explains the process as follows: In the Yom Kippur War, I put my defense mechanism into operation and it worked fantastically. I was able to push a button and start it up. In Lebanon, the picture was clearer. In the Yom Kippur War, we didnt fight face-to-face or shoot from a short distance.... If I saw a corpse, it was a corpse in the field. But here [in Lebanon] everything was right next to me.... And of all things, the thing with the horses broke me.... A pile of corpses...and you see them along with people who were killed. And thats a picture Id never seen in any movie.... I began to sense the reality [that] its not a movie anymore. 4 Anxiety emerges when, at the place of the lack, one encounters a certain object that perturbs the fantasy frame through which the individual previously assessed reality. For the soldier Ami, this happened when he saw the pile of dead horses. If Ami was able to observe dead soldiers on the field through the distance of a fantasy frame, which made him believe that he was an outsider just watching a movie, the emergence of the unexpected objectthe horses caused his fantasy to collapse and incited Amis breakdown. With fantasy, the subject creates for him- or herself a protective shield towards the lack, while in anxiety the object which emerges at the place of the lack devours the subject, i.e., makes the subject fade. Anxiety is first the response to the most original danger (Hilflosighkeit )to the absolute distress of the subjects entering the world. But subsequently, it is taken up by the ego as a signal of the slightest danger of the threats from

the side of the id. The fading of the subject can thus be understood as the collapse of the ego, as the collapse of the subjects self-perception. Anxiety is also linked to the desire of the Otherthe fact that the desire of the Other does not recognize me provokes anxiety, but even if I have the impression that the Other does recognize me, it will never recognize me sufficiently. The Other always puts me into question, interrogates me at the very root of my being. In the cases of breakdown in war, we also find a specific problem that the subject has with the desire of the Other. Psychiatrists have, in the past, taken into account the fact that soldiers breakdowns are often triggered by changes in the basic pattern of the soldier-group relationship. This might be an actual change in the structure of the group, or something affecting the individual directly and subsequently his relationship with the group. In either case he lost his place as a member of the team; alone now, he was overwhelmed and became disorganized. 5 In traditional war, the group provided the most important basis for the subjects psychic stability as well as for his motivation for fighting. Some military theorists therefore conclude that the men were motivated to fight not by ideology or hate, but by regard for their comrades, respect for their leaders, concern for their own reputation with both, and an urge to contribute to the success of the group. In return, the group provided structure and meaning to an otherwise alien existence, a haven from an impersonal process apparently intent on grinding the life from all involved. 6 This group relationship very much involves the desire of the Other. The soldier thus wonders what kind of an object he is supposed to be for the desire of the Other when he questions his role in the group. Studies in military psychiatry have shown that the soldier who has suffered breakdown is best treated near the battlefront where he is close to his comrades. Soldiers who have been removed from the war-zone or sent back home suffer longer from their breakdowns. Paradoxically, the Soviet army

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Peter Lew Untitled #23 (Pig Blood Series) (1999)

in World War II, which kept the soldiers on the front no matter what and did not acknowledge psychological breakdown as an excuse from battle, suffered a smaller number of long-term psychiatric casualties than other armies that tended to send the troubled soldiers out of the war zone. But if military psychiatry at the time of World War II was still considering group relations as the most important for the soldiers endurance of the war situation, later, in the case of the Korean War and especially in Vietnam, the military embraced the idea of individualism. The soldier was trained as an individual who could be placed into a group for a short time, and quickly removed from it when necessary and placed into another one. At the time of the Korean War, psychiatrists thus started talking about short-termers syndrome and rotation anxiety. With the disruption of group sup port, combat now became an individual struggle and the short-term soldier felt very much disengaged from his comrades. Similarly, in Vietnam, psychiatry used the term loneliness disorder to describe states of apathy, defiance, or violent behavior that emerged among the soldiers on the battlefield. In Vietnam, the military used twelve-month rotation, which meant that individual soldiers were injected into a war zone as individual replacements and after a year they were also individually extracted often they were deposited back into normal civilian life within 24 hours after they left base camp.7 The Vietnam veterans also encountered enormous public antipathy in their home towns, which took away the possibility of finding some moral repayment for their actions by perceiving it as something that was done for the public good. Similar problems occurred with the peacekeepers that recently served in Bosnia. The Canadian media reported that their soldiers who acted as peacekeepers in Bosnia suffered from numerous attacks of anxiety

and depression when they returned from the front. Wendy Holden points out that peacekeepers suffer from the fact that they must observe atrocities but are helpless to fight back or to defend properly those they have been sent to save. Proud to become professional soldiers and keen to fight a war, they are, however, distanced from death and the reality of killing. They are members of a society that finds fatalities unimaginable. When presented with the unimaginable, they crack. 8 British peacekeeper Gary Bohanna came to Bosnia with a belief that a peacekeeping role is better than war in which colleagues get killed. But he quickly became disillusioned when he saw numerous civilians killed, women raped, and whole families slaughtered. For him the most traumatic event, which precipitated his breakdown, was when he saw a young girl who had shrapnel wounds in her head, half her head was blown away. Her eye was coming out of its socket and she was screaming. She was going to die, but I couldnt bear her pain. I put a blanked over her head and shot her in her head. That was all I could do. 9 Here again we find a case of the soldier who comes to the war with the protective shield of a fantasythis time it is a fantasy that he is actually coming to do good deeds and is not fully engaged in war. However, this fantasy quickly collapses when an event undermines the story he was telling himself beforehand. Since fantasy protects the subject from anxiety, military psychiatry in the past has tried to use its power to incite soldiers to engage in combat. The Allies, for example, tried to artificially create fantasies that would help the soldiers be willing to engage in killings in the first place. This need for psychological training in aggression was especially strengthened when military theorist Colonel S. L. A. Marshall reported that almost three-quarters of the soldiers were not willing to kill in combat. This figure

was later proclaimed fake, but it nonetheless determined the perception that psychology was needed to incite aggression in the soldiers. In the early 40s, the British army, for example, introduced special blood training and battle schools. Animals blood was squirted onto faces during bayonet drill; men were taken to slaughterhouses and encouraged to test the resistance of a body by using their killing knives on the carcasses; and kill that Hun...kill that Hun was chanted from the loudspeakers as soldiers waded through water and mud pits, were shot at with live ammunition, and fired their own weapons at three-dimensional imitation Germans and Japanese. 10 To teach soldiers how to kill and to incite their desire to do so, it was therefore important to create an artificial fantasy scenario, i.e., killing needed to be presented in light of a story with which the soldiers were able to identify. One possible scenario was to present killing as a hunt for animals. An Australian training instruction pamphlet reads, The enemy is the game, we the hunters. The Jap is a barbarian, little better than an animal, in fact his actions are those of a wild beast and he must therefore be dealt with accordingly. 11 This training tried to incite the subjects inner aggressiveness and to control his anxiety and guilt. Some of the trainers who had had some contact with psychoanalysis also tried to present killing the enemy as a mythical rite in which the death of the leader of the enemy-group is celebrated in an orgy of displaced violence. Since this slaughter satisfies deep-seated, primitive unconscious strivings derived from early childhood fantasy...The enemy is a sacrificial object whose death provides deep group satisfaction in which guilt is excluded by group sanction. Combat is a ritualistic event, which resolves the precarious tension of hatred created by the longdrawn frustrations of training. Without these frustrations, a group would not be a

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military force. 12 The incentive here is supposedly to recreate, in reality, the Freudian theory of the killing of the primal father (in the guise of the enemy leader) and the establishment of strong brotherly bonds among the soldiers. While military psychologists tried to artificially create fantasies with which the soldiers would identify, the soldiers actually created their own fantasies. Soldiers in their diaries often reported on how they killed someone with a bayonet and how just before dying the victim looked into the attackers eyes with dismay, as if shocked to see who the killer was. This memory of being recognized by the victim is quite common among soldiers; however, military statistics show that the bayonet is rarely used in war and that most of the killing in war is done from a distance where the killer remains anonymous. It is thus obvious that the memory of the bayonet killing is in most cases a fantasy, a scenario produced by the soldier himself. This fantasy is obviously extremely valuable, since even in todays armies, where one cannot expect many one-on-one battles, soldiers are still extensively trained in bayonet killing. However, by World War I military instructors already had great trouble teaching soldiers how to use the bayonet properly. Most soldiers had the strange idea that they needed to toss the bayoneted enemy over their shoulder. Many accounts of combat in popular literature also depicted scenes in which a soldier bayonets an enemy and hurls him over his shoulder, just as a man might toss a bundle of hay with a pitchfork. 13 Soldiers claim that they prefer bayonet killing to anonymous killing because it is more personal and the responsibility is clear. Military psychologists have tried to convince soldiers that war is just an impersonal game in which they are not responsible for their actions since they have sacrificed

themselves for a higher cause. The paradox is that soldiers responded to this explanation by creating their own fantasies of killing. In the memories of the bayonet killing that never took place, it is crucial that the enemy recognizes the killer with his shocked gaze, but by pitchforking the enemy, the killer then tries quickly to get rid of this gaze. This example shows that soldiers also have no desire to give up the feeling of guilt for their actions. As military psychologists were explaining to soldiers that they are not responsible for their killings, the soldiers insisted on their guilt to the point of inventing crimes they had never committed. If in past wars there was still minimal engagement between the soldier and the victims on the battlefield, in recent wars the soldier is often just a distant actor who shoots from afar and does not even know what happens on the actual front. Contemporary wars are supposed to be aseptic, so that American soldiers might fly for a couple of hours to drop bombs over Kosovo and then return home to watch the football game on TV. For those soldiers who will still need to engage in direct fighting, military psychiatry is trying to invent special medication which will alleviate any possible anxiety and turn the soldiers into almost robotic creatures who will not be emotionally engaged in the atrocities they are committing. One theory why it is necessary to invent such drugs is that the war has become too horrible for the human mind and body to realistically tolerate. Military psychiatry therefore has an expectation that in the new types of war, anxiety will just be too overwhelming and paralyzing, and a chemical substance will be necessary to alleviate it. So far all attempts to create such drugs have failed. The anti-anxiety drugs used on the front not only did not alleviate anxiety, but they produced numerous side-effects that made soldiers zombielike creatures, barely able to function and perform war duties.

This trend to make war anxiety-free paradoxically goes hand in hand with todays attempts to make wars independent from political struggles. In the way the West assessed the whole situation in former Yugoslavia, we can see how political dimensions of the conflicts were constantly overlooked or too quickly historicized. Many Western observers often still cling to the view that Yugoslavia collapsed because of the separatist tensions of Slovenia and Croatia and that some European states contributed to the collapse by too quickly recognizing the independence of these two republics. These observers forget that it was Milosevics assumption of power in the mid-80s that actually incited the secessions, and that Yugoslavia collapsed not because centuries-old nationalistic hatreds suddenly resurfaced, but because Milosevics political bid for power incited these hatreds. The problem with the interventions that NATO made in the past few years in the former Yugoslavia is that they were publicly presented as simple humanitarian missions that had nothing to do with the political situation in the region, and that did not admit the Wests strong economic interests in the Balkans. This ideology of humanitarianism goes hand in hand with the way the war has been presented in the media. On the one hand, we get pictures of the intervention that present war as a simple computer game in which the soldiers dropping the bombs from the air are completely detached from the reality of the situation on the ground. On the other hand, we get images of suffering victims of the war in which we can see the most horrible distortions of villages; numerous people killed; wounded and dead bodies exposed on the screen; and so on. It is as if in contemporary war everything can be seen regarding how the victims of the nationalist conflicts suffer on the ground, while the machinery of the Western intervention into the conflict looks

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like a distant computer game. This overvisibility, on the one hand, and complete invisibility, on the other, are very much linked to the fact that the economic and the political logic of the war remained unraveled. The attempts of military psychiatry to alleviate soldiers feelings of anxiety go hand-inhand with these trends in todays wars. The ideal soldier will be completely detached from the situation (an outsider not really present in the war) and will neutrally observe the atrocities going on in the war. The problem with the militarys attempts to find anxiety drugs is that rather than preventing the soldiers anxieties, such drugs actually help to incite new ones. While it is unclear how much the military has actually tested such drugs on the battlefield (for example, at the time of the Persian Gulf War), soldiers have indulged in numerous conspiracy theories. A whole set of new anxieties is emerging in regard to the scientists who are supposedly testing dangerous drugs on the soldiers, and in regard to the paralyzing side effects these drugs have. The ultimate trauma for the soldiers becomes a fight against the hidden enemy among those who have sent him to war in the first place..

1 Lawrence Ingraham and Frederick Manning, American Military Psychiatry, in Richard A. Gabriel, ed., Military Psychiatry: A Comparative Perspective (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), p. 43. 2 See Jacques Lacan, Anxiety (unpublished seminar 1962-63). 3 Zahava Solomon, Combat Stress Reaction: The Enduring Toll of War (New York: Plenum Press, 1993), p. 77. 4 Ibid., p. 78. 5 See Ingraham and Manning, p. 44. 6 Ibid., p. 45. 7 Ibid., p. 55. 8 Wendy Holden, Shell Shock: The Psychological Impact of War (London: Channel 4 Books, 1998), p. 171. 9 Ibid., p. 172. 10 Cf. Joanna Bourke, The Intimate History of Killing (London: Granta, 1999). Bourke quotes from Norman Demuth, Harrying the Hun. A Handbook of Scouting, Stalking and Camouflage [1941], p. 84; Major M.D.S. Armour, Total War Training for Home Guard Officers and N.C.O.s [1942], p. 46; and Realism in Army Training: The Spirit of Hate, undated newspaper clipping in PRO WO199/799; Realism in Training, The Times, 27 April 1942, p. 2. 11 Cf. Bourke. Bourke refers here to Colonel R.G. Pollard, 6th Aust. Div. Training Instruction No.1 Jungle Warfare, 27 March 1943, 1 in Lieutenant General Sir F.H. Berrymans papers, AWM PR84/370, item 41. 12 Cf. Bourke, ibid. Quote from Major Jules V. Coleman, The Group Factor of Military Psychiatry, American Journal of Ortopsychiatry, XVI (1946), p. 222. The soldiers also selectively incorporated the psychological theories they became knowledgeable in. They especially liked to identify with theories that present killing as a natural instinct and which helped soldiers to perceive killing as an emotionally transient event. The soldiers thus liked to say that they were nor really killing since they were just temporarily taken over by a murderous zeal and later returned to their normal selves. 13 Cf. Captain Frederick Sadlier Brereton, With Rifle and Bayonet. A Story of the Boer War [1900], p. 271, quoted in Bourke, op. cit.

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96 Etc.

David Scher Face, 2000