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kim adams///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
She’s wearing those cop shoes with thick crêpe soles you hate so much. Plus limp beige trousers flaring at the ankle, in style 10 years back! Some kind of faded blue print shirt, tight across her tiny breasts. Quickly, you start to help her take it off, hoping she’ll put on something better later. But when the two of you get up, she reaches for the same old things again, save the shirt, which has been changed for a rather nice red sweater…
The two of you puffing up the incline on rue St. Denis, the fog, thank god, so thick (it’s getting suddenly warmer or colder), that if your French friends pass, you two will be invisible.1
Three months after the Theory, A Sunday seminar, what I remember most vividly is the narrator of Gail Scott’s “‘The Kiss’ of Evard Munch,’ Revisited” hoping her chic French friends won’t see her walking up the hill with this embarrassing girl at her side. This girl who dresses inappropriately. Who likes the wrong kind of music. Who gets drunk and passes out on romantic evenings.
She is a terribly normal grotesque, “that demi-cowgirl [who] was kissing you in the bar” with her oversized feet inside cowboy boots, trembling knees and a “gangly boy’s body.”2 An abruptness of manner, an insistence, an absurd accent. Clothes that don’t fit the place. The uncomfortable impression of a body in space. A swift and troublesome physicality, a suburban incongruity. A body that gets sniffed at in the second paragraph – “You lean over and sniff her pale nipple” – a gesture of derision and desire.3 This boyish woman somehow fails to perform femininity while continuing to perform it; she falls into the gap between success and failure, between knowledge and desire, between rural and urban, moving oblivious along the frayed seam of the tacky and the sublime. She sours sexuality inappropriately, and is somehow still the object of the narrator’s desire.
Sometimes I wonder if my affinity for the militant tenants of second wave feminism, rather than the sexier and more conceptually compelling proposals of third wave feminism, has to do with my own failure to perform femininity successfully.4 Rather than play with the polymorphous perverse possibilities of gender performance, I’d prefer not to do gender at all – to retreat into the fantasy of a socially and sexually unmarked body – which I realize is a reification of the pervasive projection of masculinity as the unmarked gender. And still, under the weight of my failed tendency toward an untenable neutral, I end up displaying femininity slightly badly. A little off. A small failure of form, an ill-fitted, outdated shirt.
At a certain point in Gail Scott’s piece, the second person narrator finds herself “Screaming (almost)” at her abrupt and avid lover to turn the “horrible country music” off – “Because (to tell the truth), it is spoiling your desire.”5 This woman and her music, this music and what it represents, they have the power to make desire go bad, not to become evil or sinful or violent, but to sour, to become inconsumable. Desire here is tenuous, perishable.
This idea of spoiling desire reminds me of a figure I had attempted to track, with fairly little success, in my reading over the past few years: milk going bad in theory. I encountered the image that inspired me to attempt such a concordance in the work of Roland Barthes, whose name appears with some frequency in the footnotes of Theory, A Sunday. In Camera Lucida, Barthes compares the photographic image to the linguistic sign, but unlike the sign, and like our narrator’s desire, the photograph is perishable:
Photography is unclassifiable because there is no reason to mark this or that of its occurrences; it aspires, perhaps, to become as crude, as certain, as noble as a sign, which would afford it access to the dignity of a language: but for there to be a sign there must be a mark; deprived of the principle of marking, photographs are signs which don’t take, which turn, as milk does.6
The photograph and desire – both “aspire, perhaps, to become as crude, as certain, as noble as a sign,” both yearn ambivalently for “access to the dignity of language.” And there is a window, a set of temporal, spatial, and bodily constraints within which such a possibility remains open, before they go off. For the moment, one could consume them and not get sick. It seems that there is a space in which desire and the photographic image might take, take hold, hold good and steady. But reliable desire is just as fantastic as the meaningful image. Deprived of the mark, which Barthes finds fundamental to the functioning of the sign, they cannot hold, they “are signs which don’t take, which turn, as milk does.” In fact, the potential for sickness, for sourness, wrongness, the bacteria is present in milk, in desire, in the photograph all along.
whence, finally, what one must call an affinity and a complementarity of the elements that come into play in the encounter, their ‘readiness to collide-interlock’, in order that this encounter ‘take hold’, that is to say, ‘take form’, at last give birth to forms, and new forms – just as water ‘takes hold’ when ice is there waiting for it, or milk does when it curdles, or mayonnaise when it emulsifies.7
This is the only other instance of ‘dairy going bad in theory’ that I’ve managed to come across and note down since reading Camera Lucida. These lines are written by Louis Althusser, a theorist whose name does not appear in the footnotes of Theory, A Sunday, no doubt in part because he belongs to a Marxist tradition in French political thought, while the authors of Theory, A Sunday are more invested in the psychoanalytic tradition of French high theory. He also fails to appear, perhaps, because unlike Barthes with his careful closeted queerness, Althusser was a powerful straight male in the French philosophical establishment, and, three years before the formation of the Sunday reading group that lead to Theory, A Sunday, he strangled his wife and never stood public trial. He did, however, spend the rest of his life in various mental institutions, where he wrote, among other texts, the rather peculiar essay cited above. “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter” charts an outsider genealogy of materialist philosophy, beginning with the atomic materialism of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. For Epicurus there are no gods who matter, no heaven and no soul – the entire universe is formed by the random collisions of atoms.
In the passage above, Althusser attempts to explain the almost inverted temporality of the event in Epicurean philosophy. Atomic bonding, the initial event in this trajectory, is both contingent and inevitable. Here is where the spoiling milk comes in, with a trio of edible metaphors: the encounter takes hold, or takes form, “just as water ‘takes hold’ when ice is there waiting for it, or milk does when it curdles, or mayonnaise when it emulsifies.” This curdled milk does the opposite of the sour milk in Barthes’s photographic fridge – the image cannot take, it turns, but the encounter does take, precisely because it curdles.
Rather than returning us to the possibility of spoiled desire in Gail Scott’s “‘The Kiss’ of Evard Munch, Revisited,” this metaphor might be put to use in considering the project of Theory, A Sunday as a whole. The book takes hold as a necessarily contingent concatenation of atomic bonds. Formally distinct segments of theoretical prose and experimental fiction or verse are bound together by each author’s name, which are in turn bound to the preceding and succeeding author by the project itself, crystalized as a narrative entity by the foreword and the afterword, and enveloped by the clean aesthetic pleasure of the book design, the elegantly functional binding. French and English materials are held together by covalent bonds, by the work of the texts and the work of the translators, often the authors themselves. Theory, A Sunday is a compound molecule, formed in contingency and necessity, in a chain of reactions, from a small group of women arriving at noon at a house in Montréal to a small group of readers meeting on a Friday at one in a seminar classroom in New York. A reading group, a repeated encounter, in which the elements, the texts and their readers, “at last give birth to forms, and new forms.”
1. Gail Scott, “‘The Kiss’ of Evard Munch, Revisited,” in Theory, A Sunday (New York: Belladonna, 2013), 59.↩
2. Ibid., 56, 55.↩
3. Ibid., 55.↩
4. In this rather loose reference to third wave feminism, I mean something like the idea that one could successfully perform traditional traits of femininity to a high degree, and remain free from the intellectual and historical baggage of those traits. Makeup is a good example. My roommate once told me about how an older feminist professor at her university had chastised her in the name of feminism for wearing red lipstick. Clearly there is something wrong in that chastisement. But when I look in our medicine cabinet at her assortment of makeup, at the tubes of concealer, I think, what does it mean to habitually conceal your face from the world? What do you have to conceal? Who are you concealing it from? And isn’t that something like lying?↩
5. “‘The Kiss’ of Evard Munch, Revisited,” 58.↩
6. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 6.↩
7. Louis Althusser, “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,” in Philosophy of the Encounter, ed. Oliver Corpet and Françoise Matheron, trans. G. M. Goshgarin (New York: Verso, 2006), 193.↩