Harry's Place Arts

A guest post episode by de Bentvueghel

Episode two is here

In his work of theory-fiction, Pacific Wall, Jean-François Lyotard describes an imaginary notebook found in the foreign manuscript acquisitions of the University of California. He reproduces the text of the notebook and comments that it is “little more than a collection of syntactical and lexical approximations, far-fetched metaphors, unexpected linkings, gross errors and misconceptions, and delirious reasonings.” It includes a discussion of Ed Kienholz’s Five Car Stud, a piece with some similarity to the one currently on show at the National Gallery, The Hoerengracht. Similar in that both installations take place in cave-like enclosed spaces lit by light sources which form an integral part of the exhibit.

Here are excerpts from the notebook:

Second Group [of axioms]

Empire is indefinite expansion. A limes or limit to Empire is set, for the time being only, by exhausting your forward flight and your concern for exclusive appropriation.

Third Group [of axioms]

Some “nations” don’t succeed in settling down into the Empire and are put on reservations. They’re displaced to border areas or destroyed.

[...]

If the heavy tent of dark green canvas, with lighting independent of daylight illumination, wasn’t a trap for visitors, then at least it turned out to be an impasse – since you were required to go out the same way you got in. As big as a circus tent, this dead-end was just as moveable. The crime it concealed could be set up anywhere. So that in a short time its moveable nature made it an act of revenge on an imperial American Roman Germanic name by wandering nations. This totally contradicted its contents – a tableau representing a “final solution” of the Negro (migratory) question.

[...]

So you tried to get closer to the scene to make it out. When you did find out it was too late – since you were part of it now. The light from the rear came from converging headlights of a number of cars stopped in a circle.

But you couldn’t misunderstand the clothed plastic sculptures Kienholz placed at the convergent point of your vision and the headlights: the three men who held the Negro spread-eagled and the fourth concentrating on cutting off the black man’s cock couldn’t even for a second be taken for real. Their immobility went beyond what’s seen in ordinary tableaus because, declining to continue the deception, where a victim’s belly would be expected, Kienholz placed a rectangular pan, a pan in whose black water individual letters floated, letters (read American English here) which should occasionally drift into position to spell out N-I-G-G-E-R. The liquid was fed by nothing less than the man’s black cock trussed up like a terrifying faucet by the left hand of the castrator, who with his right hand sank in a knife. For Mrs. Greenstone and her friend, the letters swirling in the stream of liquid falling into the pan seemed to evoke some elusive feeling about black nationhood, a thing white imperialism in the tableau was unsuccessfully trying to eradicate.

They [Mrs Greenstone and her daughter] imagined, instead of the six letters swirling around in the water of the pan, that there were four different ones making the word JUDE. And that Klan disguises were replaced by SS uniforms. They looked on the visitors as monsters, carefully monitoring their reactions, secretly watching their emotions – visitors like the well-dressed mother who gathered her children together quickly and pulled them to the exit so they wouldn’t understand the horror. Or like the young couple who just stood there looking dazed. Or the old man they suspected of feigning attention better to conceal a Nazi past. In their minds, whoever approached was guilty. Each had the tell-tale mark of crime laid bare, a crime that spread continuously from the scene in question to visitors through the intermediary of a history that wasn’t just the history of the destruction of American blacks or even European Jews but was as well the history of an Empire that could be victorious over itself only at the price of destroying all those partial drives known as minorities.

[...]

So what were our friends doing when they cast their suspicions on these visitors? Weren’t they themselves involved in the perpetuation of imperialist delirium? It’s now they who, at the heart of a new but continuing Empire, expel the Germans around them from the Empire, thus relegating them to the status of a minority contained at its borders. They perfect Western Caesarism at the very moment they discover it everywhere. They’ve reinstalled a repulsive whiteness.

[...]

Pimp, whore, customer: these three roles set up their stage, their theatricality, their voluminousness on uninhabitable white surfaces.

[...]

Oh, the familiar jealousy theme! laughed the Greenstone girl and Andrea, quite unimpressed. In fact, yes – their friend insisted.

He also maintained that this is proof the time is ripe to write a history of drives, a history more cruel, less exact, but more precise than a history of interests or trivial enthusiasms. Faced with Jewish wandering, not every Empire contains in its backlogs of jealousy a Final Solution. For it to go to this extreme its métèques (here, Jews) must quietly refuse to allow themselves to be defined as minorities, even oppressed ones. They have to persist in calling themselves a chosen people of the Kingdom, an Elect against which claims of Empire will now seem forever ludicrous. It’s possible this Empire also wants to be a Kingdom. Sheer deception. So this strange impulse has to be added to the pot, that the Empire declare itself marked by election and destined to be Kingdom. When Titus ordained the Diaspora, the political idea hadn’t come that far yet. This is because Titus wasn’t a Christian and Rome didn’t yet have the terrorist claim of being simultaneously Empire and prefigured Kingdom of the Elect.  Final Solutions require a strange conjunction, election and conquest. The Biblical model of election doesn’t give you a thing to conquer, only a request to be heard. And you don’t receive Empire. The exclusiveness this people would like to deserve is one of justice, one that doesn’t expropriate anyone. A possible implication of this exclusivity is that a people remain forever métèques.

It seemed to us that Nazism’s sole motive was to wipe out that election and appropriate its advantages for itself. It wasn’t enough just to conquer. They had to feel destined to conquer by an elective and transcendent force, the only power to be able to get these humiliated Franks back on their feet.  The threat of an exclusive promise to others had to be extirpated so the narration of an incomparable blood would become credible. We know the consequences of that deception.*

* Merlin Vachez’s notebook ends here

Jean-François Lyotard, Pacific Wall. Translated by Bruce Boone, The Lapis Press, Venice, California, 1990. First published as Le mur du pacifique, Éditions Galilée , Paris, 1979.