Weimar Constitution, War Measures Act, and Sovereign Decisions: Guises of Liberal Democracy and Acts of Protest

The Canadian “War Measures Act,” passed in 1914, is a sovereign order that decides the necessity of a state of emergency to authorize the government to suspend all civil liberties and by-pass parliamentary debate. The order, which defines sovereignty as well as “the enemy,” creates a no-man’s land or a state of exception where all laws, as well as constitutional formations are dissolved.  The sovereign, unconstrained by law, is thereby  able to implement military actions against the designated “enemy” and when decided, will act to reestablish order, civility, and “the norm”: “The sovereign must decide both that a situation is exceptional and what to do about the exception in order to be able to create or recover a judicial order when the existing one is threatened by chaos” (Schmitt xx).

The Act was implemented three times in Canadian History: during World War I with the represented threat of Germans and Communists (for instance, Leon Trotsky was arrested in Halifax), during World War II with the detention in Interment Camps of those “identified” as Japanese or others marked as spies, and in 1970 during the Quebec October Crisis which was sanctioned as “a state of apprehended insurrection” (a euphemism that only Trudeau could come up with).

In 1988, through the process of liberal democracy, the Act was repealed and replaced with “The Emergency Act. ” The change in the Act differs from the original in that it is now subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and that a declaration of a state of emergency must be reviewed by Parliament.

With this said, it is crucial to understand what exactly sovereignty is and how it is defined by identifying “the enemy,”  by declaring a state of emergency, and more significantly its ability to make exceptions.

Carl Schmitt, a German legal and political thinker, who, although let’s face it has a rather unsavoury past, remains instructive when deconstructing the concrete meaning of sovereignty.  Schmitt defines sovereignty as “he who decides the exception” (5).  The sovereign has the absolute, dictatorial and unlimited quality of the decision.  Yet, the paradox of sovereignty is that the law is the judicial norm and without it the exception to it could not exist and thus nor could sovereignty. Therefore, the sovereign exists both inside and outside of the law. Schmitt’s political and theological touchstone is Thomas Hobbes and is reflected in Schmitt’s assertion that “the one who has authority can demand obedience – and it is not always the legitimate sovereign who possesses the authority” (xxxix).  The caveat is significant.

In an analysis of sovereignty Schmitt’s critique of liberal democracy is also salient, particularly in a study of sovereignty’s many guises.  For example, a core tenet of liberal democracy is that power is to be checked by power.  This is made evident, for instance, in the change in the War Measures Act and the move to demonstrate and “show” its citizens that the government is accountable to and for the public’s safety.  However, with the sovereign’s exception in mind, how then does the Canadian Emergency Act, as law, really function and how is it implemented and against whom?  It is indeed difficult to believe that an Act that determines a sovereign’s force has only been declared three times? How then does the Act manifest in Canada and what are its latent enforcements?

But first consider examples of legislated States of Emergency in a comparison between  Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution (which Schmitt had a hand in producing) and the Canadian “Declaration of a Public Order Emergency”:

If, in the German Reich, public security and order are considered disturbed or endangered, the Reichspräsident may undertake necessary measure to restore public security and order, and if necessary my intervene with the aid of armed forces.  For this purpose he may suspend, temporarily, in part or entirely, the basic rights as provided in articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124, and 153. (Schmitt xivi)

and the Canadian “Emergency Act”:

(1) When the Governor in Council believes, on reasonable grounds, that a public order emergency exists and necessitates the taking of special temporary measures for dealing with the emergency, the Governor in Council, after such consultation as is required by section 25, may, by proclamation, so declare.

2) A declaration of a public order emergency shall specify
(a) concisely the state of affairs constituting the emergency;
(b) the special temporary measures that the Governor in Council anticipates may be necessary for dealing with the emergency; and (c) if the effects of the emergency do not extend to the whole of Canada, the area of Canada to which the effects of the emergency extend.[1]

…

(1) Nothing in a declaration of a public order emergency or in any order or regulation made pursuant thereto shall be construed or applied so as to derogate from, or to authorize the derogation from, the control or direction of the government of a province or a municipality over any police force over which it normally has control or direction.

(2) Where the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is used or employed in a province or municipality pursuant to an arrangement under section 20 of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Act, subsection (1) applies in respect of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, subject to the terms and conditions of the arrangement.

Present in both Acts is the word “necessary” which ultimately is deemed by the sovereign alone.  The move from legitimate to dictatorial is indeed slippery.

Interestingly, in 1914 the Canadian sovereign State ‘s “War Measures Act,” similar to Germany’s Article 48 “State of Emergency Act,” was used against Germans in Canada.

The police action against protestors in Montreal poses an interesting contemporary example, among a league of others including continuing resistances by Aboriginal nations against the federal government, and post 9/11 surveillance, detentions and torture.  Does the sovereign state make exceptions to the rule of law by circumventing the legislated “State of Emergency” when it decides what action is necessary to maintain public “safety”?  What nuanced tactics does it use to maintain order when dealing “with an emergency,” and to demand obedience? Does the act of giving the police force additional power without parliamentary review, or being subject to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, form an exception that by-passes the messy implementation of the Emergency Act and most certainly public scrutiny?  What is the norm? Is the enemy always already a subject who counters not only the laws of civil conduct but also anyone who resists the sovereign’s order of obedience?  Schmitt would say yes and so would Hobbes. It is therefore important to understand the prerogative of the sovereign’s political authority; its Machiavellian exponents, as well as its ongoing power to make exceptions to laws; and more crucially to be aware of the liberal democratic guises that shroud the beast of sovereignty.

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[1] Canada. Department of Justice. “Declaration of a Public Order Emergency.” See Act in its entirety at http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/E-4.5/page-5.html#docCont

Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Trans. George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

The Intimate Distance of the Public Execution “… where, on a scaffold that will be erected there…”

The alignment of spectacle with the political subject rather than citizen is a strong one, and for good reason. Grounded in political history, it reoccurs every time the public gets drawn to a major media event such as the Super Bowl or the outbreak of war. (Hariman and Lucaites 299)

The public execution is to be understood not only as a judicial but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested. (Foucault 47)

Torture and Execution of Robert-François Damiens, 1757

… where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulpher, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn way, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds … ‘Finally, he was quartered,’ recounts the Gazette de’Amsterdam of 1 April 1757. This last operation was very long, because the horses used were not accustomed to drawing; consequently, instead of four, six were needed; and when that did not suffice, they were forced, in order to cut off the wretch’s thighs, to sever the sinews and hack at the joints … It is said that, though he was always a great swearer, no blasphemy escaped his lips; but the excessive pain made him utter horrible cries, and he often repeated: ‘My God, have pity on me! Jesus, help me!’ The spectators were all edified by the solicitude of the parish priest of St. Paul’s who despite his great age did not spare himself in offering consolation to the patient. …” (Foucault 3)

In the opening pages of Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault describes in excruciating detail the eighteenth-century torture and execution of Robert-François Damiens. Foucault, as John Durham Peters explains in his book Courting the Abyss, “rigorously refuses to contain the spectacle of the broken body” (88), and instead “Foucault stages a theatre of cruelty, leaving the reader with the unpalatable option of assuming that he is taking a sadistic glee in the torture and inviting the reader to enjoy the show” (88).

But why, as Peters asserts, would Foucault refuse to contain the spectacle?  Perhaps, here, Foucault is undertaking something else as he lifts the veil of spectacle to make present the political infrastructure of how the body is used to “perform ceremonies, to emit signs” (25).  The declarative “signs”of discipline and punishment have always already been impressed in the individual subjects through multiple social pedagogies and when disseminated through mediated formations harness collective publics, celebrate a meeting of minds even with an inclusion of dissent, and create, what Benedict Anderson calls, imaginary communities. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites explain this intelligibility of the signs as a foundation that begins to construct the icon within an aura of spectacle to engage a “direct audience response … which … provide[s] a public audience with sufficient means for contending with potentially unmanageable events” (25).

Spectators at a Public Execution (Kentucky, 1936)

Hariman and Lucaites suggest that media functions through and through this manifestation of power by creating emotional scenarios that not only secure the readers’ everyday habits such as eating breakfast, reading the newspaper, or taking out the trash but also activate “vital repertories of social behaviour”  that include sharing, archiving, and responding (34). Here, I am interested in Michael Warner’s suggestion that “the particular character of a public is that it is a space of discourse organized by discourse.  It is self-creating and self-organized; and herein lies its power, as well as its elusive strangeness” (68-9).

The media facilitates the intimate distance for its readership, a space wherein the practice of punitive action “between the ‘serene’ search for truth and the violence … cannot be entirely effaced from punishment” (Foucault 56). The media’s authority bolstered by naturalized public assumptions of civility support the utopic “search for truth” while it leads the reader into the gallows of punitive action, hand-in-hand to witness, vicariously, the spectacle of execution. The public is present while it maintains a comfortable and congregational distance.

Foucault explains that by the nineteenth-century, as a product of Enlightenment, a distance became necessary between the criminal and justice and “as a result of this new restraint, a whole army of technicians took over from the executioner, the immediate anatomist of pain: warden, doctors, chaplains, psychiatrists, psychologists, educationalist; by their very presence near the prisoner, they sing the praises that the law needs” (Foucault 11).

Execution of Ruth Snyder by Electric Chair (New York, 1928). The iconic photo was taken with a camera hidden in the photographer's clothing and published the next day in the New York Daily News.

 

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House, 1977.

Hariman, Robert and John Louis Lucaites. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Peters, John Durham. Courting the Abyss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Warner, Michael.  Public and Counterpublics.  New York: Zone Books, 2002.

Green Eggs and Ham, Mein Kampf, and Naked Lunch: Banning the Unpredictable

Humans are odd beasts especially when confronted with acts of transgression.  When, for example, a rogue force unhinges the ideological glue that was so carefully applied to “fix” a specific social narrative.   Unpredictable. Unorthodox.  Dangerous.   Three words that share a commonality among Green Eggs and Ham , Mein Kampf, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover along with thousands of other books that earned the status of banned.

But what exactly does it mean when a book is banned?   The banning of books has a long reach in history including Thalia  by Arius in 250 AD and more recently Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto’s Fist Fight in Heaven.

The etymology of the word ban is from Old English bannan or “to summon, command, proclaim” or from the German bannen “banish, expel, curse” and originally from bha “to speak publicly.”  In the late 14th century, Old Norse banna was “to curse, prohibit … to speak or a threat.”  In Old French ban was “outlawry and banishment” and the Germanic root is “banish, bandit, and contraband.”  Implicit in the word’s language formation is the circulating power between, among, and within both the sovereign and the outlaw.

But how does it slip from the strategic minds of those who mark an object as outlawed or as banned that they are actually highlighting an already existing discourse and by branding it with the Scarlet Letter provokes instead, as if by magic, a desire for it?  Hawthorne’s book, by the way, was also banned.  An outlaw, of course, is a misnomer in that by marking something or someone as transgressor or “outside of” they remain always and more potently “inside” as a threat to the status quo.  The Panopticon it seems, in its social architecture, will imprison those who watch and those who are watched.  To ban is to recognize and to authorize an object’s power – it has the power to change to shift to effect to affect.  The book is an object, a container filled with ideas and actions that are already circulating and have been circulating in other networks: from kitchens, to alleys, to libraries, classrooms, pubs, bedrooms, fields, living rooms, emails, graffiti, canvasses, music, t-shirts or no shirts,  footwear, theft, charity, hacking, poisoning, hair styles, marginalia, picket lines, fires, buses, marches, leaving, bearing witness, to undocumented silences that say so much more than that which lies between any published covers.  Why then is “the book” so dangerous?  Perhaps because it forces individuals to slow down as explained in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451:  “I sometimes think drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly”(9).

The written word is proof. Permanent.  A testament. An entry point. Social evidence. Militaristic in its very technology.  A public declaration.  Gutenberg did not only unleash the medium of print production but also a material potential of mass distribution to an unknown public, as Wilkie Collins categorized the growing demographic when criticizing nineteenth century penny press readers, who could escape marshaled codes of conduct by transgressing, without surveillance, in their own imaginations and their own will to think about stuff.  Censorship is a state praxis of population control that enables fallacies such as unification, democracy, and security by delineating “the enemy” be it in a book, individual, group, or nation, but alternatively it also earmarks distinct and very real anxieties operating through and through social systems.

The recent banning of books in Arizona relating to Mexican-American history along with cutting Ethnic Studies by the Tucson Unified School District is an example of a very real social and political anxiety and fear that manifests in the 1,951 mile long barrier wall that travels across the U.S. Mexican border.  It remains unsurprising that the state of the wall is called Operation Gatekeeper and that Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed is among the books on the state’s banned list.  Freire espouses a teaching philosophy that encourages students to think critically and for themselves by removing social hierarchies and educational barriers.

To ban anything or anyone by any measure makes socially explicit the relevancy and power of that which is cast out, while simultaneously revealing the fear and anxiety of those who dictate the order.  The book is an object filled with static visual codes that are animated in the act of reading and thinking:  a potentially dangerous action when individuals are left to their own devices to interpret words and meanings for themselves (The Reformation remains a significant example) or call into question state narratives held in place by a vast range of ideologies. Alas, what the history of book banning does make evident is that illicit books will be read and evaluated regardless perhaps to a greater degree than books that enter the status quo unchallenged.  Humans are odd beasts especially in their desire to know (and more dangerously) that which they are forbidden to know or to do which includes the reading of the banned and the outlawed because it lets loose, especially in the unwatched confines of the mind, our desires, transgressions, and fears.

[T]hough all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play on the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter? (Areopatitica, John Milton, 1644)

Among the titles included in the recent Arizona school banning is Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  The figures of Prospero and Caliban have undoubtedly released yet another post colonial allegory in Mexican-American relations, as well as inject new meaning into Caliban singing:  “Ban, Ban, Ca-Caliban” (2.2.).

Other notable banned books include:

All Quiet on the Western Front (Enrich Maria Remarque, 1929)

Animal Farm (George Orwell, 1945)

Areopatitica (John Milton, 1644)

Black Beauty (Anna Sewell, 1877)

Candide (Voltaire, 1759)

Catch 22 (Joseph Heller, 1961)

The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown, 2003)

The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck, 1939)

Big River, Big Sea – Untold Stories of 1949 (Lung Ying-tai, 2009)

The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer, 14th century)

The Diary of Anne Frank (Anne Frank, 1947)

A Feast for the Seaweeds (Haidar Haidar, 1983)

Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818)

The Gulag Archipelago (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1973)

Green Eggs and Ham (Dr. Seuss, 1960)

The Country Girls (Edna O’Brien, 1960)

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D.H. Lawrence, 1928)

Mein Kampf (Adolf Hitler, 1925)

July’s People (Nadine Gordimer, 1981)

The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka, 1915)

American Psycho (Bret Easton Eillis, 1991)

The Rights of Man (Thomas Paine, 1791)

Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller, 1934)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852)

Operation Dark Heart (Army Reserve Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, 2010)

The Naked and the Dead (Norman Mailer, 1948)

Naked Lunch (William S. Burroughs, 1959)

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties (Areopatitica, John Milton, 1644).

lucky

she didn’t see it get hit
its wing sweeping circles painting the pavement red
spinning in a small circle a spinning grey circle with its wing
and its soft head

no one saw as she ran down the five wood steps
tea towel flung over her shoulder and her hands wiping dry on her cotton shorts
she ran out into the road not looking as her hand held up a sixteen wheeled truck
it’s a wonder what hands can hold up

holding them until she was sure until she was certain it was all gathered in her blue white terry folds
“it was like picking up air”  she said
she used wood satay sticks from her drawer
she ripped thin strips of batik with her teeth
a bit of her spit held its brokenness
“the best medicine” she said
and then careful in an old fedora hat its beak tucked in terry folds its eyes closed softer than anything

she tried to set it free every afternoon
she tried while standing ankle deep in a field deeper with summer
the wind tugging her dress against her thighs
her hair across her face, her lips resting on its smooth head softer than anything
for the longest time

then its grey wings flapping frenzied from her two hands a healed thing lifted into a cloud piled sky
her hand shading her eyes as she watched its grey wings flap rising away making circles above her making circles
for the longest time
only to settle back on my mother’s shoulder and she would say what she would say as she gathered it
in the summer field this softest healed thing

 

 

 

 

 

 

FOX News Busted: Changeable landscapes and the (un)making of national fantasies.

“How does meaning get into the image?”  Roland Barthes‘ question remains an important one when considering the December 2011 FOX News images of riots that were reported to be taking place in Moscow and how the network was caught out by the public in their use of footage from riots occurring in Greece. The public’s critique of the news and its demand for  ”authenticity” is, however, not new.  Nor is the displacement of particular landscapes for particular political purposes.  This is seen in nineteenth century Canadian landscapes, among other spaces, as being artistically represented as an English countryside. Here, Benjamin West’s 1770 painting, The Death of General Wolfe, comes to mind.  Wolfe did not die on the battlefield, nor was he surrounded by military personnel, nor was there a Native American kneeling at his feet (Wolfe, in fact, held an acute disdain for Aboriginal peoples).

The image was constructed to create a national fantasy of unification and to establish a collective mass memory around a military event.   The mechanical reproduction of an “image” at the point of its very operation, as Walter Benjamin argues, is no longer “real.” “Real” can never be reproduced and therefore declarations of its rendered authenticity are impossible. With this said, the suspension of belief in its many creative imaginings remains a compelling device and therefore a lucrative commodity and political strategy to instigate mass consent.  The nineteenth century, for instance, is seen as a social site where there was a massive increase in Western readership of the paper press.  Wilkie Collins called this elusive and temporal demographic  “The Unknown Public.” Wilkie’s foundational (yet problematic) essay was first published in Charles Dickens’ periodical Household Words in 1858.  The great subtext of “The Unknown Public” is the political and capital desire and simultaneous fear of the power of individual subjects and their sovereign and unleashed opinions.  The public bodies, particularly during times of conflict, wanted to know and were discerning enough to also know the power of political rhetoric and the methods of propaganda.  One reason for the rise of the institutionalization of the library in the nineteenth century was to take the public out of the coffee houses where lively debates would take place over The Sunday Times and marginalized Penny Presses and move them into libraries where silence was demanded.

C. Wright Mills, in The Power Elite, (1956) asks a question that underpins Barthes’ rhetorical conundrum:  ”but who is this public?”  Mills sees the nineteenth century not only as a transformative period in a social visual ontology (the Victorian demand “to see” and “to know”) but as a site where the public was discursively separated into the mass: a shift determined by the power elite.

Mills explains the shift:

Public:

- many people express opinions and receive them.

- small and unauthorized venues of communications.

- outlets for effective action.

- authoritative institutions do not penetrate.

Mass:

- fewer people express opinions and received them.

- venues for communications difficult for individuals to effect.

- opinions controlled by authorities.

- mass has no autonomy from authorities.

Management, control, and surveillance of the elusive and potentially transgressive “public” functioned through and through the nineteenth century industrialized media apparatus and its freshly awakened bedfellow:  illustration.  The co-opting of text and image was and is a shape-shifting technology that continues to morph in its digital manifestations on the internet to accrue the mass.  What remains significant to note is that both media,  illustration and the internet, originate in the military along with its ideologies.  Rather than disqualify a comparison of the technologies as disparate because of their analogue and digital mechanics both rely on their relative cybernetic realities to enable production and reception.  Donna Haraway explains, “Cyborgs are not reverent. … They are wary of holism, but needy for connection– they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism. … But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential” (“Manifesto” 151).

The critique of the FOX falsification of time and space reveals the power elites attempt to homogenize the public demonstrations as an amorphous “mass” that lacks singularity, identification, or agency; moreover, it is, in the case of FOX, the resistance from “the public” that reveals the heterogeneity of the ubiquitous power bases that remain vigilant, uncontrollable, and always demanding to see the ever elusive real.

I came across an August sky …

I came across an August sky until I felt the ground that holds you.  Amsterdam was raining when I landed. A taste of sea. I knew all the paths, streets, windows, walls, and tunnels.  The church bells told me.

It’s taken me awhile to ask what’s needed to be asked, to turn our things to ash.  But I always return.
I always seem to come back to your garden, your tomb, your kitchen floor.

I waited, like you told me, for the crows to speak; instead, the old caretaker in wooden shoes fired up his weed-eater.
I chased him until he stopped.  And from behind the stone walls, he watched me.  Like I was crazy.  Loose.

I’ve been wondering why we are here?  Me. You.  Life and death scribbled on our bodies, like these stones.
When I came home from school you were gone. Never got to ask how your leaving got built, about the walls you tunneled under, swung your legs over, and then running running until you became sky.

These cedar hedges can’t hold back the smell of farms or the warm four o’clock winds.

He was vacuuming that day.  And I knew you were gone.  He never looked up again.  Your stone is cut with words that fly out of my hands stirring up wounds with your wooden spoon until I can’t even taste them anymore.  You tied this thread – a butcher’s string – around my wrist:  I could hear your breath when you made the knot.

“May the rest she missed on life’s journey…”

The knot is still tied, but it’s still not right is it?  I always spelled your name with a “y”
Listen close:                I will find our way to ash.

Leviathan and Wolves: Occupying Sovereignty in 2011

Are we witnessing in the twenty-first century Occupation of Space a sixteenth-century counter conduct palimpsest?

The opening line in Jean Bodin’s “On Sovereignty,” in his Six books of the Commonwealth, describes sovereignty as “that absolute and perpetual power vested in a commonwealth” (25). Bodin’s book was published in 1576, and similar to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), his tract was in response to the outbreak of civil war that plagued his country. Hobbes and Bodin, though their respective experiences occurred less than a century apart, had a distinct fear of anarchy and social division, both were resolute in their call for an absolute sovereign who under which all subjects would be controlled by the state through their complete submission to the sovereign’s authority. Bodin’s tract is comparable to Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince published in 1532 as a how-to manual, or a political pedagogy of sorts, for sovereign figures to effectively control the state. In circulation during Bodin’s writing, The Prince is considered to have had an influence in Bodin’s political notions of sovereignty.  Bodin, however, differs from Machiavelli’s manifesto in his insistence that even though the commonwealth must follow the sovereign’s ordering of natural and divine law, the sovereign’s power was not arbitrary and the sovereign should strive for amenity; in contrast, Machiavelli’s project was in the art of war and tailored for a more autonomous sovereign body. As Foucault points out, during “the sixteenth century we enter the age of forms of conducting, directing and government” (231).  This is reflected in the penchant of philosophers to write strategic tracts on how to conduct a subject: “the sovereign who rules and exercises his sovereignty now finds himself responsible for, entrusted with, and assigned new tasks of conducting [men]” (Foucault “Security,” 231). Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is a beast, a mythical figure originating in the Hebrew Bible and with a lengthy description in the King James version, Job 41: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook? (Norton).

Shakespeare also utilized the figure of the Leviathan in A Mid Summer Night’s Dream, yet in a benevolent context reflecting upon its monstrosity, its remarkable speed and suggests that a subject might overtake it:

Fetch me this herb; and be thou here again
Ere the leviathan can swim a league.
I’ll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes (2.1.174).

“The Leviathan” is captured in a particular performativity, a fable, and in a contained literary and visual state marks a division of bodies in the manufacturing of the sovereign while simultaneously making known the singularity of the beast - a prototype that continues to have significant impact.

The Hobbesian model is based on the urgency to avoid civil war and chaos within the state.  Hobbes believed, as Ian Shapiro points out in his Introduction to the Leviathan “Reading Hobbes Today,” that the state of nature “is terrible – depicted in perhaps the most frequently quoted of his memorable lines as a world in which life is ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’” (xix).  Hobbes believes that all subjects in the commonwealth must cede their judgment and submit to the prescribed conduct of the sovereign who is infused with divine law and judgment. If this conduct is countered, the Leviathan will return to the state of nature leaving individuals as singular subjects with no protection and security.  The images are significant here because in the seventeenth century frontispiece, for example (Plate 1), the body of the monster Leviathan, an automat, is constructed with the docile bodies, as a unity, creating a commonwealth.  Faces turned inward – individuality subsumed, and subjectified, in order to maintain the polis, and the good life.  As Derrida remarks when considering Hobbes:  “Sovereignty causes fear, and fear makes the sovereign” (40).  Something, however, is absent in this image; or, rather veiled: la bête (148). The beast, as Derrida argues, is impossible to translate but the wolf, a beast, in French is loup which also means a black velvet mask worn by women during masked balls (Derrida, “Beast,” 6).  It could also be a visor, similar to that worn by Hamlet’s ghost, or the veil that possibly cloaks the truth. Wolf as loup. The image of the beast. The beast for Hobbes is internalized in the sovereign, a unifying sensibility that requires all the power forces of the commonwealth to sustain it.  Significant, is what this fable is teaching.  The Leviathan, as beast, is unregistered.  Erased. The sovereign is coded divine; the state of nature is subtracted from the new ideology. What becomes apparent in the Hobbesian discourse is the need for an enemy in order for the sovereign body to be sustained, not unlike an Aristotelian tragedy, or a fable. For the sovereign every subject is a potential enemy and the potential enemy is the beast.

The biblical reference would be understood by the seventeenth century audience, this is crucial in order for the state to ensure obedience and instill the elements of fear of the beast that haunts the sovereign’s body: “the element of fabulation, in which the analogies between the beast and the sovereign, find their resources and their schema” (Derrida, “Beast,” 80).  A change takes place in the nineteenth-century in the image of the Leviathan created by Gustave Doré. In Plate 2, the Leviathan returns to its biblical origins seemingly drowning in the chaotic state of nature. Gustave Doré was a prolific nineteenth-century illustrator who produced among his many works Milton’s Paradise Lost, The Bible (1866), as well the figure of the Leviathan, and Perrault’s Fairy Tales that include “Little Red Riding Hood.[1]

Here, Derrida’s comment on fables is apt:  “The fables themselves show that the essence of political force and power where that power makes the law” (“Beast,” 217).  Derrida delineates the lengthy lineage of the beast who is often portrayed as the “wolf” and how it walks across the stage for Hobbes, Rousseau as a self-proclaimed werewolf, Plato’s wolf-tyrant, as well, among others, La Fountaine’s Fables, fables illustrated, incidentally, by Gustave Doré (another wolf crosses the stage).

The sovereign in this space is represented explicitly as the enlightened divine law in the act of disciplining the beast that has turned rogue (a word created by Shakespeare).  The moral of the fable, recounted in wolves and sea monsters, is that obedience is a necessity;  the United States military and global sovereign forces in 2011 calls any counter conduct by alternative sovereign states, specifically the civil occupation of space as rogue, or perhaps Hobbes might have call it the contemporary Leviathan, unleashed.

Bodin, Jean. On Sovereignty.  Ed. Julian H. Franklin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Derrida, Jacques. The Beast & the Sovereign. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Foucault, Michel. Society must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975-76. New York: Picador, 2003.

…, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1977-78. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

–, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1990.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan; or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

Shapiro, Ian. “Reading Hobbes Today.” Leviathan; or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill by Thomas Hobbes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

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 [1] It is noted that Dore also illustrated The Tempest by William Shakespeare in 1860.

volcanoes and maps: a kitchen fable

My mother would tell me this story, a fable, a legend of sorts as I sat on her kitchen floor; the broken linoleum was cool under my crossed legs. I remember tracing the torn bits of the floor with my finger tips; slowly I’d follow the sharp lines, the broken lines like a map that led me to my mother’s stove.

As she cooked, I played with one of her wooden spoons and I’d pull all the pots and pans from out of the open cupboard door beside her bare legs.

As she stirred, I stirred

and I’d watch her saute the onions and garlic; the smoke would rise in an alchemic cloud to the ceiling and disappear;  I’d watch her as the steam made her face turn like a ghost as she lifted the lid from the jasmine rice.

And she would stir.

It was a crazy legend, this story that she would tell.  It made no sense to me at all but I do remember liking the word “volcano” … even as she told the story I would repeat the word – volcano – over and over sometimes without making a sound:  only my lips would move:  vol cane oh.

“The volcano,” she would begin as she tamped the spoon on the edge of her iron pot, “was made by a daughter, a meisje, who, to win the love of her mother, had to dig a sea around the sand upon which she stood — in one night. This would not be an easy task, for you see the sand stretched out for as far as the girl could see until it slipped out over the edge of the world.  And all she had, all this girl could use was half a coconut shell, a klein kop – like this.  And so the girl began to dig; she made a circle, a wide circle.  She dug deep for she knew the sea was running beneath, and as she dug she piled the sand in the centre of the circle to make the volcano; she dug, and she dug,

and she dug

so deep that she stood hip deep in a water of sea and the sand pile had grown into a mountain so great that when she would hold her breath for a moment … she could hear a fire growing in its belly, and its groan beneath her feet.  The girl, you see, was doing very well, but she was doing so well that the gods got angry.  So angry because you see, meisje, they wanted her to fail.

It is here, in the story, that my mother would always look at me; her green eyes so clear and sharp that I thought I could hear them speak, “Meisje, what you must remember is that the gods were only afraid.  They were afraid that this girl, the daughter would make what couldn’t be made by mortals.”

“So the gods began to pound and POUND … pound seed between mortar and pestle. The sound of stone grew so great, so fierce that the dark sky shook.”  And my mother would have her stone and pestle resting in her hands, its centre still with bits of cumin husks. “Like so … the stone against seed against stone.   It was this sound of pounding, the sound of girls in the morning preparing meals around a fire and water boiling hot for washing as the sun would cut the night horizon with light, softening the dark … but you see,  it was a trick.  It was still dark.  The girl still had time but she did not know the trick that was being played.

and the roosters, they too were fooled; they thought the sun, the morning, was rising, ready to come up — so they began to crow

So, the girl, the daughter stood up, climbed out of the sea,  her hand over brow.  She looked at her mountain and then to the east.  The empty cup in her hand. The sky was still dark and filled with the sounds of cocks crowing and gods pounding.  It was then the girl knew the gods were fucking with her.  The gods were always always fucking with her.  The shape of the sky told her that much.  But by then it was too late.

And so the girl never completes the task.  And the daughter dies … longing, a half cup in her hand.   A broken sea of sand and an unfinished mountain was all that remained.

And my mother would stir.  Silent.  And I would follow the lines on the floor like a map, a map that led to my mother’s stove.  And I would for a moment hold my breath, like the girl, the daughter in the story … and it seemed as if the floor moved from somewhere below me and I could hear a fire from somewhere as I looked up at her, the steam rising and then disappearing into nothing.

I never knew what that word meant; the name she always called me:  Meisje.  No clue. But the funny thing is my body knew.  My arms, my legs, my face, my mouth all knew the meaning better than anything else I have ever known.  It felt — warm.  Like the heat from her oven.  Steam from her rice.  Her skin in an August garden.  Even though I never knew what it meant – I always went to her – always went to her — no matter what.

…

And I remember the two of us standing across from each other, each facing one other; our hands on our hips wanting to know more than anything else in the world the answers to the questions that could only be found in legends, the truth that could only be found in fables of sea and sand that were told to us.

…

–  excerpt from my play “red bridge”

small gods

making for the woods “then the river”
our august skin hears its coolness before we ever did
unlooked-for-band skipping rogue stones on curbless pavement
eight in all swearing loud for the hell of it, loose
and highly flammable

kerosene sloshes as kerosene sloshes
on the move “enough to make a jet engine …”
boasts shushed as porch lights catch hems
of shirtless backs running uncapped lapping
to ignite something anything out of breath
to show them to show them how our hands can

unmake

river mouth at our street’s very end
always unlocked and if it was a noon-time-water we’d see puddle-like-rainbows
float ’n swirl like on jenny’s asphalt black wet driveway just laid
searing leaning into her ’76 firebird.  and jenny’s shining hair

her shining hair …

row of bare foot beasts pour on past midnight
mouth to mouth filling the river full of unlit chemical giddy
shaking wooden matches shake shakeshake percussive pieces
striking one by one under johnny’s front tooth “only takes one, dumb ass”
to set it fine never thought just us could, i mean, burn up a river like that, “damn fine”
sky burnt whiteorange bare feet stomping hair caught faster than fast stomping
crinkling brows melting her two hands away (and she never did come back)

our awed bodies too hot to blink, burst skin doused in standing light baptized
small gods our dry lips
couldn’t pronounce

motorcycle girl: getting ready for the road …

It’s a bit of a late start but all that I need to do is install the two new mirrors (which were immoveable and impossible to adjust), and the new battery belt (which was basically dust posing as a battery belt).  The battery tray painted – check;  air filters cleaned – check;  and covers painted – check.

The clutch is fairly tight, so I’m going to lubricate the line to see if that will loosen it up. My left shoulder tends to ache after riding (which I know, I know, I’ve heard has something to do with the fact that I’m a new rider … but I think the fact that my clutch is as tight as the lid of a new ketchup bottle doesn’t help).  And of course add oil … and gas.  Then all I need to do is to see if it starts.  I’m going to say ten … okay, no … let’s say fifteen tries (after a winter in the garage) to get it to idle … like a rough old-alley-cat on a summer’s day kinda idle.

Battery Tray – Before and After Shot:  ”Before”

Battery Tray – Before and After Shot: “After”

I really don’t like quoting Pirsig’s 1974 metaphysical best seller (which seems like an oxymoron, no?) because however “zen” you want to get with the romantic notion of an older bike … I still need help with it.   So instead I’ll share an experience:  I took a refresher class with a girlfriend and there was something really wonderful about it:  I was simultaneously nervous and excited as I tried to remember how to start the bike  (and I was totally embarrassed because I didn’t know where the electric start was (yes, whatever). Remember mine is a kick start.  But once I got it going it was indeed … like riding a bike:  there is the gaining control over this machine (without a seatbelt), the tension building in the fiction point, and a total reliance of self to just let go; the power to take it to high speeds and to control it down into a-just-about-stand-still American Style braking without stalling and then adjusting my counterbalance so far over that my butt was off the seat to control the motorcycle in the smallest of circles.  Each circle testing my balance and fear and confidence …  I don’t know, maybe it is zen.