7KH6RFLHW\RIWKH6SHFWUDOSerge Margel, Eva Yampolsky

diacritics, Volume 40, Number 3, Fall 2012, pp. 6-25 (Article)

3XEOLVKHGE\7KH-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVVDOI: 10.1353/dia.2012.0008

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THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTRAL

SERGE MARGEL

DIACRITICS Volume 40.3 (2012) 623 2012 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

The body of a star could open a new interpretative horizon of the body-machine, along with its representations, its theater, and its staging. The definition of a body-machine lies between two hypotheses: the repressed body and the utopian body. The first is closed, limited, censored, withdrawn, oppressed, watched over, controlled, always directly in-volved in a political field, writes Michel Foucault. It is engaged in power relations that invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.1 The utopian body is open to multiple, even infinite forces, existing in an unlimited state, under a spell, imbued with possibilities, virtualities, or power that place the body in communication with secret powers and invisible forces,2 according to Foucault, between repression and utopia, enclosure and opening, at the limit of ex-tremes and on the threshold of tension. Not only does the body-machine exist between these two hypotheses, but it is also here that the body maintains a secret relation to its own death, its specter, or ghost. I will proceed by suggesting something quite simple: the expression body-machine can also be understood as power over death, a power, a force, a virtus that always acts between repression and utopia, enclosure and opening, censorship and freedom. More importantly, it is a power that expresses and stages itself within our Western, Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian culture, through a signifying chain of exemplarities, or by the challenge of exemplary bodies, hybrid and mixed, as that of a hero, a martyr, a saint, an angel, like the kings two bodies or, as is increasingly the case, like the body of a star.3 The body of a star, or the exemplarity of power over death that marks the unworked (dsuvr), disillusioned, disenchanted world of modernity, today evokes the implica-tions of such bodily power, once it becomes body-machine. From Marlene Dietrichs Gar-ters to James Deans Jeans, a possible alternative title of this text, offers two exemplary modalities or, to put it more simply, two figures, embodiments, or forms of the staging of a death machine that announces the body in its hybridity. By evoking the machinery that exists between production and deception and between industry and trickery, from merchandise to farce, I want to focus specifically on the stage, or the act of staging, but also on the obscene: that which is behind the scenes, withdrawn, in a gesture similar to the way one rolls up ones sleeves or turns a glove inside out. According to Jean Baudril-lard, the obscene is the body that covers itself in its own secretions, that appears, repre-sents itself, exposes itself, or reveals its secrets.4 It is a body that stages itself in and by its secretions, one that secretly manifests or renders externally visible what it produces internally. Secretion quite obviously concerns the question of the secretof secret powers and invisible forces, in Foucaults wordsthat expose themselves in all their obscenity, though discreetly, within the signifying chain of exemplarities that in our case is the body of a star: its esthetic, rhetoric, and grammar, known as glamour. My sole argu-ment here is this: glamour is the grammar of the obscene. But lets return to the body-machine: a body that is machine, that is nothing but machine, and perhaps also a body that machinates, and therefore one that, according to the definition given by Le Robert, secretly creates plots or schemes that are contrary to honesty and lawfulness. Machinating implies mixing up, tricking, plotting, scheming,

Serge Margel teaches philosophy at the University of Lausanne and visual an-thropology at the Geneva School of Art and Design. For the past several years, his work has focused on cultural produc-tion, especially on discursive methods used by the human sciences, literature, and art. He has published numerous books, including Alination: Antonin Artaud. Les gnalogies hybrides (2008) and Les archives fantmes: Recherches anthropologiques sur les institutions de la culture (2013).

Translated by Eva Yampolsky

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processing, but also conspiring or intriguing. And yet, what is it about the body-machine that makes us say that it machinates, and how must one understand the internal link, secret but sovereign, between the machine and machination? What we are concerned with here is the secretto manipulate is to form secretlybut also with the secretion that secretes the body-machines power over death. Drawing a hasty conclusion, one could already claim that the body-machine is a body that secretly constructs a relation of sovereignty to its death or disappearance, creating the secrecy of its death, which, as we will see, secretes on itself a surface of illusion, the image of its disappearance, of its ghost or specter. Here, the Latin machina necessarily implies an ingenious means of obtaining results. And this is precisely what the machine consists of: a means, an ingenious means unlike any other, by which one can obtain results, envision an outcome or a goal, attain an objective. It is, above all, a means that allows one to produce some-thing for someone. But let us take a step back: machine, machina in Latin, evokes the Greek machana, also a machine, yet which derives from mechos, on the one hand, signifying a means, an expedient, a safeguard, or a remedy, and from mechane, on the other hand, connoting a clever invention, a war machine or a theater machineand here the question of the stage reemergesa machine of artifice and tricks that fabricates, molds, and invents. Continu-ing this lexical game with the term machana, we can link it to the Germanic and Slavic verb mag, with magen and megin in Old High German, and mgen and Macht in modern German, the first signifying to be able to and the latter force. The powerful, impor-tant, influential figure of the mogol or mogul symbolizes today, and particularly in the movie industry, a powerful person in Hollywood who influences, owns, and dominates the market. The machine implies a power or a force that allows it to influence or to create a network of influences, and at the same time to secretly form schemes that are beyond control, to invent plots and tricks, in order to elude attention and avoid expectations. The machine is cunning, it is a ruse, a trick, a clever and witty remark. It always acts in secret, it always creates a secret that produces something, an object or a body, by secreting its own death, a relation to its death, that resembles an image of its disappearance.5 The machine is a body, just as the body is a machine that machinates, rearranges, schemes, manipulates, and plots. In body-machine, however, there is the machine and there is the body. Our concern here is that which machinates. And in Greek, this body or thing (machin) means first and foremost a cadaver, an inanimate or dead body. And if the invention of philosophyyet another machine and another schemeplaces the body in radical opposition to the soulthe soma and the psucheto reason, speech and thelogos, it is because the term soma, as it appears in Homers texts, designates a dead body, or more precisely the body of a dead person, of one who died in combat: cold, rigid, and motionless. It contrasts not with the psuche but with the demas, the living body, its posture, allure, and style. In Homers texts, no unified body exists in subjection to a logos: there are merely various forms and positions that isolate body parts, arms, legs, hands, genitals, eyes, mouths, or parts that produce gestures, acts, gazes, and speech, in the framework of a muthos, a story, a narrative, or an odyssey. When speaking of soma

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or corpus, the story or the narrative is completed and the body is dead, like a cadaver or something that falls to the ground. And if the machine is a power or a force that secretly creates something for someone, the body, on the other hand, is a cadaver, always the body of a dead person, or of death itself. This is why we can translate body-machine as power over death. Defining the body-machine as a power over death suggests a certain reading, ap-proach, perspective, or point of view that allows us to consider the challenge of exem-plarities, from the hero to the star. How can one speak of the body if its power or force is always invested, by the body itself, as power over death? In Spinozan or Deleuz-ean terms, the body mechanically express-es the capabilities that are at once proper to it and that it manifests or exposes, doing so only as power of death, or as power over death, exercised through different repre-sentations and various physical, biological, symbolic, and even socio-political effects. Yet, the body can also manifest power that is proper to death, where it is death itself, so to speak, that functions, creates, affects, and even represents by acting on the body by its own means. Within and by the body-machine, death is also a means, a mechos, a tool, an expedient, or a remedy. Death is never simply reduced to an accident that happens to the body. Death is notor is not onlywhat happens to the body accidentally, but, rather, it always constitutes that which the body produces mechanically. Like a produc-tive force, a working or useful force that shapes and fictionalizes, death allows the body to produce itself, just as one might say that an actor appears (se produit) on stage, pres-ents or represents himself in communication with secret powers and invisible forces. Death allows, accords, or, as we will see, promises to the body a relation to the secret, or to its secret powers and its own secretions. Death promises it sovereignty, or to reveal its secret through the metamorphosis of its reality into illusion, or by shaping the image of its disappearance.

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All exemplary bodies secrete, secretly expressing a relation to death. A hero who dies in combat, a martyr who dies for his faith, a saint who dies out of love, all these deaths are stories, similar to the ones we find in Homer. They are narratives, mise-en-scnes, rhetorical discourses, a grammar of disappearance. Today we might call them aesthet-ics, particularly when referring to the exemplary body of a star and its aesthetic called glamour. However, I would rather talk about grammar. Following the hypothesis that I put forth here, glamour is to the star what combat is to the hero, what sacrifice is to the martyr, and devotion is to the saint. It represents the secret place of the power over death, the stage where the productive force of death and disappearance is presented, where it takes shape in secret and is plotted. In other words, it is a place of secretions,

Glamour is to the star what combat is to the hero, what sacrifice is to the martyr, and devotion is to the saint.

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between the body and its death. But what precisely does glamour refer to? It has nothing to do with death, nor with love. Josef von Sternberg, the film director who invented or machinated Marlene Dietrich, describes it as follows:

Glamour is the quality of being provocative, tantalizing, entrancing, fascinating, ravishing and bewitching, all these implying vibrating and twisting the beholders emotional wiring. Glamour can also produce, though this is rare, a purely aesthetic satisfaction, divorced from all primitive impulse, by first draining the blood from your body.6

Terms such as provocation, fascination, ravishment, and bewitchment all indicate a rhetoric of subordination, of chase and captureall these implying vibrating and twist-ing the beholders emotional wiring. More importantly, what these terms express is the magic of a secret and, at the same time, the power of secretions. Indeed, and contrary to what one might expect, the word glamour comes from grammar, denoting gramiae, gound, or discharge from the eye, the viscous, thick secretion that collects at the corner of the eye, a viscous discharge or rheum in the eyes. As Le Sage writes in Gil Blas, He cleaned his eyes of a thick gum that filled them.7 The Latin source for these terms is the grammarian Festus, known as Festus Grammaticus, from the end of the second century CE: Gramiae oculorum sunt vitia, quas alii glamas vocant.8 Gramiae is another term for glama, from the Greek glamon, rheumy, which can be found in several Slavic terms, among others: the Lithuanian gleive s, the Polish klejacy, or in the English clammy, sticky, tenacious, and in the French glamour, this viscous secretion, a glutinous discharge that collects at the corner of the eye, and sometimes even covers the eyesas if to veil, blur, or bewitch them. This meaning is rooted in the French word chassieux (rheumy), from the Old French chacie, which originates in the Vulgar Latin caccita, derived from cacare, to shit, or, more precisely, to excrete, to secrete something from the inside to the outside. In glamour, there is not only glama, but also gramma. Here is another definition of this term from the Oxford English Dictionary:

Originally Scots, introduced into the literary language by Scott. A corrupt form of grammar; for the sense compare gramarye (and French grimoire), and for the form glomery.1. Magic, enchantment, spell; esp. in the phrase to cast the glamour over one.2. a. A magical or fictitious beauty attaching to any person or object; a delusive or

alluring charm. b. Charm; attractiveness; physical allure, esp. feminine beauty.9

Here again, it is a question of bewitchment, rapture, fascination, seduction, and charm. Glamour is magical, but this magic is secret, encrypted, encoded, obscure, or in-comprehensible. Similarly, grammar in Medieval Latin also denotes various regimes of unintelligibility, which explains the shift in terms to gramoir, and then to grimoire, a mysterious book of magic or a secret book of witchcraft. In Mallarms Igitur, the gri-moire is the place where the secret of the Book is hidden. It is a book that must be de-coded, whose secret must be deciphered, in other words, it constitutes everything that implies vibrating and twisting the beholders emotional wiring.

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But the chain of significations does not end here. From grammar to gramoir, from gramoir to grimoire, there is also grima of French origin, meaning a mask, as in grimace; the French grimaud (pedantic); grimage (makeup); and grimer (to put on makeup or to disguise, especially in reference to an actor who draws wrinkles on his face to appear older). By metonymy or synecdoche, this term can go so far as to denote a manner, an expression, or the head itself. Faire la grime in French means to make a face or to sulk. We also find Grimm haben in modern German (to be angry) or grimmig gucken (to look with rage), and grim in Russian (theatrical makeup). In Old Saxon, however, grima also denotes the specter, which can still be found in the English phrase grim reaper, often serving as an allegory of death. The word glamour contains all of these connotations: se-cretions, the grimoire, and the face of death. A manner, an expression, appearance, a look that expresses a secret relation to death or a relation that secretes something related to death, one that in a certain sense stages a viscous secretion or a grim, deathly pallor. Glamour is the body-machine of a star, a body that machinates or schemes, mixes up, processes, tricks and plots a secret of death, in order to cast a supreme spell, to bewitch and beguile, to entrap or capture the spectators gaze. Glamour concerns the eyes, not in the sense of vision, the vi-sual, or the visible, but rather of the ocular, the eyes globular sphere that encompass-es (englober) everything, secreting a vis-cous, mucus-like liquid (les glaires), that agglutinates images. Yet, how is this exemplary body-machine perceived, once its glam-our is limited or reduced only to feminine charm? Is the body of a star always a female body, or a body in the feminine? Is the body-machine only able to machinate a female body and to concoct femininity? In other words, is the sex machine necessarily female? Is this exemplary body, as a prototype of a disenchanted modernity, still able to produce or to stage anything other than the name, and only the first name, of a woman: Marlene, Greta, or Marilyn? We can recall von Sternbergs claim: I am MarleneMarlene is me. I will return to this statement after the following long passage on feminine glamour:

There are styles in glamour, as in everything else; one year glamour is partial to plump ladies in tights and on a bicycle, as in the early daguerreotypes; another year it embraces inflated bosoms, gartered legs, veils and extravagant hats, features rapturous expressions, angelic eyes, saccharine nudes of the pinup syndrome, and now documentary bleakness, but oneand the principalfacet of glamour never changes: it promises something it cannot deliver. . . .

Glamour in a photograph is the treatment of surfacea surface that is not even skin deep: it is only as deep as the paper which reproduces the image.10

Glamour is the body-machine of a star, a body that machinates or schemes, mixes up, processes, tricks and plots a secret of death, in order to cast a supreme spell, to bewitch and beguile, to entrap or capture the spectators gaze.

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Glamour is fashion, the art of the ephemeral, of the temporary, of change, of the transi-tory in Baudelaires terms, and of trends, as one might say today. Glamour is a trend, creating preference for a body on a bicycle at one moment, for gartered legs at another, but no matter the trend, what is crucial is that it almost always concerns womens bodies. In Valentinos case, his glamour is grotesque, his appearance, his looks and expressions are ridiculous: As far as Valentino is concerned, the less said the better, writes von Sternberg, his antics bordered on the ridiculous.11 Valentino adopts expressions and fashions various styled, affected, and contrived, seemingly unnatural looks lacking in simplicity and constancy. Garbo, on the other hand, displayed remarkable persistency. She was taught by a master craftsman: Brought from Sweden and tutored by a master craftsman, Mauritz Stiller, she succeeded in making an entire world aware of her grace and personality.12 Like a demiurge, the master craftsman reveals to the world, and with his firm and skillful hand brings to light and into consciousness a womans potential, her dormant virtues, her secret powers, her latent and invisible forces of elegance, fas-cination, rapture, seduction, and provocation, which, like a sex machine, exist in the be-witching body of a woman. A woman does not have access to her own strengths. Without the intervention of a master craftsman, an interpreter of signs, a hermeneutist, a kind of translator of charm, she would never be capable of freeing, expressing, openly exhibit-ing, or displaying, rendering comprehensible, staging or performing her essential quali-ties, her specifically feminine attributes, her sex appeal, her impulsive properties, from grace to elegance, nor could she reveal her secret, which took nature millions of years to create. As von Sternberg explains,

It is not my intention to diminish the stature of womanhood, for there is nothing on earth that is more graceful and attractive than a female in bloom. Nature did a lot of experiment-ing before it arrived at a perfect version. But man is not content to value a woman for the extraordinary qualities that took millions of years to flower, and will often favor an image that has qualities that took no longer to produce than the split second that transfers the real thing into a black box to become an illusion.13

The anthropo-phallocentric claim I am MarleneMarlene is me resonates here. More importantly, this passage shows how in the course of history, glamourwith its grammar, rhetoric, and aestheticsappears as a moment of rupture, discontinuity, and utopia. On the one hand, Nature did a lot of experimenting before it arrived at a perfect version [of woman]. Von Sternberg also adds that legends of glamour go deep into history, with Helen who launched a thousand ships, Cleopatra of the rolled-up carpet, and many other stories that could confirm natures experiments, whose aim was to achieve its own completion.14 On the other hand, however, manthe masculine, the master of a work, a craftsman or a demiurgewill not be content or satisfied with such exceptional, extraordinary qualities, among all the beings that nature has created. Man will never be able to reduce his pleasure, his perspective, or attention only to the

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state of exception, even to the most extraordinary one. Masculine pleasure will not be content with reality or nature, seeking instead an image or an illusion, the sexual ma-chine par excellence. Von Sternbergs claim is at once superb and superbly troubling. Seemingly placing man in competition with nature, or perhaps even in competition with God, the masculine with the divine, von Sternberg chooses to compare the millions of years that nature took to create the reality of a woman with the fraction of a second that was necessary for cinema to transform this reality into an illusion. But man is not content to value a woman for the extraordinary qualities that took millions of years to flower, and will often favor an image that has qualities that took no longer to produce than the split second that transfers the real thing into a black box to become an illusion. The black box, the book of magic, the gramoir, or the grammar of glamour that ag-glutinates the dull, glaucous, blurry, bewitched, dispossessed eyes of the spectator with a viscous discharge or secretions. The perfecting of a woman by man, in this case, is revealed in and by this fraction of a second, this overwhelming irruption of the machine, of the sex machine that transforms natural reality into a grammar of illusion, makeup, or a face that has been made up. It would not have even taken cinema a secondand we would not have been able to count or measure the time that the masculine, lets call it the cinemasculine, needed to shut the reality of a woman in the grimoireto reduce it to the treatment of surface, a surface that would no longer look like skin, but have the thickness of film, which reproduces the image.15 This transformation occurred in the blink of an eye, a transformation that could otherwise not be achieved over millions of years. That is the perfect version of a woman: an illusion, the treatment of a surface, secretly hidden in the grimoire, preserved mechanically but unfailingly in the black box of cinema. And if, in this overwhelming instant of metamorphosis, it is indeed a ques-tion of glamour, if, after a million years of natures striving without succeeding toward glamour, as if toward its end or telos, in other words, if glamour has always been natures tendency, its teleological principle, or a trend (tendance), as that which attracts or se-duces, provokes or bewitches natures spellbound eyes, it is precisely because glamour contains or possesses, shuts up or hides natures secret, the secret of its end, its death and disappearance, in the grimoire or the black box of cinema. Thus, in nature, glamour will have always already played the role of a transcendental principle, exhibiting a desire for power, life, and preservation. We could compare von Sternbergs idea of glamour to Kants notion of metaphysics: it is everything and nothing, on the one hand, and everything or nothing, on the other. Na-ture by essence is glamour, while glamour is the illusion that nature desires. Hence, the secret of glamour, the secret hidden in the black box, or more precisely the illusion that the box secretes when it transforms a womans natural reality into perfection, in such forms as Greta, Marlene, and Marilyn. If, as von Sternberg claims, it is difficult to see [glamour] objectively,16 and to say what glamour is as such, to define the concept, its se-cret reality, or simply the secret that provides it with the sovereign power to bewitch the eyes of the spectator, or to drain the blood from his body, we can nevertheless establish among its various styles a principal and never-changing facet. As von Sternberg states,

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but oneand the principalfacet of glamour never changes: it promises something it cannot deliver. This claim resembles the Lacanian definition of love: to give something that one does not have to someone who does not want it. Von Sternberg, however, is more concerned with the promise, not in terms of a true or a false promise nor of keeping or breaking a promise. Here, not offering or not giving what one promises does not mean that one breaks a promise, nor that one makes a false promise. It is not a question of a lack, a defect, or failure, nor of a lie or deceit, but rather of perfectionof [arriving] at a perfect version of a woman. The body of a woman, the body-machine of a star, or a sex machine, is perfect, it has finally reached perfection, it is finally reduced to its surface, treated like a surface, as paper or film that promises something it cannot deliver. A gendered body, or the sexual dimension of the body, can only machinate this promise, mix, trick, plot, scheme, or se-cretly create the promise of precisely that which it cannot give. We will later see the direct, objective link between the promise and the illusion, either as a promise of an illu-sion or as the illusion of a promise. What concerns us most for now is that such a precise, singular, and unique promise, which, according to von Sternberg, is typically masculine, set the conditions necessary for the existence of the black box, where the illusion of re-ality took shape. Promising something one cannot givewhich ultimately means being glamorous, embodying a star, being a sex machine, or the only copy of a paper surfacewould produce a singular image, unprecedented in the million years of the history of representation, images, copies, imitation, and mimesis. This image, surface, screen, or stage results neither from the double, nor from reproduction, nor even from mimesis, but rather from a certain promise. Indeed, this paper image no longer belongs to the category of oppositions: the model to its copy, the authentic to the simulacrum. This image does not reproduce nor represent anything, it does not imitate anything, nor does it represent a double of anything. Whats more, it does not say anything, it does not express itself on any subject, nor does it turn away from anything. We learn nothing from it about reality, which it transfers into a black box to become an illusion. This transcendental image of glamour is nothing more than a promise, neither real nor falsea promise that promises and does nothing other than not give what it promises. The magic of this promise, as that which seduces and bewitches the eyes of the spectator, its charm, is that it promises precisely not to give what it promises. It is the only promise promising this, thus contra-dicting the formal, customary, conventional laws, the performative laws of promises in general. In other words, this promise is the only one that promises not to keep its prom-ise. This, for von Sternberg, is the perfect version of a womans body, the body of a star, at once sex and machine, a surface that is treated and arranged by the cinematographic grimoire of a master craftsman that I would call the cinemasculograph.

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>> The Automaton, the Marionette, and the Star

Lets imagine now the body of a star as a theater. Once again, lets consider what is done to the body, and what is said of and understood by it, if perceived as a stage or a mise-en-scne. A theater, a spectacle, a whole society of the spectacle are staged in the body, and at the same time manipulate this body. It is a society that exploits and abuses the body, not just by marking, tattooing, dissimulating, or painting the body, dressing and disguising it, nor by hurting, wounding, and subduing it: all violent, diabolical gestures and common practices that transform an individual body into a social one. Many modes of expression also share, exchange, and trade bodies, with the intention of using and benefitting from them. The theater of the body, however, will never be reduced to this. Marking the body would never suffice to incorporate it in the writing of history, to sub-ject it to the authority of the Law, nor to share the political body. The theater of the body represents the actions played out on and by the body, manipulating it into becoming like a marionette, a doll, or a ghost. But what type of theater, what kind of knowledge, history, or drama does the body stage? Heinrich von Kleist, among others, speaks of a theater of marionettes, situated between an automaton and a star, where a doll moves on its own, with the automatic or mechanical movements of a dancing body. Yet, this kind of movement is ambigu-ous, for it does not constitute in itself the movement of an individual body. The order of realities seems to be reversed or overturned, perhaps even calling into question the metaphysics of the body, the physics of movement, and the aesthetics of gestures. In this type of theater, movement is no longer an attribute of the body. Rather, the body itself becomes the attribute of a movement. The body of a movement is always what constitutes the body, what is said of and understood by it, what is acted out and staged in it. When we speak of body movement, or of falling bodies, it always involves shifting from one place to another. It is always a body that has already been constituted, named, marked, set in place, already established as a principle, a body that is mobile, that moves and chang-es position. A body of movement, however, refers to movement that has no body, no individual body, with no attributed, des-ignated body, as if detached or separated from all subjection to property and to the principle of a body. The body of movement does not move from one place to another, nor is it a principle that controls body parts, instead, it is nothing more than a limit, a thresh-old, a boundary that divides, dismembers, or dismantles the body, while at the same time putting it in communication with external or outside forces and powers. The enigma of the automaton, the marionette, and the star lies in the possibility of movement without a body. But this movement would only constitute a limit, or would simply embody the appearance of a boundary, of an indeterminate, undifferentiated zone between the major categories of reality, between life and its absence, which in this

A theater, a spectacle, a whole society of the spectacle are staged in the body, and at the same time manipulate this body.

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case is death or the machine. It is a movement between genders, between species and worlds, where only ghosts exist and specters roam. Most importantly, this uncanniness, as Freud would put it, of a detached, separate, volatile movement, anarchical and with-out principle, manifests and reveals with the body, inscribes on the body, the limits of the living. Freuds well-known text quotes doctor Ernst Jentschs article on automata and dolls:

Jentsch has taken as a very good instance doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate; and he refers in this connection to the impression made by waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata.17

Jentsch also speaks of a zone of incertitude, on the brink of indiscernibility between the living and the inanimate, between a sentient body and a machine, between a living body and a cadaver. This zone of indiscrimination incites anguish in response to the uncanny, the familiar unknown, or the common and ordinary beyond. Nevertheless, power or bio-power, in Foucaults terms, invests and takes possession of this zone or limit, seeking to occupy and appropriate it, in order to dominate, manipulate, and exercise power over the body, to reduce it to certain properties, and to subject it to principles. The bodys actions, occurring at the limits of the living, become perceptible at the threshold of incertitude. Something of the body becomes perceptible and apparent, manifesting movement or expression. A movement manifests itself in the body, a move-ment that indicates through the body that it is not bound, tied, or ascribed to this body. A movement appears in the body that is foreign to it. It is the automaton, the wax doll, the clever marionette, and the star, all indeterminate specters. One thing is certain, this threshold of incertitude that troubles and worries us, that leaves us with a feeling of strangeness, this limit of the living is the place within the body where the sovereignty of power comes into being. These are all exemplary figures controlling the border; they are guards or safeguards from the obscure limits between the living and the inanimate. This obscurity generates yet more obscurity, expanding the indiscernible gray area. Just as we are unable to distinguish with complete certitude the living from the inanimate, the inanimate too will never be able to differentiate between death and the automaton, for it is the power of a body-machine, between the society of control and the society of the spectacle, that is at play in this gray area. This is already present in Descartess The Passions of the Soul:

And let us judge that the body of a living man differs from that of a dead man as much as a watch or other automaton (that is, other self-moving machine), when it is wound and con-tains the bodily principle of the movements for which it is constructed.18

The Society of the Spectral>>Serge Margel 17

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Modern sovereignty is the power to control the accumulation of the indiscernible. From the non-distinction of a dead man and an automaton, we can infer a zone of indis-crimination between the living and the inanimate. More importantly, we can infer that we will be able to control indeterminate limits of the living, inasmuch as it is possible to relate death to the automaton, or to animate death by the automaton, as is the case with the invention of the marionette theater, the wax museum, or the celeb-rity magazine. Playing death, the automa-ton controls the living. The automaton-controller plays death, or plays dead, like a charm seeker who conjures up specters and stages ghosts and automatons, from man-machine to artificial intelligence. It has always represented an effigy of power. It is the sovereign figure of a power that subjugates the uncanniness of specters. In short, the automaton itself represents the power to make specters dance. In a theater of mari-onettes, I am not the one who looks at ghosts, sees the dead wander about and specters roam. Instead, it is I who am seen by ghosts,19 observed by the dead, for I am the one external to death, writes Antonin Artaud, as if offered to specters as a spectacle.20 I am always, states Artaud, confronted with specters that want to control the real. The sov-ereignty of a society of the spectacle lies in the power to control bodies with specters, au-tomata, marionettes, and stars. In other words, sovereignty is the society of the spectral. A theater of marionettes always represents or constitutes the place from which I am seen by ghosts. The stage from which I always observe myself is the point of view of my death. I am not already dead, nor do I see myself as already dead, anticipating my own death, by projection, fantasy, or obsession. Instead, I adopt or borrow the point of view of death, in order to observe or watch myself, spy on and haunt myself. I adopt the point of view of a doll, which represents the indistinguishable body, that zone of indiscrimina-tion between death and the automaton. But let us at last look at Kleists text. It is con-cerned less with the theater or the stagein the literal sense of a place where a spectacle is stagedand more with the fabrication of marionettes, the preparation of dolls, with art or artifice, invented for the masses.22 The virtuosity of this play, this text that is only a few pages long, lies in the deliberate confusion of theater and fabrication, of the stage and artifice or, as Kleist says, of dance and pantomime, the high art and the culture of the masses. A dancer at the Opera praises a marionette for its perfect mechanism, wound like a watch, with symmetry, flexibility, agility.23 Here, a dancer not only compares the high art of dance with the pantomime of a doll, but more importantly he claims that no dancer could ever equal the power, force and grace of a marionette:

The automaton-controller plays death, or plays dead, like a charm seeker who conjures up specters and stages ghosts and automatons, from man-machine to artificial intelligence.

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He smiled and said that he dared claim that if a mechanic could build him a marionette according to the stipulations he envisioned, that he would have it perform a dance which neither he himself, nor any other skilled dancer of the day, not even Vestris, could execute.24

The reference to Marie-Jean-Auguste Vestris is key here. A leading dancer with the Paris Opera, he was already a well-known star throughout Europe, on tour, as one would still say today. He was also the inventor of a new, large traveling step called the grand alle-gro, which distinguishes itself from the classical terre--terre step by rendering the body light, as if floating in midair, like a weightless cloud, or mist without gravity. This new leap frees the body from the body itself, which becomes airborne, just like the elves that Kleist mentions, who graze the ground. Yet, even Vestrisa star, a birdlike dancer, a feather, a fairy, who always flies offcannot equal the dance of a doll, the performance of a marionette. No matter how light and vaporous, at some point Vestriss body will always fall back down and, at that tragic and fatal instant, will have to stay on the ground and thus incorporate a moment that is foreign to dance, as Kleist argues, into the movement of his dance. This moment of standstill must be gotten over and done with:

The puppets only need the ground, as do the elves, to graze it, and thereby to reanimate the swing of their limbs against the momentary resistance; we need it to rest on it and recuperate from the strain of the dance: for us the moment of contact clearly plays no part in the dance and we have no other recourse but to get it over and done with as quickly as possible.25

That is the difference between the movement of a bodya heavy, burdensome individual bodyand the body of a movement, which has no body, no properties nor principles: one could call it a body without organs that merely grazes or caresses the ground for an in-stant, just the time to take off again. For Kleist, this difference also concerns the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, of high art and the culture of the masses. This social divide literally creates a schism in history, between an art of imitation and an artifice of substitution, or more precisely, between a mimetic art and a prosthetic art. Kleists On the Theater of Marionettes is a text on prostheses, machine-limbs, phantom-limbs; it is a text that reflects on prosthesis, or the prosthetic, as a new paradigm of art. It provides a new model for a new industrial art, catered to the rabble.26 Henceforth, it is the pros-thetic, rather than the mimetic, that must serve as an artistic model, on which the indis-cernible point or the zone of indiscriminationthat vague limit between the natural and the artificial, between the body and the machine, the living and the inanimatemust be established, developed, and asserted. In Kleists text, the prosthetic represents the very essence of the dolls disembodied movement. In other words, prosthesis is the move-ment without the body of a dancing specter.

Have you, he asked, upon noticing me cast my gaze in silence to the ground, have you heard of those mechanical limbs that English artists had fashioned for those poor unfortu-nates whod lost their own?

No, I said. I had never laid eyes on such a thing.

The Society of the Spectral>>Serge Margel 19

What a shame, he replied; for if I told you that these poor unfortunates could dance with them, I almost fear you would believe it. . . .

I remarked in jest that he had surely found his man. For the artist able to construct such a remarkable limb would undoubtedly also be able to build him an entire marionette according to his specifications.27

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We can clearly see now that it is no longer simply a question of substituting one limb for another or replacing a mechanical limb with a dead leg, but rather of fabricating an entirely prosthetic body, an entire marionette according to his specifications. The body must itself become a prosthesis, a phantom body, like the body of a specter. This is the Opera, the total artwork, the dance of a transcendental doll that makes the weight of the bodywith its corpse-like return to the grounddisappear or evaporate. And this suspended moment in dance must be gotten over and done with. The surprising, daz-zling function of the prosthesis is its capacity for erasure, its power to eliminate the fall of bodies. Yet, what is even more astonishing, more worrisome too, is what this erasure produces: the spectral and the ghostly, generated by this moment of evanescence, dis-sipation, and disappearance. The perfect, ideal doll, the transcendental prosthesis, be-tween the automaton and death, would have in a way attained the power to occupy this undifferentiated zone: the indiscernible gray area at the limits of the living. The doll is prosthetic inasmuch as it stages the complete control of bodies, by imposing a new massive restriction, invented for the masses. Bodies are no longer controlled by force, weapons, or the law, nor by being marked, or forced to comply with norms, but by pure observationthe domination of specters. The doll is an eye. However, it is not an eye-machine that serves as a surveillance tool or a media network broadcasting the living. On the contrary, the eye of the doll repre-sents a place of erasure and disappearance: the moment of evanescence, where I am seen by ghosts and where the living are watched by the dead. A blink of an eye, a flash that makes the living external to death. The eye of the specter is sovereign: this, in essence, is the doll. This is the case with the eye of a star, as in Star Academy, where the entire program is grounded in the eye. Global and globular, integrated into the entire body as a prosthesis, an eye is anonymous, as the eye of the other, while also being the double of the same: the reflection, the mirror, and consciousness. Here, we must mention Rous-seaus unsettling statement that establishes or anticipates the academic voyeurism of the star. Facing a public that speaks of me, that takes pleasure in disfiguring and slandering me, to defend myself against it, writes Rousseau, I had necessarily to say from which eye, if I were an other, I would view the man that I am.28 An eye of the other. But how is one to understand this eye, its alterity, its strangeness? How to observe oneself with this eye and see oneself with the eye of the other? More importantly, what name should we give this eye? How do we speak of it, indicate it, or point at it? As our anguish increases,

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we must ask ourselves what makes it possible, if it is indeed possible, to say how this eye, at once strange and familiar, determines the place, the stage, or the theater from which I am seen by ghosts, observed by specters, and controlled by the dead. The society of the spectralwhere I am controlled by specters and in subjection to ghosts, where I am reduced to the subject of my own deathrepresents a grand theater or spectacle, a total staging of the eye of the other. But we must not forget to indicate which eye this is, from which point of view this eye sees, from which place this eye of the other allows me to see the man that I am. This eye represents the transformation of my body into the prosthesis of power, the place, the point of confusion, indecision, and indiscrimination, between the automaton and death, where the limits of the livingbe-tween the animate and the inanimatebecome manifest in their ambiguity. In this sense, the eye of the other is not the eye of another individual, a familiar gazethat of a neigh-bor, a friend, or an enemy, which can be pointed out and named. The eye of the other neither announces, shows, nor hides itself. Instead, it is the eye of the automaton that plays Death, which observes me, watches me live, even lives my life, replacing my life with a death survived. There is no denying that this eye uses my life as the prosthesis of a dead body. In the society of the spectral, according to Bla Balzs, writing on the movie stars of the 1920s, we are no longer simply concerned with anonymously living the life of an other, a Doppelgnger, living the different life of an other. Nor is it a question of knowing how to be someone else and still be myself?29 Instead, my life itself is at stake once it is lived by the death of the other. No logic of fantasy, no theory of illusion or even of hallucination, will succeed in re-ducing or diminishing the power, or deconstructing the sovereignty of the prosthetic body of a doll. It is a body situated between the automaton and death, in the form of the body of the other playing Death, playing dead, or of this prosthesis of death that observes me. No knowledge could formulate the concept, nor could any narrative ever have the last word. In a mass culture, the sovereignty of a doll, as the sovereign exemplarity of the body of a star, no longer consists of living the different life of an other, but rather of being lived by the death of the other. This is the new condition of existence that the sovereignty of a society of the spectral imposes. This biopower of death makes the bodies available, completely accessible, exposed on all sides, where each subject becomes, like a marionette, the plaything of its death. In this society of the spectral, like in a theater of ghosts, everything must disappear, everything can only disappear. We could also speak of a society of disappearance: itself in the process of disappearing. This society of control functions, creates, and destroys only through the evanescent movement of its own dis-appearance. Society, as a pure prosthesis of itself, and of all its subjected, appropriated bodies, can only control, dominate supremely, and observe at the price of disappearing in the gray area at the limits of the living, of becoming itself the place of extreme confusion between the automaton and death. Exhausted, it can only become a theater of disappear-ance where the specters biopower of death performs.

Cdric Le Borgne, LES VOYAGEURSDurham, United Kingdom, 2011Photo courtesy the artist

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Originally published in Serge Margel, La socit du spectral (ditions Lignes, 2012). This translation by Eva Yampolsky is published with the permission of ditions Lignes.

1 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 25.

2 Foucault, Utopian Body, 231.

3 See Morin, The Stars and Dyer, Heavenly Bodies.

4 A sweaty body begins to offer erotic repulsion and attractionthe body's urge to cloak itself in its secretions (Baudrillard, What Are You Doing after the Orgy?, 44).

5 In his reading of Freud, Derrida observes the following, in reference to the psychical apparatus as machine: That the machine does not run by itself means something else: a mechanism without its own energy. The machine is dead. It is death. Not because we risk death in playing with machines, but because the origin of machines is the relation to death (Der-rida, Freud and the Scene of Writing, 227). See also Szendy, Machin, machine and megamachine.

6 von Sternberg, The von Sternberg Principle, 172. See also Graefe, Marlene, Sternberg, 12425.

7 Le Sage, The Adventures of Gil Blas, 191.

8 Festus, De verborum significatu quae supersunt cum Pauli epitome, 85.

9 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. glam-our. With regards to feminine charm and cinema, the OED makes a reference to Eric Partridge, Usage and Abusage, 353: A girl or gigolo may possess glamour: and it makes no matter whether the girl is glamourous in her own right or by the catch-guinea arts of her dressmaker or her cinematographic producer.

10 von Sternberg, The von Sternberg Principle, 172; my emphasis.

11 Ibid. See also Chastellier, Tendanologie, 1315.

12 von Sternberg, The von Sternberg Principle, 172.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Freud, The Uncanny, 226.

18 Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, 21.

19 Derrida writes, Vertiginous asymmetry: the technique for having visions, for seeing ghosts is in truth a technique to make oneself seen by ghosts. The ghost, always, is looking at me (a me regarde) (Specters of Marx, 168).

20 For I, a living man, am a city besieged by an army of the dead, / intercepted by their mass graves, / cut off from all external objects, when I am external to death, / me, / and those who attack me / are outside,/ and it is from within that they act (Artaud, Suppts et Suppliciations, 68; English translations of Artaud by Eva Yampolsky).

21 Artaud, Cahiers de Rodez, 323.

22 Kleist, On the Theater of Marionettes, 267.

23 Ibid., 268.

24 Ibid., 267. Only a god could measure up to inert matter in this regard; and here precisely was the point at which the two ends of the ring-shaped world came together (ibid., 269).

25 Ibid., 269.

26 Ibid., 264.

27 Ibid., 26768.

28 Rousseau, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, 6; translation modified.

29 Balzs, Bla Balzs: Early Film Theory, 3132 passim.

Notes

The Society of the Spectral>>Serge Margel 23

Artaud, Antonin. Cahiers de Rodez, avril25 mai 1946. Vol. 21 of uvres compltes. Paris: Gallimard, 1985.

. Suppts et Suppliciations. Vol. 16, part 2 of uvres compltes. Paris: Gallimard, 1978.

Balzs, Bla. Bla Balzs: Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Edited by Erica Carter. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010.

Baudrillard, Jean. What Are You Doing after the Orgy? Translated by Lisa Liebmann. Artforum 22, no. 2 (October 1983): 4246.

Chastellier, Ronan. Tendanologie: La fabrication du Glamour. Paris: Eyrolles, 2008.

Derrida, Jacques. Freud and the Scene of Writing. In Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, 24691. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans-lated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Descartes, Ren. The Passions of the Soul. Translated by Stephen H. Voss. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989.

Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Soci-ety, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Festus, Sextus Pompeius. De verborum significatu quae supersunt cum Pauli epitome. Edited by Wal-lace M. Lindsay. Leipzig: Teubner, 1997. 1st ed. 1913.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1977.

. Utopian Body. Translated by Lucia Allais, with Caroline A. Jones, and Arnold Davidson. In Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, edited by Caroline A. Jones, 22934. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.

Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 17:21756. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.

Graefe, Frieda. Marlene, Sternberg: Glamour, beaut ne de la camra. In Stars au fminin: Naissance, apoge et dcadence du star system, edited by Gian Luca Farinelli and Jean-Loup Passek, 12130. Paris: ditions du Centre Pompidou, 2000.

Kleist, Heinrich von. On the Theater of Marionettes. In Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist, translated by Peter Wortsman, 26474. New York: Archi-pelago Books, 2010.

Le Sage, Alain Ren. The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane. Translated by Tobias Smollett. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011.

Morin, Edgar. The Stars. Translated by Richard How-ard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Partridge, Eric. Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English. London: H. Hamilton, 1947.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues. Translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, and Roger D. Masters. Vol. 1 of The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1990.

Szendy, Peter. Machin, machine and megamachine. Translated by John Tittensor. In HF|RG (Harun Farocki|Rodney Graham), 6675. Paris: Black Jack Editions, 2009.

von Sternberg, Josef. The von Sternberg Principle. Esquire 60, no. 2 (October 1963): 9097, 172.

Works Cited

Cdric Le Borgne, LES VOYAGEURSSeoul, South Korea, 20082011Photo courtesy the artist