Fred Evans

The multivoiced body : society and communication in the age of diversity

Preface and AcknowledgmentsPart 1 The Dilemma of Diversity 1. The Age of Diversity2. History of the Dilemma: Cosmos, Chaos. and Chaosmos3. Society as a Multivoiced BodyPart 2 The Primacy of Voices 4. Modernism and Subjectivity5. Postmodernism and Language6. The Primacy of Voices7. Communication and an Ethics for the Age of DiversityPart 3 The Political Dimension of the Multivoiced Body 8. The Social Unconscious9. Globalization, Resistance. and the New Solidarity10. Democracy and Justice in the Multivoiced BodyNotesIndex

Deleuze, Bakhtin, and the ‘Clamour of Voices’1

This paper pursues two goals. The first concerns clarifying the relationship between Deleuze and the Russian linguist and culturologist, Mikhail Bakhtin. Not only does Deleuze refer to Bakhtin as a primary source for his emphasis on voice and indirect discourse, both thinkers valorise heterogeneity and creativity. I argue Deleuzes notions of ‘deterritorialisation’ and ‘reterritorialisation’ parallel Bakhtins idea of ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘monoglossia’. Clarifying the relationship between Deleuze and Bakhtin leads directly to the second of my two other goals. I will argue that an important difference in their characterisation of voice reveals a strong point in Deleuzes philosophy, one related to the political sphere. At the same time, however, Deleuzes particular way of articulating this point conceals a weakness, one related to the idea of the subject. I will conclude my paper by suggesting a way to address this weakness.

Genealogy and the problem of affirmation in Nietzsche, Foucault and Bakhtin

Genealogy is a critical method employed most notably by Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault. Although he does not explicitly acknowledge it, Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian linguist and philosopher of language, also uses this method. I examine the way these three thinkers construe both the critical and the affirmative roles of genealogy. The ‘affirmative role’ refers to what genealogy itself valorizes in exposing the limits of the universal claims it critiques. I identify three tasks of the critical role of genealogy and explore what I feel are two limitations of its affirmative side: the anonymity of Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return of the same’ and the indeterminacy of Foucault’s ‘undefined work of freedom’. I argue that a judicious use of Bakhtin’s notions of ‘voice’ and ‘dialogized heteroglossia’ can help genealogy to overcome these two limitations without resurrecting the totalizing systems of thought that all three thinkers repudiate.

Solar love: Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty and the fortunes of perception

Both Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty repudiate the “mirror” view of perception and embrace what Nietzsche refers to as “solar love” or creative perception. I argue that Merleau-Ponty thinks of this type of perception primarily in terms of “convergence” and Nietzsche in terms of “divergence.” I then show how, contrary to their own emphases, Merleau-Pontys notion of flesh” and Nietzsches idea of “chaos” suggest that convergence and divergence are abstractions from an ontologically prior realm of “hybrid perceptions.” In this realm, each perception is shot through with the others, simultaneously inside and outside one another. The creative tension among these perceptions continually produces new perspectives or voices, that is, a realm whose very being is metamorphosis. Moreover, this realm of hybrid perceptions suggests a political principle that might prove attractive for communities in an age of diversity and cultural hybridity.

The Dilemma of Public Art's Permanence

The title for this special issue of Public Art Dialogue speaks of a “dilemma” at the heart of “public art’s permanence” within democratic societies. To simplify our discussion of the dilemma, we can restrict ourselves to government sponsored public art and the artistic efforts that sometimes challenge it. Like every dilemma, this one has two horns, both required and yet each threatening the other. The first is permanence itself. Government-sponsored public art is supposed to help unify a nation by reflecting its audience’s national and aesthetic values. To carry out this function, such works should endure like the values they represent. But this permanence is immediately challenged by the second or “processual” horn of the dilemma. Erika Doss highlights its sharpness by reminding us that the form and content of public art are “dependent on a variety of cultural and social relationships and subject to the volatile intangibles of multiple publics and their fluctuating interests and feelings.” What is thought to be an appropriate aesthetic expression of a society’s values during one period of history can appear dated in the next. What one group cherishes, another can find offensive. What the law sees as vandalizing property, the graffitist can take as legitimate dissent. Moreover, democracy itself is processual, in continual redefinition of its meaning. Thus Claude Lefort states that democracy gains its legitimacy from being “the image of an empty place, impossible to occupy, such that those who exercise public authority can never claim to appropriate it.” Doss responds to this dilemma by defining “vandalism,” “removal,” “re-siting,” “destructions” and other keywords that she feels are important for “theorizing public art.” Her response also includes several pertinent questions. The first couple ask when a public artwork or an artistic challenge to it count as an act of citizenship, as a legitimate project in a democratic society. Her other question flows from the first: “[w]hat are the alternatives to the defacement and destruction of public art?” At the end of her paper, Doss suggests an answer to this second question when she presents a brief analysis and appeal to Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Bunker Hill Monument Projection. She points out that Wodiczko “confronts the dilemma of public art’s permanence” by using slide projections to “animate

Citizenship and Public Art: Chicago’s Millennium Park

In 1893 Chicago put on the World’s Columbian Exposition. The aim of its chief designer, Daniel Burnham, was to outshine the earlier French World’s Fair and its crowning glory, the newly built Eiffel Tower.1 Burnham also hoped to overcome the taunts of New Yorkers and other easterners that the City of the Big Shoulders could “produce only a country fair.”2 To meet these challenges, he hired America’s best architects. He assigned them the task of creating the temporary structures of the Exposition in Beaux Arts style and demanded that they complete them in an impossibly short period. The result of his effort was the internationally acclaimed “White City.” Despite this success, Burnham received stinging criticism for importing the majority of his architects from outside Chicago and for promoting the conservatism of their designs. Louis Sullivan, the famous Chicago builder, complained that the White City had killed off “architecture […] in the land of the free and the home of the brave—in a land declaring its fervid democracy, its inventiveness, its resourcefulness, its unique daring, enterprise, and progress.”3