Leather-Bound Edition

How To Become a Word

Mario Veen

Originally written in 2004.

Introduction

Imagine a painter, a biologist, a linguist, and an economist together in the same room, invited to gather around a rose and make it into an object of study. The painter would probably start mixing his paint until, to his astonishment, the biologist takes the beautiful flower apart. The linguist, disturbed by the unfolding quarrel, would kindly ask if she were allowed to leave the room in order to check her etymological dictionary. The economist, wondering what he is doing there in the first place, would simply leave. Each would, in claiming the rose as a romantic symbol, a specimen, a word, or a waste of time, change the object in such a way that we will wonder what has happened to the rose – especially when the biologist is done with it.

This essay will take as its object a piece of art that calls for an interdisciplinary analysis. Traditionally, monodisciplines set limits for the kind of objects that they can analyze, and the possible approaches to be taken. While this allows for a division of labor among the academic disciplines, it also excludes a whole range of objects that are deemed irrelevant, so that they fail to show up on the ontological radar of that particular discipline at all. Hamlet, for example, is a legitimate object for studies in literature, philosophy, or even anthropology, but is invisible to biology or physics. The Mona Lisa, on the other hand, can be approached from an art history perspective, or even be of interest to economists, but is not included in the field of relevant objects of literary studies or philosophy.

Skin, the artwork that I would like to exhibit and analyze in this essay, runs the risk of being lost to oblivion simply because it cannot be easily assigned to any one discipline. Skin deals with issues of literary studies, art history, gender studies, linguistics, philosophy, and biology, but runs the risk of being mutilated if any of these disciplines lose sight of all the others. In order to avoid this, we will have to listen to what the object has to say for itself, and what type of analysis it calls for – in order to get, so to speak, under its skin.

Skin is a short story of 2095 words, written by Shelley Jackson. The words are published one by one, in the order of their appearance in the story. At the time of this writing only 1600 of those words have been published. Skin’s publication depends entirely on respondents to the call for participants that appeared in various magazines and on Jackson’s web page. It is printed here in its entirety:

Writer Shelley Jackson invites participants in a new work entitled "Skin." Each participant must agree to have one word of the story tattooed upon his or her body. The text will be published nowhere else, and the author will not permit it to be summarized, quoted, described, set to music, or adapted for film, theater, television or any other medium. The full text will be known only to participants, who may, but need not choose to establish communication with one another. In the event that insufficient participants come forward to complete the first and only edition of the story, the incomplete version will be considered definitive. If no participants come forward, this call itself is the work. Prospective participants should contact the author ([redacted]@drizzle.com) and explain their interest in the work. If they are accepted they must sign a contract and a waiver releasing the author from any responsibility for health problems, body image disorders, job-loss, or relationship difficulties that may result from the tattooing process. On receipt of the waiver, the author will reply with a registered letter specifying the word (or word plus punctuation mark) assigned to participant. Participants must accept the word they are given, but they may choose the site of their tattoo, with the exception of words naming specific body parts, which may be anywhere but the body part named. Tattoos must be in black ink and a classic book font. Words in fanciful fonts will be expunged from the work. When the work has been completed, participants must send a signed and dated close-up of the tattoo to the author, for verification only, and a portrait in which the tattoo is not visible, for possible publication. Participants will receive in return a signed and dated certificate confirming their participation in the work and verifying the authenticity of their word. Author retains copyright, though she contracts not to devalue the original work with subsequent editions, transcripts, or synopses. However, correspondence and other documentation pertaining to the work (with the exception of photographs of the words themselves) will be considered for publication. From this time on, participants will be known as "words". They are not understood as carriers or agents of the texts they bear, but as its embodiments. As a result, injuries to the printed texts, such as dermabrasion, laser surgery, tattoo cover work or the loss of body parts, will not be considered to alter the work. Only the death of words effaces them from the text. As words die the story will change; when the last word dies the story will also have died. The author will make every effort to attend the funerals of her words. [1]

As an object of analysis, Skin is ambiguous. To approach this project simply as a piece of writing would completely miss the point, for such an approach would fail to take into account its means of publication. And even though the means of publication are all that is visible to us of the project, the project is not limited to it. It is a tempting possibility to ignore the original written text, since it is hidden from us. This would allow us to focus solely on the tattooed words as an artwork in progress. Yet since this text is exactly what the project aims to reappropriate by distributing the words, it is an essential part of the work. Another important part of it is the call for participants. This announcement proclaims itself the work, and does work at the same time. It sets the terms and conditions for Skin, and invites people to participate. To complicate this even more, the participants that this announcement generates agree not only to have a word tattooed on their body, but to literally become this word.

Skin is more than a kind of sophisticated computer-printer combination where publishing the announcement would be like pushing the “print” button, and the words are printed on humans instead of paper. It is not just a short story, nor simply an assemblage of various tattoos. At least this participant does not seem to think so:

Now that I have the tattoo (on my inner wrist) I keep saying "I'm a word!" and to be a part of a story with 2,000 others... it's something bigger than just a tattoo, it's a gathering of the creative writers and body modificated. [2]

To get a grasp on Skin without losing precisely its movement and refusal to be restricted, we could approach it as a machinic assemblage, a kind of identity-producing machine. This machine emerges as a gathering of objects that are integrated into something that is both inorganic (writing) and organized (by the announcement) and produces the organic (bodies). The tattoo is then the inorganic organized that gathers the organic. Yet we are not one of the gatherers. We do have to choose whether to focalize as a participant or a spectator. If I wanted to be a word, I would have to send Jackson an e-mail expressing my interest in the project. She would then send me a contract and waiver that I would sign and return to her. After that, I would receive the word, and possibly punctuation mark, assigned to me. Agreeing with this word, I would proceed to the nearest tattoo studio, and have it placed somewhere on my body, in black ink and classic book font. From this moment on I will have become its embodiment. Then I would send Jackson two pictures of myself, after which I would receive the full story. When, on the other hand, we approach Skin as an observer, as we are forced to do, we get quite a different picture. The announcement and news about the project are accessible on Jackson’s web site, and pictures of tattoos and online discussions can be easily found through Google. From this we can try to infer a rough blueprint of its workings. This blue print, however, will be shaped by the concepts through which we focalize, so that the first candidate to discuss is the concept of focalization itself.

Analyzing Skin is like walking around an object of exhibition as a museum visitor, varying our distance and angle, reading the name tag next to it, as we try to relate it to objects we saw in this exhibition and others. The question posed by this intricate mating ritual is not what Skin is or what it means, but how we can get it so far as to reveal itself to us. An external analysis of Skin necessarily comes from within it, from a subject who is entangled with the object of perception. Mieke Bal defines focalization as the relation between the subject and the object of perception. (2002: 41) Moreover, “the object [of analysis] is already always in the past.” (1999: 1) At present I am sitting in my chair, writing. I assume that I am sitting in it in the present, but as soon as I concentrate on the feeling against my back, I no longer feel the chair but the concept of the chair. The object is an object of cognition as soon as it becomes mine. This is a crucial point to keep in mind during this analysis. When the object speaks to us, we hear it through an active listening that focalizes through a concept. Any direct access to it is denied. Instead of upholding the illusion of objectivity, we should be continuously present to our relation to our object.

Through focalization, the movement of our look, we are continuously engaged in an act of framing. On the one hand framing selects context in the sense of taking it “under its umbrella” (Fuchs 2001: 59). On the other hand the frame pressures what is within it to interact (Bal 2002: 43). It takes on the double meaning of constructing (framing a house), and setting someone up (Who Framed Roger Rabbit?). This is why we feel that two strangers sitting next to each other on the subway, who do not make eye contact during the whole trip, and are unaware of each other’s existence, are somehow connected when we see them together in the same photograph: they are framed as it. Framing is the concept that connects the concepts of context, the wider situation, with the concept of discourse, the act of putting objects together. Interdisciplinary analysis – or any analysis, for that matter – has to deal with the paradox that by selecting a context the subject changes itself as much as its object. Hayles expresses this in her discussion of reflexivity, which is “the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates.” (1999: 8) In Skin, this is the movement whereby Shelley Jackson tattoos the title of her story on her wrist, or whereby her call for participants proclaims itself part of the work.

Adorno writes in a discussion of the relation between concept and object that “by gathering around the object of cognition, the concepts potentially determine the object’s interior.” (162) [3] Adorno uses the metaphor of a well-guarded safe-deposit box to illustrate his idea of constellation, in which one circles around what is to be unsealed, “in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers.” (163) At the outset, Skin appears as a collage of texts and images, and precisely such a safe-deposit box. On closer inspection, it seems that these texts and images are active, and this might be the key to unlock it. The call for participants, for example, is a text that does more than just describe something. The concept of performativity was introduced by J.L. Austin in 1962 for utterances where “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action – it is not normally thought of as just saying something.” (1975: 6) It seems that this concept is an adequate candidate to try and unlock the mysteries of Skin. This essay will therefore look at the ways in which Skin itself and participation in it can illuminate this concept, and how this concept can reveal the mortal work of art to us. Before bringing it into constellation with our object, however, we have to make an initial sketch of the blueprint to find out what is at stake here. This will require a detour through the concepts of text and image, a closer look at what one of Skin’s words (the word “the”) can tell us about identity, and the detour-concept itself: différance.

Text, image, and identity

The short story Skin can easily been seen as a text, just as the announcement and the letters sent to prospective participants. They can be reprinted and are not dependent on the kind of paper or font that is used in their reproduction. Tattoos, however, are usually seen as images, even if they are texts in the form of an image. These images are intrinsically bound up with the bodies that bear them – hence Jackson’s warning about body-image disorders in the announcement. If this distinction between text and image be maintained, the question arises how imagistic the short story is, and if it is possible for the human body to be textual.

If we look at Skin as image, our object appears in the form of words tattooed on bodies. These tattoos are themselves images, and at first sight they occur as separate from the body, as stickers on a vessel that could be peeled off, or, in this case, removed by a laser. Yet on closer inspection they have a performative function, as VOID on a driver’s license, BREAKABLE on a moving box, or MISS AMERICA on a model. Just as the driver’s license is void, the body is the word, the image. Without getting into the fortunes of the performative yet, we can already note that it is not what tattoos say that matters, but what they do. They determine whether the body in question is discarded, treated carefully, or being photographed. It would be more accurate to say that they are embedded in their bodies, or even that they have bodies.

Although photographs of the tattoos are copyrighted, they can easily be found on the internet. Take, for example, the tattoo of the word “country,” (that is, country-comma) over a man’s chest and left shoulder. The framing of the picture pressures “country,” together with its bearer to become a unity, an identity. Cover the tattoo and we see a man, cover the man and we see “country,” printed on skin. As a body, it is always already an embodiment – in this case of “man” and “country,”. This is a picture of a man-country,. Instead of an image we now have a conjunction of two words, and what applies to the one should equally apply to the other. In this way the concept of image points away from itself. It makes the point that it is about something else.

As soon as we start looking at the picture in this way, we are in the realm of text. The presence of the comma not only signifies that there is more to follow, but at the same time creates a context in which the absence of a capital C is made to mean something to us: the word is part of a sentence, and it is neither its beginning nor its end. The image, then, is about a text. Now it becomes difficult to maintain that it would be any different if the body of this word would not be a man, but a piece of paper or Shelley Jackson’s computer screen. That in this case there is a text is obvious, but where it is, if anywhere, is a mystery. If changing the font or color is not supposed to change the text, it must be something else that has changed: the image of the text. Tattooing the text on a human body might only make explicit what is already true of all texts, independent of the type of body they are imprinted on. One of the statements Skin makes is that words have bodies, and that they can speak. If this is true, perhaps it would be a good idea at this point to hear what the words have to say for themselves.

Someone who participates in Skin exposes and is object of exposition at the same time. He or she that has become a word is also visible as a word. At the same time this becoming is also a statement about becoming it. Word Saram/”the” makes such a statement in her essay Becoming a Word. Before mentioning her participation in Skin, she first discusses her interest in words in general:

As a reader, writer, and outspoken speaker, I have a lot of respect for words. The right words are worth a lot in life. [….] Putting something into words can give it power, or take power away from it. Words can be beautiful to look at, and beautiful to hear spoken. They can also be offensive or disgusting. One word may have many meanings or connotations. I believe that words are power. (Saram 2003, her emphasis)

This last statement goes further than the saying that the pen is mightier than the sword. That one can exert power through writing implies that words are a means that can have power. Just as a sword is useless in a writer’s hands, the pen is not the weapon of choice for those who do not know how to use it. Saying that words are power, instead of merely having it, implies that the power lies in the words themselves.

The fact that one word may have many meanings or connotations which are not necessarily intended by the writer entails a break between meaning and intention. As Mieke Bal remarks, “meaning is slippery and variable, both smaller and endlessly greater than what the speaking subject would like to convey.” (1999: 10) This comment appears in a discussion of a graffito on a city wall, exposed by its anonymous writer as well as by the city that decided not to remove it. The meaning it yields, according to Bal, is not “what one person ‘wants to say’, but […] what a community and its subjects think, feel, or experience to be the consequence of the exposition.” (10) This is true in our case, first of all, because Saram/”the” takes her word out of the context of the story that was written by Jackson, and creates her own. The word “the” in the man sat down (or any other context in which it might appear in Skin) could make the statement that man is not just any man, but the man that has been spoken of before. Saram/”the”, however, appropriates, has abducted it with her essay, and made it into her own by making a statement about what it means for her to become “the”. The same word that in the short story was probably merely a slave to the one following it, now makes the statement that words are power.

Having made this statement, Saram/”the” goes on to defend the importance of her particular word:

However, we frequently take words for granted, especially the simple ones we use all the time — the conjunctions and pronouns and articles. We say them and write them every day, without thinking twice about it. Without them, language would be completely different! [….] These words are elegant but overlooked. They are the backbone of every famous book, story, or speech. [….] I like “the.” It's small, short, and even a beginning reader knows what it is. It's taken for granted and entirely essential. I think it's a nice-looking word, too.

Here we have an exceptional case of a word defending its own essentiality to language, which, if anything, proves that at least this word is power. This is done not so much by the arguments she puts forward as by the fact that a word can actively defend its case. “The” concludes,

So now I am “the.” I am a definite article, derived from Old English. I may be small and simple, but you need me. You use me all the time. I give you power, and you give me power. I have become a word.

Something has happened between the beginning and end of this essay, between “as a reader, writer, and outspoken speaker…” and “I have become a word”. The old identities are apparently not erased by the new one. On the contrary, as she is writing and rereading her essay, and talking about being a word to her friends, she constantly reaffirms that she is a reader, writer, and outspoken speaker. Still there seems to be a difference between the first three identities, and that of being a word. The outspoken-speakership, for example, is produced over and over again by the action of speaking, and would cease to exist if she were never to speak again. Removing or hiding the tattoo would not have this effect on the word-identity, since she signed a contract stating that “only the death of words effaces them from the text.” It is something that is imposed on her, and comes from outside, as opposed to her identity as a reader, writer, and speaker, which allegedly comes from the inside, and is dependent on her actions.

Becoming a word, framed in this way, sounds a lot like marrying someone. At least in the eyes of God, it can only be undone by death. In an online discussion about Skin, Steven Shaviro remarks that

texts, or just say words, are alien: they always come from outside, not from within, which is why imprinting on the body seems a better way to conceive them than expressions of the spirit. So this outsideness would be my relation to the word that Jackson would order to be imprinted on my flesh, were I to respond to her injunction and agree to embody (part of) her text. This coming-from-outside, this responding to an injunction, is how I think of my own writing, though admittedly I do not know how Jackson thinks of hers. (Shaviro 2003)

Derrida comments on this outsideness of language in a similar fashion, when he follows Saussure in maintaining that “language is not a function of the speaking subject.” (in Derrida 1986: 128) According to Derrida, this implies that “the subject [….] is inscribed in language, is a function of language, becomes a speaking subject only by making its speech conform [….] to the system of rules of language as a system of differences, or at very least by conforming to the general law of différance[.]” (1986: 128)

Recalling Saram/”the”’s statement that words are power, and Shaviro’s assertion that they are alien to the subject, Derrida takes it a step further by calling the speaking subject an effect. That speech has to conform to a system of language may seem obvious, since people could never understand each other if it were otherwise, but it does undermine our initial inside-outside distinction between Saram/”the”’s reader/writer/speakership and her word-ness. The key point is this: even when she writes that she is an outspoken speaker she has to refer to an alien set of rules to be recognized as such. If there is a difference, it must be elsewhere, perhaps to be found in the concept of the performative. At this moment, however, we should find out more about Derrida’s “general law of différance” to which all speech has to conform. This might provide us with clues from which angle to approach Skin with the concept of performativity.

Différance

In his lecture on différance, Derrida poses the question of how to resist the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible in the space between speech and writing. (1986: 121-122) As he delivers this lecture to the audience, he remarks that “we will be able neither to do without a written text, nor to avoid the order of the disorder produced within it.” (120) His situation seems to be similar to that of Skin, where the text is hidden from us, but still determines the (dis)order in which the words are brought into existence as images. Through the detour of speech Derrida represents a written text. And since the essence of writing is always speech (126), he moves forward the presence of this essence which the text aims to reappropriate. He defers its difference, in a way that is different from deferring. In Derrida’s words: différance “(is) (simultaneously) spacing (and) temporization.” (127)

It seems that the first thing to do in order to understand this sentence is to explain the necessity of the brackets. Différance escapes being, since it is never present. (122) Furthermore, simultaneity and difference only exist within spacing and temporization of things that are. Différance as the foundation of these concepts refutes their application to itself. Therefore it is not reflexive – recalling that reflexivity is “the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates.” (Hayles 1999: 8) Rather, différance is determinate negation, or, in Derrida’s words, a negative theology without being a theology. If Derrida’s method to get a grasp on this nonconcept is in any way comparable to the method of negative theology, which seeks the positivity of God in the endless negation of determinate things, even reflexivity would have to be negated. Yet negating reflexivity would entail a reflexive move, and leave us only with reflexivity. The bracketed “is”, “simultaneously”, and “and” are precisely those movements that Derrida has to make to show his intention to negate them, and these movements are under suspicion. They are effects of différance, and a reflexive re-application to their foundation will only lead the analysis astray. Though it cannot avoid using them, it should always treat them as an effect.

The general law of différance appears in Skin as its mortality. The heading of the announcement on Jackson’s web page even calls it a mortal work of art. Skin (simultaneously) temporizes (and) spaces. The announcement, with all its legal connotations and by setting up its logistics, creates a context – a space – in which the work can come to presence. By determining where the tattoo can or cannot be placed in what kind of font, and by assigning specific words to specific individuals, who have no choice in the matter except to retract their participation, difference is established. The ground rules laid out in the announcement together with the permanence of the tattoo make difference possible by making the acts repeatable. They temporize the words by acknowledging their mortality. “As words die the story will change; when the last word dies the story will also have died.” Death, as Adorno remarks, has no subject, “for who should be the subject of which we predicate that it is death, here and now?” (371) With the mortality of the artwork, it is introduced in space and time by constantly putting off its end until later. This is the case with each of the words. As a mortal word, I defer death by deferring my proper death. In accepting a word I tie my faith to it, which means that it will die when I die, and vice versa. By tying my faith to this particular word, I posit myself as different.

Tattoos are commonly viewed as permanent and unchanging, but nothing is further from the truth. Once applied to the skin, a tattoo changes and grows with it as stem cells die and emit ink that is taken up by the new ones surrounding it. The context of the word is constantly changing, and we cannot say otherwise than that the skin constantly reiterates the word. After seven years, every cell is renewed, and we cannot even speak of the same word again. Only when the human body dies, this process stops and the tattoo becomes fixed. Saram/”the” has to constantly reaffirm her identity as an outspoken speaker, but her skin cells have to do the same with the tattoo. If the tattoo is said to come from the outside, it could not exist without a cooperating body which is first of all cooperating by putting off its death. If words have bodies, then, they are dependent on those bodies for survival and success. I will discuss this further after finally introducing the concept of performativity.

Performativity

As mentioned earlier, the concept of performativity was introduced by Austin (1975: 6), but in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics we can already see early glimpses of it. The passage below appears in a discussion of the dialectics of identity. Here Adorno brings to light what happens when descriptive sentences are called “affirmative”, and would be constative in Austin’s language:

The copula says: It is so, not otherwise. The act of synthesis, for which the copula stands, indicates that it shall not be otherwise – else the act would not be performed. The will to identity works in each synthesis. As an a priori task of thought, a task immanent in thought, identity seems positive and desirable: the substrate of synthesis is thus held to be reconciled with the I, and therefore to be good. Which promptly permits the moral desideratum that the subject, understanding how much the cause is its own, should bow to what is heterogeneous to it. (147)

When the truth principle adequaetio res atque cogitans (364) is applied to the copula, we judge it by whether the representation of the object is adequate. This adequacy (“it really is this way”) thereby suppresses the object (“the object is not otherwise”). It becomes the fixed definition of the conquered thing. For example, in the act of judging whether a new-born baby really is a girl, we surpass and thereby suppress the question of whether this is relevant. The question is it a girl or a boy? or even we do not want to know whether it will be a girl or a boy is therefore just as suppressive as it’s a girl!. It now has to bow to something foreign. Judith Butler calls this activity “girling” (1993: 7). She is very close to Adorno, who attributes the will to identity to ideology, when she asserts that the activity of gendering is not a willful appropriation of sex, but “the matrix through which all willing first becomes possible, its enabling cultural condition.” (1993: 7) Yet while Austin considers only speech acts to be performative, and Adorno is concerned with acts of thinking, for Butler something like gender is created by all acts. (Culler 2000: 512) .

It seems that in Skin we have found a strange combination of the way Austin, Butler, Culler, and even Adorno apply the concept of performativity (although for the latter it was an idea rather than a concept). Skin is a piece of literature that brings into being characters not only in the short story itself, as in Culler, but also by creating living words. These bodies are “worded”, in Butler’s language. Without referring to the call for participants the will to become a word in Skin would not be possible, just as for Derrida one has to conform to a system of language to speak, and for Butler to a cultural matrix to have gender. Jackson’s contract and the words’ exclamation I am a word are more in the territory of Austin’s speech acts. According to his logic, being “worded” would be comparable to getting married. Adorno illuminates the identity aspect of this, as the letter assigning the word to the individual is the copula that says “It is so, not otherwise.” If it were otherwise, for example in case the participant refuses, the act would not be performed. It implies an act of synthesis between a word and an individual. The participant is “it” which shall be “so”. And according to the constitution of this system, it has the form of a word. This is what Adorno calls “the will to identity.” (148)

Jonathan Culler applies performativity to literature, and examines the ways in which “the literary utterance […] creates the state of affairs to which it refers.” (2000: 507) A piece of literature first of all creates characters and actions that did not exist before, as well as the concepts the work of literature deploys. In his discussion of Austin’s notion of the performative, Culler points out that “the performative breaks the link between meaning and the intention of the speaker.” (2000: 507) This is what we have already seen in Saram/”the”’s statement that words are power. There we concluded that she was able to do this by taking a word out of context and appropriating it, thereby creating a new context for it. For Culler, one of the ironies of his application of the performative to literature is that while Austin tied the felicity of a performative utterance to the context, and therefore considered literature not serious, literature uses a world-making language that brings about a new state of affairs.

If for Austin performativity refers to the context, for Butler it is the context. Following Derrida, for whom everything is context,

the norm of sex takes hold to the extent that it is “cited” as such a norm, but it also derives power through the citations that it compels. [….] The paradox of subjectivation (assujetissement) is precisely that the subject who would resist such norms is itself enabled, if not produced by such norms. (1993: 13/15)

Subjectivation, then, is subjectivication to something. This is the double coercion that the performative exerts on the present, a coercion that we have already seen in Adorno’s passage. Constative sentences of the form “this is this” on the one hand refer to a prior state of affairs by making an existing object a relevant object of discussion. On the other hand, they create a new state of affairs by implying that it is not otherwise, and fixing the object by making it a new heterogeneous (different) totality. In this way the act itself is coerced, and also coerces things around it to comply to its norm. What Austin calls felicity is the movement whereby the substrate of synthesis is “held to be reconciled with the I, and therefore to be good.” (Adorno, 147) The substrate, the underlying layer of the synthesis between two elements other is the authority of the norm or the context. In Austin’s example of “I do” as a performative utterance that performs the act of marrying, the context that is given authority by being made relevant, is the law. In Skin this is the context with which the announcement provides us. It is within this space that the leather-bound edition – the only edition – of Skin is published.

End Notes

[1] http://www.ineradicablestain.com/skin.html

[2] This is a discussion board posting by [redacted]@aol.com at http://ghw.wordherders.net/archives/000917.html

[3] These and subsequent references to Adorno are all taken from Negative Dialectics (1973)

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