Representation	Interpretation / Translation	Assemblage
Repraesantare - (Latin) show, bring back. This artifact brings back events, among other things. Events named: Spectacle, Plan, and Signal Distortion. In bringing them back for myself, in re-presenting them, I present them to you for the first time. But this presentation is also a first, for me. The bringing back necessarily folds into the conjuring into existence. The mode of bringing back interrupts the purity of the back being brought. The unfolding of events even in my mind - in real time - relies upon an accruing of meaning through interpretation and translation. Thereby, what I present to you here are representations that only become such after you interpret and translate them, after you witness these events as moments in time that only attain meaning in relation to their iterative re-tellings (even in your mind).  The event of your reading about these events and conjuring them into relation is itself an event (or property) of this artifact and its relation to your reading.	Spectacle, Plan, Signal Distortion.  Interpretation / Translation - can be read as event reading: internal (for now) archaeological digs into lived experience; a reading of the unfolding that re-presenting invites. The spectacle of a museum spectacle sends this interpretation down recursivity road. The jagged edges of such recursive turns invite rhizomatic branching into the world assemblage of spectacle relations. The plan of Roissy airport similarly cracks open into larger cultural "plans" when one pushes past the impasse of a sticker into global fissures of emergent systems. Finally, signal distortions on calls to "abandonment actions" in Troy implode action into interpretation; multiplicity looms on this horizon.	"[A]ssemblages are a kind of infrastructure - a complex, crazily reticulated transportation system. You can move, but always in certain directions. There's no absolute freedom . . ." (Fortun 1998: 105-6).  The striking out is always a striking into. To hit upon reticulation is a blow to clear understanding. Making my way through these way-making events reveals constraints within the free play of life - some deadly serious games. What does it mean "to be" within the interpretive life-games of others, to unfold existence into the maps that others unfold, to be bound within this flood of foldings? This binding is one of ethics, possibility, & responsibility.

Date: Sunday, February 20^th, 2000
Place: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City
Time: Early to late afternoon
Theme: Meta-translation of representations through spectacle
Sub-theme: Assemblages of desire and desired assemblages

Emerge from the clarity of Central Park: brisk, green, bright, precise. Dodge taxis and cross over Fifth. Slide with sideways steps through the chattering bustle of foreign faces and bodies and needs. Like a hypodermic needle, this penetrating entry deposits you into the shocking warmth and darkness of Frank Lloyd Wright's concrete edifice (the Guggenheim museum). Teeming masses. Tinges of claustrophobia prick through your neck, arms, and back. If the insertion was surgical and hygienic, this central womb-hive cloys in a most unclean way: spiraling algae-green lasers, masses of televisions stuck to the black floor like eggs hatching dizzying light and movement. Figures move about the eggs. These ghosts sneak fearful peeks at the emerging larvae. But where is the egg-mother of this unnatural brood? A quick and cautious glance upwards re-disorients - spirals and spirals of moving concrete and iridescent lights and gasping flashes and half-glimpsed marching bodies. The ritual of desire. NOISE! At once the cacophony strikes and rattles the already traumatized equilibrium. Spinning, spinning, spinning. Children hug the walls. Sniffling with sensory overload their round eyes scan without focus through the legs of visitors that have ceased to be human. Sacrifice to the hungry mouths. Bodies shuffle somnambulistically toward the knee-high offspring. Waiting-pushing-hoping-wanting-needing-fearing. Release. In the spiral now...ascending without volition, the gentle yet insistent current propels you upward. No hurry now. The mother awaits you at the top. And unlike the chaotic womb-hive, this slow and viscous arterial flow does not allow for escape - it erases (you) behind you.
 

Site: Photography exhibit hall

An introductory, situating blurb confronts viewers before they enter into this hall. It espouses the perceived democratic promise of photography as an artistic medium. It cites the works of Warhol as exemplars of this artistic spirit. I think of the democratic potential of art in relation to my schema. Where the textual etching refers to the participatory nature of photography (anyone can do it?), I wonder about interpretations of photographic representations. What does this relationship between interpretation and representation yield? What becomes of art or of audience when they individually or collectively engage in interpretive acts. The noticeable trend on this Sunday: those viewing explicit and controversial representations of bodies do so en masse. They stand close together; they crane their necks to peer over shoulders, past heads and arms. The throng of bodies moves in a disjointed dance. Occasional whispers and forced, uncomfortable laughs. They turn themselves into a group spectacle in the interpretive act - a community probing the limits of expressibility, of their own public desire. Contrast this to the solitary shuffling of disembodied representations. When photographic representations absent themselves of human forms, spectators more readily engage these works alone. Viewers can interpret themselves into these works with greater ease. Landscapes and timescapes seem not to require a mass interpretive experience. Or are they simply less provocative than body experimentations? I, too, am part of this throng: representations and interpretations of the body also draw me into the crowd. 

Photographic artist Vito Acconci uses his 1971 work entitled "Conversations II" to perform absence. The absence performed is that of sexuality within photographic representation. Acconci narrates the absence of his penis through a series of nude photographs, claiming that the dialog between camera and body can (productively?) problematize gender. But the penis tucked between the artist's legs is not really absent - or it is absent at the moment of viewing and interpretation, but not absent at the time of photographic capture. By alerting viewers to the performance of absence, Acconci reveals what he would keep hidden: the "truth" of his sex. Or does he lie? The text on the art-work is also absent from its moment of inscription; time has bisected writing from its performance. Because Acconci reveals the truth of his performed absence (or that of his penis) through words, viewers feel included in the deception, so they do not seek out other absences performed by this performance. In the clarity of blurred photography and text, they do not see the absence within trust - recursive deception. So when Acconci writes upon his representation, "A performance might be used as an occasion to activate biography," viewers activate Acconci's biography within themselves yet fail to activate their own biographies within Acconci. In the interpretive act, viewers willingly problematize the artist's sex in representation, but when they wonder at their wonder about the "real" sex of the artist, do they ever wonder about their own sex or sexuality? Or, at the most, they problematize their own representation of their own sexuality. The audience is not left in doubt long enough about sexual truths, and they are left in doubt about the absence within trust too long so that they fail to experience this deeper malaise. 

Marina Abramovic attracts through representational performances like no other artist in this hall.
Still black-and-white images of the artist's own violated body capture active gazes, stealing the action of viewers and absorbing it into the representations so that the images emanate out a wider aura of audience capture. All are lured by this silent siren. And since these works profess to perform body control through art, it is not surprising that they actualize this on the level of representation and on the level of audience manipulation. Abramovic's "rhythm" pieces portray the artist during or after actual live, participatory performances of body violation. In one piece, the artist has tape recorded herself as she cut her hand with a series of over twenty knives. She then re-performed the performance in exactly the same sequence of cuts and cries. This image portrays the artist sitting on her knees with a canvas spread before her; knives lie in a oblique rows on the canvas. Another piece captures the artist in a recipe of human responsibility. This time she is naked from the waist up. Unportrayed participants have "followed instructions" and used a list of thirty ingredients and artifacts upon her. The list of ingredients included food products like honey and whipped cream but also artifacts such as scissors and pens. Her instructions clearly state that she wanted the participants to do whatever they wanted with her, and that she would take total responsibility for the outcome. She gives the camera (and museum participants) a distant look. Some darker substance is smeared over her face and torso. The black-and-white photograph prevents viewers from discerning whether the darker hues are blood, some other substances, or a mixture.⁽¹⁾

In these rhythm pieces, Abramovic opens the meanings of participation and responsibility up for endless readings that haunt viewers long after exposure. The overt violences represented on her body signify the multitude of real and symbolic violences committed upon bodies all the time. When a person as the object of violence takes responsibility for that violence, does that absolve observers and other participants of blame or responsibility? Are museum viewers any different than the absent but acknowledged viewers present at the time of these performances? Aren't the performances still performing beyond their temporal and spatial boundaries? They are for me. In the act of interpreting Abramovic's representations, we insert ourselves into the loop of complicity. The translations play out upon the bodies of congregated viewers. Viewing is an acknowledgment; it transforms the audience - collectively - into performers. Viewers become group participants in a tangle of conflicting roles and obligations. Abramovic's implosion of responsibility upon the bodies of viewers inscribes viewers within an assemblage of complicity that treats defensive distancing with haunting determination.
 

Date: Thursday, March 17th, 2000
Place: Charles de Gaul Airport, Aerogare 1, Paris, France 
Cultural Note: Airport also referred to as "Roissy⁽²⁾" (as in king). The same model, with the same proportions, is elaborated at the Centercultural fission, political deterrence.
Time: Mid-morning
Theme: Functionalist "plans" at the margins of rationality
Sub-theme: Global flows, ethnoscapes, and ruptures

Jean-François'⁽³⁾ Parisian mantra echos in my mind: "You've gotta have a plan to live in Paris." He frequently pulls out his pocket map of the labyrinthian Paris streets and refers to this artifact as "his plan." He also relates the way people orchestrate routes of passage as "plans." Plans permeate. They are not just about mobility and cartography; they are about cultural comport and bodily hexis in this seemingly chaotic bustle. Without a plan, one is lost - literally and metaphorically. Can one ever get a glimpse of the plan of these plans? What is the doxic "master plan," if there is one? I sense it . . . but it eludes me. It is the aporia here, in Paris. 

Jill expertly guides us through the transportation and cultural obligatory points of passage as we make our way to the airport. The RER train deposits us at "Roissy-pole," an airport passage point that makes little rational sense to my North American eyes - one must simply move through it. That is the plan. From Roissy-pole we navigate to the shuttle bus. (Tense moments sitting next to a uneasy French man in sandals and a tight striped shirt who mumbles to himself, sneezes on the head of the person sitting in front of him, and continuously elbows me in the ribs.) Off the bus, escalators carry us into a stifling condensed imbrication of plans: Aerogare 1.

The line for check-in requires one to start near the far end of the terminal (where one ultimately needs to go to get to the planes) and proceed back toward the front of the building. Every employee of the airport or airlines serves a crucially important purpose. One person looks at our passports, asks us about electronic devices in our bags ("yes, we have some"), and then places "inspected" stickers all over our bags (we later found these stickers adhered to our clothes and picked them off each other). Another person governs the line toward the check-in counters and gruffly orders people about - his role is that of disciplining flows of people through this space, or at least signifying such a disciplining practice. Another woman checks us in and takes my bag; another person stands on the bag conveyor-belt and organizes unruly luggage that won't flow as planned; another person prevents us from taking a ("rational") short-cut toward the gates. Queues upon queues. Moving people fall into step behind wrong lines as they try to figure out the plan of Aerogare 1. 

At every transition point in this space, employees stand guard, each performing a different function with utmost seriousness. They each represent a node of this complex airport grid, the totality of which gives the impression of a brittle structure completely dependent upon the integrity of each fragile node. Efficiency of movement is not the plan. Efficiency in safety precautions is not the plan (one could easily play the game of bouncing from one person to the next without triggering "suspicion" in the North American sense). In spite of the plethora of individuals directing the flow of passengers, there is no redundancy! In my somewhat detached cultural musings at the apparent absurdity of our participation in this social drama, I glimpse part of the plan. The airport "works" because each employee serves a purpose that occupies their complete attention. There were no managers that I could detect. Instead, each person governs their own actions, and the range of those actions is finite - singular. The socio-technical structure of the airport may not be efficient in moving people, but it is efficient in providing individual responsibility within a tightly knit network of interrelated functions.

The existential moment of system crisis. At the second-to-last passage point before boarding the plane, we encounter the person whose sole responsibility is checking for the appropriate "ok" sticker on our tickets. Since we purchased tickets electronically, we do not have the appropriate artifacts to pass by this symbolic gateway. This individual encounters a moment of crisis that, as I read it, also threatens the stability of the entire airport plan. The plan did not (yet) accommodate for our situation. The employee repeatedly searches our documents for the necessary sticker. This is her only function, so letting us proceed without a sticker would call her importance within the airport system into grave doubt. She is visibly disturbed (a moment of nausea?) yet finally lets us proceed anyway. (I later discovered the necessary sticker on an inside fold of our electronic-ticket confirmation printout; the sticker-affixing person did not fail in his/her task!)

Aerogare 1 employees and the interdependent relationship of their functions represent the King plan of the airport, which itself may represent the King plan of Paris. This representation serves a disciplining function upon the diverse flows of people from multiple cultures. The airport is an "ethnoscape Ethnoscape: "the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree" (Appadurai 1996: 33).." It doesn't only function as a space for organizing cultural flows, however, it also functions as a model of French culture, complete with the existential twist on individual responsibilities. Our sticker incident interrupted this functionalist representation (at least my reading of it). When multiple flows of people, information, and technologies intersected at this location ostensibly designed to facilitate such movement, opportunities for crisis and negotiation emerge. In this instance, the technology of electronic ticketing temporarily ruptured this system. As well-planned as the airport was in functionalist terms, the insertion of alterity forced a micro-level moment of renegotiation. The Parisian logic of interdependency and individual responsibility was not impervious to challenges arising by means of the speed of global flows and changes in their mercurial configurations. Because racing global flows of people, information, and technology catalyze local crises, rigid cultural systems such as those at Aerogare 1 must continuously adapt, creating possibilities for continuous questioning of structural representation of nationalistic logics. 

Real Literary Margins

In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's treatment of open margins in literature relates to the possibilities created through interpretation of representations Spivak speaks, for instance, of the textual margin left open in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus by means of closing with the monster's disappearance past the edge of vision. The 1818 text of Frankenstein concludes: 
 

"But soon," he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, "I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell."  He sprung from the cabin-window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance. THE END. (Shelley 1982: 221)

Yet the light and heat from the monster's immolation persist through space and time because they pass beyond the confines of the book's covers into the public imaginary. The monster's plight of alienated existence resonates with us still and resounds across the gulf of almost two centuries. The monster does not sleep peacefully but roams the night in search of retribution. He is our unconscious, in Freud's terminology, or différance in Derrida's. He is that which does not let us rest peacefully because he is the powerful unknown or Other roaming within us. For both Freud and Derrida, recognition of the Other within us represents the first, necessary step toward individual and social health. But "THE END," at least for Derrida, can never arrive because total understanding can never be achieved. One requires constant vigilance and effort to keeping the margins of our living texts open for new assemblages. 

If representations serve as signifiers of multiple meanings, it is the practice of reading that opens these meanings up for enactment or evaluation. Without interpretation of readings, artifacts and texts (or signs, more generally) can artificially signify wholeness, integrity, or clarity. Interpretation, then, is political in that it reveals value choices in narrative constructions. This is why interpretation disrupts - it destabilizes semblances of order and universality. This is what the various readings of texts and events in this paper try to demonstrate. I am not rendering "correct" meaning but performing some possible meanings that lie beneath the surface or skate relationally between surfaces. If one disagrees with readings of this nature (or with semiotic analyses), then that disagreement opens up space for dialogue about alternate readings. The willingness of individuals to sincerely or ethically engage in that dialogue is another matter. Still, the space has been created for that possibility - the possibility for recognition, tolerance, and appreciation of difference; the possibility for a change in worldviews; the possibility for new constellations of meaning and new ways of being in the world with others. 

_________
 

Rhizomatic Intertextuality

Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989) opens up synaesthetic perception to the rhizomatic technological connections and constructions that keep each of us on call. We are called to acknowledge connection even within disruptions and breaks. We are called to hear noise even when we can't discern meaning or when there is no meaning. We are called to Be in the world in a way that questions the effects of such being upon multiple psyches and subjectivities. We are called to probe the realm of ethical possibility within the static of socio-technical constellations.

The Telephone Book is less a book than a site of multiplicity and intertextuality. It is a location of what Roland Barthes calls "stereographic plurality." It performs the function of a switchboard by means of its own disruptions and defamiliarizations. A raised keypad calls to the reader from the face of the hardcover edition's dust-jacket. This covert cover displacement (of space) calls to the "reader" not to read but instead to touch, and to be aware of that touching as a making strange of the act of reading. The book's passive identity recedes as this keypad touching connects subjects to texts in new, resonate ways. For instance, I gave into the temptation to dial a familiar number upon the book. I weave the book into a very personal part of my life by such an (inter)action. I am called to recognize the personal places that other technologies hold and mediate in my life by this act of dialing. Ronell invites a dialing for difference. 

Next, I play. I dial made-up numbers. I dial numbers that would not "work" in the world as I know it. I dial alterity and différance - possibilities for other world-constellations that reside outside of my imaginary. This play transfers (or is forwarded) to the "real world" by way of the book as locus and rhizomatic node of / for meaning. The phone-line running across the back pages does more than "represent" the book's connection to our technological world; it skewers the book and ourselves - it screams embedded multiplicity into us as temporary receivers and senders. The EKG-phoneline-seismometer traced on the book's front cover (beneath the keypad dust-jacket) registers the shock of this call-recognition upon our life-support systems. Temblors rattle us into flatlines; the vampire of technology resuscitates us (just) in time for future shocks. Our modalities-of-being coincide with the modalities of technology. The seismometer inscribes as we begin engagement and lifts when we disengage. Possible inscriptions and reading persist, though, even without such traces, even without such books. 
 

Date: Tuesday, April 12, 2000
Place: 4^th Street Market, Downtown Troy
Time: 9ish PM
Theme: Identity Formations, Active Interpretations, (Inter)Relations
 

"[T]elephonic logic means here, as everywhere, that contact with the Other has been disrupted; but it also means that the break is never absolute. Being on the telephone will come to mean, therefore, that contact is never constant nor is the break clean" (Ronell 1989: 20).

Beth Orton laments about insatiable human emotional needs as I drive the streets of Troy late at night. "Calling angels down to Earth." Is this a new kind of modernist hope for deus ex machina? Or is it just an acknowledgment of the hopes human beings harbor for purity and completeness, even at the cost of autonomy, responsibility, or self-sufficiency? What signals do I cross as I yearn for sanctity yet eschew narratives of deliverance? Signal distortions reverberate through my body from the experiences of a night or two before - charging the reflective interpretations I make as I drive with this song. 

Jill and I cross the threshold of the 4^th Street Market at 9PM. The Arabic-looking man behind the counter gestures subtly yet intently for me to approach him. With hushed almost embarrassed tones he speaks to me of a need, of an uncomfortable burden that has been placed upon him. "How would one contact the police," he begins his query in broken-English, "if a mother left her child here and ran?" As if rendered visible by the enunciation, I now observe a mulatto child with curly rust-colored hair sitting behind the counter. Her wide-open, surveying eyes speak of resigned concern as if it were a way-of-being that she had necessarily adopted by the young age of about two. 
 

"You must call," he requests with the overtone of a demand. A grimy-white portable phone is pushed into my hands, and I accept the call to call. Jill enters into the drama by locating the non-emergency police number in the telephone book and translating the address of our location for the verbal demands I anticipate from the stranger I am calling.

"Public Safety," a gruff man's voice filters through the receiver, "Is this an emergency?"

"No," I reply.

"Go ahead."

"I am a customer at the market on 4^th Street next to I Love New York Pizza. The cashier asked me to call because a woman dropped off her child here and ran."

"Ohhhh NICE," his intonation drips with sarcasm.

Within seconds of handing the phone back to the man behind the counter, it rings again. He pushes the phone back into my face telling me to get it. This time I refuse: "It's your store; you answer the phone." Upon answering, the man launches into a stream of Arabic. He evidently knows the caller. Jill and I take this moment to study the child. She relays, "At least he's taking good care of her." The man held a small container of juice with a straw for the kid while I was on the phone with the police. We call out to her with friendly baby-talk inflected voices, but she pays us no heed - she watches the man on the phone instead.

The phone emerges in front of my face again. The man says something like "here!", but connotes "you must speak with this person."

"Hello," I begin with trepidation.

"You must call the police," a man with an Arabic accent informs me.

"I already have. They're on their way."

<CALL WAITING BEEP> 

I ignore the annoying insistence of this electronic interruption signal and hand the phone back to the man. He speaks a few rapid phrases and then hangs-up.

<RING>

This time the cashier answers the phone. No luck - I find the phone thrust into my face one more time. Distorted signal. Static on the line. I'm starting to feel as though I'm caught in a telephonic drama loop from which I cannot extricate myself. Something strange is going on, and I'm in the middle of it; I've somehow been thrown into the starring role (or at least acting role) in this drama that I don't understand. All I have is incomplete information, and I don't know the veracity of what I do know. The conspiratorial tones of the next inter-action increase my mounting dis-ease.

"Listen to me," a man's voice crackles in perfect English. 

"The child behind the counter is related to that man there. The mother, Alex, left the child because she was being abused by the father. The guy behind the counter's name is Roger. If he tells you that he doesn't know the kid, he's full of shit. That's his niece."

"What's your name," I ask the guy behind the counter.

"Roger. I'm Roger," he confirms.

Knowing that the police are on their way, I try to get some more information.

"What's the father's name," I ask.

I reach for a pen on the counter and accidently send it flying to the floor out of reach. Jill motions for it and the man picks it up and gives it to her. I grab a tiny paper bag and begin scribbling, for the man on the phone is already speaking.

"Alam," he begins and then speaks to someone else, "What's Alam's last name?"

"Alam Nugana."

"Nugana?" I repeat.

"No, Mugana. M-U-G-A-N-A."

"And the mother's name is Alex?"

"Ya, Alex, Alexander, you know."

Distortion hisses over the line.

"Listen," I say, "The police are almost here. Can you stay on the line and speak to them?"

"I can try, but I'm on a pay phone on the side of the highway and I'm out of change. Here's the number xxx-xxxx."

Just then a police car pulls up, and a clean-cut officer of about my age saunters in. Holding the phone away from my face I try to quickly explain the situation.

"I'm just a customer here. A woman dropped off her kid and ran. The man on the phone right now claims to know what's going on and who the parents are. But, he's at a pay phone and is running out of time."

The officer looks around, sizing-up each of us and reading the scene. He accepts the phone. "This is Officer Smith." The caller is out of time. Smith calls the number I scrawled on the bag and then announces "Out of service."

I debrief Officer Smith as best I can. Roger vehemently denies that the child is a relation of his. Next, I decide to get the drink that we came into the store to get in the first place. I ask Smith's permission to leave, and he assents because I had not "witnessed anything." While ringing up my drink, Roger conspicuously places the bag I had written on upside-down next to the register. Then, in spite of the fact that I say I don't need a bag, and in spite of the fact that the bag is WAY too small for the bottle I had purchased, Roger puts my drink in the bag and hands it to me. Officer Smith is too observant to miss this and takes the bag into his possession. Jill and I depart the scene (of the crime?).
 

<<RING>>Interpretive Call-back<<RING>> 
 

"Calling angels down to Earth.⁽⁵⁾" "[C]ontact is never constant nor is the break clean.⁽⁶⁾"

The simple story of abandonment became further complicated with every ring. My own role as "just a customer" also become less true with each phone ring. I accepted the call and was thus thrown into this world-drama, where each iteration called for my reinsertion into the play. My egress diminished with each utterance. Thus, freedom to choose became constrained (or always becomes constrained) with each decision to act, or re-act, or en-act. Naming became my central preoccupation: to name the child, to name the cashier, to name the father and mother. My own identity became wrapped-up in this naming process, following from signifier to signifier without ever knowing "the truth." I placed one call and received many answers. Defined by my relation to those that I did not know and who did not know me, my position within this abandonment-assemblage shifted with the entry of each new character. For the cashier, I became a helpful citizen. For the child I became a temporary yet determined protector. For the Arabic man on the phone (the store owner? the father?), I became a verifier of actions in progress (police involvement). For the American caller, I became a confidant. And for the Police Officer, I became an informant. Then, in the act of becoming this informant, I became a (dangerous?) nuisance to the store cashier. I accepted being thrown into this assemblage but the assemblage defined me and limited / constrained the lines that I could speak. This incident represents the dynamic constraints placed upon becoming.

Active Interpretation. The police, Jill reminded me on the walk home, are responsible to act. We could leave the scene without necessarily implicating others within our interpretations and evaluations. The officer, on the other hand, had to make a call. He had to determine what to do. Moreover, the repercussions of his determination would affect lives, especially the life of the child. Uniquely, the officer's main act was interpretation and postponement. Like myself, he was thrown into this abandonment-assemblage and had to read quickly. His role carried the most weight: he who is responsible for others. In this instance, interpretation is the primary action utilized by the officer. He acted through the process of reading the conflicting knowledge-signals transmitted to him and postponing his call as long as possible. The process of reading was the action, and the outcome (of which I don't know) was / is just an extension of this process set into motion. Avital Ronell says, "The worst moment in the history of technology may not have an off switch, but only a modality of being on" (16). Similarly, action proceeding from knowledge (the Enlightenment ideal) can be re-read as an always already "on" modality of "active interpretation" where knowledge, interpretation, and action weave together what we call experience.

Appadurai, Arjun (1996). Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press.

Baudrillard, Jean (1983). Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e).

Fortun, Mike and Herbert J. Bernstein (1998). Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the 21^st Century. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint.

Perlmutter, Dawn (1999). "The Sacrificial Aesthetic: Blood Rituals from Art to Murder." Anthropoetics 5, no. 2 (Fall 1999 / Winter 2000) http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0502/blood.htm.

Ronell, Avital (1989). The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1982). Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus. The 1818 Text. Ed. James Rieger. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.