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And Everything within ReachScott Walkers The Drift (A Listeners Companion)
T i m o t h y J . D e i n e s
Michigan State University
The Scott Walker legend remains at once disseminated and obscure. The growing
number of pop bios and record reviews converge around the increasingly stale
narrative of Walkers life, his rise and fall, his recovery [from alcoholism], re-
discovery, etc. The Walker industry (a funny notion, though this is what we now
see) has become all-too-predictable in its reliance on conservative biographical
methodologies and facile periodizations in the service of a kind of perfunctory
hagiography. It has reached the point where even Walkers detractors, when you
can nd them, enfold their discourse within the boy childs myth. One ironic effect
is that recording industrial techniqueproduction, distribution, exchange, con-
sumptioncontinues to fail the art of an artist who supposedly went underground
30 years ago in a gesture of refusal of such technique. After all, the records still
dont sell. One wonders when well ever hear Scott Walker.
The following notesten readings of the ten tracks on Walkers latest record,
The Drift (2006)appeal not so much to Scott the avant-garde crooner as Scott
the theorist of relation. These notes represent provisional arguments that grow
CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2007, pp. 139164. issn 1532-687x
A n d E v e r y t h i n g w i t h i n R e a c h140
out of a long engagement with Scotts text, sonic, and graphic. I have decided to
concentrate on this single album and risk the gesture of treating it as a unity. The
reason for this is not due to a fans preference for The Drift over Tilt, say, or Scott
4, or out of a desire to return criticism to the territory of the well-wrought urn.
The Drift, Ive decided, is not even my favorite Scott record, though Im nearly
persuaded that it is his most important. Scotts performance on The Drift is es-
sentially critical, and The Drift is a terrifying record. Thus, it irts with a certain
timeliness, a certain madness, a certain responsibility towards what remains to
come. That more or less accounts for my interest in it.
1 . C o s s a c k s A r e
Cossacks are / charging in // Charging into / elds of / white roses1
There is nothing one can do to stop the other from coming.
We already know Scott Walker, or some version of him: the one who, in
the late 1960s, foregrounded an overpowering vocal/lyrical cocktail of
Jacques Brel and bel canto against a Spectorian symphonic wall over a span
of four albums; the one who, with the revamped Walker Brothers on 1978s
Nite Flights, conjured a handful of Berlin-era Bowie-inspired compositions,
thus surviving, in an odd way, the challenge of punk; the one whose trium-
phant reemergence in 1984 with the avant-rock Climate of Hunter ignited
a slow burn of second coming which, rst, achieved the white-hotness of
Tilt in 1995, and then, arch-frigidity in 2006 with The Drift. These last two
e ortsmore concrete and sonically articial than anything previously
attempted, though completely unlike each otherare two of the most im-
portant records of the last two decades. The Drift may be the rst important
rock record of the twenty-rst century.
But it all may be for naught, quite literally, and this is where Walker
worship ends. If Jeremy Reed is right in saying that since the massive hits
scored by the Walker Brothers in the mid-sixties, Scott Walker has set about
deconstructing the image of himself as commercially successful pop star,
there is still no sense of what this deconstruction gives us to think about all
T i m o t h y J . D e i n e s 141
that is not Scott Walker the subject (1998, 10). I would suppose that Walker
himself is least of all interested in the deconstruction of Scott Walker, as if
one could ever know. Which is not to say that the art is not deconstructive.
To the contrary, it profoundly works to that e ect, and on several levels.
But, again, it is all for naught, which is to say that it is for nothing itself,
for refusal as art object and experience. If Warhol is the philosopher of the
twentieth century on the problem of fame, as someone recently said, then
Walker is the rst philosopher of the twenty-rst century on the problem,
not only of the refusal of fame, or of this or that, but of refusal itself, in all
of its senses. This is made most explicit on The Drift.
Walkers refusal manifests itself in many, perhaps innite, ways. Biog-
raphy names one. In Cossacks Are, the rst track from The Drift, the joke
is on all those who thought Scott Walker named some homogeneous
public persona. First, consider the sound: loud, dark, angularit sounds
like it hates the idea. An electric guitar leads in with two compressed minor
chords, divided into eight notes. It echoes and repeats within and across
verses as electronic treatments ride above or parallel to the grating rhythm.
Bass, drum, and tambourine gallop forward aggressively, but lyrical coun-
terfeit cuts the menace: A moving aria / for a vanishing / style of mind
// A noble debut / tackling vertiginous / demands // Has absence ever
/ sounded so / eloquent / so sad / I doubt it? Scott Walker, now the old
man, and long the most eccentric of crooners, is back again, trammeling all
security, all presumption. By this time, of course, we expect the avant-garde
treatment and technique. The trick, and the joke, lies in how to refuse the
expectation. Its both old and entirely new; uncannily, it repeats, yet di ers
from the Walker one has come to know, even the Scott of Tilt, a ground-
breaking record in its own right. Explicit self-refusal is one strategy: throw
out the baby with the bathwater. Weve heard this before in Rawhide, o
Climate of Hunter, for instance, in which human self dissolves into mon-
strous dismemberment: This is how you disappear / out between midnight
// Foot, knee, / shaggy belly, face, / famous hindlegs (Walker 2006a). The
rst lines of Cossacks Are, for its part, are faux-plagiarized missives tar-
geting the conventions of a music criticism that too often relies on a nave
sense of biographys relation to art. Even when the criticism is right on
A n d E v e r y t h i n g w i t h i n R e a c h142
the money in the interpretation of Walkers art, moneysymbolically at
leastremains precisely the motive, or at least the e ectconsumability,
distribution, exchange, and so forth.
But Cossacks Are is precisely the hit that one precisely cannot eas-
ily / picture . . . in the / current top ten. Like almost all of Walkers solo
work after the song The Shutout, o of Nite Flights, Cossacks Are is
virtually inassimilable to a pop-rock atmosphere. This is generally true of
the production strategies of the last three recordsClimate of Hunter, Tilt,
The Drifteach more angular, oblique, fractured (if thats the right word)
than the last in the way it slides into another mood or viewpoint. If, as
Reed suggests, early solo Scott (Scott IIV) was all about assimilating the
auteur to a pop context, instituting personal interpretation as the MO, post-
turn Scott (the ones after The Shutout) is about guring out how to turn
what one might call the subject-machine inside out, detailing its anatomy,
and handing back to the listener an unexpected, singular experience that,
with luck, forces self to the edge of its own possibility. (This, also, perhaps
begins to articulate the refusal that is also a form of madness.) Could this
be in order to achieve a responsible forgetting of the present self, a kind of
work of mourning that names, decides on, seals o the self, in order to let
come something else, namely a future?
To be sure, Cossacks Are mobilizes a metonymy that could too quickly
be reduced to an economy of self, and perhaps it must be, up to a point. The
temptations to do so are certainly there: With an arm / across the / torso
// Face on / the nails // With an arm / across the / torso // Face on / the
pale / monkey / nails. How is one to trace synecdoche to the source? Is
that source or origin Scott himself? Paradoxically, such a reading seems
unjustiable, even as it remains as a kind of phantasmatic possibility. One
could read the parts as part of the present whole, except that the whole,
if there is one, appears to be dead, a dismembered corpse. With face on
the nails, this self appears to have battled with a self (its own or the other)
and lost. Throw monkey on top of it, and the dehumanization is nearly
complete. This is how you disappear.
As antidote to such black sorrow, one might reply that what is being
offered here is a postromantic theory of fragmentation irreducible to
T i m o t h y J . D e i n e s 143
subjective assemblage. In other words, is there a sense in which Cossacks
Are performs the criticism between metaphor and metaphysics? If the
part is not a fragment (which I understand in part as a nitude that
would be too narrow to express what overpowers it) then what is a part
(Gasch 1986, 294)? Not fragments, these parts are perhaps better described
as fractals, to borrow from Jean-Luc Nancy. Instead of the ambiguous
end of the [romantic] fragment, Nancy says, it is a matter of the fray-
ing of the edges of its trace . . . of the frayed access to a presentation, to a
coming into presenceand by way of this coming into presence. (1993,
126). Shutting down here, sings Walker, in Rawhide: Shutting down
here // to where necks / leave the air / unpossessed // and giant heads
lock / constellations (2006a). Uncoupled, fractal necks and heads
spell the exhaustion of the subjects aria and block the ascertainment of
constellations, leaving them unpossessed. This is how the subject-ma-
chine, the biography-machine disappears: by examining its parts, and the
parts of its parts, ad innitum, if not exhaustively, without giving into the
temptation of mistaking the part for a whole.
Cossacks are / charging in, taking no prisoners, crushing white roses,
purications, without remainder, without sense, on the one hand, only to
leave the possibility of other sense, on the other hand. These fractals signify
at the very limit of dismemberment, and therefore refuse every supposition
of corporeal unicity, even as partneither a part nor apart. The fractal
interrupts a nave discourse of associative, cumulative imagery; interrup-
tion merely glosses interruption, and irruption. The text drifts. . . .
2 . C l a r a ( B e n i t o s D r e a m )
Sometimes / I feel like / a swallow / a swallow / which by / some / mistake / has
gotten / into an / attic / and knocks / its head / against / the walls / in terror
Clara is Benito Mussolinis dream, but Walkers liner notes rehearse a
moment of historical terror:
A n d E v e r y t h i n g w i t h i n R e a c h144
On the 28th of April 1945 Benito Mussolini was taken for execution by mem-
bers of the committee of national liberation for Northern Italy. Claretta
Petacci insisted on dying with him. They were shot, the bodies piled into a
truck and taken to the Piazzale Loreto at Milan to be strung up by the heels
side by side, their heads about six feet from the ground. They were mocked,
villied [sic] and riddled with bullets by the crowd that had gathered.
This is how you disappear. But what justies the lynching? Mussolinis
own acts of terror? And after death, what justies the vilication? How is
mourning, and therefore justice, possible here? The text opens onto such
questions, leaves them suspended, and beckons us to make a decision.
Walker refuses to do it for us, or, better, his decision is in the hearing. For
justices sake, there must be a means for mourning the most evil persons
and deeds. But this mourning of the most evil necessarily makes the most
evil possible. If Cossacks Are invites this theme of the worstIts hard
to pick / the worst moment, cribs Walkerthen Clara mourns the
inability or failure to mourn, resulting in a sense of justice denied. Some
version of this is what is now happening within and without Chile after the
death of Pinochet.
Clara is a meditation on the necessity of mourning and justice, but
it begins with the refusal of this necessity, and the subsequent refuse of
the bodies of Mussolini and Petacci. What remains after their lynching?
Nothing? Death remains. Of absolute freedom, Hegel writes: its nega-
tion is the death that is without meaning, the sheer terror of the negative
that contains nothing positive, nothing that lls it with a content; pure
negation; nothing to claim in the name of a future resource or telos; no
aufhebung; not only death but the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with
no more signicance than cutting o a head of cabbage or swallowing a
mouthful of water (1997, 360). Opposed to this abstract negation, in
Philosophy of History Hegel writes that the cunning of reason . . . sets the
passions to work for itself, while that which develops its existence through
such impulsion pays the penalty and su ers loss; and, further, that the
particular is for the most part of too triing value as compared with the
general: individuals are sacriced and abandoned (2006). For Spirit,
T i m o t h y J . D e i n e s 145
whose truth is Absolute Freedom, the particular is only sacriced and
abandoned inasmuch as these actions contribute in some positive way
towards Spirits total development. In Hegelian dialectics, there is loss, but
it is always, or ought to be, loss in the name of some greater general gain.
Sounds rather pragmatic, actually.
Can we remark in Clara the beginnings of a critique of Hegel, which
is to say a further consideration of the relation between absolute loss and
dialectic recovery? Begin with the sound: an audio or video tape winds
backwards or forwards. A high, soft voice is heard to say birds over the
tape. The tape continues to wind, in a di erent frequency, and a lower,
equally soft voiceWalkersis heard to say birds. This bird its back
and forth through the text, and knocks / its head / against / the walls / in
terror. We might pause the tape here to consider this insurmountable limit
that the walls pose for the bird. They admit of no passage, and certainly no
freedom; pure negativity. Play the tape.
Percussion and ocarina enter, followed by a voice: This is not a corn-
husk doll // dipped in / blood / in the / moonlight // Like what / happen
/ in America // This is us / our eyesides / snagged // dipped in / mob /
in the / daylight // Like what / happen / in America. This rst verse
yields to a sequence of corporeal imagery, fractals: The breasts are / still
heavy // The legs long / and straight // The upper lip / remains short // The
teeth / are too small // The eyeside / is green // The hair / long and black.
Dismemberment is matched by string dissonance, bass drum thud, and, not
least, the syncopation supplied by a side of slapped pork. The nightmare
exhausts itself in Walkers shriek: Still coming / through // Still coming
/ through. The fractal synecdoche of which we heard, and thus imagined
we saw, in Cossacks Are repeats itself here, forbidding any attempt at as-
semblage into the form of a body, Claras body, Benitos, Scotts. The text
forbids us, one might say, to mourn the murder that has occurred here, the
worst of death.
How does one mourn fractals? The mob is not interested in dialectics
but madly caught up in murderous frenzy. There may be an expression by
the mob of grief here, but it is not yet mourning. The perverse syntax of
Like what / happen / in America insinuates that America has been home
A n d E v e r y t h i n g w i t h i n R e a c h146
to a plurality of mob-driven crimes, but doesnt elaborate. Images, themes,
structures consistently thwart our e orts to piece the text together by not
o ering the resources out of which we might make sense of what is happen-
ing here. In this way, Clara is not a generous textor else its generosity
lies in its semantic stinginess.
But if the text forbids dialectics from one perspective, it perhaps invites
it from another. These images, after all, are Still coming / through, but
from where and through whom? Claras senseless death, more senseless
than Benitos because she is innocent, has not squelched the facts or
conditions of its occurrence. Her death has a history, part of which we are
privy to. We are given some of her memories of Benito, in the third person,
but not when she thinks them nor where, for example at the moment of
death, before the ring squad: She knows / this room // She can / navigate
it / in the dark; His enormous eyes / as he arrives; His strange beliefs
/ about the moon; Shell eclipse / it with her / head // stroke him / until
he / sleeps; She gazes from / the window // At the fountain / in the
courtyard. This history, which must always remain to be criticized, that
is, decided upon, also lies behind Claras own decision and ultimate death.
Death does not prevent these signiers and discourses from still coming
through to determine the present, to demand a judgment as to their
meaning, on the one hand, and maintain a certain secrecy, on the other.
But none of this is inexorable; it is all decided moment by moment.
On one side, then, the swallow that knocks its head against the walls
in terror, unable to escape deaths nitude, senseless death involving no
sacrice. On the other side, Walkers own voice, at the end of the song, that
seeks to expose, if not release, this nitude to the conditions that limit it:
I picked [the swallow] / up // so as not / to frighten / it // I opened / the
window // Then I / opened // my hand. Between abstract negation and
Absolute Freedom, there is decision.
T i m o t h y J . D e i n e s 147
3 . J e s s e ( S e p t e m b e r S o n g )
Jesse / are you / listening?
One should at least speculate that Jesse supplements Clara on the sub-
ject of labor, particularly the labor that is the work of mourning. To come
back to this theme mentioned above, if the work of mourning in Clara la-
bors to articulate the di erence between senseless negation and sense itself,
Jesse labors more intently on the work of mourning that all sense making
must ceaselessly undergo. One e ect of this meditation is the introduction
of the idea of autoimmunity.
This is Walkers 9/11 song, and it is fabulously overdetermined and
bizarre. The liner notes tell us that Jesse refers to Jesse Garon Presley,
Elviss stillborn twin brother whom Elvis, in times of despair, . . . would
talk to. As practically every reviewer has noted, the song begins with the
chords of Jailhouse Rock slowed down and distorted in a nearly unrecog-
nizable strum. A menacing hum and an intermittent double concussion of
Pow! Pow! (jets striking buildings, bodies being hung, twins [still]born)
surround these chords, and give way to lurking cello and strident violin. In
between, Walker describes Nose holes / caked / in black / cocaine, and
the apostrophic No one / holds / a match / to your / skin. This is not easy
stu . The pain and pleasure of drugs, torture, death are all immediately
brought to bear on the listener (Jesse and us), but with little guidance as to
how to separate them, what sense to make of them. As Nose is truncated
to noNo one; No dupe; No chiming; No needledeprivation
(of sense) gradually emerges as an overwhelming theme. Supercially, Elvis
is identied with one of the twin towers in between pows, deprived of its
doppelganger, doomed to tragedy. One facet of the tragedy is that all of
the labor that has gone into the idea and reality of America may be for
naught. Elvis moans: Famine is / a tall / tall / tower // a building / left / in
the / night // Jesse / are you / listening? // It casts / its ruins / in shadows
// under / Memphis / moonlight // Jesse / are you / listening? Elvis and
the World Trade Center, nominal sites of a potentially innite national
metonymic substitution, and money machines to boot are here, in the land
A n d E v e r y t h i n g w i t h i n R e a c h148
of plenty, starving to death, and the catastrophe reects across America and
beyond; a national labor gone terribly awry; Six feet / of / foetus // ung
at / sparrows / in the / sky. The bleakness is only increased by a mournful
refrain, a kind of mantra that sounds like it will continue forever: Im the
/ only / one // left alive // Im the / only / one // left alive. . . .
There appears to be, from one side, a cystic action to every work of
mourning, a sealing o of trauma from the possibility of it ever repeating
itself, which is to say our experience of its repetition. In this way, a certain
singularity is bestowed upon the eventuality of the trauma, and its situa-
tion as that which has passed. But in speaking of the possible event-ness of
September 11, Derrida indexes another quality and time of trauma and thus
another work of mourning: There is traumatism with no possible work of
mourning when the evil comes from the possibility to come of the worst,
from the repetition to comethough worse. Traumatism is produced by
the future, by the to come, by the threat of the worst to come, rather than by
an aggression that is over and done with (Borradori 2003, 97). One work
of mourning labors to put dead things in their places, to prevent them from
haunting the future-present, or at least to render this haunting amenable to
a sense of progress beyond, or displacement of, the trauma. Where trauma
cannot be mourned, where the trauma is perceived as still to come, we must
question, with Derrida, to what extent the trauma, if there is one, qualies
as event, and what the e ect of being unable or unwilling to clarify the event-
ness of the event might be.
But this problematic may not be reducible to a simple choice. As Derrida
stresses repeatedly, decision is necessary for justices sake, for justice in
generaljustice to history, politics, to friendship, to fraternity (whose
gendered articulation always causes Derrida to demure), to futurity, and
so forth. One must mourn; it is necessary. One must always mourn. Life
itself, what we know of it, depends upon the chance of time that mourning
edges upon. In this sense, mourning itself must open to the future; there
must be a mourning to come; one will have had to mourn.
In Jesse, there is an astonishing image that comes before the nal
repetition. It is literally an American dream: I am crawling / around on
my / hands and knees / smoothing out / the prairie // All the dents / and
T i m o t h y J . D e i n e s 149
the gouges // and the winds / dying down // I lower / my head // press
my / ear / to the / prairie // Alive / Im the / only / one // left / alive. Is
this mad groping by a deserted giant in the desert the result of too much
or too little mourning? I cant tell. The listener, in any case, is left with the
thorny problem of the last man. Zarathustra, who warned against the last
man, supposed that one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give
birth to a dancing star (Nietzsche 1982, 129). To what extent is Zarathustra
addressing the need to mourn here? And to what extent would it no longer
be a matter of oneself?
4 . J o l s o n a n d J o n e s
Curare! Curare! / Curare!
Commenting on the concept chora, Jesse is also an iteration of what
Derrida calls the immemoriality of a desert in the desert, the always-
already innite withdrawal of being, or the thought of being, from its own
phenomenological positing, before memory, history, science, religion,
and so forth (2000, 59). Because chora is the most obscure of existential
secrets, the last man will never have quite vanquished the other, be it psy-
choanalytical, political, economic, etc.; there will never have been a last
man. Moreover, the last man will not even have avoided the logic of the
third party: not the third term as condition of the symbolic and the law,
but the third as destructuring structuration of the social bond, as social
disconnection and even as the disconnection of the interruption, of the
without relation that can constitute a relation to the other in its alleged
normality (Derrida 1995, 251) Thus, a certain viral condition of the subject,
before the subject: a desire, drive, or even logic to refuse that which makes
self-relation both possible and impossible.
In curare, a Carib word indicating a poison that causes paralysis,
Walker, the American expatriot, summons the West, particularly the New
World, at the same time that he ngers the murder weapon. As a means for
survival, the New World always represented a rejuvenating, utopic resource
A n d E v e r y t h i n g w i t h i n R e a c h150
for Europe. Right away, it entered the bloodstream of the West, even as blood
purity/di erence was instituted; it became the most positive of idealities,
even as its lands and peoples were appropriated and negated in the most vio-
lent ways. But the sacricial structure of Europes relation to the Americas
has also always been in question; the general hegemonic discourse, if there
is one, has never been simple and clear cut. The worst would be if all of the
su ering passed away without having been properly mourned. Listening
to Jolson and Jones, especially in the opening linesAs the grossness / of
spring / lolls its / bloodied head [ . . . ]one is struck by the similarity of its
imagery to another classical moment in Hegel:
The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything
in its simplicityan unending wealth of many representations, images,
of which none belongs to himor which are not present. This night, the
interior of nature, that exists herepure selfin phantasmagorical repre-
sentations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody headthere
another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disap-
pears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the
eyeinto a night that becomes awful. (Qtd. in iek 1999, 2930)
Close to Zarathustras chaos, this philosophical moment recognizes a
kind of frenzied analytical destruction prior to (or over and above?) me-
diated reconstruction, or redemption-in-sacrice. The relation between
the innite detachment of being and the socius remains vital, if obscure.
Walkers indexing of Al Jolsons blackface rendition of Sonny Boy in
The Singing Fool (1928), for example, reminds us to question whether the
work of analytical destruction can ever be isolated from the totality of
the subjects constitution/dissolution; can one take the blackface out of Al
Jolson?
Curare! Curare!: isnt there always already a kind of poisoning of the
subjects blood, then, and a kind of paralysis induced by the poison that
will have innitely interrupted all e orts to purify the subject? In Jolson
and Jones, the subject of a crime rehearses what will have been uncovered
by police. The clues pile up: The chair had / been shifted / ever so slightly
T i m o t h y J . D e i n e s 151
/ say / ve feet or / two centimetres // The prints of / my ngers / dusted
from / doorknobs // A lamp had / been dimmed // Some sawdust / where
a ring / had been. We are put in mind of the tormented Raskolnikovs dou-
ble murder, to be sure, all the way out into the paralysed / street and the
obscene braying of a donkey (a grotesque homage to crooner Allan Jones,
whose big hit was The Donkey Serenade). A paralysis has overtaken the
spacetime of the initial scene itself. Each object is imagined in strict relation
to some other object or action, as if no thing could be said to exist alone, to
be the last. These relations are then imagined as belonging to the past: the
chair had been shifted; ngerprints dusted from doorknobs; the lamp had
been dimmed; sawdust where a ring had been. We can almost hear the police
ordering us not to touch anything and thus contaminate the miraculous
purity of the crime, the Gardens with / fountains / where peacocks / had
strutted // The splendour / of tigers turning / to gold in / the desert. On
the one hand, we are detached from the subjects relation to the objective
details, the implication of the subject in the details themselves. On the other
hand, the repressed past returns as the subject enters what, to him, is the
paralysed / street. Dipping from the isolated retreat of the mind into the
public space of the street, the subject conates the two and ends up peering
Into eyes / imploding / on mazes / of sins. The poison of the other has
seeped into the very cracks supposedly separating the private and public.
Indeed, this is one of the most important sociopolitical and economic func-
tions of the rhetoric and criminalization of drugs (poisons):
By means of this law, at once supplementary and fundamental, these insti-
tutions protect the very possibility of the law in general, for by prohibiting
drugs we assure the integrity and responsibility of the legal subject, of the
citizens, and so forth. There can be no law without the conscious, vigilant,
and normal subject, master of his or her intentions and desires. (Derrrida
1995, 230)
Self-mastery takes place in accordance with the law, and nowhere else.
What must be kept out of the socius at all costs, despite the practical hypoc-
risy which may violate the discourse, is a poisoning of self-mastery, of the
A n d E v e r y t h i n g w i t h i n R e a c h152
subject-machine. It must keep working, and must not succumb to paralysis.
It must be built to last.
This concludes the rst half of the record. Those lending an ear might decide
to take a break at this point and resume later.
Tracks 510 form a kind of suite around the general problem of autoimmunity
and its ineluctability that was begun on the rst four tracks. These songs further
gloss, in a variety of ways, the radically frayed circularity and communication
characteristic of the records opening movements. We shall see if they constitute
a despairing response to the problem of autoimmunity raised in the rst half,
only to be relieved by A Lover Loves. In what follows, it will be important to
determine the extent to which autoimmunity and suffering are coextensive. While
the problematic that autoimmunity names may also be a problematic of suffering
(life/survival as a matter of suffering-in-mourning) it is certainly not the case
that this suffering is limitless. No suffering is limitlessquite the contrary.
5 . C u e ( F l u g l e m a n )
Immunity // wont feed / on the / bodies // Bones / closing /
too / soon / at the / tips // wont feed / on the / bodies
What do / Seoul[/] / Sudan / have in / common? asks the singer, against
an atmospheric backdrop of brooding percussion, electronic treatments,
strings, and brass. Both start / with an S, is the reply, as if to mock
Western ignorance and responsibility, thus setting a dark, sardonic tone
for the second part of the record. The sound matches the sense. Walker has
produced lm scores before, most notably for Leos Caraxs Pola X (1999),
a lm based on Herman Melvilles Pierre, or the Ambiguities, and he obvi-
ously feels comfortable (or is it extremely uncomfortable?) singing against
such soundscapes. Tilt, The Drifts predecessor, exhibits similar operatic
and dramatic moods as one nds stretched out on this track, and on every
other track for that matter, though usually more compressed.
T i m o t h y J . D e i n e s 153
Clocking in at 10:27, just behind Clara, Cue arrives halfway through
the record, and therefore, symbolically at least, occupies a position of
privilege in the production. The liner notes conrm this by the caesura of
two blank pages after Jolson and Jones. It also distinguishes itself in its
indexing of the theme of immunity. Thus far the record has concerned itself
with putting its arguments on the table. From this point on it recasts them
in other forms, trying to imagine where they might lead.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, immune was rst used to
signal exemption from a public service, burden, or charge (2002, 818).
Before it was a medical term, it appears to have meant, more or less, freedom
from. The word immunity holds a similar position in Cue as famine
does in Jesse: they both enter at the highest, shrillest moments of their
respective songs. When Walker sings immunity in Cue, the recording
sounds like a dozen violinists being hurled against a concrete wall, only to
slide down to have the mad act repeated. The total e ect of the typically
bizarre lyrics, the immunity theme, and the repressed, biding sound (which
may, and does, erupt at any moment) is something like a cautionary tale
on the dangers of indulging in the sense of immunity, as if the treacherous
passages of the world didnt apply to life and survival.
Walker himself is helpful on this point. Discussing Cue, he told Wire
critic Rob Young, at the beginning it was rather a meditation on all these
plagues that are coming that we have no answer for. We put it out of our
minds. But they are coming, and theyre there. It started out that way, and
it became something else . . . it all comes back to the self in some waynot
the ego self, but the other self (2006c, 27). It all comes back to the (other)
self in some way. Relation, the other, will have remained, despite our best
e orts to shut it out: Stars led / to sky // lash led / to eye // herpes /
to clit // then / stopped; From the / voice / ooded / semen / clotting /
to / paste // Cant / swallow it / then / bury it; Stars led / to sky // toe
led / to thigh // tumour / to breast // then stopped. The juxtaposition
of natural imagery and disease, sexuality and death destroys all com-
placency that would want to subtract disease, infection, and death from
beauty, pleasure, and life. The problematiclife itself, survivalruns
A n d E v e r y t h i n g w i t h i n R e a c h154
Deep / as a / virus. To ignore it is to tarry in a confusion of mourning,
to dream of an apocalyptic worst-to-come, for not having understood that
life is already dead. Facing up to it is, as Walker puts it, is like Trading
/ the / wah-wahs / for // BAM BAM // BAM BAM.
In his probing essay on AIDS, Alexander Garca Dttman cites Nietzsche,
saying that life is not just measured by the degree to which health is spared
from sickness; the less life is prone to sickness, the more it is sickened
by its health, he writes (1996, 46). The more a body resists those agents
that might cause it harm, the more vulnerable it becomes to its own body,
to itself. This is the strange logic of autoimmunity, of which Derrida has
written: What will never let itself be forgotten is . . . the perverse e ect
of the autoimmunitary itself. For we now know that repression in both its
psychoanalytical sense and its political sensewhether it be through the
police, the military, or the economyends up producing, reproducing, and
regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm (Borradori 2003, 99). The
contemporary politico-economical example, par excellence, of course, is the
origin of the 9/11 highjackers, who came as if from the inside, from forces
that [were] . . . able . . . to get hold of an American weapon in an American
city on the ground of an American airport, and who, moreover, were im-
migrated, trained, prepared for their act in the United States by the United
States (95). The body of the State, like the biological body, virtually pro-
duces the force that returns to destroy it.
Are we to conclude, then, that being itself is essentially viral, which
is to say innitely exposed to its own death, despite its best e orts to
preserve its life? Can such an understanding help us make general sense
of disaster, and in its other registers, the politico-economic, for example,
without depriving the latter of their singularity, their causes and e ects?
Answers to questions like these cannot be simple. They may not even be
calculable, though we must try to supply them, for justices sake. When
Walker says that the plagues are coming and that we must face them, he
is outlining a problem of life, or survival, that, at the very least, must be
thought doubly. On the one hand, there is the existential commonplace
that life is only life by virtue of its innite relation to death. On the
other hand, this death makes itself known, epistemologically and
T i m o t h y J . D e i n e s 155
phenomenologically, simultaneously on the inside and the outside of the
living bodyit is not merely symbolic; it is never perfectly clear where
death originates. In this regard, how can Walkers uglemanwhose
tune rises / on the / harvest / clouds of / dustnot remind us of the
ambivalence of cummingss queer old balloonman, eddieandbill, and the
green dancing devil that binds them?
6 . H a n d M e U p s
Forever and / ever
Without a pause, the sound that something terrible, some terror, is hap-
pening, the worst. . . . Images of a profound desecration, or what is worse, a
status quo: splintering white / bone // Teeth shaken / out with / a stroke // Brain
running / down along / spear / from the wound / in the / eye hole // Stones pound-
ing / in past / the screens / past / the shields.2 Then, if this is a desecration, a
consecration: I felt / the nail / driving / into my / foot / while I / felt the
/ nail / driving / into my / hand. These words are Walkers plagues. They
come, and are to come, despite our best e orts. The narrator puts on his
best face: Mend amend // bring and rub / beat the band // I tried / I tried
// Shrugged o . But try as he might, he fails to achieve what one might
call an ethical relation to what plagues him. That is, he relinquishes the
possibility of making a decision about what is happening to him; indeed,
he does not even want to think about it (and thinkingreal thinkingis
always ethical). The e ect of this is that he subjects himself to the onslaught
without reservation, and imagines his su ering as redemption.
In other words, the metonymy of ceaseless threat from the outside turns
inward as the nails enter hand and foot. The form of the song reinforces the
sense that the singer-narrator is caught in a trap he cannot escape. Brutal
horns, crashing cymbal, and an obscure yet palpable backing vocal open
Hand Me Ups, just as the narrator begins to complain that he can never
escape the demands placed upon him. In one reading, the demands are not
serious. Walkers own sense of the lyrics is instructive here: he imagines
A n d E v e r y t h i n g w i t h i n R e a c h156
some extremely selsh, ambitious man who will stop at nothing, includ-
ing sacricing his children on whatever altar, because they steal his youth
and the focus of his attention, preventing him from living his dreams
(Walker 2006c, 28). In another reading, things couldnt be worse: mere
inconvenience takes on monstrous proportions, and The pee pee / soaked
/ trousers // The torn / muddied / dress, for example, become signiers
of war, dead children, the worst. As the songs persona imagines that the
mundane equates with the worst and that the worst is entering into him,
the music drops o progressively, until the a cappella refrain I felt / the
nail / . . . becomes, on the one hand, mere self-pitying, and on the other,
testament to an awful subjection. This overdetermination, then, implicates
the trivialities of life/survival in a larger theater of war, in which life/
survival takes on entirely separate meanings, the signiers shift contexts,
border on di erent limitations, demand di erent ethics. Thus, when the
singer-narrator sings The audience / is waiting // its audience / is wait-
ing, one must attend, rst, to the switch from denite article to possessive
pronoun, and second, to the e ect this has on the listeners sense of who
this audience is. Is this The the fantasy audience that this mans children
are depriving him of? More seriously, is its an audience in a theater of war
awaiting some deliverance, some unforeseeable event, a deus ex machina? In
tying a play on a clich of inheritance to crucixion imagery (a man being
handed up to a cross), Hand Me Ups forces the listener to decide between
bad, worse, and the worst. But will the worst ever have an audience, or must
it, Forever and / ever, remain to come? Will we ever be able to mourn the
worst?
7 . B u z z e r s ( F a c e s o f t h e G r a s s )
Hes done / Boys / Hes done
In Hand Me Ups, the singer-narrators Jesus-fantasy (crucixion never
merely indicates an ancient form of torture and death) carries its own
autoimmunitary connotations, certainly. Jesuss crucixion can stand as
T i m o t h y J . D e i n e s 157
a symbol, on the one side, as the exorcism that returns to save the ex-
orcist, in spite of everythinga real event. On the other hand, and from a
di erent point of view, it names the singularity whose sacrice redeems the
totality, eternal life/survival beyond death. This suggestion of a certain
messianism in Hand Me Ups is further polished in Buzzers, but it is
ambivalently recast as a question of decision, not revelation.
Buzzers quietly obsesses over the work of burnishing the silver-plate
to a luster, so that it can be used as a weapon: Polish / the fork / and stick
/ the fork / in him, repeats the singer. Hes done / Boys / Hes done /
Boys. The sound of metal striking soft metal (a quote of the cowbell on
Rawhide, o Climate of Hunter?) brings the violence in the tone down to
the bare level of the earth, as if to say, if a messiah is to enter this scene, it
will be an earthly one. A note (one of two) on the back of the CD slipcase
reads, Srebrenica had been the richest inland city in the Balkans, a cosmo-
politan mining townits very name meant silver. The him of the songs
refrainPolish / the fork / . . .plausibly refers to Dr. Karadzic, whose is
quoted to have said, at the very start of the song, in a fake radio broadcast:
Milosevic couldnt care less if Bosnia was recognized . . . Caligula pro-
claimed his horse senator but the horse never took his seat. Thus, another
theater of war, and, more precisely, the scene of the Srebrenica massacre
of 1995.
The lyrics are largely absurd: Where will / you sleep / my / stomach //
my second / stomach / though / the trees; and Spooking / yourself / in
the / breeze // Somebody / dies / somebody / dont shave. And, as often
happens, the listener is o ered imagery that he or she is virtually compelled
to attach to whole bodies. Massacres, the imagery suggests, consist of the
unjust destruction of whole bodies. The strangest (and in some ways most
haunting) moment of this meditation on the relation between part and
whole takes the form of a prose-poem interlude:
Faces of the grass go lengthening (oor) the lengthening faces through the
ice and the sun (ooor) faces lengthen go lengthening faces into lengthening
faces from the branch to the grass with buried heads they stand in full view
eyes sliding of the faces up and up slide up the faces ice and sun and up
A n d E v e r y t h i n g w i t h i n R e a c h158
the faces go lengthening faces eyes are sliding above the tall and peaceful
grass.3
Walker says somewhere that the lengthening faces refer to horses faces,
which might immediately put one in mind of Picassos Guernica. But what
is more readily apparent is that the di erences between faces, buried
heads, eyes, branch, grass, and ice and sun are not at all discern-
ible. They all slide together; all distinctions, such as the di erence between
nature and human, collapse. Walker croons these words over sustained
electronic treatments and plucked strings, lending to the impressionistic
mood of this segment of the song. This mood, however, serves to o set
the comic violenceanother clich, in factof the possibility of the stuck
silver fork, the less moody theme that surrounds this interlude.
Short of reading Buzzers (Faces of the Grass) as bald allegory of a kind
of response of the people of Srebrenica to their su ering, as I am tempted
to do, it is at least possible to say that one is o ered the terms of a decision
here between the sliding together of all distinction, on the one hand, and
the possibility of decision itself, on the other hand. Again, the listener is
presented with imagery of the worst kind, but he is not left to wallow in
it. Representations of su ering in Walkers text are never so passive as to
indulge that su ering; there is always a tension or a limit demarcating these
representations, opening them up to response and responsibility.
8 . P s o r i a t i c
Cross the west / coast to the / west coast to /
the west coast // The angelus / begins
One gets the sense listening to the second half of The Driftfrom Cue
forwardthat the general thematic of infection and communicationthe
autoimmunitary impulse, one might saythat limits subjects in the most
destructive and promising ways (including The Drift itself ) is close to turning
in on itselfthat what remains to come, in the Derridean sense, is in danger
T i m o t h y J . D e i n e s 159
of being pushed beyond the margins of the text. On the other hand, there
is another reading according to which the weakness of interiority becomes
a kind of strength of exposure, according to which overdetermination puts
language itself on trial as a terminally infected medium of exchange and
communication. Psoriatic acts as a kind of punctum in this regard: the
more one tries not to look at it, the more impossible it is to ignoremore-
over, the more it comes to structure the art object in its generality.
One of the more up-tempo tracks on the record, Psoriatic begins
with a soft, thunderous sound, as if, again, one of Walkers plagues is ap-
proaching. A down-tuned electric guitar marches between the thunder and
the opaque lyrics: Neath the bougie / a thimble rigger / slyly rolls / the
pea // Bye the bye / the bye the / bye. From this point forward, nothing
becomes clearer, except that we nd ourselves in a resolutely ontic world,
which is to say a world of things, existents, nontranscendental realities. Even
abstractions come down to earth: Red is patchy / snows the silver; cant
turn / from a / crotch in / the / darkness. But something is coming, and
its Wrapped in blankets / then in blankets. One can Hear the germs /
pinging on / the night wind in a frenzy of strings. Smallpox arrives, or has
it always already been there? Cross the west / coast to the / west coast to
/ the west coast puts one back in mind of Jolson and Jones and the West,
the sense of Manifest Destiny spreading, communicating in every sense.
There are other, obscure clues. In the chorus (or is it a verse?), for example,
laid over what sounds like the planing of wood (a casket, a cross), we hear,
Eye for hand / Dyey-et eye / bye-t the negro / come on sucker / anthrax
jesus / sack of the-b / shawl for he-b / no bye the / bye. No doubt we have
come back to America and the scene of its crimes. What remains interesting
in all of this is the autoimmunitary problem, or question: is there a sense
in which the communication that comes from without (here: the scourge,
the white) in e ect, was always already within? And can we make such a
claim without, for a moment, exonerating the crimes, or supplying an alibi
for them?
What is perhaps most curious about this piece is the suggestion that the
arrival of plague also marks the arrival of the angelus, that is, Christian
Catholicism, in general, and a ritual of the Incarnation, in particularin
A n d E v e r y t h i n g w i t h i n R e a c h160
short, the arrival of metaphysics, and the possible subordination of the
ontic to the ontological. Once the angelus begins, there is no stopping it
from claiming everything that went before the beginning. Its discursive
force works backwards in time, as it were, articulating and translating the
past in terms of the hegemonic future-present. The West, even before New
World contact, will have always already been Christian, will have always
already prepared the way for modernity, for disease, for communication.
Thus, west becomes east: Cross the east / coast to the / east coast //
Scratch the air / and blue burn // The angelus / begins. The beginning, the
angelus, in the end, is total. This is, quite literally, the oldest excuse in the
book for domination and repression.
The other note on the slipcase of The Drift refers to Psoriatic: during
the middle ages people aficted with the skin disease psoriasis were known as the
silver people. The formulation of the syntax in the passive voice suggested
that the silver people were named such by certain forces of exclusion,
likely the Church itself. I dont know for sure. In a sense, it doesnt really
matter, because the name serves to bring psoriasis, the disease, into the
fold, which is to say that the silver people, vis--vis the name and what the
name names, are at once included and excluded, and thus truly limited with
respect to the other.
9 . T h e E s c a p e ( T h a n k Y o u M r . K )
Wind blown hair / in a windowless / room
The theoretical stakes of The Drift (according to this reading anyway) can be
understood as coming down to the question of immanence, a concept that
fascinated Deleuze. In his neat text Plato, the Greeks, Deleuze wants to
identify the e ect of Platos Idea on the Greek cities, which Deleuze regards
as elds of immanence (1997, 136). These elds are the home of, or home
to, (the birth of ) philosophy itself. Deleuze quotes Vernant as saying that
the Greek philosopher invokes an order that is immanent to the cosmos.
Platos problem with this orderor rather within this order, according to
T i m o t h y J . D e i n e s 161
Deleuzeis the fact that anyone can lay claim to anything. There is no
criteria of selection among rivals in these societies of friends, or free
rivals (13637). Basically, there is too much democracy in Greece for Plato.
His response, for Deleuze, is to invent a transcendence that can be exercised
and situated within the eld of immanence itself (137). Platos poisoned
gift continues to infect modern philosophy, and every reaction against
Platonism is a restoration of immanence in its full extension and in its pu-
rity, which forbids the return of any transcendence. Deleuzes question,
then, in the wake of antiphilosophys (Spinozas, Nietzsches, his own)
reaction against Platonism, is how di erence, and thus hierarchyor as
Deleuze says selectionenters immanence. The answer to this problem
may be tautological: di erence-in-immanence is immanent, and there is
no transcendental rationale. But, as Deleuze recognizes, the problem itself
runs up against numerous paradoxes and aporias.
The Escape, and arguably the entirety of The Drift, can be read not
in terms of a solution to this conundrum, but as an articulation of it, of
both sides of itwhich is to say, before it. The lyrics opens in media res
with the suggestion of selection: The car / in front / follows / the long /
way around // Prey moves / predator moves. There are indications that
the predators, Foreshortened / angels, entertain at least the pretense of
transcendence, but they are either always exceeding or failing to meet the
mark: Underkill- // sticks in gullets // Overkill- // is personal / too many
/ bullets. The rabbi crater, however, keyed for action, does not fail,
and hits the mark. It would take too long to analyze why Walker might
refer to a rabbi here and not a priest, for example, or why he would insert
the Kabbalah references of Serifot and Kellipot immediately after. One
tact of analysis, however, would be to suggest that, contrary to Psoriatic,
for example, in which Apocalyptic vision replaces the prophetic word,
here the reverse is true, and the prophetic word takes precedence (Deleuze
1997, 41). The sensuousness of Combs of honey comes between Serifot
and Kellipot, and sensuality of Salivas coating / balls of money comes
after. These images are not counterpoised to the Kabbalah, but express the
worldly truth of it.4 Which is to say that Foreshortened / angels might
be better read, after all, not as an indicator of apocalyptic transcendence,
A n d E v e r y t h i n g w i t h i n R e a c h162
but of prophetic immanence, consistent with the elegant immanence of
Christ (4142).
However, Walkers text suggests the terrifying possibility that apoca-
lypse remains to threaten an immanent world. Singing over an abrupt shift
in sound from methodical minimalism (drums, treatment, cello) to a kind
of schizophrenic onslaught, Walker repeats, in simple melody, three times,
You and me / against the / world, and then, also three times, World about
/ to end. Can we recognize here a kind of perversion that would desire
immanence without apocalypse, on the one hand, and apocalypse without
immanence, on the other? In a di erent register, what would be the stakes
of imagining democracy without, say, sovereignty, on the one hand, and
sovereignty shorn of the limiting force of democracy on the other?
Two puzzles conclude The Escape. The rst, which I use as an epi-
graph to this entry, is the asymmetrical Wind blown hair / in a windowless
/ room, and the second is the symmetrical Look into / its eyes // It will /
look into / your eyes. Taken together, these lyrics imply that the thought of
immanence, its concept, must itself posit a limit. For the idea of immanence
to retain its credibility, however, this limitthe source of Wind blown
hairmust be silenced. Otherwise, one is left with the tautology that the
truth of immanence is proper to immanence itself, and that the di erentia-
tion and hierarchy within immanence are their own justication.
Perhaps Walkers Donald Duck impression, lodged between the two
riddles, is the proper Bataillean response to the qua(g)(ck)mire.
1 0 . A L o v e r L o v e s
and everything // within reach
Tautology is perhaps an appropriate place to end, for there is a kind of
truth in the idea and act according to which a lover loves. As everyone
knows, a lover only loves when the beloved remains to come. Requited love
is no love at all. Psst Psst / Psst, interrupts Walker, a self-interruption,
in fact, of the crooners own love song, accompanied by plucked guitar:
T i m o t h y J . D e i n e s 163
Corneas misted / Psst Psst // colour high / Psst Psst / Psst // Motionless //
Psst Psst / Psst Psst // for seconds / at a time. The high color of love, blood
in the fact, tears in the eyes, senselessly and forever interrupted. Psst also
functions as the nonsensical imperative of nitude here, limiting love so
that love may come. Walker imagines the sharing of singular nitude as a
kind of death-in-love: A hand / that is / cold / in another / colder. No two
singularities alike, and thus di erence and hierarchy, perhaps. But could
one ever determine the hierarchy-in-di erence of love without register-
ing love as political? This question will remain. And everything // within
reach will also remain, including a future, so long as love remains, in some
sense, immune to itself.
I
n o t e s
1. Unless otherwise cited, all lyrics are taken from the liner notes of The Drift by Scott
Walker (2006).
2. These lines are apparently taken from The Iliad (see Walker 2006c, 28).
3. Scott Walker takes a keen interest in his liner notes; practical limitations prevent me
from reproducing the exact spacing and enjambment of his text. Interested readers
should consult the liner notes directly.
4. Another analysis might want to test this text against Marxs On the Jewish Question
to determine the relationship between prophetic sensuality and the possibility of both
political and human emancipation.
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