Deines, S. Walker

139

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

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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


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


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:


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,


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


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.


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


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


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


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


/ 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


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.


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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,


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:


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.

r e f e r e n c e s

Borradori, Giovanna. 2003. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jrgen Habermas.and

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Critical and Clinical, translated by D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco, 3652. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.

. 1997b. Plato, the Greeks. In Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by D. W. Smith and

M. A. Greco, 1367. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 2002. Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of

Reason Alone. In Acts of Religion, translated by S. Weber, et al, and edited by G. Anidjar,

42101. New York: Routledge, 2002.


. 1995. The Rhetoric of Drugs. In Points . . . : Interviews, 19741994, translated by Peggy

Kamuf, et al., edited by Elisabeth Weber, 22854. Stanford, CA: Stanford University

Press.

Dttman, Alexander Garca. 1996. At Odds with AIDS: Thinking and Talking About a Virus.

Trans. P. Gilgen and C. Scott-Curtis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Gasch, Rodolphe. 1986. The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reection.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hegel, G. W. F. 1997. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

. 2006. Reason in History: General Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Marxists

Internet Archive. 18 December. www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/

introduction.htm.

Immune. 2002. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed., 818. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1997. The Sense of the World. Trans. J. S. Librett. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1982. The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York:

Penguin Books.

Reed, Jeremy. 1998. Scott Walker: Another Tear Falls. New York: Creation Books.

Walker, Scott. 2006a. Climate of Hunter. CD [liner notes]. London: Virgin Records Ltd.

. 2006b. The Drift. CD [liner notes]. New York: 4AD.

. 2006c. Interview by Rob Young. Wire 267 (May): 2429.

iek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso.

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