Conditional Love
by Ardele Lister, 1997. Courtesy of the V tape.

Conditional Love
by Ardele Lister, 1997. Courtesy of the V tape.

Christine Ross

The following is excerpted from an article which appeared in Revue d'art canadienne/Canadian Art Review (RACAR) XXIV:1, 1997; pub. 1999, pp. 42-51.

Résumé

Dans La Communauté des citoyens, la sociologue Dominique Schnapper définit la nation comme une communauté abstraite de citoyens dont l'unité est garantie par un corps politique qui arrache l'individu de ses appartenances religieuses, dynastiques et ethniques pour « unifier les hommes ». En tant que principal processus de collectivisation de l'ère moderne, la nation performe la transcendance du local en supprimant graduellement les différences à l'intérieur pour accentuer les différences par rapport à l'extérieur, favorisant ainsi un processus d'homogénéisation. Les principales questions qui sous-tendent le présent article sont les suivantes: l'art actuel est-il critique de la nation? Dans l'affirmative, quelles sont les stratégies esthétiques mises en oeuvre dans l'élaboration d'une telle critique? En quoi le processus national d'homogénéisation fait-il place à d'autres modes d'appartenances? L'essai se penche sur trois oeuvres vidéo canadiennes réalisées pendant les années 1990, Yes Sir, Madame… de Robert Morin, Conditional Love d'Ardele Lister et Vexation Island de Rodney Graham, dans le but d'examiner leur représentation de l'appartenance « canadienne » à travers le questionnement de la nation. Ces trois oeuvres médiatiques articulent une esthétique de négociation qui met en place un mode d'appartenance nationale intermédiaire qui remet en cause la conception d'un « Canada unifié ».

In La Communauté des citoyens, the French sociologist Dominique Schnapper defines the modern nation as an abstract "community of citizens" whose unity is guaranteed by a political body which has replaced religious, dynastic and ethnic communities to "unify people."¹The nation unifies beings, but it does so only by pulling out, by tearing off the individual from the limitations inherent to his or her belonging to a particular group.² This means that the modern nations activates a split with ethnic belongings and with any forms of belonging lived as natural by the individual. This split may seem violent, yet for Schnapper, it is the main condition of possibility of nationhood. But like many thinkers writing today on the question of nation, Schnapper observes a crisis. The reinforcement of productivist societies, the development of globalization and the rise of nationalistic claims by ethnic groups seeking recognition as nations have weakened the political principle, which in turn has weakened the social bond.³ Even though she champions nation, she sees cause for alarm: "Nothing guarantees that the modern democratic nation will still have in the future the capacity to ensure the social bond as it did in the past."⁴

Nation is not an easy term to define. A modern phenomenon whose initial elaboration may be traced back to premodern societies but whose foundations are historically situated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a holdall concept referring to polymorphous realities, a notion that has become as vague as the notions it refers to (such as culture, universalism and the will to live together), it has nevertheless been the main means of collectivization in the modern era.⁵ Such diverse thinkers as Homi Bhabha, Yael Tamir, Gérard Bouchard and, to a certain degree, Schnapper have argued that, notwithstanding this conceptual vagueness, the modern constitutions of nation have this in common: that they establish themselves by transcending local powers, and by attempting to suppress the ethnic, cultural, linguistic, religious and gender differences between communities.⁶ As Yael Tamir maintains, this process of homogenization takes place by gradually erasing the differences from within so as to accentuate the differences from without, a process which strengthens the citizen's awareness of borders and separates "us" from "them."⁷ In other words, each citizen is compelled to forget his or her particular belongings to be part of a nationally bordered social order. But as contemporary nationalist, feminist, neo-immigrant and ethnic group claims have been made manifest, complete oblivion of particularisms did not occur and communities have struggled, are struggling more and more, for the recognition of their differences. We are now witnessing the breakdown of a national paradigm based on homogenization and possibly the beginnings of another paradigm, which would allow for the redefinition of unity through difference. This essay is an attempt to examine how recent media art represents this transitional moment and how image technologies are explored in contemporary art's questioning of nationhood, so that one may start to understand it and how new national paradigms are slowly emerging in the western world.

Schnapper's definition of the modern nation is extremely useful for the present problematization of nation as the "only" means of legitimate social bonding. It emphasizes the abstract nature of nation, that is, the pulling out or arrachement from particular forms of belonging that has to take place in order to achieve national universalism. Following Bruno Latour's definition of modernity as a project of purification of categories, as an ongoing attempt to separate the human and the nonhuman (i.e. the subject and the object, culture and nature),⁸ modern nation may be described as a project which seeks to separate the citizen from his or her "natural" belongings. But, and this is where Schnapper's uncritical reinforcement of nation as arrachement needs to be problematized, modern nation is also about intermediacy and hybridity. As Latour maintains, modernity is also paradoxically about the creation of quasi-objects or quasi-subjects who incessantly proliferate because of modernity's faithfulness to purifying practices which prevent it from considering the mixture of categories:

Moderns do differ from premoderns by this single trait: they refuse to conceptualise quasi-objects as such. In their eyes, hybrids present the horror that must be avoided at all costs by a ceaseless, even maniacal purification. […] There are as many purification processes as there are collectives. But the machine for creating differences is triggered by refusal to conceptualise quasi-objects, because this very refusal leads to the uncontrollable proliferation of a certain type of being: […] [t]hese nonhumans possess miraculous properties because they are at one and the same time both social and asocial, producers of natures and constructors of subjects. They are the tricksters of comparative anthropology. […] Worlds appear commensurable or incommensurable only to those who cling to measured measures. Yet […] nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else. Never by itself, but always through the mediation of another.⁹

Hence, as nation attempts to purify the individual of his or her ethnicity, it also creates hybrids because of its "refusal to conceptualize" them. Hybrids are quasi-objects or quasi-subjects who do not completely comply with the "measured" abstraction of the national and who bring into play complex networks of negotiations, mediations and intermediate organizations between the particular and the universal, between nature and culture. So the question emerges: what constitutes belonging when it puts into crisis the holistic view of the nation? Furthermore: how does one represent hybrid belongings? How are image technologies explored so as to problematize what Bhabha has termed the "pedagogical"¹⁰ nation (the normative homogenized view of nationhood)?

This essay is about how recent media art rethinks belonging in the midst of the questioning of the national. It addresses three Canadian art works from the 1990s [Yes Sir, Madame… by Robert Morin, Conditional Love by Ardele Lister and Vexation Island by Rodney Graham] that, together, articulate a renewed sense of "Canadian" attachment. These works elaborate what I would call an aesthetics of negotiation, which is for me the locus of hybridity. If this concept is to be useful at all, however, we need to keep in mind the contingent and contradictory nature of the negotiations it underlies. My intention here is to complexify hybridity by emphasizing the networking of its mixtures instead of merely stabilizing its achievement. This objective is motivated by my belief in the potential flexibility of "New World" nations. As the historian Gérard Bouchard has argued, the new Western communities which emerged in and soon after the sixteenth century, in Canada, Latin America, the United States and Australia, were exposed from the start to indigenous and immigrant groups with whom they had to negotiate in order to constitute themselves as nations. Bouchard maintains that these new nations were not models of tolerance - they have continually attempted to suppress differences through such violent practices as genocide, deportation, forced interbreeding and sterilization of non-white individuals - but because of the resistance of different cultural collectivities, they have become more productive in inventing ways to reconcile differences, in opposition to France, for example, where cultural and religious differences have yet to be officially recognized.¹¹ In this context, it is imperative to examine the type of negotiations at play in media representations of nationness and to see how they problematize unity by diversity. In their use of image technologies, the three art works share the following feature: they surge the abstraction of a unified "Canada" so as to put into play an intermediate space of negotiation between linguistic, ethnic and technological categories. In this liminal space, national belonging is defined as an in-between process of attachment. This is why I have called the three works the "negotiation works." […]

Negotiation work no. 2

The one-hour-long Conditional Love by Ardele Lister was released in 1998. Like Yes Sir! Madame…, it may also be seen as a self-portrait, particularly if we keep in mind Raymond Bellour's theorization of the term as one of the key modes of narration in video. The self-portrait brings into play not so much the story of one's life but the story of an ongoing quest for identity, a search narrated by the video artist who "starts with a question that reveals an absence to oneself."¹² A Canadian artist who has been living in the United States for several years, Lister begins her self-portrait with the question "What is Canadian about me?" As the tape unfolds, we follow Lister's voice-over as she comments, questions and thinks about Canadian identity, presenting us with footage of post-WWII Hollywood films about Canada interlaced with family films and excerpts of interviews held with different Canadians asked to define their own perception of Canada.

I do not have space here to elaborate on the many facets of this videotape. What I want to emphasize is that video is being used by Lister to tell the story of an absence which is in fact the absence of Canadian cinematic representations of Canada in 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. As Hollywood cinema is being shown on the screen, she notes how the Canadian Co-operation Project had donated the feature film industry to the Americans. Until the mid-1960s, Canadian leaders failed to support the development of a Canadian feature film industry which would have been the means (this was, after all, the role of wartime and post-war national cinema) to provide Canadians with a recognition and mirroring device "necessary for developing a sense of self." In Conditional Love, video becomes the medium responsible for the representation and the storytelling of Canadian identity; it does what cinema has failed to do, but it does so, and this is crucial, only in as much as it "represents lack." Indeed, Lister's story is the story of Canada as lack. This non-identity is made manifest not only in the reproduction of different Hollywood films representing Canada from an American point of view, but also in the series of interviews where Canadians either fail to define Canadianness ("it is nothing" claims one participant), or succeed in defining it but only in relation to and in an attempt to resist American identity.

Indecisiveness is therefore created in that the video does not fill the lack of cinema and does not resolve what it is to be a Canadian. Nor does it effectuate the breakdown of "Canada" as a cohesive norm as in Morin's Yes Sir! Madame…On the contrary, for Lister, this cohesive construct has never really been imagined. Conditional Love narrates, from beginning to end, the absence of Canadian representation, a gap which has prevented the shaping of a unified whole, of an imagined community of citizens. The surge is not schizophrenic but depressed, melancholic, taking the form of a lament denouncing Canada as an empty signifier. For Lister, if Expo '67 seems to be a moment of imagined community, this imagination does not hold in the context of the recent Free-Trade Agreement which is perceived as yet another step in American absorption of Canadian identity. As the footage of American films and anti-Free-Trade demonstrations unfold, as Lister's voice-over fails to secure Canadian nationhood, a troubling question gradually emerges from Conditional Love: if one cannot represent nation, how can one even imagine the hybrid? In other words, is it possible to negotiate with no construct to negotiate with? These questions are not, cannot be, answered by a videotape which is about lack. The function of video here is to reveal and question the failure of cinema in providing Canada with a representation of itself, articulating a revelation of absence, one that the voice-over insists upon even though Conditional Love is also composed of more recent films (from the 1960s and 1970s) on Canada produced by the National Film Board. Let us emphasize, however, that if the question of the representation of nation is not resolved, it is at least enunciated, and if this is so, it is because video is negotiating with cinema. A form of technological and narrative hybridity is at play between video and cinema, the present and the past. The productivity of this negotiation is that it represents Canada as a country where the vagueness of the concept of nation results from the incompleteness of its homogenization project that would have otherwise guaranteed its cohesion and sovereignty. The video narrative is ultimately about a nation that had never really succeeded in defining its existence because of its inability to establish a clear distinction between "us" and "them," between English Canadians and Americans. It shows how Canadians lack the sovereign political power to undo critically and creatively a paradigm of homogenization.

As video negotiates with cinema to provide a representation of Canada, its acknowledgement of lack opens up two possibilities with regard to Canada's future development of nationhood. The absence of a homogenizing discourse could mean a greater flexibility in reconciling unity and cultural diversity because a weaker identity is not trapped by the questions of mission and affirmation of superiority. But it could also mean an inaptitude for thinking, understanding and representing difference because difference can only be defined in connection with identity. […]

Christine Ross is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. She is the author of Images de surface: L'art video reconsidéré, and a regular contributor to Parachute.

1. Dominique Schnapper, La communauté des citoyens: sur l'idée moderne de nation (Paris, 1994), 14.
2. Schnapper, La communauté des citoyens, 92.
3. Schnapper, La communauté des citoyens, 15.
4. Schnapper, La communauté des citoyens, 11. Trans. C. R.
5. Gérard Bouchard, "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?", unpublished paper delivered at the "Nationalité, citoyenneté et solidarité" symposium organized by Le Groupe de recherche sur le nationalisme and the Department of Philosophy at the Université de Montréal, Montreal, 21-23 May 1998.
6. Cf. Homi Bhabha, ed., The Location of Culture (New York, 1994), and Bhabha, ed. Nation and Narration (New York, 1990); Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton, 1993), and Tamir, "The Age of Atonement: The Changing of a Political Paradigm," unpublished paper delivered at the "Nationalité, citoyenneté et solidarité" symposium organized by Le Groupe de recherche sur le nationalisme and the Department of Philosophy at the Université de Montréal, Montreal, 21-23 May 1998; Gérard Bouchard, Entre l'Ancien et le Nouveau Monde: le Québec comme population neuve et culture fondatrice (Ottawa, 1996), Bouchard and Yvan Lamonde, eds., La nation dans tous ses états: le Québec en comparaison (Montreal, 1997), and Bouchard, "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?"
7. Tamir, "The Age of Atonement."
8. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Hemel Hempstead, 1993).
9. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 112-13.
10. Bhabha, "Dissemination: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation," Bhabha, ed., The Location of Culture, 147.
11. Bouchard, "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?"
12. Camilla Griggers, Becoming-Woman, Theory Out of Bounds, VIII (Minneapolis, 1997), 119-20.