Confessions of a Critic (2020)
About the only published response to my 1984 lecture and article “Axes of Difference” was an article by the Toronto Globe and Mail art critic John Bentley Mays writing, though, in C magazine [John Bentley Mays, “Miracles of Emanuel Jaques,” C, 2 (Summer 1984): 38-47]. The article was typeset in two columns: the marginal text was a notational response to “Axes of Difference,” while the main body a piece of fiction that could be read as Mays’s allegorical response. Only decades later did I realize that the fictional part could be read as a roman à clef, with me as the subject! I wrote this text in early 2020 to be a chapter of an as yet unpublished book on discourse in Toronto during the 1980s, but decided not to use it.
For Mays’s article as published in C magazine [single page], click here.
For Mays’s article as published in C magazine [double page spread], click here.
For “Axes of Difference,” click here.
For a retrospective look at “Axes of Difference” and its controversy, click here.
Confessions of a Critic
Whenever a critic resorts to fiction, you wonder what he or she is confessing. Unwittingly. [1]
“Fiction” became available as a device for criticism in the early 1980s, primarily under the influence of French writers Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. [2] These new forms of writing were performances: critical performances; genre performances, too. In that the influences sometimes were literary critics and philosophers in the case of Barthes and Derrida, and not fiction writers per se, contexts not contents were brought into play. That is, it was not just the devices of narrative fiction or genres that were adopted, but the formats and layouts of publication, too. [3] So in his “Miracles of Emanuel Jaques” John Bentley Mays, a sometime fiction writer as well as critic for Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper, tried his hand at ficto-criticism. He juxtaposes two texts, one fictional, the other a marginal commentary based on facts and events. Some might think the latter merely displaced footnotes, but the two texts are of different registers. The commentary is not an explanation of the fictional text. [4]
Who can explain this strange text, the fictional part, that is? It is an allegory, it seems, perhaps a roman à clef. So it is ripe for interrogation, if not interpretation. The marginal text begins: “This story may be read as a reply to a paper by Philip Monk, entitled ‘Axes of Difference.’” [5] The story itself begins: “Once I knew a man, the critic Isaac Steinway, and the knowing was in Toronto. I knew him in the city through a springtide season of my life, years ago, learning from that elder satyr how to play the pipes of our critics’ trade, how to dance the uncertain dance of theory, desire and ecstasy according to the measures offered us by the city” (38). How do we reconcile these two beginnings in the reply of one to the other in reply to Philip Monk?
The commentary continues: “In it, Monk argued that one can read new Toronto art as a symmetry of motives, dividing along lines of gender…. Philip Monk’s argument was presented (inappropriately, to my mind) as synchronic survey of artistic practices, with virtually no reference to the recent history of popular imagery, desire and cultural determination in Toronto. Having considered some aspects of that history, I am inclined to believe Monk was being quite optimistic about Toronto women artists, without justification” (38). Mays himself was pessimistic. His story is no riposte to “Axes of Difference,” no argument against its divisions and favouring of women. Seemingly aggrieved, Mays would not take sides in this debate; his reply was more like a plague on both your genders.
The lecture, or Philip Monk’s lecture, or Philip Monk himself, or Philip Monk in the exposure of himself in this lecture, or the death of Philip Monk, his end, in expending himself in this lecture, what was this story replying to? What was this story performing if not the end of Philip Monk? That is, the end of Philip Monk in the death of Steinway, the fictional character in Mays’s story. Killing was a drastic reply! Was Steinway Philip Monk? But how could this be, since in the story Steinway is older than the narrator and John Mays, the two friends for a time, was a decade older than Monk?
A story has a beginning and an ending. The diachrony of Mays’s fiction replied to the synchrony of Monk’s argument. But where did his story come from? What were its motivations? Not the lecture alone, although the story was written in the white heat of its aftermath. It was written quickly, it seems, after Monk’s lecture in mid-February (Monk’s May Vanguard article, too, being mentioned) to be published in C magazine’s summer issue. Perhaps Mays already had been ruminating on some aspects of it. Certainly, some of it, for instance, the last section on the murder of the Toronto shoeshine boy Emanuel Jaques, the event of which is not fictional, may have been written in the late 1970s. [6]
There are two stories in operation here, one of the history of Toronto art from the mid-1970s to 1984 in which two generations of artists participate, and to which the shoeshine boy’s murder is appended; the other of the fictional critic Steinway. The two stories are linked by two entities the narrator calls “the Machine” and “the Corporation.” [7] They are the agents of this story.
Richard Rhodes’s exhibition 80/1/2/3/4 Toronto: Content/Context, “where some of the artists cited by Monk were included,” was on hand during the writing of “Miracles” (38). [8] Its initial manifestation in the story as “the “Machine” may mislead readers to believe that Rhodes may be a player in Mays’s story; he is not. His exhibition only became “the Machine” through the unintended intervention of Jeanne Randolph, who delivered her lecture, “Influencing Machines,” that same day as Monk’s “Axes of Difference,” with John Mays in attendance. [9] “The notion of speaking of art exhibitions as industrial operations first came to me during a lecture by the Toronto critic and psychiatrist Jeanne Randolph. The address dealt with the relationship between the viewer’s experience of certain art works and the schizophrenic’s experience of ‘influencing machines’. Every exhibition can be understood as a meaning-creating Machine of the sort described here” (39). This may be the case, but Rhodes’s exhibition remains a marginal note, even if Mays refers to it there as “the Machine”; it is merely a reference point for the artists it showed—on which Mays performed an analysis and created categories Rhodes himself failed to make, failing, therefore, to make his exhibition into a machine. [10] (These categories appear in the commentary, but not in the story.) Rather, Mays constructs his own machine, partly the story itself but also a component part within it, in opposition to “Axes of Difference.”
Steinway was a vehicle for John Mays to talk about the recent history of Toronto art from his own perspective, which meant that this history had to go back to the seventies, not only to explain how we got to 1984, the subject of Monk’s synchronic address, but also to provide what Mays thought a proper critique of the second-generation artists who were the subjects of Monk’s lecture.
Of those days in the 1970s, which were also the early years of Mays’s association with the artist-run gallery A Space, the narrator says, “Steinway recalled the heyday of that joyful blasphemy against Olympian abstract authority, recalling the spectacles of self-disclosure and self-analysis in the mortal and carnal art of performance, in the spectral, staring examinations of video, and in extravagant deeds of means mixed and impure…. And he remembered with special pleasure the wit of those days before the closing years of the 1970s, before the change that took place then, when artists stopped deploying the complex strategies of parody, perversity and appropriation as means of ripping away the veil from established power’s absurdity—when artists, sadly, stopped resisting power’s presumptions to total, inevitable reality” (39-40). Steinway dated this change to around 1978, when a new generation had started to create its own artist-run centres (actually it was 1979), when he “observed a pattern of solemn reversions…. The artists in those days put aside the previous outrage and valour of sexual artistic, intellectual parody, preferring instead to mimic the powerful, uniform conservatism of father, policeman, capitalist, and academic artist.” Steinway noted “the striking of the new apolitical, passive stances” and a “shift from audacity to melancholy in Toronto’s art” (40). [11] Steinway’s observations of art in 1984 do not differ so much from Philip Monk’s—and, in fact, at this point of the story, he is espousing Monk’s view in “Axes of Difference”—of artists’ reversion, passivity, and melancholy—though applying Monk’s condemnation now to both genders. [12]
Steinway’s point of view was also that of the Machine, but to understand the Machine we need to flesh out the critic Steinway. Steinway was not a pure art critic (neither was Mays); his mytho-poetic imagination showed he had more Northrop Frye than Clement Greenberg in him. Hence his story of the ancient Titan, “who now lies buried and dreaming beneath the urban grid woven upon the land…. Steinway speculated that we who live in Toronto have no histories except those the sleeping Titan gives us from his endless dream, that fathomless treasury of histories. We are the fictions of his desire; so to know ourselves, and what we and artists make, is really to know the varieties and powers of the Titan’s desiring” (38). The narrator disobeyed his mentor in “telling out this story of Toronto,” confessing some of Steinway’s secrets, too, the secrets of art critics. They were not tricks of the trade since Steinway admitted that the critic was not in control of them. Moreover, perversely, they were articles of “bad faith.” For “we must not forget that the art-works are reading us as well, revealing the heart that receives them,” Steinway admitted on his last day with the narrator. Criticism was born from the “critic’s bourgeois and rational body being violated” by means of the artwork’s “act of penetration and revelation,” as much as the critic might try to hide it—or even be unconscious of it. “The critical writings we produce do two things, only one of which is readily apparent to the reader: the texts first press the reader’s attention back toward the works of art, but also away from the critic’s complicities, anxieties and hopes disclosed. Thus criticism, whatever else it may be in theory or practice, is secretly a decoy, attracting notice away from the wounded creatures we critics are” (38-39). [13] We need remember that it not only Steinway confessing here but perhaps also the bourgeois art critic of Toronto’s conservative newspaper The Globe and Mail, too.
The story hinges on this penetrating wound, but its referent is different depending on who is telling it, the narrator or author John Mays. The Machine is a hinge, too, a transitional device—a decoy, as well. It is both subject (“The Machine”) and process: that is, it inhabits language and writing, the “museum of our disorder,” as the narrator calls it. The Machine “abolished time and created meaning in time’s place.” It was a writer’s artifact. Abolishing time, the Machine therefore was synchronic, as in Mays’s complaint of Monk’s lecture, retaining only a trace of material and temporal artworks in its assemblage. [14] Looking into the Machine Steinway saw what Philip Monk saw in “Axes of Difference.” (One could say that “Axes of Difference” was a differentiating machine.) “The Machine, he told me, had torn away the veil from the occulted history of Toronto art, and had also torn away the bandage from his wound” (39).
But then later, on the fateful day Steinway looked deeper, deeper than Philip Monk, and found beneath the decoy of theory what the Machine disguised. “Steinway left off his unhappy, obsessive monologue of theory, and told me what he had seen in the heart of the Machine.” He saw the Corporation. The Machine and the Corporation were the inverse of each other: the Machine was meaning minus time; the Corporation was time minus meaning. The Corporation “abolished meaning and created time and nothingness in meaning’s place,” drowning bodies in a “devastating temporal flow.” Thus “having stripped meaning from the bodies, the Corporation filled the emptiness with the sheer bourgeois rationality and desolation of Toronto…. Steinway saw the Corporation inside the Machine, at the centre of recent Toronto art” (42).
It was not that Steinway differed from Philip Monk in seeing in recent Toronto art “the public ascendance of doleful sentimentality; he saw artists portraying themselves insistently as ruined and violated victims, and society as omnipotent, penetrating, infinitely knowing victimizer, overwhelming everything with language.” Steinway’s understanding was more penetrating than Monk’s because it was historical, not synchronic, more local, not theoretical from afar. [15] “Then came the further revelation, as he saw that the Corporation inside his body and inside the artists’ younger bodies had also been at work in the public history of the city, in 1977 … [shaping] the art made in Toronto during the previous seven years” (43).
What happened in 1977 that divided the practices of two generations of Toronto artists? Then led to a “period of inward immigration, painful solitudes, [that replaced] a period of centrifugal sexualities, sociabilities, and desires” (40)? It was not an art event at all but the “notorious murder” of twelve-year old shoeshine boy Emanuel Jaques, “a child of impoverished Portuguese immigrants from the Azores,” by three gay men. The moral panic that followed led to the cleanup of prostitution and body rub parlours on Yonge Street: the “miracles.” It led as well to the subsequent monitoring of sexualities—as well as to the censoring of the polymorphous meanings of art. [16] But the effects of this event, according to Mays, were more pervasive, more insidious, because more personal and subjective: “But not before the day he stood in the presence of the Machine, and saw the Corporation in its heart, did Steinway come to believe that Emanuel Jaques’s death in that ghastly mystery play of language, power and desire was not an event in past history only. It was also a rite replayed again and again in the production of art, as artists, the first artists to have come of age after the myth’s genesis, continually performed in their work the transformations of the boy’s last hours” (47). [17]
This is an extraordinary diagnosis of the collective psychological state of young Toronto artists, turning an event into an ongoing rite and claiming it totally determinant of the art they made. Responding right after the publication of Monk’s article, Mays’s article/story was pertinent; but it seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Was it the opacity of his fiction or the fact that Mays was even more devastating than Monk in his condemnation of a whole generation of Toronto artists, male and female alike? [18]
At the time, everyone could agree on one thing, though: getting rid of Philip Monk. [19] Simone de Beauvoir once asked, “Must we burn Sade?” Toronto added, “Must we kill Philip Monk?” John Mays’s approach was novel: killing Monk through the surrogacy of fiction. Apparently, Mays believed Monk had already sacrificed himself in front of the Toronto art community through his ritual performance of “Axes of Difference.” [20] A Freudian might ask of the death of Steinway, did Mays wish Philip Monk dead—or a fascination with him extirpated from his own psyche?
For Mays was killing a bit of himself, too. Monk had not gone far enough in his lecture; he had not seen deeply enough. Although he was looking at the art in front of him, theory had gotten in the way. He needed to be supplemented, not just countered by a stronger theory—anything but theory. Mays chose fiction; he chose a story to tell this history. [21] But to tell this history in fictional form, its protagonist had to be dual. The elder Steinway was based on the younger Monk as far as Steinway penetrated only the Machine. [22] “Axes of Difference” would take us only so far, however. To reveal the workings of the Corporation, Monk had to be supplemented by Mays. How delighted was Mays in this consummation of two in the character of Steinway? Only Mays, though, could tell us why each, Monk and Mays (who, though, lived on perhaps in the narrator), had to die off in the death of Steinway.
It was not enough to have a rival history of Toronto art; one needed a rival machine. Mimetic rivalry demanded more than counter-critique. It demanded invention: the invention of a machine, a machine to rival the other. In this rivalry, which would win out to become the influencing machine of Toronto art? [23]
Mays doesn’t invent his machine from an analysis of Toronto art; he invents his fictional machine from an actual event: the 1977 murder of Emanuel Jaques—or, rather, from the “organization” that made it possible. He interprets this organization—the loose association of murderers—and its acts as an apparatus. (According to Mays’s story, the murderers composed a [small “c”] corporation as a visible “icon” of its unseen “archetype,” the Corporation.) Then he structures this apparatus so that it operates as a linguistic model. The model determines the outcome, ipso facto: the murder.
Every action in their mechanistic scenario followed the structures of language; and especially the institutional rhetoric of the small and independent (and therefore pre-modern) capitalist company…. It existed, however, to create nothing except itself, as a fiction of language. And because it set language as its eschatology and goal, the organization was thoroughly imbued with the fundamental strategic character of all language, its naturalness. Each act of the corporation had to be forced into purely linguistic form; therefore that form partook of the radical naturalness of language. In the trio’s small Yonge Street rooms, saturated by language, there could be no tolerance for anything except linguistic structures and acts, self-referential fulfillments of nature at every point (43)…. The only resolution of this dilemma—of every dilemma precipitated purely by the linguistic structures of sensual discourse—is premeditated murder. One can only experience pleasure as non-pleasure, or powerful language, if the object of desire is wholly undesirable; living, yet already dead; in revolt, but already reduced to fantastic, discursive non-entity…. The cycle came to an end when the final theoretical solution presented itself as the inevitable and appropriate product of the cycle itself, or mere Nature” (44). [24]
Except this machine, which invents itself through the patent of another (namely Roland Barthes’s book Sade/Fourier/Loyola), is not quite true in its mechanics. “Barthes’s book has influenced my thoughts throughout this passage,” but Mays fundamentally misinterprets Barthes’s “linguistic” or, rather, rhetorical analysis of the Marquis de Sade. (Not only that, Mays also hadn’t read Of Grammatology well. [25]) For Sade’s is a “universe of the discourse,” not the real world. As Barthes writes, “what happens in a novel by Sade is strictly fabulous, i.e., impossible; or more exactly, the impossibilities of the referent are turned into possibilities of the discourse…. Sade always chooses the discourse over the referent; he always sides with semiosis rather than mimesis: what he ‘represents’ is constantly being deformed by the meaning, and it is on the level of the meaning, not of the referent, that we should read him.” [26] Barthes is saying exactly the opposite of Mays.
Mays had to make us believe that these youths, paid or persuaded by the trio of young men for their sexual gratification, were rational bourgeois subjects, as in Sade’s novels; that they were aware of their subjected function, cognizant of their role within this machinic set-up; and that the trio of soulless degenerates and drifters would have the intelligence to enact, even imagine, this “rhetorical fantasy” (44). [27] This is a fiction Mays himself rhetorically imposes on the event. Its purpose, however, is to serve another end. He deceptively leads us through a series of equations—from the corporation as an entity to “Axes of Difference” as a discourse—to the conclusion that murder = linguistics = theory. Steinway died from his adherence to theory, deserved to die. Philip Monk, too. Death was the logical consequence of theory.
For Mays is making his allegory a discourse on aesthetics, where it is the critic/theoretician who is as twisted and perverse as these murderers: who “can only experience pleasure as non-pleasure, or powerful language, if the object of desire is wholly undesirable; living, yet already dead; in revolt, but already reduced to fantastic, discursive non-entity.” Some Toronto artists may have believed this description applied to Monk’s rational theories that discounted the discursive non-entity of the work of art; and some may have believed, figuratively, that “the only resolution of this dilemma—of every dilemma precipitated purely by the linguistic structures of sensual discourse—is premeditated murder”; but in Mays’s allegory, wounding ultimately turns on itself: the critic kills only himself through theory, not the work of art.
“But Steinway saw all these things in his own heart as well, and the fear of that vision drove him to take refuge in theory. His understanding was debased to abstract critical languages radically emptied of desire, because he could not bear to desire art any longer in Toronto; to austere philosophies, because he could not stand the critical surrender to art works, which only confirmed the brokenness of his heart, and which declared again the Titan’s awful dream of alienation, being dreamed for and through us all. So I found him in his rooms, old priest being strangled by the snakes of theory, when I went to him in his last days” (47). Mays saw Monk’s turning on the art community as a portrait of him turning on himself, passionate surrender to artworks having given away to dispassionate alienation, acting out in advance, although Mays could not foresee, Monk’s exile from the art community.
Mays gave no rationale for his criminalization of theory, other than his identity of murder and linguistics. He didn’t have to: “Miracles” was a story. We have to reach back ten years, to the “heyday of that joyful blasphemy against Olympian abstract authority” to find its roots in Mays’s paean to General Idea published in the literary journal Open Letter. There we find that Mays long had an argument against theory, and he used this essay to champion culture over nature, sensuous surfaces over bare structure, erotics over hermeneutics, polymorphous perversity over rationality, in short, mythic consciousness over the unanimity of the One (i.e., theory), whose technological telos went back to the beginning of the West in the pre-Socratic philosophers Thales and Anaximander. [28] For John Mays, Philip Monk preaching “Axes of Difference” in front of the Toronto art community was the rational representative of all that he had long opposed. Preaching, he was as good as the police, or the Portuguese crowd calling for “death to homosexuals.” [29]
Mays’s mimic machine was not just to rival Monk’s but, in an act of bad faith, you might say, fundamentally to discredit it—to discredit theory in general and to discredit the theory of “Axes of Difference” in particular. [30] Let’s be clear, Mays’s story is a moral argument against theory; this is the main purpose of its allegory.
Mays interred a period when he buried Steinway, a period perverted by that event in 1977. Not only Steinway, one can imagine that John Mays also “saw in the public discourse of its disclosure an ending of dreams for those, like himself, who had lived long in Toronto” (45). The dream could not be resuscitated by a younger generation of artists, so Mays chose to bury part of himself in this story. He was set free by another event in 1984 to do the telling: “Axes of Difference.” The “telling has been my grieving, my offering of flowers and incense at the secluded sylvan altar, after the ancient custom of critics who mourn their beloved dead” (47). Although Mays was not the narrator, he was the author of this story; he, too, was confessing. His love, his rivalry, went as deep as death.
NOTES
1. Andy Fabo wrote, “critics attempting an overview of recent Toronto art have tended to resort to fiction—sometimes intentionally (‘Miracles of Emanuel Jaques,’ J. B. Mays, C 2) but most often unwittingly.” Andy Fabo, “Nationalism / Internationalism / Regionalism,” C, 3 (Fall 1984), 71.
2. To various degrees of invention, Barthes’s books from the 1970s provided the main models: S/Z (1970/tr. 1974), Sade/Fourier/Loyola (1971/1976), The Pleasure of the Text (1973/1975), Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975/1977), A Lover’s Discourse (1977/1978). Derrida’s influence was more complexly inscribed, equally performative though more theoretical in its contextualization, whereas Barthes was more immediately seductive in the pleasures of his text. Performative criticism enacts; it does not state, which is what it has in common with fiction. Barthes describes the procedure in “How this book is constructed”: “Whence the choice of a ‘dramatic’ method which renounces examples and rests on the single action of a primary language (no metalanguage). The description of the lover’s discourse has been replaced by its simulation, and to that discourse has been restored its fundamental person, the I, in order to stage an utterance, not an analysis.” Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 3.
3. Pertinent examples of this strategy of divided text would be Jacques Derrida’s “Living On,” Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), “Tympan,” his introduction to Margins of Philosophy (1972/1982), and Glas (1974/1986). Closer to home there was Philip Monk’s “Exits,” his commemoration of Roland Barthes, whose “main” text was on George Bataille and “marginal” text on Barthes. Philip Monk, “Exits,” Impulse, 8:3 (Summer 1980), 29-31; reprinted in Struggles with the Image: Essays in Art Criticism, Toronto: YYZ Books, 1988, 21-26.
4. As his formal studies were in Medieval literature and literary criticism, Mays, who was also a scholarly practicing Christian, would be well aware of the history of exegesis.
5. John Bentley Mays, “Miracles of Emanuel Jaques,” C, 2 (Summer 1984), 38. Hereafter pages references are within the text.
6. Writing on this event, Mays referred to “Roland Barthes’s illuminating remakes of the Marquis, in Sade/Fourier/Loyola. Barthes’s book has influenced my thoughts throughout this passage” (44). And again, “The narrator reveals that he had been reading Michel Foucault’s projected History of Sexuality” (45). As these two books were translated respectively in 1976 and 1978, it seems likely that Mays may have been reading them then, when at the time in the late 1970s he was considering the cultural aftermath of Jaques’s murder. It was Christmas 1980, after all, that Mays inscribed two volumes of Sade to Philip Monk as if to commemorate their mutual reading of Barthes’s book.
7. The story has a parallel construction; each part on “The Machine” and “The Corporation” has the same subsections: “Seduction,” “Affliction,” Penetration,” and “Production.” Like all machines, the story thus repeats on itself.
8. The works in that exhibition were “reconstructed as cultural meanings in the mind of Steinway. The works as historical and material entities outside Steinway’s reception of them do not exist for the narrator of this fiction,” which is an interesting—and cautionary—distinction (39).
9. The two lectures took place during a one-day conference (February 12, 1984), “The Practice of Pictures,” that Monk organized.
10. Mays writes in the margin that “The Machine is an exhibition entitled 80/1/2/3/4 Toronto, which was organized by Richard Rhodes for Mercer Union and exhibited there in March, 1984” (39). Though one was due, Rhodes failed to produce a text for his exhibition. In an end-of-the-year wrap-up, Mays complained that the exhibition “closed without a catalogue, so we remain in the dark about what this rich, various show was really trying to tell us about advanced Toronto art.” John Bentley Mays, “ART 84 A troubling string of ‘gee-whiz’ showcases,” The Globe and Mail, December 29, 1984, E 17.
11. “And surely, the striking of the new apolitical, passive stances was made easier in the late 1970s when the men in charge of the bourgeois nations decided once again that the rhetoric of hierarchal rigidities was more useful than the language of tolerance and mercy for the maintenance of their dominion” (40).
12. “The naked maker of the early 1970s, given to disclosure and the construction of a truth of the radically local, re-clothed himself in art’s traditional stuff of history and general, moralizing stories. The sublime mortal technologies of performance and video were exchanged for the history-laden beaux-arts media of painting and sculpture, now being summoned from their graves” (40).
13. “By becoming such a decoy, criticism becomes a perversion, an act of inevitable bad faith…” (39).
14. “Receiving them into its spatial construction, the Machine then annihilated the time (or difference, or material/causal separations) in the works, by disallowing all ways of seeing the particular objects as individually intelligible objects, outside the embracing, trans-temporal emblem produced by the Machine” (41).
15. “That language of somewhere else, anywhere else other than Toronto” (41). Here Mays uses Monk’s own arguments against him. In a marginal note he adds: “In Toronto, theoretical discourse is always based on the philosophy of somewhere else, that is, some fiction of theoretical continuity borrowed from elsewhere and imposed on the fracturing, wounded artistic culture of Toronto; hence, a lie” [41].
16. “Above all, he said, the murder of Emanuel Jaques simplified things for those who were baffled and repelled by the new, polymorphous structure of meaning emerging in Toronto” (46).
17. “In these acts of the Corporation’s historical icon [i.e., the murder of Jaques], Steinway believed, the central and immensely complex horror of the Titan’s dream disclosed itself, and became paradigmatic, and became the haunter of dreams for all those, including artists, who would become of age after its disclosure in 1977. And he also saw in the public discourse of its disclosure an ending of dreams for those, like himself, who had lived long in Toronto” (45). “As we walked along the harbour’s edge that cold, final spring afternoon, Steinway told me that he had seen in the Machine’s meanings an insistent, inescapable allegory of the artist as victim. In the meanings of Toronto created by the Machine, Steinway saw the pervasive image of the artist that had emerged after the boy’s death: artist as seduced child, deluded by the allures of glamour and freedom, lured by the contrived drives and discourses of advanced capitalist society into tightly enclosed rooms papered entirely with received, controlled imagery of desire. He next recognized in this image the afflicted child, trapped in the rooms of false desire, and in the very powerlessness of art, unable to escape or deter the cruel, impersonal persecution of society” (47).
18. It was not just that “some sought to rescue Monk’s rejected terms by explaining that melancholy was the prevailing, historically logical condition of current Toronto art by men and women alike,” as Barbara Fischer claimed of John Mays’s article. Barbara Fischer, “YYZ—An Anniversary,” Decalog (Toronto: YYZ Books, 1992), 17.
19. See the letters to the editor following the publication of “Axes of Difference.” “Letters,” Vanguard, 13:7 (September 1984), 51-52.
20. “By becoming such a decoy, criticism becomes a perversion, an act of inevitable bad faith—an act of language deployed as sacrificial victim atoning (by being perverted, made to lie) for the critic’s sins of self-knowledge, of permitting his heart to be revealed and recognized” (39). Mays would have been aware of Monk’s “Violence and Representation: Representation as Surrogate Victimage” (1980) and its themes of mimetic rivalry and sacrifice, although for Monk it is the artwork that is sacrificed in the critical act not the critic. See Philip Monk, “Violence and Representation: Representation as Surrogate Victimage,” Impulse, 8:4 (Autumn 1980), 34-35.
21. Here is the narrator’s justification for storytelling: “Because I have studied all his utterances and printed words on Toronto’s acts in art, I could now recite the public deeds of Steinway, letting that be his obituary. Or I could tell out his mental glory in the strong language of philosophy or the history of art. If I choose instead to cast my elegy in the weak language of story, it is because story is the vessel of wars, passions, enchantments, rages; and these are the things I have heard when I listened to Steinway’s heart, and sought to salve his hidden wound” (38).
22. Here perhaps is John Mays’s representation of the young Philip Monk as the elder Isaac Steinway: “in his tiny apartment on Spadina Avenue, I found my old teacher secreted inside shrouds of abstract theory’s strong language, that language of somewhere else, anywhere else other than Toronto…. I watched Steinway move easily in the society of the Toronto art world, a tall and weathered man famous for his critical intelligence and independence of spirit, renowned as much for his sensual grasp of art’s beauties as for his mental penetration of art’s meanings. I found him wrapping himself for the grave, and yearning for that cold carnal transfiguration…. But loving him taught me Steinway walked by public codes learned carefully, but never grasped confidently, since he could never find an established code or strategy which would enable him to fulfill his complex desires…. Yet he found the effecting of desire could only come through the performance of codes, and so became a connoisseur of codes while being unable to give his heart to any one of them, or to any one object of passion…. For in some long-past time, perhaps long before his erotic awakening, Steinway had been wounded in the sex” (41-42).
23. Since Mays and Rhodes were not rivals, consequently, Rhodes’s exhibition did not count as a rival machine.
24. Mays’s whole argument is disingenuous and contradictory. A “mechanistic scenario,” as well as any “institutional rhetoric,” can hardly be natural, which calls into question Mays’s notion of “naturalness.” One wonders, moreover, whether Mays was also thinking in this allegory of General Idea and “the trio’s small Yonge Street rooms, saturated by language,” General Idea being a corporate enterprise whose work was nothing but “a fiction of language.” General Idea thought of their enterprise as anything but natural. Moreover, the murder coincidentally took place two doors up from General Idea’s Yonge Street studio and the headquarters of Art Metropole. Monk had made the argument for the capitalist functioning of General Idea’s work in a 1982 lecture (with Mays in attendance) and 1983 article, “Editorials: General Idea and the Myth of Inhabitation,” Parachute, 33 (December 1983 – February 1984), 12-23. “Forced into purely linguistic form” would perhaps describe Monk’s analyses of Toronto art.
25. For instance, when he writes, saying the opposite of Derrida: “Textuality itself is the struggle of Nature against Culture,” 43. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakavorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
26. Roland Barthes, Sade/Fourier/Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 36-37. “Sade is boring only if we fix our gaze on the crimes being reported and not on the performances of the discourse.” That Mays was guilty of confusing semiosis with mimesis would seem to discredit any notion of language and linguistic bearing upon this murder.
27. “Principally, the strategy of the organization involved the progressive elimination of the most cultural of all bourgeois culture’s cultural productions—the individual bourgeois body as embodiment of social value and repository of meaning—and its replacement with a linguistic, sociological entity, definable purely as an object of power” (43).
28. “At a remove: the level at which science since Thales has operated its cultural machine for the production of ascending orders of abstraction and conceptualization…. The problem: how to deconceptualize and resensualize … life.” John Bentley Mays, “General Idea,” Open Letter, Second Series #8 (Summer 1974), 8.
29. “The central project of the West is the suppression of the presences and forces whose visibility disrupts the West’s claim to unity and unification. Against these forces, its armies, universities, corporations, religions, and police are mobilized.” Ibid., 23.
“But in the popular myth which grew up, hugely and immediately, around the event, the boy had been trapped and killed by the mystical anus of Yonge Street. People gathered in large demonstrations to demand that its geographical expression be cleaned up, as they put it. But, as all students of myth know, evil is polymorphous, hardy, deep-rooted. The mystical anus could be lurking anywhere as a destroyer and subversive, so strong action was necessary, in all places, times and situations: calls and petitions for death to homosexuals, celebrants of the anus, were made even at the funeral of Emanuel Jaques.” Mays, “Miracles,” 45-46.
30. That Mays invented his machine (the story of Emanuel Jaques’s murder) in response to “Axes of Difference” indicates that this last part indeed was written in 1984 although it may have been cogitated earlier. Mays demonstrated that he, too, could invent a synchronic machine, but only to discredit it within a longer history.