But if, as was asserted earlier, a unity always exists in addition to and alongside the multiplicity it unifies, then it stands to reason that there is something more inclusive than unity, and more abstract than the simply topological: an interconnecting mechanism that defines the relation between the unifying substance and what it unifies. Subtending and surrounding the body and body image of the national unifier and the bodies and images they bring together, there is another kind of body that has no image--that can never have one because it is only ever in-between. There is a body without an image that inhabits the gaps. It occupies the spaces under, above, and between bodies and images, residing in the interrelation of all that is. It does not extract (dismember) or abstract (unify). It is effectively all-inclusive. The interactive medium: the 'body politic' in its fullest extension, at once infra-concrete and super-abstract. A void where no anus can go. But where the proper name "Reagan" can, and does.
It has taken me many years to get used to seeing myself as others see me, and also seeing myself instead of my mental picture of the character I'm playing. First, very few of us ever see ourselves except as how we look directly at ourselves in a mirror. Thus we don't know how we look from behind, from the side, walking, standing, moving normally through a room. It's quite a jolt. [Reagan and Hubler 1981:79]
To see yourself as others see you. But not as in a mirror. Not an inversion or reversal. A surrounding--of the body in motion. From all angles simultaneously, and in all qualities of movement, front, back, walking, standing. To leave "my" self-perspective, but not for "yours." Not for the Other's I; for others' eyes. To see oneself as "one" would see one: an impersonal (objective) perspective conceivable only as the sum total of subjective perspectives. To be the division, not only between the "I" and the "you," but between all I's and all you's at once. To be "one"--in all its multiplicity. Unity as a supertopological overlay of all possible inter-geographies of bodies in motion. Subsumed by a name.
A nagging question is how "Reagan" could produce a wholeness- or wellness-effect in spite of his evident mental and physical deficiencies, what his so-called 'charisma' consisted of. At first, what seemed to be the most plausible hypothesis was that it was his hairdo. But it became increasingly clear that the 'magic'[12] "Reagan" worked did not have to do with his body itself, or any of its organs, natural or dyed, whole or incised, or any power of interpersonal magnetism they had. It seemed to have to do with two quite mundane things.
First, his gestures. On a good day, Reagan was a master of the smooth move. Like the circle he drew in the air to illustrate the Great Wall, his movements drew pleasing figures in space. It was as if his entire body were a cartographer's pen drawing an invisible map of some atmospheric utopian realm. He surveyed an invisible space of well-being that was attached not to its body, but its movement, its transitoriness, its fluidity. The body would some day rot, perhaps was rotting already, but 'Camelot' would remain in the traces of his passing. Wholeness and wellness was not on his body; it was not in his body. It was around it, in his wake. It was like a negative trace of his body: his body grasped not as an object or an image of an object but as a set of ordered motions between unlocalizable points suspended in the air. "Wholeness" and happiness could be had by inhabiting the 'same' virtual space as Reagan. We could make our personal space coincide with his by going through the 'same' motions. Of course, any repetition of the 'same' passages between points that are by nature unlocalizable will be different, a translation, an im-personation (a personification of the unpersonifiable subsumed by the Reagan name). Repeating "Reagan's" gestures with a difference, we actualize a quadrant of his virtual geography in our personal neighborhood, overlaying his super-abstract kinetic map on our terrain, like an invisible image of all we could be (were we as inhuman as he).
Second, the "Reagan" 'magic' seemed to inhere in his voice, his reassuring, mellifluous voice. His voice also drew patterns. Or rather, it set down rhythms, wrote musical notes in tune with the national anthem.
Reagan's brain, body, and body-image were supplemented and subtended by abstract figures: gestures and trajectories; and rhythms. These were without content, nonvisual, and suprapersonal. The word "figure" is therefore misleading. Call them processual lines. "Reagan"s political effectiveness was to be found on that pre-symbolic, pre-logical, quasi-corporeal level, in his ability to construct a body without an image: to "meld image and body in a space where they cannot be separated" [Agamben 1990:54-55].
BACK TO CHAPTER 3 CONTENTS PAGE
BACK TO FIRST AND LAST EMPERORS HOME PAGE
CONTINUE