26 THE PICASSO PAPERS

From the buzz of tiny letters, black flecks on white, which in imitating the look of scumbled paint conjure the effect of air, to the crisply cut edge of an adjoining (or even of the same) sheet, which now hardens to the solid of a porcelain dish, each little paper piece submits itself to meaning, but never enduringly so. For the same piece, in another location, con-

stellates another sign ... . . . But then, and very site of these signs, comes

the sound of voiceS' (Fig. 5). "Before long I saw the first corpse still grimacing v\rith suffering; its face was nearly black," he says. "Then I saw two, four, ten, twenty; then I saw a hundred corpses." As he tells of the dead piled high on convoys and lying in ditches, he asks, "How many cholera victims did I come upon like this? Two thousand? Three thousand? ... But I had seen nothing yet."! Who tells this story and in what tone? Is this tragedy or melodrama; is it empathy or exploi-tation? Is it war reporting or news blending imperceptibly into fait-divers? Is it joined to the battle reports the way the story about the soldier spitting out a bullet lodged in his head for twenty-six years abuts the news, a week or so later, of the peace ("Les Allies signent l' Armistice. La Grece s' abstient"

December 4, 1912)?2 Is it in same tone bleau, a tramp turns himself in for 10)-some-thing straight out of Hneon's "News in Three Lines"?

• • •

At first they circulate through the crystalline space, its white-ness their "medium," both a real place and the abstraction of

THE CIRCULATION OF THE SIGN I 27

a system. In one of the collages __ IIlOV!-ment is given physical fOflll' since one of the fragments is the other's twin-having originally been scissored from the same sheet, so that, as in a jigsaw puzzle, both match along their common edge-only now flipped relative to the other, back to front. A pair, but nonidentical, unlike.

One of them, scrollwork of its left-edge to_ assume the profile of a violin. Or rather half a

violin, since it depends on Picasso's drawn additions of bridge and neck and right-hand side to elaborate the musical instru-ment. All by itself, however, notched as it is into the whiteness of the sheet, a flattened shape set foursquare upon the page, it declares itself allied with the support on which_it lies: the sheet, it is physical, material, opaque; like the sheet, it is resolutely frontal, facing its viewer. This is how the little fr.a!?-ment, in itself indeterminable, for it might be almost any-thing-bubbles of soda, stripes of shadow, rays of sun-hardens and solidifies, its lines of writing now posturing as the

graining of wood. becomes the support, or sigIlifier, for a visual signified. Together they produce a mean-ing: the density, the opacity of a physical object, here, a violin. 3

The circulation of the sign, however, is a rule of relativity. And Picasso, here as elsewhete, abides by this rule. The second ne:vspaper fragment, placed above the violin's shoulders, de-ploys its own notches and curves to cup the pegs and scroll of the instrument, becoming thus their "background." In this position, the newsprint's lines of type now assume the look of stippled flecks of graphite, the painter's visual shorthand for

I I'

28 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

a£mospheric surr()tll1:d. A

new place then sum

mons forth a

different sign. Light it declares, or atmosphere.

But the m

agic of the whole collage, indeed the brilliance

•••

<-<

of the game it plays, is_that the tw

o opposite meanings-light

on hand and opacity on the other-are generated from

the "identical" scrap of paper, the "sam

e" physical shape. LjJ<:e phonetic substance, this support is seen to take on

meaning only w

ithin the set of oppositions that pits one against another, the im

plosive p of up against the explosive p of put. Picasso's sheet, sliced in tw

o, is thus a paradigm, a

binary couple married in opposition, each taking on a m

ean-ing insofar as it is not the other. Figure and ground becom

e this kind of contrary here, joined and redoubled by opaque and transparent or solid and lum

inous, so that just as one fragment

is, literally speaking, the back side of the material from

which

the other was cut, the circulation of the sign produces this

very same condition, but sem

iologically, at the level of the sign: front, solid, shape; behind, transparent, surround.

Does Picasso need to state any m

ore clearly the sense in w

hich the sign here, like the linguist's tokens, has no natural relation to a referent, no real-w

orld model that gives it a

meaning or secures its identity? D

oes he need to declare any m

ore forcefully that here, in the fall of 1912, with his new

--

"--._--, .-

medium

of collage, he has entered a space in which the sign

has slipped away from

the fixity of what the sem

iologist would

call an iconic condition-that of resemblance-to assum

e the ceaseless play of m

eaning open to the symbol, w

hich is to say, language's unm

otivated, conventional sign?4 I like to think his ,-

p----

1.

Violin autum

n 1912

2.

Bottle on a Table autum

n-winter 1912

3. Bottle on a Table

autumn-w

inter 1912

4. Table w

ith Bottle, Wineglass and N

ewspaper

autumn-w

inter 1912

•

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I 33

answer to this

of fortuitous

lettering offered up to him by the real-since he w

rites with

them, again and again, alw

ays placing one very large J in op-position to the other, very sm

all. Penning therri half on, half off the elem

ent that makes up the front face of the instrum

ent, he inscribes them

onto a surface that is resolutely flat, stolidly

facing forward.

is their unequal size that then

it for

s:,"iveling of the ()bject like a door that is slow

ly sw

inging open. Scripting the fs onto the face of the violin, w

here manifestly there is nothing but flatness, Picasso w

rites depth onto an object set squarely before us and only as deep as a sheet of paper. "D

epth," he says ...

. . . But another

well from

the very surface of the new

sprint fragment, the one onto w

hich the fs are appended. This is the "depth"-historical, im

aginative, po-litical-of a place to w

hich the word Tchataldja refers, the

name of the battle site in the B

alkans from w

hich this dispatch w

as sent to Le Journal, Picasso's main source of new

sprint-and, som

e would argue, of new

s. 5 It might have been Pod-

goritza, of course, or Saint-Nicolas, the datelines of accounts of the B

alkan wars for articles that appeared at just this m

oment

in the avant-garde magazine Les Soirees de Paris, signed by one

of its editors, Andre Tudesq, a pal of A

pollinaire's, and by Jerom

e Tharaud. T

o listen to Tharaud is to picture the m

ajestic isolation of the M

ontenegrin fighter, tall, gnarled, and armed to the teeth,

perched on his mountain redoubt. This is the honor of the

34 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

fighting clans, never submitted to the regim

entation of the m

odern army but nonetheless ravaged,

now, by Turkish

guns. 6

To listen to Tudesq is to hear strategy talked, a m

apping of relations in space, to understand the w

ay in which the battle

for Saint-Jean de Medua is really a fight for Scutari, the prize

the l\1ontenegrins most covet and from

which they w

ill be excluded if the peace, about to be concluded, com

es too soon. This is w

hat King N

icolas fears: to be merely an onlooker

when the Serbs and the B

ulgarians share the spoils. The M

on-tenegrin king began the adventure, w

rites Tudesq, as though he w

ere watching an am

using film, w

ith his son Prince Danilo

gaily igniting the first canon. It's turned out badly. But not

for the Serbs. Tudesq tells the story of a battle in w

hich the Turks w

ere routed. A pursuing Serb, obeying the rules of

combat, asks a w

ounded soldier: "Christian or M

uslim?" R

e-ceiving no answ

er he lops off the soldier's head. Of course,

Tudesq adds wryly, he had "inconsiderately asked his question

in Serbian: why didn't the T

urk know the victor's language?"7

They are there, in M

ontenegro, some of them

Picasso's friends. Indeed, an international brigade of volunteers has col-lected, from

Milan, Paris, V

ien?a, Rom

e, Saint Petersburg. T

heir accents join these reports as well.

Whose voice is Picasso flagging w

hen he lets the Tchataldja dateline surge forth from

beneath the bridge of his otherwise

stately violin? The assum

ption on the part of the scholars who

analyze "what the papers say" is that for Picasso to cut a frag-

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

\

35

ment from

a newspaper-particularly w

hen, by the

columnar layout, the piece allow

s itself to be read-is for him

to produce a "statement."8 E

ven if it is through the voices of others, Picasso is assum

ed to be speaking here. And if Picasso

is speaking, we should listen; for aren't these his beliefs?

• • •

At first they seem

to circulate through the crystal air like so m

any weightless facets, the lights struck off a revolving but

invisible chandelier. Their glinting m

eanings-now this, now

that-play in the register of the visible the w

ay Mal1arm

e's notorious hom

ophonies play in the fIeld of the audible: cygne or signe?

or n'etre? verre or vers? blanc (white) or blanc

even Picasso's fascination with the turned frag:-

ment

the back of the other's front-seems to lead in

*The hom

ophonic series that Derrida suspends as a single "tide" over his essay

"The D

ouble Session"-"L'antre de M

allarme," "L

'entre de Mallarm

e," and "L

'entre-deux 'Mallarm

e''' ("The 'Into' of M

allarme, " "T

he 'Inter' of Mal-

I ' " "T

he Antre of M

allarme," and "T

he In-two of 'M

allarme' ")-is

arme,

. .

compared by him

to idea of a lustre, or crystal chandelIer: hangIng

over a stage. This image of the lustre (because

replIcatIon facers reflecting into one another m

akes it a mirror into w

hich no realIty ourslde it

reflected) will function em

blematically as D

errida develops not idea of a kind of m

imicry that m

imes nothing-being w

hat Mallarm

e calls a

allusion without breaking the

a condition of

the fold and the "re-mark," w

hich he will calI

As the present

chapter moves the sem

iotic system of collage closer and doser.to this idea of

fold and re-mark (see pp. 78, 81), the em

blem of the lustre w

ill become In

-

creasingly important. See Jacques D

errida, "The D

ouble (1970), In

Dissem

ination, trans. Barbara Johnson [C

hicago: UniversIty of C

hIcago Press, 1981], 173-285; for analysis of the fold as re-m

ark, see 251-58.

36 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

the direction of Mallarm

e's "fold," the sacred cleft of the binding, w

here one page closes over another in sen-suous duplicity.

Alm

ost from the very outset of this series of collages, ex-

ecuted so minim

ally, so sparely, with just new

s clippings, charcoal, and the w

hite of the drafting paper, Picasso had evoked M

allarme (Fig. 4). H

e had cut a headline from a page

of Le Journal so as to read "Un coup de the ... ," signaling

for his group of poet friends, the innermost circle of the band

a Picasso, the title of Mallarm

e's most notorious w

ork, "Un

coup de des."9 Sprinkling the lines of type upon the page, som

e large but truncated, some a kind of m

iddle voice insis-tently rising into one's perceptual field, the rest a tiny scatter of type, he could have im

agined he was perform

ing the poem

's arabesquelike refusal of the regular poetic stanza with

its docile block of gray. Just as, in turning the twin of the

"Tchataldja" clipping over on its back, he could see himself

entering into the logic of the "fold," the logic of the facet, the logic of the binary in w

hich as the sign circulates it con-stantly reattaches itself to m

eaning: cygne! signe, white/black.

T_he game of the fold is alm

ost nowhere played m

ore cun-ningly than in a pair of collages, tw

inned at the level of the charcoal draw

ing-which sparely designates the neck and

throat of a bottle, the curve of a supporting table, and a series 'of other highly schem

atic lines, some gridlike, som

e diagonal (Figs. 2 and 3). In both collages the bottle "itself' consists of a vertical axis that term

inates in a circle we inevitably read as

the disc of the vessel's base. But in the one case, the axis is

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I 37

articulated through a column of new

sprint pasted onto the w

hite page, with the circle cut out of its low

er flange. In the other, w

hich is executed on a full page of newspaper, the sam

e vertical axis-plus-excised-circle has

been scissored out of w

hite paper, obliterating the newsprint ground and rem

inding --

us of the ultimate backing for the collage in the w

hite of the

supporting sheet. T

here have been various passes at reading one or another of these collages in w

ays that slow the circulation of the sig-

nifiers to a stop and supply a single signified for the newsprint

column. E

ither understood as standing for the bottle itself or for its liquid contents, this identiflcation then expands to in-clude the textual content of the new

s clipping and thereby to produce an ideologically expanded interpretation: this is "the stuff on w

hich French culture is temporarily drunk," it con-

cludes.lO A

nd needless to say, the fact that the support for one m

ember of this pair of collages is the financial page of Le

Journal reinforces this sense of what Picasso's ideological pro-

ject must be.

But Picasso's collage piece (in either its positive or its neg-

ative-cut-out-guise) is not simply colum

nar. It is an elon-gated L from

which a circle has been rem

oved. Thus

arm of the L extends beyond w

hat could be imagined as the

perimeter of the object, to suggest itself as the bottle's cast

shadow. Since the vertical axis that defines the long arm

of the L's left-hand edge extends up into the object's throat, this axial line further proposes itself as a center around w

hich the ---_ •.... __ ... __ .... -

fiI} of paper might rotate in order to describe the cylindrical

38 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

volume of the object. (This suggestion of a rotating fin is even

stronger in the collage executed on the financial page, since a second fin, in black, its upper edge cut on a slant, abuts the first, hinting at foreshortening.) Like the paired fi that inscribe depth or turning onto a frontal plane, this extrem

ely economic

shape-an L from w

hich a circular notch has been cut-b

e-com

es signifier of an axis slicing into the sheet itself to

to the experience of a page turning. Front to back, around a central spine. T

he impossible fold it

writes onto the collage sheet inscribes both som

ething like the m

emory of the volum

e of a bottle and something like the

feeling of the space that would contain it. A

nd if the fold is som

ething like a page turning, it is a page-and this is to be explained presently-taken out of M

allarme ...

... But then the voices begin. T

he one that speaks from

the very ground of this work pronounces Le Journal's w

eekly roundup of financial new

s: "La sem

aine economique & fin-

anciere." It gives the stock exchange report under the rubric "C

oulisse." It speaks about the upcoming L

ondon conference to negotiate the arm

istice in the Balkans. In these last w

eeks of N

ovember and throughout D

ecember, the period in w

hich Picasso is m

aking this first great..series of collages, it is indeed of the arm

istice that most of the voices telling B

alkan stories speak, w

hether or not from the point of view

of Montenegro's

King N

icolas.

For of course the problem is, w

ho is speaking? And on

whose behalf?

The m

ost ardent readerlinterpreter of these newspaper

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I 39

texts is positive that it is Picasso who is speaking here, if not

with his ow

n voice, then through the vehicle of these reports. "Picasso juxtaposed readable colum

ns of newsprint," w

rites Patricia Leighten, "w

hose authors insistently reiterated sub-jects of specific concern to left-w

ing radicals: war, w

ar prof-iteers, m

achinating politicians, ministerial abuses of pow

er, strikes and strike-breaking, anarchist and pacifist antiw

ar dem-

onstrations. The new

s items accum

ulate to project an image

of French politics as venal, power-m

ongering, and posing a crazy threat to all those values of hum

anity and civilization that Picasso's w

ork had always em

braced." In using the fi-nancial page to m

ake his statement, Picasso, says Leighten, is

employing the stock m

arket's reaction to the war new

s to m

editate on the effects of capitalism: "W

hile some profit from

w

ar, others suffer disastrously. Thus this collage affirm

s the direct link betw

een war and the econom

ic health of nations. T

hat the isolated bottle seems to rest on a table form

ed by the new

spaper itself suggests that the economic structure m

aking cafe life possible rests on the uncertain and despotic w

himsy

of uncontrollable world events. "11

Thus w

e are told that here, in the collage called Bottle on a Table, it is Picasso w

ho is speaking. It is his "exploration of these politicized them

es" w(t encounter, his "thoughts" w

e read, his "cnticism

" that is "offered."12

Without entering into the debate about how

much of these

texts a viewer of the collages m

ight have been imagined to

read-the title of the paper with its play on Le Journal, vari-

ously cut into JOU

or JOU

R or URNAL? the big headlines like

40 T

HE

P

IC A

SS

0 P

AP

E R S

/'1

"Un C

oup de The ... "? the subheads? the fine type?13- and'

without arguing w

hether their projected audience to have

been a large circle of friends or a restricted audience of two

(Braque and G

ris) 14 or only the lone reader in the person of their m

aker, we need to acknow

ledge that textual fragments

join with the other signifiers in these collages and circulate

along with them

. And w

ithout actually reading the stories em

bedded in its ground, we see plainly that one of the Bottle

on a Table collages sits astride the title announcing "The W

eek of E

conomic and Financial N

ews." A

voice we have no dif-

ficulty taking note of, sounding as it does at the scale of a headline. A

nd yet, we are still entitled to ask, is it Picasso's?

• • •

At first they cycle through the system

of the collage, each fragm

ent in constant semantic play. A

trapezoid of newsprint

silhouette of a wine glass; another fragm

ent, a of repeated curves, conjures up the com

plicated form

of a bottle, deceptively labeled SUZ

E (Fig. 5). Pasted on an

oval of bright blue paper, the newsprint fragm

ents activate this ground in different w

ays, the former-tan w

edge against blue field-declaring it the

surface of a table top, the

latter, reversal triggered by the rhym

e .. curves, lifting the selfsam

e blue off the "table plane" to produce it as the transparency of the bottle's surface. A

nd around this visually complex oval center, even m

ore bands of new

sprint fan open like the cards in a triumphant

player's hand. The airiness of this "space" that surrounds the

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I 41

table with its glass and bottle, and its shifting shadow

s, is un-m

istakable ... ... A

nd yet from the very bottom

of the space's edge a headline obtrudes. "Les Serbes s' avancent ... " ("T

he Serbs A

dvance"), it says; and this "atmosphere" fills w

ith voices. To

the table's left is a news clipping reporting on a pacifist m

eet-ing attended by fifty thousand people and addressed by a va-riety of left-w

ing speakers, from the parliam

ent mem

ber M

arcel Sembat to the G

erman socialist Scheidem

ann, calling for French and G

erman w

orkers not to fire on one another in "a general E

uropean war" or to die "for the capitalists and

the manufacturers of arm

s and munitions." T

he right-hand splay of colum

ns is the "Walk on the B

attlefield," with a

report of cholera that has devastated the Turkish soldiers, this account pasted upside dow

n on the page. Below

the table, w

ith the dateline "16 Novem

ber," is news of the Serbian

advance toward M

onastir in Macedonia and the siege against

Adrianople. O

nly the ripple of print from w

ithin the bottle's m

ultiple perimeters speaks in a different tone: it is a fragm

ent from

a serial novel satirizing upper-class rakes. This collage,

and Bottle of Suze, has been characterized as

representation of a conversation taking place around a cafe table: the discussion of Picasso and his friends, talking politics and pacificism

and war. B

ut more than this, these

it is said, give us Picasso's own position, not only

012_"these issues," which "Picasso explored through 'quoting'

with the new

sprints he selected," but on the very issue of the 'ne\yspaper itself, the vehicle of inform

ation w

hich

42 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

the "news" m

ust inevitably pass.1:; T

he newspaper, the ar-

gument goes, is syytem

atized distraction, politics and fashion, sports and advertising abutting one another in a kaleidoscope of topics, each its ow

n seemingly independent segm

ent. It is this

and disarray that seems to stand for, to

be.thewarrant of, the "objectivity" of the new

s itself, its be-holdenness to no interest, to no voice. B

ut disarray, in the new

spaper, has its own w

ork to do, which is to disorganize

of and of m

emory and to

sell !lews

The com

modification of new

s is the new

spaper's business, and it isn't just confined to the printed ads. Instead, it is disjunction itself that does the w

ork of advertising, turning new

s into entertainment, history into

spectacle, mem

ory into comm

odity.

This transformative ability, the argum

ent continues, ulti-m

ately projects the force of the centralized, dominant voice

of power in m

odern Western societies, a voice that decep-

tively masks its m

essage behind the motley of all the different

sections and headlines of the newspaper's separate rubrics, cre-

ating thereby a jumble that "neutralizes w

hat would otherw

ise be their cum

ulative and interconnected logic: they systemat-

ically 'rationalize disjunction; they are organized as disorgani-zation.'

"16

B

ut Picasso,

it is

argued, sees

through this

cacophony to its purely venal, comm

ercialized core and his response is to shape these bits and pieces into an organized m

ontage: "Picasso structures the collage through juxtaposi-tion in a w

ay that reconceptualizes and transforms both the

pictorial system and the com

modified character of the daily

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I 43

paper." H

ere are VOIces that jump past the barriers of the

newspaper's dispersal to be brought together in such a w

ay as to produce its author's ow

n critique, for, if in the dominant

form of the new

spaper the voices are fragmented, "in the

collage, Picasso has created the potential for a narrative by juxtaposing this satirical novel on a libertine aristocracy w

ith grisly stories from

the Balkan W

ar and reports of a mobilized

left-wing. M

oreover, he has done it in a Cubist style w

hose assum

ed 'anti-aesthetic,'

'anti-French' disorderliness

was

aligned to anarchism in the critical press."17

The argum

ent that is presented here claims to derive from

M

ikail Bakhtin. B

akhtin's analysis of the voice of power as it

discourse," of which the m

ass-new

spaper is one prime exam

ple, is summ

oned as a .w

ay ofynders.tanding what is seen as Picasso's strategy to

produce a "counter-discourse" and thus to rebind w

hat the centralizing pow

er of the dominant culture has seen fit to

dissever. y

.of dazzling account ()f

the work_()f D

ostoevsky, w

hich the novelist's relation to journalism

is also exploited to forge the "fundamentally new

novelistic genre" of the polyphonic novel, is both to find. striking parallels w

ith Picasso's invention in these collages and to encounter a repeated critique of the argum

ent I have just been sum

marizing, an argum

ent that Bakhtin w

ould have seen. as "re-m

onologizing" these works and thereby m

asking the "radical artistic revolution" (B

akhtin's words) that is at stake.

D_efining D

ostoevsky's polyphony as "a plurality of indepen-

44 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

dent voices and consciousnesses" and m

aking this the c.ll.aracteristic

of his radical poetics, B

akhtin argues: "W

hat unfolds in his works is not a m

ultitude of characters and fates in a single objective w

orld, illuminated by a single

authorial consciousness; rather a plurality <if consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, com

bine but are not m

erged in the unity of the event. "18

Again and again, B

akhtin rehearses the various analyses of D

ostoevsky's work offered by literary critics w

hom B

akhtin respects, m

any of whom

focus on the fabric of conversation and argum

ent from w

hich these novels are woven, m

aking them

multivoiced and m

ultileveled, or polyphonic. But again

and again, that the adm

ission of this presence of polyphony, or of w

hat he also calls "dialogism," is m

ade on!y to be taken back again, insofar as these m

ultiple voices resynthesized by these critics into the old, traditional,

m()nological form

. In general, there are two w

ays of doing this. O

ne is to take the polyphony present in the novels as a reflection of the m

ultivoicedness found in the real world and

-->

-

thus to "transfer [one's] explanations directly from the plane

of the novel to the plane of reality." The effect of doing this,

Bakhtin says, is to characterize the novel as a single conscious-

ness's vision of this fragmented w

orld, something that is quite

the contrary of Dostoevsky's procedure. For if "the m

ono-logic unity of the w

orld is destroyed in a Dostoevsky novel

... those ripped-off pieces of reality are in no sense directly com

bined in the unity of the novel: each of these pieces grav-itates tow

ard the integral field of vision of a specific character;

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I 45

each makes sense only at the level of a specific consciousness."

Thus B

akhtin's critique is that, "if these chunks of reality de-prived of any pragm

atic links were com

bined directly as things em

otionally, lyrically, or symbolically harm

onious in the unity of a single and m

onologic field of vision, then before us would

be the world of the R

omantics, the w

orld of Hoffm

ann, for exam

ple, but in no way could it be D

ostoevsky's world"

(20-21). exam

ple of the Suze collage, this option w

ould be the one of seeing the work as a represented con-

versation taking place around a cafe table. Someone (Picasso)

is observing a dialogue taking place in all the fragmented m

ul-tiplicity of how

it happens in the real world, but it is his

"monologic field of vision" that brings it to us. T

he in rem

onologizing di-

Bakhtin says, is to understand the constant

voicil1 g different positions as part of an ideological project

and to try to identify which of these ideas are D

ostoevsky's ow

n. (The parallel w

ith the Suze interpretation would be to

__ putative idea of coun-

This again is to remonologize the novels by

making them

either the expression of a single consciousness

(the author's) or the re§ecti?Ll.of a of

th.e)dea. Synthesize A into the evolution of a_unified Sp!rit then, "each novel w

ould form a com

pleted philosophical w

hole, structured according to the dialectical method. W

e w

ollid have in the best instance a philosophical novel, a novel w

ith an idea ... [or] in the worst instance w

e would have

46 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

philosophy in the forni of a novel." But in D

ostoevsky we

have neither. Dostoevsky, B

akhtin writes, "doesn't represent

'idea in itself (Plato), nor the 'ideal existence' as phenom-

enologists understand it. ideas, thoughts,

c:x:ist 'in themselves' belonging to no one." A

nd this is because "the idea is not the hero of his novels, but a m

an. for him

was either a touchstone for testing the m

an in m

an, or a form for revealing it, or a 'm

edium,' an envi-

ronment in w

hich human consciousness could be revealed in

its (25-26).

That essence, as w

e know, is conflictual. It is in constant

argument both w

ith itself and with others. Every thought is

by a continual sideways glance at another

thought "senses itself to be from the very be-

ginning a rejoinder in an unfinalized dialogue. Such thought," B

akhtin explains again and again, "is not impelled tow

ard a w

ell-rounded, finalized, system

ically monologic w

hole. It

borders of someone else's thought"

(32). This conflictual character not only produces the internal-

ized of_colltradictions w

ithin a single character, "forc-ing a character to converse w

ith his own double," but also

leads Dostoevsky to invent dialogically paired characters, cou-

opponents (like Ivan and the Devil, R

askolnikov and Svidrigailov, etc.) w

ho become a w

ay of "dramatizing the

contradictions within one person" (28). A

nd indeed it is this

this up of an oppositional pair on the site

of every supposed unity, that constitutes Dostoevsky's form

al

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I 47

"Where others saw

a single thought, he was able to

find and feel out two thoughts, a bifurcation; w

here others saw

a single quality, he discovered in it the presence of a second and contradictory quality. Everything that seem

ed sim

ple became, in his w

orld, complex and m

ulti-structured. In every voice he could hear tw

o contending voices" (30). A

nd it is this dialogism lying at the heart of D

ost6evsky's poetics that is to be found as w

ell in the newspapers to w

hich the author contributed in his guise as journalist. W

hile Bakh-

tin has no interest in Dostoevsky's biography as an explanatory

fulcrum for his analysis, this journalistic practice, w

hich re-quires that everything be treated in the context of the present and that issues of causality be constantly suspended, is not unconnected to D

ostoevsky's invention: "His love of the

newspaper, his deep and subtle understanding of the new

s-paper page as a living reflection of the contradictions of con-tem

porary society in the cross-section of a single day, where

the most diverse and contradictory m

aterial is laid out, exten-sively, side by side and one side against the other," is not an explanation for D

ostoevsky's artistic vision, but rather is itself explained by that vision (29).

The polyphony that B

akhtin sees in Dostoevsky, the open-

ing of an oppositional pair 01;1 the very site of every identity supposed as singular, is w

hat we have seen happen in w

hat I have been characterizing as Picasso's circulation of the sign. A

nd this whirl of signifiers reform

ing in relation to each other and reorganizing their m

eanings seemingly out of nothing, in

an almost m

agical disjunction from reality, this m

anipulation

48 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

at the level of structure, be.

once again the parallel w

ith Dostoevsky is w

elcome-at the level

textual. representation of the "voice." Each voice, in dialogue at least w

ith itself, is doubled and dramatized by be-

coming the voice of another.

For, whoever is speaking of capitalist exploitation through

Picasso's repeated use of the market reports, either in the form

of the com

plete financial page as in Bottle on a Table or in sm

aller, more fragm

ented doses (Figs. 7, 10), another, quite different voice-possibly A

pollinaire's-is also speaking on behalf of fraudulence and blague (trickery). W

ho could forget the hilarious spectacle of A

pollinaire posing as a market expert

and offering stock tips to the Am

erican poet Stuart Merrill on

the basis of his position as editor of a half-phony financial m

agazine? As m

any others joined in asking his advice on in-vestm

ents, Andre Salm

on and other of Apollinaire's close

friends watched these perform

ances, knowing how

"totally ignorant he w

as of every aspect of the Bourse."19 B

ut, then, the fabrication of inform

ation was as natural to A

pollinaire as breathing.

. . . A

t first they seem to tum

through the limpid space like so

ma!ly glinting facets on the surface of w

ater. The new

spaper fragm

ents on both of them date from

early Decem

ber, one a Siphon, G

lass, Newspaper, Violin (Fig. 6), the other a Bowl with Fruit, Violin and W

ineglass (Fig. 7).

The first has the stark sim

plicity of the "Tchataldja" Violin,

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I 49

just a few shards of new

sprint, plus a fragtnent of wood-

grained wallpaper, pasted to the w

hite page articulated here and there by spare charcoal lines. T

he title "JOU

RN

AL

" ex-cised from

the newspaper itself is attached to a draw

n oblong as its unam

biguous label. A sw

atch of ads scissored into the shape of a seltzer botde, its lines of type upended, releases the

of the "siphon" into the sign for rising bubbles. A

nother piece of newsprint produces the

stippled atmospheric space to cup the neck of the violin. A

fourth patch is the operator of the w

ork's complexity as its

prismatic contour m

anages to function as both figure and ground; its shape m

imicking that of the w

ineglass Picasso has draw

n onto its surface and, by simultaneously serving to pro-

file. the yiolin's left shoulder, executing a figure/ground re-versal that propels it backw

ard to signifY the light-filled

surround for all these objects.

Bowl with Fruit takes this production of the oppositional pair from

within the supposed unity of the single collage piece and

expands it over the surface of the entire work. T

he wood-

grained paper cut to the profile of the violin extends past the instrum

ent to insinuate itself as the ground of the table that supports the com

pote dish, signaling at one and the same tim

e figure andground. 20 T

he black r,ectangle that elongates the blue plane of the violin's face to produce the solid opacity of its neck is also coerced by an abutting w

hite shape tc:J read as the transparency of shadow

. Even the page from

a comm

ercial il-lustration of fruit types is forced into this play of the double, since each elem

ent gathered into the concavity of the "bowl"

50 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

is a naturalistic rendering of apple or pear (figure) appearing. against the w

hite of the page (background); and yet, cut into a set of paper shards-trapezoids, rhom

boids, rectangles-that one. another in their pasted configuration,

each of these white grounds opacifies to becom

e a figure, each paper shape obstructing the view

of its neighbor ... . . . B

ut in both these works the sound of voices bubbles

to the surface. In the former the legible type w

ithin the siphon initiates the talk, w

ith a "proposition interessante" ("good deal") concerning "vetem

ents confectionnes" ("ready-made

clothes"), followed by the sputter of "pret," "pret," "pret,"

"prets" ("loans") from the adjoining classified ads. In the

other the headline for "La V

ie Sportive" ("The Sporting

Life") pits the racing news against" ... arition," the title of a

story about a seance ("Apparition") w

here a Madam

e Har-

melie encounters the departed spirit of her desire ("C

' est elle!" ["T

hat's her!"]). Whoever chooses to read the fine print w

ill go on to other topics: a m

edical case history detailing the patient's m

uscle tone and the amounts of m

orphine admin-

istered, the stock data given in the "Chronique Financiere,"

an adman's assurances about the pow

ers of a certain brand of m

otor oil. So m

any voices let into the space, each with its w

orld, its tope, its point of view

. It is like A

pollinaire's conversation poem "Les Fenetres"

("Window

s"), also written in D

ecember, w

here the voices are unnam

ed although recognizable to the poet's friends. A

pollinaire himself starts the talk off w

ith the announcement

5. G

lass and Bottle of Suze autum

n 1912

6. Siphon, G

lass, New

spaper, Violin autum

n-winter 1912

7. B

owl w

ith Fruit, Violin and Wineglass

autumn-w

inter 1912

8. Still-life "A

u Bon Marche"

early 1913

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I 55

that "From red to green the yellow

dies entirely," but some-

one else replies, "There's a poem

to write about the bird w

ith one w

ing," and a third asks someone to "R

aise the blind." "W

e'll send it by telegraph," suggests a fourth. Each of these fragm

ents is just enough to produce the motion of conver-

sation, the play of relations, the sociability of the group. None

is enough to solidify into "information" or "argum

ent" or "idea." A

nd none can be said to represent the position of the author of "Les Fenetres," not even the title, w

hich is Delau-

nay's.21

It is this aspect of conversation that Picasso stages in these collages. W

hatever he might have felt about the politics of

the newspaper's layout-either M

allarme's disgust or D

os-toevsky's pleasure-or about the contents of the texts, it seem

s undeniable that theprinted

as parallel and

double the activity of the visual forms. For if in the latter the

signs offer just enough visual support for the circulation of m

eaning, in the former there is just enough m

eaning-in the form

of the voices, in the guise of the "news" they u

tter-to

support the circulation of the sign: to float the bits and pieces of text in a circuit that could be defined as m

ore abstract than B

akhtin's dialogism, for it is conversation understood as the

----

..

almost disem

bodied matrix that the sociologist G

eorg Simm

el w

ould define as the categorical precondition of sociability it-self

• • •

56 I T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

At first they seem

to fan through the brilliance of the room

like moving shadow

s cast from an unseen source, perhaps

branches waving outside the w

indow, so that now

it's the dark that m

akes the pattern, now it's the light one w

atches. In Still-life

Marchi" (Fig. 8) the snap of w

hite on black plays a particular gam

e of over and under since what seem

s to be incised out of the w

allpaper surface, indeed what is even la-

beled "TR

OU

, rer" ("hole, here"), is in fact a buildup of very shallow

relief, like a thin slab of gesso hovering above the patterned ground.

of the increased presence of w

hat has been_ declared to be an absence, a lacuna, contributes to the am

biguity that settles into the lower center of the im

age. Ex-

ecuted entirely on the top of one of the department store's

cardboard boxes, the collage exploits the box top's label-

"Au B

on Marche, Lingerie, B

roderie"-the form of w

hich (a parallelogram

) allows it to be flipped, w

ith a little help from

Picasso, into perspective so that it will itself appear as the top

of a box nestled within a decorative setting of ornam

ental stripes that com

e to stand for "wallpaper. "2

2 T

he help Picasso

is in of a shadow

y wash tl-latprojects

a __ right-hand side k>r this "box," even w

hile (Bow

l of Fruit-style) the utter continuity of the striped surface that now

functions as both figure and ground. B

ecause of this continuous flow, the extent of the box is un-

clear. The articulation of the front fac;:ade plus the label iden-

tifYing it as "Lingerie B

roderie" suggest that it is a shallow

traylike container, while the elongation of the right-hand side

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I 57

almost to the bottom

edge of the work im

plies with equal

plausibility that the object in question is a deep coffer, more

like a locked casket. Should it be the latter, the "hole" referred to w

ould signal the lock of this box and thus obliterate the kind of space Picasso often suggests as circulating below

the table top of the collage stilllifes-in Bow

l with Fruit, for exam

ple, or Bottle of Suze. Should it be the form

er, then the lock functions, as it had in analytic cubist paintings such as

The Dressing Table

(1910), as the keyhole in the drawer below

the table surface, w

hich, whatever its sym

bolic function, also serves as an ad-m

ission (operational since Cezanne's early stilllifes) that for a

painting, the place where the table hangs suspended several

inches above the lower fram

ing edge is always a vexatious

visual "hole" indeed.23 The shadow

s cast from the decanter

on the left (whose cut-glass stopper also suggests that it m

ight be a bottle of perfum

e) or the goblet on the right, reinforcing the sense of a table plane, offer no further help in this m

atter. A

ll that seems certain is that w

e are in a decidedly feminine

space, a boudoir with its dressing table, and that on the w

all above this assem

blage of objects appears the kind of array of fem

inine pictures so often found there, indicated here by the ad Picasso has appropriated from

the Samaritaine departm

ent store but cut now

to read only "SA

MA

" next to the image of

a young wom

an wearing a lace bodice and adjusting her neck-

lace. T

he boudoir, the lace, the cut-glass flask, the casket-all suggest a presence that had inflected these collages before in

58 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

the direction of poetry but does so now m

a bow tow

ard fashion. W

e seem to hear the tones of

writing in

La derniere mode under the pen nam

e Ix. "Let such a volum

e [of verse] linger for eight days, half-opened, like a bottle of scent," he advises, "on silk cushions em

broidered with fan-

tasies; and let that other volume [of tales] pass from

this testing ground onto the lacquered surface of a heavy cabinet-jew

el boxes near at hand, locked shut until the next party," for Ix assum

es his reader to be a wom

an. 24 Or, in yet another of his

personae, that of Miss Satin, w

ho signs the magazine's "Fash-

ion" column, he adm

its: "We have all dream

t of this gown,

without know

ing it. Monsieur W

orth, alone, knew how

to create a toilette as elusive as our thoughts." This is M

allarme

who, indeed, considers each detail of a dress, and each detail

of its description, as "the thousand charming nothings" de-

signed to imply less the physicality of an objective presence

before him than a m

agical, evanescent, global effect. An effect

not unlike the one he called for in poetry. W

ithin his magazine La derniere mode, M

allarme spun a

multitude· of voices out of his ow

n, giving each a different colum

n to write, a different w

orld to represent. Not only w

as Ix, w

ho covered literature_ and the theater, or Miss Satin,

who com

mented on Ie high-life; M

arguerite de Ponty ad-dressed "Fashion," the "C

hef de bouche de chez Brabant"

published elegant menus, M

arliani advised on interior deco-ration in the colum

n called the "Cam

et d'or," for which Zizi,

the mulatto m

aid, also supplied a recipe for coconut jam. M

al-larm

e held this sparkling conversation with him

self through-

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I 59

out the fall of 1874, a conversation he took so seriously that ten years later, w

hen Verlaine asked him

for an autobiograph-ical note for a kind of "W

ho's Who" of France, he ended his

self-description with La derniere m

ode, "the eight or ten pub-lished issues of w

hich inspire me still, w

hen I groom them

of their dust, to dream

on at length. "25

But other dream

s besides the ideal of these dematerialized

"nothings" find their voice in Picasso's "Au Bon M

arche." Indeed, the allusion to the w

hite sale (B is for B

LA

NC

), to the trousseau (the "hole" of the truncated T

RO

U from

the ad is a reference to this), to the precious horde of undergarm

ents, is uttered as w

ell in the tone of the w

hose sensibility, quite the opposite ofIx's or M

arguerite de Ponty's, is form

ed on the packaged sentimentality of serial novels such

as Le Journal's romanjeuilletons ("Y

ou know, M

iss Jodel, that if ever you need m

y help ... " -"To

o late!") ,26 the belief in

spiritualism ("C

'est elle!"), the emotions of dance tunes such

as "Trilles et Baisers" ("Trills and K

isses" [Daix, 518, 521]),

and, most of all, the vicarious thrill of the Jait-divers. T

he Jait-divers, w

hich is news reduced to gossip, inform

ation making

its way m

ore or less in the form of rum

or, is a kind of false coin put in m

ass circulation by the newspaper and read w

ith avidity by the concierge, the dressm

aker's assistant, and

-by

her ow

n adrnission-Picasso's Femande O

livier, the great consum

er of sensationalism, rom

ans a l'eau de rose, and playlets of personal tragedy. Fem

ande, who, kidnapped, raped, and

held prisoner as a sixteen-year-old by the young man her aunt

will then force her to m

arry, loses herself in magazines: "I am

60 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

left alone the whole day; I can't leave. I found a pile of illus-

trated Gil Bias that I devour w

ithout dreaming of nourishing

myself physically. W

hen the evening comes, I am

there, crouched on the sofa w

ith the magazines scattered around m

e. I have forgotten about tim

e, about life. These poems, these

stories, these songs, these pictures, how full of talent this Stein-

len is! "27

This is Fernande, who at the age of seventy-four com

posed a fraudulent "diary" of her adolescence and her subsequent career as artist's m

odel, widely shared sexual object, and m

is-tress: fraudulent-since it is clearly no diary-and filled not only w

ith "biographical" details surely modeled on years of

romance reading but w

ith embarrassing attem

pts at literary

style that constantly fall back into purple prose:

I love the radishes I unearth, the sorrel leaves that set one's teeth on edge, I love-like the Parisian I a

m-

everything that country children disdain. I love that sum

mer thunderstorm

s catch me by surprise to m

ake me

a dripping thing with hair stream

ing onto my neck, I

love to feel the water slipping betw

een my skin and m

y slip and not be able to m

ove forward since m

y dress, glued to m

y body, impedes m

y legs, and to feel my face

glistening with rain, the w

ater in my eyes, m

y ears, down

'my neck, and then, the rain stopping, a rainbow

streak-ing the repurified azure, lets m

e slide on the sparkling grass and feel m

yself dry under the burning rays of the sun, restored to itself again. 28

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I

61

It is the document of a m

ind nurtured on pulp romance, in

which the cliche of the prostitute-indolent, gluttonous, les-

bian-able to rise in society and be made w

hole again by the noble intervention of a painter (the exam

ples here are a roman-

feuilleton like Xavier de M

ontepin's La porteuse de pain or the extraordinary M

emoires of C

eleste Mogador, a registered pros-

titute in the 1840s who becam

e a countess by 185429) m

ixes w

ith the middle-class idealization of art.

Tw

o stories touching on Fernande are told by Gertrude

Stein through the voice of Alice Toklas. T

he first-addressing Fernande's literary tastes-is the jealousy she exhibited during her separation from

Picasso in 1907, upon finding out that it w

as Picasso to whom

Stein had given the month's supply of

"funnies" from A

merican new

spapers. The second is Picasso's

comm

ent-straight out of "Un am

our de Sw

ann"-after his definitive separation from

her in 1911: "He said her beauty

always held him

but he could not stand any of her little w

ays."30 Indeed, both Salmon and Sabartes speak pityingly of

"Picasso's eight years ofboredom."31

And indeed, the shop girl w

ho speaks in "Au Bon M

arche" has, herself, tw

o "voices." The first, calling to m

ind Fer-nande's dem

and for a maid and a "day" (to receive regularly)

after she and Picasso had mdved to the boulevard de C

lichy in 1911, is drenched in propriety. She shops the w

hite sales. She thinks about her trousseau, her undergarm

ents. But the

second is pictured by Octave U

zanne, writing a sociology of

Parisian wom

en in 1910 and describing the young middle-

class taught from

the age of fifteen to think about nothing

62 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

but love and flirtation, who then m

arries into coldness and boredom

but lives "in a city overflowing w

ith sexual excite-m

ent. "32

How

could there not be scandal? he asks. These are

the w

ho exploit the classified ads of the newspapers

under the guise of offering "massages, hair rem

oval, dye jobs," m

ake sexual contacts. 33 Thus in "A

u Bon Marche "

, above the Sam

aritaine ad, Picasso includes a thin strip of the classifieds w

ith MA

SSAG

E a prom

inent offering, and even more

nastily he has "trousseau" play associations with "tro

u"-as

in Apollinaire's early pornographic novel M

irely, or The Little Low

-Priced Hole.

If th=-circulation of the sign is shadowed by the circulation

news, of rum

or, of comm

ercial offerings of various kinds, all of them

given "voice" by these surges of type, one of the speakers here is talking sex for m

oney, while another (the

same?) is dream

ing of romance, and yet another is m

using on fashion and its expressive form

, coquetry.

Thinking about the distance betw

een these two-coquetry

and prostitution-in 1910, just a few years before Picasso

made this collage, G

eorg Simm

el sees them both as a form

of

abstraction. 34 strips both seller and

buyer of his or her subjectivity, reducing each to nothing but

a pure sex act, in w

hich the organ is m

oney with no rem

ainder (indeed, the econom

ic counterpart of the prostitutional relation is money),

c()_quetry, he argues, is something else altogether. T

here, as the coquette m

anages to hold her pursuer in constant tension, suspended betw

een her "yes" and her "no," her refusal never

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I 63

produced as an ultimate rebuff, eroticism

is stripped of its m

eans/ends content, to become a pure form

of play. "This

freedom from

all the weight of firm

content and residual re-ality," Sim

mel w

rites, "gives coquetry that character of vac-illation, of distance, of the ideal, w

hich allows one to speak

with som

e right of the 'art'-no

t the arts-of coquetry. "3

5

Coquetry is, then, the aesthetics of sex. It is eroticism

as purposiveness w

ithout purpose, carnal knowledge stripped of

concepts, a Kantian ground of freedom

. As this kind of "play

form" of eroticism

, Simm

el compares it to conversation,

which is for him

the ultimate play form

of social relations: pure circulation stripped of all function except that of being the very expression of sociability itself

To read Sim

mel's 1910 essay on "Sociability" is to en-

counter a strange gloss on Picasso's

collages of 1912 or A

pollinaire's contemporaneous forays into a poetry of "con-

versation." For Simm

el wants to project a social space in

which signs circulate endlessly as w

eightless fragments of rep-

artee, stripped of practical content-that of inform

ation, argum

ent, business-taking as their content, instead, the

functional play of conversation itself, conversation whose

playfulness is expressed by the speed and lightness with w

hich its object changes from

mom

ent to mom

ent, giving its topics an interchangeable, accidental character. It is in this w

ay, Sim-

mel says, that conversation is "the purest and m

ost sublimated

form of m

utuality among all sociological phenom

ena," since conversation "becom

es the most adequate fulfillm

ent of a re-lation, w

hich is, so to speak, nothing but relationship, in

64 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

which even that w

hich is otherwise the pure form

of inter-action is its ow

n self-sufficient content" (137). In the art of conversation, Sim

mel adds, the storyteller con-

tributes his or her gift to the social group by telling it imper-

sOllally so as not to im

pose an individualized presence-w

hich Simm

el calls "the light and shadow of ::m

e's inner life"-b

ut instead to enjoy "the im

personal freedom of the

mask" (131). T

he disembodied voice, a pure persona w

ithout the three-dim

ensionality of personhood, thus refuses to make

speech the instrument for ulterior ends, em

itting it rather as "the abstraction of association," the "w

hole meaning and

content of social processes," and ultimately, since the ideal of

conversation is that it should circulate among equals, "the

play-form for the ethical forces of concrete society" (139).

It was w

ith this same "tact" that Feneon sent his "new

s in three lines" every m

orning into the whirl of daily circulation,

the fait-divers as amusing deadpan, the frisson of the alm

ost m

eaningless event. And Picasso also contributes: "M

r. Char-

don's suicide remains m

ysterious" (Daix 553); "A

sixty-year-old is beaten by a burglar and left for dead" (D

aix 546); "An

actress kills her lover" (Fig. 9). T

oo fragmented to body forth

the dialogical novel's world, they. enact the pure circulation

of sociability itself, the play form of the not yet fully voiced

"statement.' ,

• • •

At first they seem

to flutter through the empty space, to land

weightlessly on the abstract surface, yellow

ed leaves blown by

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I

65

the wind, som

e upside down, som

e right side up. The play is

always m

ost brilliant when the reversals are pairs, as in the

BOHle __ glassJ

913), wheEe a

toquelike shape, cut from a sheet of w

allpaper, reads as trans-articulating both the lip of the w

ineglass its

liqllidcontents, while below

, the upside-down silhouette left

by the "toque's" excision from the sheet registers the opacity

of the stem and base of the object, declanng itself a figure (no

matter how

ghostly) against the wallpaper's tablecloth ground

(Fig. 9). The paradigm

is perfectly expressed, as the signifi-ers-identical in shape-produce each other's m

eaning, their opposition in space (right side up/upside dow

n) echoing their sem

antic reversal. In an exam

ple from the opening series of these collages

during the fall of 1912-the ones reduced to the "ascetic" com

ponents of just one or two new

spaper pieces against the cursive lines of charcoal on p

aper-a lone fragm

ent, pasted upside dow

n, holds the center of the work (Fig.1Q

).36 It

wo.uld seelll not

not sufficient to keep the simple

iconic, or naturalistic reading at bay. Indeed, Daix says quite

flatly, "This cuttill lLe)(."presses the volum

e of the bottle"; and R

osenblum, having rem

arked that the lightbulb advertise-m

ent that appears on the fragment can be read as a com

ment

on the orientation of the fragment itself ("the only [bulb]

which can be placed in any position at all"), goes on to declare

that the illustration of the. bulb, falling where it does in the

center of the work, "transform

s this bottle-shaped volume

66 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

into a lamp base (w

ith arced shade), yet another example of

Cubist sleight of hand. "3

7

The pressure to turn the collage-sign back into an Icon

with a purely m

imetic thrust is very like the pressure B

akhtin speaks of, even w

hile resisting it, to remonologize the space

of Dostoevsky's polyphony. D

aix's impulse is that of sim

pli-£Y

ing-"It's the volume of the bottle"-w

hereas the trape-zoid of the clipping, set w

ithin a cursively drawn oblong, from

the upper edge of w

hich another, narrower rectangle rises,

with the indication of the neck of the bottle jutting from

its top edge, renders perfectly am

biguous the identity of these objects and the relation betw

een them. Insofar as the block

of advertising on the clipping can be read as a label, the news-

print seems to articulate the w

ine bottle (much in the style of

a somew

hat later, rather similar m

ember of the series [D

aix 547] w

hose sole clipping, an inverted trapezoid, places the ad for "V

in Desiles" at the point w

here a label would be affixed

to its schematic profile of a bottle). B

ut because the oblong to

newsprint is attached seem

s to extend beyond the

and to rest in front of it, the clipping appears to itself to and thereby to signal a third, unnam

ed element

tab1.e: the daily paper so u!>iquitous among the other

mem

bers of this series. Yet even m

ore important, since the

lonK trapezoidal shape of the new

sprint suggests a foreshort-ened canting into depth, it signifies the transparency of the collage system

itself, the shuttling relationships between one

figure and another (newspaper and bottle) or betw

een figures , and their grounds. (In the case of the "V

in Desiles" collage a

9. Bottle ofV

ieux Marc, G

lass and New

spaper spring 1913

10. Bottle and W

ineglass autum

n-winter 1912

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I 69

similar am

biguity occurs as the "label," rhyming in shape w

ith the bow

l of the wineglass that is sketched in beside it, attaches

itself now to the bottle and now

to the goblet, alternating as figure and ground.)

IfDaix's reading presses this spatial and sem

antic ambiguity

out of the work, it does not violate the collage's representa-

tional order. Rosenblum

's, on the other hand, pushes toward

an iconic condition that is utterly foreign to Picasso's system.

The idea that Picasso is "finding" realistic im

ages in the clip-pings out of w

hich to construct a naturalistic representation-"a lam

p base (with arced shade)"-converts this signifying

system into a naive gam

e of projection. This does violence to Picasso's evident control over the sign's circulation w

ithin a universe of fairly fixed param

eters, not only in terms of its

repertory of objects and their scale in relation to one another but also in term

s of the semes (or units of m

eaning) the collage pieces w

ill generate. Now

here is this naturalizing tendency m

ore vulgar than in Edw

ard Fry's reading of "Au Bon M

ar-(he, JJ w

hich, taking off from R

osenblum's earlier suggestion

that Picasso is punning with the prom

inent placement of the

word (rou, sees this "hole" as the linchpin of the collage's

putative depiction of "a wom

an of apparently easy virtue" seated behind a cafe table, her "legs beneath the table [indi-cated] by clippings w

ith the pun 'LU

N B T

RO

U le

I.' "38

The

idea that Picasso would break the tension of the breathless

closeup within w

hich he controls these stilllifes to open up the deep perspective of a w

oman behind a table or that he

would violate the coherence of scale that is part of his system

70 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

to build a composite figure w

ith dwarf head and colossal gen-

itals goes against all the other evidence of this entire practice as it evolves from

work to w

ork, maintaining the logic of a

senes ...

... And w

hen the voices begin they refer to other things. T

he one that emerges from

the lightbulb advertisement

speaks, as Rosenblum

caught, in the tones of a modernist

game of self-reference. "T

he only [bulb] which gives light on

all sides," it boasts, from its ow

n upside-down position. A

nd then another voice, w

hich also rises from w

ithin this ad, pro-nounces "L

AM

PE O

.R.," and is reinforced by the fragm

ent Picasso cut from

the next day's paper to use on another collage

voice "[L

E L]

ITR

E D

'OR

"

("T.e-e Golden

Speaking reflexively, then, of the col-lage piece itself, it is also speaking o

f gold.

The. re are many w

ho would say that to refer to the m

ate-rials of collage and, at one and the sam

e time, to speak of

gold, is a contradiction in terms. T

he very point of collage, they w

ould say, its radicality at the level of cultural produc-tion, is that these are m

aterials born to die. If high art is ad-dressed to tim

eless values like beauty or truth, it chisels this speech into the hardness of granite, seeking out those m

ate-rials, like gold, that tim

e will neither fade nor erode. T

he m

ethod in the artist's choice of oil paint or bronze or marble

is one of securing a permanence of form

to underwrite a pre-

sumed tim

elessness of content. But paper is the A

chilles' heel of the art system

, rendered perishable by light, by worm

s, by m

old. And nothing in the entire range of fiber could be m

ore

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I 71

visibly open to attack than the newspaper, yellow

ing as it does in the course of a w

eek, under one's very eyes.

The defiance of high art, the argum

ent goes, is written into

this "pasted paper revolution" most visibly by the use of

newsprint, although all the other paper objects-the cigarette

packs, the matchbooks, the w

allpaper, the department store

and bottle labels-flaunt their connection to a mass-cultural

source just as openly, thereby shrugging their shoulders at the sacred preserve of high culture and its values. 39 E

ven the tech-nique of m

aking collage, with its bits and pieces that can be

shifted about on the drawing sheet and provisionally pinned

in place before their definitive gluing, is derived from com

-m

ercial practice. It is more rem

iniscent oflayout design than of anything taught at the Ecole des B

eaux-Arts. 40

But G

ertrude Stein, turning to the topic of Picasso's col-lage, has this to report on his notions about ephem

erality as defiance:

Later he used to say quite often, paper lasts quite as well

as paint and after all if it all ages together why not, and

he said further, after all later, no one will see the picture,

they will see the legend of the picture, the legend that

the picture has created, th,en it makes no difference if

the picture lasts or does not last. Later they will restore

it, a picture lives by its legend, not by anything else. He

was indifferent as to w

hat might happen to his pictures

even though what m

ight happen to them affected him

profoundly.41

72 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

Indeed, without retreating to that "high ground" w

hich, w

ould consider nothing but the formal character of collage's

operation, other historians, following Stein, insist on w

eigh-ing the im

portance of Picasso's own cultural context before

assessing the socio-aesthetic meaning of collage. For D

avici.

case that Picasso-from w

ithin the protective shield of a subcultural group that w

as both inter-nationalist and intensely aestheticist in m

akeup (composed of

collectors, dealers, poets, and a few other artists)-has to be

materials for the sam

e aesthetic ends __

obtained for cubism in general, nam

ely, the herme-

ticism of a sym

bolist notion of artistic autonomy.42 So that if

---.

these materials seem

to speak in the demotic language of dail-

iness, the point they are making is not to negate the goals of

high art but rather, "using means that are w

ithin everyone's grap,

his power as a creator." H

ere Cottington is

quoting Pierre Daix's position, before going on to generalize

what he feels to be the real point Picasso m

ust be making here

about the transformative pow

ers, not so much of his ow

n creative gifts as of the aesthetic discourse itself: "turning the dross of the vernacular, as it w

ere, into the gold of art. "43 C

ottington is relatively alone, however, in a chorus of

voices that would say "Pish tush!:' to a claim

that would go

so faras to suggest the Mallarm

ean character of Picasso's col-lage.

would rem

ind him o

f Apollinaire's w

ords in "Z

one," written just as Picasso w

as embarking on collage,

praising what he saw

around him in the streets: "T

he inscrip-tions on the sign boards and the w

alls / The plaques, the

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

\

73

notices bawl like parrots." G

oing even farther, they say, Apol-

linaire ruptures symbolism

's pretty autonomy, its golden iso-

lation from com

merce:

You read the handbills, catalogs, posters that sing out

loud and clear-That's the m

orning's poetry, and for prose there are

the newspapers,

There are tabloids lurid w

ith police reports, Portraits of the great and a thousand assorted stories.

"Zone," they w

ould say, was w

ritten under the effect of sudden conversion, in the late spring of1912, to

hence its embrace of the very m

edium-journalism

the new

spaper-that Mallarm

e loathed. Nam

ing Mal-

century, Marinetti

had cried, "Let us reject our sym

bolist masters!" and A

polli-naire w

as soon to second this in his own poetic m

anifesto. G

iven the link between A

pollinaire and Picasso, they argue, it is obvious that Picasso's very adoption of\new

sprint as his w

ork's major support at the outset of collage points to his

adherence to the esprit nouveau position that understands the

world of M

allarme as irrevocably superseded. 44

Further, they would add, "Z

one" is not merely a celebra-

tion of the collapse of the difference between the poetic

"high" and the mass-cultural "low

." "Zone" has in store an-

other implosion as w

ell. For at the poem's end, the C

hristi-anity A

pollinaire supports throughout its length is submitted

74 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

to the challenge of those "fetishes from O

ceania and Guinea"

, w

hich he calls "Christs of darker hopes." Em

bracing this other "shape and creed," he ends by denigrating the golden, eternal, W

estern God: "Farew

ell, farewell," he says, "D

ecap-itated su

n-"

So, they retort, the idea of "turning the dross of the ver-nacular into the gold of art" has to be taken, at this m

oment,

ironically indeed.

And yet ... it is Picasso w

ho has planted those voices say-ing "gold"; and as w

ith the case of his proffering of the market

reports, we are entitled to ask of these collages: "W

ho is speaking, and to w

hat end?" For, indeed, even if we take this

utterance right at the mass-cultural level of A

pollinaire's "tab-loids lurid w

ith police reports" or his media "portraits of the

great and a thousand assorted stories," we have to ad

rnit-

and here we w

ould be corning to Cottington's defense in this

matter of a M

allarrnean Picasso-that it was M

allarme w

ho com

posed, something in the m

anner of Feneon, a fait-divers on the very subj ect of "gold. "

Of the eight essays gathered by M

allarrne under the rubric "G

rands Faits Divers," only tw

o-"O

r" ("Gold") and "A

c-cusation"-w

ere actually triggered by news stories. 45 T

he first w

as stimulated by the financial crash of the Panam

a Canal

venture of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the second by the journal-istic accusations against French w

riters during the wave of

anarchist bombings in the 1890s, and m

ore specifically in de-fense

of his

friend Laurent

Tailhade, w

hose rem

ark, "Q

u'importe la victim

e si Ie geste est beau" ("What m

atter

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I 75

the victim, if the gesture is beautiful"), w

as distorted by the press. 46 B

ut the "themes" of gold, finance, cash (num

eraire) , and the new

spapers themselves are threaded through m

ost of the texts. Indeed, as the M

allarrne scholar Robert G

reer Cohn

points out, even the title of the de Lesseps piece employs the

French word or in its double sense as both noun (gold) and

conjunction (now), thereby referring reflexively to the cycle of "G

rands Faits Divers" them

selves since the "now," by

"stopping time m

omentarily," signals "w

hat afait-divers does, a 'flash' (new

sbrief)," as in what the text itself w

ill name as

the "instant venu ostentatoire" ("come the show

y mom

ent [of a financial crash]"). 47

It is nonetheless the case that Mallarrne is hardly celebrating

journalism here. As one w

ould expect, he castigates its lan-guage-"the universal journalistic style"48-w

hich he com-

pares to money-"vain universal divinity" (335)-in that

both strive for an unmediated relation betw

een representation and object: "direct and palpable." Further, the result of that language is a dreary grayness that M

allarrne compares to the

page of the

newspaper itself,

that flat "journal eploye"

("spread-open newspaper" 386), w

hich depends on the ag-gressiveness of its headlines, its typographic variations, to produce the ersatz of feeling. W

hereas poetry contains its own

music, and this "par Ie privilege d'offrir, sans cet artifice de

typographie, Ie repos vocal qui mesure l'dan" ("through the

privilege of offering, without that artifice of typography, the

vocal repose [through measured lines] that m

easures the elan [of one breath or one line]" 368).

76 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

Indeed, music is one of the sources of experience that M

al-. larm

e repeatedly characterizes as golden ("an orchestra only m

arking with its gold").49 T

o this can be added sunsets, m

oonrises ("this gold moonrise"), the book ("0

golden clasps of old m

issals!"), light ("shafts of vibratory gold"), and, of course, the sun itself, w

hich by extension, as a glittering star, becom

es a version of the Mallarm

ean lustre that "scintillates in a thousand glances, now

[or], like gold, an ambiguous

smile .... "5

0

In this sense Mallarm

e's poetic gold joins hands with G

ide's counterfeit coin, since it w

as that coin's crystal center that, paradoxically, could represent the signifier's abstract purity. For, w

hen stripped of its comm

odified exchange value, this coin w

as instead endowed by the m

odernist artist with the

substitutional condition of the sign in its continual play of circulation.

It might be easy to read the lesson articulated by G

oux's m

odel as merely equating the abandonm

ent of the gold stan-dard w

ith the rise of abstraction. With gold seen as equivalent

to nature-epitomized by the sun-M

alevich's Victory over the Sun (1913) w

ould then stand as a declaration of the mod-

ernist position, its defiant its refusal of any

identifiable referent. But G

oux's model is m

ore complex than

just marking an allegiance to abstraction understood as an ide-

alist transcendence of material reality. T

he structuralist system

through which m

arkers of wealth as w

ell as linguistic signs cir'2:late m

ay have cut off a direct connection to the referent,

itself takes on a special kind of material presence.

_.-., ..

-.. .. _---_.

-",

---

--

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I 77

Mallarm

e celebrates this in the unexpected connection he m

akes between poetic language and m

oney in the fait-divers called "G

old." In "G

old," this comparison betw

een the gold of the po-litical econom

y and of the poet is by the.possible

comparison of a financial crash to a shipw

reck. T

he extravagant display of huge amounts of w

ealth going up in flam

es would then be like a "phantasm

agoric sunset" into w

hich "a liquefaction of treasure creeps, flushing crimson and

gold at the horizon." Unfortunately, how

ever, "If a Bank fails

[there is only] vagueness, mediocrity, grayness" (336). A

nd this grayness seem

s to be in direct proportion to the precision w

ith which the universal equivalent of m

oney-"Cash (Ie

numeraire), a device of terrible precision"-registers the ca-

tastrophe of failure, since it is this very precision, expressed in num

bers, that leaves the reader of these reports totally cold. M

allanne focuses on the paradox that the more zeroes

added to a figure, even as these push it farther and farther tow

ard the "grandiloquence" of an astronomical sum

, the m

ore an effect of subtraction takes over as the number "loses

any meaning" for our im

aginations and begins to recede: "sig-nifying that its totality equals alm

ost nothing, spiritually." B

ut when he speaks of the :'abstract shine" of the w

riter's gold, w

hich money fails to possess, this abstraction itself needs

to be given the particular cast of Mallarm

e's or, which, as

Cohn has rem

inded us, is also the conjunction "now .. " or

"whereas." Thus, as a

a word that m

arks the here and now

of its own position (either syntactic or physical,

78 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

to say, either logical, temporal,

o!has the' possibility of operating against the grain of abstraction under-

as a of idealist unity. This is the reading thatJacques

Derrida stresses in order to disengage M

allarme from

the lit-erary-critical notion of an interplay of them

es built on the slippage of polysem

y. Going far beyond C

ohn's interpretation of the "O

r" ofMallarm

e's title as only a temporal "now

" that signifies news flash, D

errida argues that it is the very uncon---

of the physical spread of OR overthe page of the

text-" dehO

Rs" ("outdoOR

S"), "fantasmagoRique" "tresO

R"

("stOR

e"), "hOR

izon," "majoR

e" ("moR

e"), "hOR

s" ("ex-O

R a signifier truly cut free of the gold

standard of even its most shifting signified. 51 For it is in this

,t() vvhich Derrida gives the nam

e" dissemination,"

that it can approach the "vacant sonority" of the music

dreamed by M

allarme in the poem

"Igitur," where "son or"

("its gold") and "sonore" ("sonorous") play against one an-other in the relationship that D

errida calls "re-marking." B

y this he m

eans folding over one another to produce both the replication of the series and difference of the sam

e from itself.

The character of the re-m

ark here is to produce a lateral pres-sure that "transform

s the possessive adjective into a noun, Ie SO

N or ['the sound, "or" '], and the noun into an adjective Ie

son OR ['the sound or]. T

he 'sound or' re-marks the signifier

or (the phonic signifier: of the conjunction or of the noun, w

hich latter is also the signifier of the substance or of the m

etallic signifter, etc.), but it alSD re-marks m

usic. "52

It is this folding over of the "re-mark" that, as it produces

11. Bottle, C

up and New

spaper autum

n-winter 1912

12.

Guitar, Sheet-m

usic and Glass

autumn 1912

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I 81

a syntactic and gramm

atic (not to mention sem

i c) split into nonidentical pairs w

ithin one and the same signifier, m

akes one think of the structural play w

ithin Picasso's collage where

the same operations of the fold and its "re-m

ark" yield the sam

e aesthetic "gold." For th.ere, as well, the collage pieces

onto the "fiction" (Mallarm

e's desire for language) of their signifieds-shape and atm

osphere wrought

from identical new

spaper segments-as w

ell as their utter-ar:ces-,-. the m

urmur of the aesthete doubling the speech of

sh()£ girl. O

ne of the bifurcated utterances most historians of Picasso's

collage seem to agree on is the one enunciated in w

hat is perhaps the first of the series in the fall of 1912 . (Fig. 12), w

here the newsprint says, "L

a bataille s' est engagee." This

headline, which truncates the original announcem

ent con-cerning the w

ar in the Balkans ("La bataille s'est engagee fu-

rieuse sur les Lignes de Tchataldja" ["The battle is furiously

joined at the Tchataldja front"]), also cuts the master title of

the newspaper from

LE

JOU

RN

AL

to LE

JOU

. Given the "play" .

of the collage operation itself, sc!:-()!a.!s have tended to see the ensem

ble of words as w

orking on two different levels, one

---

--

-.-

addressing the Balkans, the other the aesthetic battle un-

leashed by collage either against the "high" of oil painting or against the (traditional) system

of iconic representation still visible in the (now

superseded) analytic cubist drawing of a

glass juxtaposed to the other paper fragments. 53 O

ne inter-how

ever, triangulates this dialogical space, adding a voice that at this point could only be identified as Picasso's

82 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

own. 54 For this speaker is seen as fighting a som

ewhat m

ore personal "battle" than either that of political engagem

ent with

the left's resistance to interference in the Balkans or that of

modernism

's revaluation of artistic media. In this interpreta-

understood as Picasso, is that opened in O

ctober to enthusiastic resE?nse

many avant-garde patrons and critics, am

ong w

hom figured,

most distressingly from

Picasso's point of

view,

Which m

eans that in the fall of 1912 another, m

ore partisan sense of "gold" is circulating w

ithin the collage sequence.

It in the context of the Section d'O

r show that A

pol-linaire gave his lecture "T

he Dism

emberm

ent of Cubism

" --.'

-,

in praise o[ a younger generation than that of Picasso and B

raque, one to which A

pollinaire was now

consigning the future of the avant-garde. 55 T

he or of the Section d'Or w

as , of course, the Platonic notion of the G

olden Section or an abstract system

of proportion that was to open painting onto

a unified, harmonic ideal.

whose cubist variant

Apollin:lil"e

"()rpl1ic" in reference to its musicality

and abstraction, had m

ade his house available to A

pollinaire all through the fall; and the poet was to go on to

write his conversation poem

"Window

s" as the catalog for D

elaunay's January 1913 show in M

unich.

But this excitem

ent on Apollinaire's part over w

hat Picasso considered a m

ove to outflank him on his

right-Orphism

being stylistically more reactionary than cub-

ism-w

as matched by A

pollinaire's sudden enthusiasm for a

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I

83

challenge on cubism's cultural and political "left," in the form

of futurism

. Both Picasso and A

pollinaire had visited the fu-turist exhibition in February 1912, and the poet, taking his cue from

the painter's distaste, had written a critical review

of the m

ovement ("T

he Italian futurists declare that they will

not abandon the advantages inherent in the subject, and it is precisely this that m

ay prove to be the reef upon which all

their artistic goodwill w

ill be dashed to bits").56 Over the

succeeding months this w

as to change radically, however, as

Apollinaire w

as swept up in the futurist call for breaking the

barriers between art and life.

Perhaps the impetus w

as the sudden appearance on the Paris scene of Blaise C

endrars, who w

ith his poem "Piques

a New

York" w

as putting pressure on Apollinaire to distance

himself from

what could be seen as his outm

oded allegiance to sym

bolism. A

pollinaire's response was im

mediate. C

hang-ing the title of his forthcom

ing book of poems from

Eau de vie (too sym

bolist) to A leo 0 Is (more populist, m

ore sexy), he began running around Paris w

ith Leger to look at the urban iconography of billboards and street signs, w

riting the mani-

festo for the futurist magazine Laeerba w

here he praises Ma-

rinetti's "Words in Freedom

," and generally espousing what

he called "1' esprit nouveau. Picasso, w

e know, disliked futurism

. He hated the futurist

philosophizing about art in the name of "advanced" ideas

such as dynamism

, subjectivism, and objectivism

. "That kind

of chatter gave Picasso the horrors," Severini reported, quot-ing him

as complaining: "W

hat's the point of yamm

ering on

84 T

HE

P

ICA

SS

O

PA

PE

RS

like that?" Picasso is supposed to have interrupted a futurist discussion about the need for m

odern subjects, such as racing cars (m

ore beautiful than the Nike of Sa m

oth race) or armored

trucks, by shouting: "One can m

ake a modern subject out of

Greek w

arriors."s8

But apart from

the many things that Picasso w

ould have disliked about futurism

-from its claim

s to have outdistanced him

even though it clung to the naturalist referent (no matter

how disguised); to the ultim

ately monologic space (despite

the typographic noisiness) of its "Words in Freedom

," so for-eign to the bifurcating "re-m

ark" of his own use of w

ords; to its colonization of A

pollinaire, which, given the constrict-

edness of Picasso's "subculture," was a serious threat in

deed

-there w

as also futurism's intrusion into his private life in the

form of Fernande's new

relationship to Ubaldo O

ppi. In a letter to B

raque in May of 1912 Picasso gives the flavor of his

personal disgust: "Fernande has left with a Futurist. W

hat am

I going to do with the dog?" A

nd throughout the summ

er Fernande continued to plague him

. She not only made the

complicated m

ove of his studio from M

ontmartre to M

ont-parnasse even m

ore unpleasant 59 but went to C

eret, where

Picasso had intended to summ

eJ;: with his new

companion,

Marcelle H

umbert (w

hom he renam

ed Eva Gouel). Picasso

testifies to his worry about becom

ing a potential fait-divers him

self: ''I'm really annoyed by all this because I don't w

ant m

y love for Marcelle to be hurt in any w

ay by any trouble they [the new

spapers] could make for m

e," he writes to

Braque in June. 60

TH

E C

IRC

UL

AT

ION

OF

TH

E S

IGN

I 85

From the subject w

ho speaks, to the object who is jour-

nalistically "spoken," Picasso joins the conversation that cir-culates in the polyphonic space of the collages. B

ut his is only one voice, itself bifurcated. M

any other voices attach to these speakers, all of them

doubling and tripling from w

ithin. A

small am

ount of text will do it. If the fait-divers depends on

just enough "reality" for the circulation of rumor, the collages

have just enough meaning for the circulation of the sign,

while the signifiers are in vivid enough circulation to trigger

the constellation of the signified, as it moves betw

een Mal-

larme's "fiction" and G

ide's "counterfeit."