The wig was at the centre (or slightly above the centre) of this performance, and it was, as I say, a lard wig. It had the light, fluffy appearance of whipped or shaving cream, but as it melted before the heat lamp fan set just to Arcand’s right, it gave off a fatty odour; that slightly greasy, stale scent recalling unwashed hair or a flat-top grill, but also reminiscent of the smells from the abattoir down at Niagara and Wellington, a few blocks away, which as downtown Torontonians know, envelop the heights and depths of malodourousness in the summer heat, the vapours of which can reach all the way up to the former shores of Lake Ontario above Dupont Street. It is the smell of rendering. Of rendering a nation-state by rending existing local multiplicities apart. This I believe is a subtext of Arcand’s wardrobe. As the wig melted it left rivulets of liquid, sparkles, and stars upon his cheeks.

Arcand stood (on stage at the Drake Underground) in front of a large canvas backdrop that depicted a vague landscape.⁽⁸⁾ To his right was a heating fan, and he spoke into a microphone. He made some introductory remarks, seemingly meant to flatter his audience, in a manner that suited his dress – formally. For he was dressed not only in a wig, but in a frock coat and breeches, hose, buckle shoes, a foulard and I believe, a waistcoat with a blouse underneath. He complimented the dress of the Torontonians – “black on black, on black” an observation he promised to take with him and share with his fellow Vancouverians, whom, he mentioned, were “working with taupes on taupe.”

He then raised the question of voice: “with what voice shall I address you, I have so many.”

[In Who Says What and The Question of Voice Denis Donoghue] studies some of the relations and discrepancies between an oral culture and a culture of print; and certain recent attempts to undermine the privilege of voice and the definition of presence in terms of speech uttered and heard....
Professor Donoghue pursues these discrepancies further; examines the rivalry of voice and text, the different rhetorics of authority… the question of tone..., anonymous and pseudonymous styles, parodic voices....
He examines the embarrassment readers audiences feel when they can't ascribe printed words to any particular voice, real or imagined.⁽⁹⁾
[my insertions and deletions]

Styles, tones and privleges, anonymous and parodic are the thought balloons hovering over Arcand's head, so I veer from Rousseau's troubling attachment to his wig to search the “question of voice.” The second site in the list leads me to the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab where questions of voice appear to loom large for web content writers who wish to enhance their own credibility. By this point the Google list seemed to be mirroring the narrative stream of the Arcand performance. The accomplishment of credibility is a necessary condition for the actor, but as proposed in the quote from Deleuze above, there is a paradox between credibility and dissembling in performance; between "being oneself" at the outset, or concealing the self to "project characteristics in common," before revealing one's essence.

All of this leads me looping back to Arcand’s nuanced question. One which he answered for us; “this voice is quite honest, I think,” a paradoxical and pivotal moment. Though accepting that the voice is honest, its assertion also draws upon a persona, that of the public intellectual (an idea Arcand mentioned in later correspondence.) The P.I. is someone who might enlighten and edify, who takes a position while amusing. But this notion, this figure – like the wig – is imbedded in a history.

I defend my digressions with wig 1:

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; - they are the life, the soul of reading; - take them out of this book for instance, - you might as well take the book along with them.

- Laurence Sterne

Digression 5: The Public Intellectual

What we now identify as an intellectual is a twentieth century phenomenon that has its roots in a very specific constellation of incident, place and time – circumstances that continue to colour the social perception of what and who an intellectual might be. The incident was the Dreyfus Affair, France, 1898. An incident replete with military cover-up, charges of anti-semitism, counter espionage and an island prison, all with eerie parallels in our own times. Georges Clemenceau himself coined the term in reference to the outpouring of support from academic and literary circles following the publication of Emile Zola’s open letter, J’Accuse (which indicted the French military for fabricating the case against Captain Dreyfuss). This “protest of intellectuals” appeared in Clemenceau’s own radical newspaper.

In recounting this history in The New Criterion, James Piereson writes:

The term stuck as a description of academics and writers who are active in political causes. What was new and important about the protest was that the signatories sought to use their academic qualifications or professional achievements to suggest that their views should be given privileged standing in a political context. Their protest generated an immediate counterattack from conservatives who associated the term “intellectual” with disorder, treason, and abstract reasoning.⁽¹⁰⁾ [my emphasis]

Disorder (or re-order), very ocasionally treason, and abstract reasoning are also the hallmarks of good performance so it is just that Warren Arcand might propose to inhabit the role of the early 20th c. public intellectual as a meeting ground for the 18th c. wig-wearing modern colonizer and empire builder (what were they thinking!) and the 21st c. Desiring Machine.

Nothing is so perfectly amusing as a total change of ideas.

- Laurence Sterne

Digression 6: “Is it not the case that we are the beneficiaries of a constant state of war?”⁽¹¹⁾

In the brief Historical Account of 18th c. Canada from which the following excerpts were taken, there is no mention of Indian, Native, or Aboriginal persons or lands. It is barely possible for me to fathom the depth of disconnection which would cause this to be so.

The Peace of Utrecht (1713) gave Britain Acadia, the Hudson Bay area, and Newfoundland. To strengthen their position the French built additional forts in the west (among them Detroit and Niagara).

wig. 3, Montcalm

The decisive battle of the entire struggle took place in 1759, when Wolfe defeated Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham, bringing about the fall of Quebec to the British.

 
wig.4, unidentified withness to the death of Wolfe

In the Treaty of Paris in 1763, France ceded all its North American possessions east of the Mississippi to Britain, while Louisiana went to Spain.

The Quebec Act (1774), granted important concessions to the French and extended Quebec's borders westward and southward to include all the inland territory to the Ohio and the Mississippi. This act infuriated the residents of the Thirteen Colonies (the future United States). In 1775 the American Continental Congress had as its first act not a declaration of independence but the invasion of Canada.

This period was also one of further exploration. Alexander Mackenzie made voyages in 1789 to the Arctic Ocean and in 1793 to the Pacific... George Vancouver secured for Britain a firm hold on what is now British Columbia.

wig. 5, Vancouver ⁽¹²⁾

From sea to sea to sea, between the Event which is the formation of the nation-state (the new World) through the processes of colonization, there is still the Body and the Trace,⁽¹³⁾ the pre-existing (still existing) nations un-formed or deformed. There occured a psychic shift, and this is what I believe Arcand is revealing. In the process of realizing the nation of Canada, the Indigenous nations become at first imaginary and then (more violently) unimaginable to the colonizers.

At this point Arcand, having identified his speaking voice as “honest”, makes a sound into the mic for which there really is no word –  it is a diaphragmatic vocalization somewhere between sobbing, cooing and panting – an abrupt break with the graciousness and control of his previous speech which invokes his body, the honest body, a Deleuzian desiring machine, “a machine of love, a machine of truth.”⁽¹⁴⁾

“Its so nice to be back in nature … with you” he says, at once indicating the quasi-naturalistic backdrop painting and our presence (as a body without organs), an audience.

But then he questions the authenticity of the chair which is also on stage. The silly chair insists upon its oneness. And so he must “do damage and violence” to this chair. He menaces the chair, and hisses at it. “We cannot let the chair continue as it is. We have needs…It is a time of war…don’t be afraid, in fact, it can be a beautiful thing.”

Our passion and principals are constantly in a frenzy, but begin to shift and waver, as we return to reason.

- Laurence Sterne

The time has run out on the wig. The tension between the persons of nature and the persons of culture is dissolving. The melting timing device of this performance has left rivulets of grease and glitter on his face and clumps of fat mixed with sparkle dust on the floor. Warren Arcand bids goodnight with a flourish of handkerchief and a blown kiss.

Lessons of wisdom have the most power over us when they capture the heart through the groundwork of a story, which engages the passions.

- Laurence Sterne