Antarctica is often talked about as articulating silence, that is, it is said to be silent, yet filled with noises of ice-creaking and moving. Without words, but full of imaginings. lissa mitchell in her vocal recordings articulates the impossibility of nothing. Both are beyond the word/site, in utterance without meaning and in shifting edges of melt and freeze. Post-structuralists said that Being' is not closed, subjects are in a constant state of becoming, articulating their presence but never arriving at it. To want not to be is to be outside of the world, and to be outside of the Word. how to write and to not exist, to document non-voice.. "Not to be, that is, in the final instance to be God; but to dissolve being itself, to free it of the Word, of God, of Self"1. Derrida writes Being ‘sous rature’ -under erasure2. Pointing to the necessary place of the word, but its inaccurate function. Lissa Mitchells Vocal Recordings are outside of the word. By articulating absence and a denial of Being, an absence of the absolute word is documented. With noises she frames the absence of speech. These are articulations that trouble the word and define(make present) its absence. (when I say word, here, I am referring to derrida's critique of logocentricism and implications of rationality3 regarding the word as a fundamental expression of reality). In lissa mitchell's Vocal Recordings communication is attempted through denial, as a means to finding a path elsewhere. the word holds reason and closure. With lissa mitchell, she's articulating the impossible, trying to say the unsaid, but unable to figure the word except through it's negative presentation4. No possible representation for the unsaid apart from framing blankness and inability to articulate

when we are confronted by antarctica as white space, it exists beyond the faculties, beyond knowledge. Kant suggests absence of form5 as a possible index to the unrepresentable. When trying to represent the infinite, the blank space is the only possible thing that can act as an object defying figuration. Lyotard suggests to"make one see only by prohibiting one from seeing"6 in searching for what it is, it is the negative presentation that leads us to the infinite. That is, it will avoid figuration, avoids the absolute image. there is no finality in infinity. It is beyond the word-which would take it into definition and control. Infinity is beyond the page/text, kant says that in the process of exploring empty space you are encountering the infinite. the empty abstraction that the imagination encounters in its attempts to find a means and sign of articulation, is in itself the process and presentation of the infinite. an "incessant deciphering for the disclosure of the truth as a presentation of the thing itself"7 Therefore the infinite can only be arrived at negatively. By eliminating figurative representations, it acknowledges that there is something elsewhere, and documents the absence of presence in the painting/word by it's blankness. And the hidden presence of noise ....

blank space on a map suspends all ordinary information that makes up geographical space elsewhere8. It is appealing as a space that exists for creative possesion, it is freed for the imagination, for filling in the blanks. It proceeds and legitimizes the desire by framing the absence. It is presented as blank emptyness and as such it is open to appropriation by what is outside. The sense of absence is documented as a negative presence that tells of something other with the limitless possibilities of its potential. Without inscription or figure(body and word) blank space is, in the instance of the map, ready for imagination and appropriation and knowledge; in noise the emptiness/void is a denial of the possibility of a figure/word. Filling in the blanks, or falling without of the blank. even though nothing is ever really empty, blankness frees things in space and time. metaphysics of presence relies on logocentricism. This can give rise to phonocentricism9, priviledging speech over writing. If the word is a fundamental expression of reality, then speech is closer to the pure presence of meaning, as a more direct conveyor of reality. Writing is seen as mediated, against an intimate relation between speech and it's utterance.. Derrida says that it is impossible for meaning to exist as pure unmediated presence at any stage of language10. And that Thought itself is a language. privileging speech over writing assumes an original thought before word. a writing down of what's already there, derived from speech/thought. This works in same way as mind body split. aristotle said "spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words"11 which means, as a result, "Writing is disparaged because it stands for something else of which it is a trace."12 So, equating thought and mind, and putting writing outside, says that meaning comes only from thought, and writing has no influence reciprocally. as if writing has nothing to do with making meanings. derrida uses the written presence of differance' to alter thought/language split.

logocentricism prioritises presence. Derrida "hopes to see logocentricism yield to something else, a concern with archiwriting' that is, in the widest sense, the very possibility of writing; to give weight to writing would be to recognise the dependence of presence on a trace"13 Speech over writing is a binary that needs deconstructing. No language has a pure presence(nothing). derrida's trace denies the possibility of arriving at an end of meaning or presence, that what is present plus what is lost could make a whole. the trace is not only the disappearance of the origin,.. "it means that origin did not even disappear, that it was only ever constituted as the reciprocal of the non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin."14. Derrida's trace "is the mark of absence of a presence, an always already absent present, of the lack at the origin that is the condition of thought and experience"15 as unmediated utterance, lissa mitchells vocals seem raw,wild stuff. In the same way, nature is seen as pure origin before the word of natural history....`True' nature represents freedom, spontaneity, authenticity, romantic nostalgia for a pure origin, where things were whole, and wild is perceived as the state that exists before the word. but nothing is prior to language. no pure presence that exists before or without of it's grasp. Antarctica isn't the pure origin of nature that has elsewhere been tamed by culture. Aligning nature with chaos, that exists before arrangement and knowledge, privileges thought over language.

the image of antarctica as pure nature can not exist without an image of false nature. To establish a nature reserve or represent nature is to recreate paradise, or an ideal of nature through processes of control. absence is obscured by a mask of excess. Simulation provides the availability of all things for they no longer exist, simulation given in order to halt the pursuit of authentic model, which derrida will tell us will never be found, and is nostalgic and pointless to look for. An authentic object can be found if it is looked for, but it will be meaningless.. .it will exist as a simulation of the lack, providing an image of a potential whole (nothing). we can't confuse derrida's trace' with the metaphor of a footprint once filled by a presence now gone because it gives rise to the belief in an object that once was present in it's totality. lack and loss live in the hope of filling and becoming an essential wholeness. Antarctica can be seen as blank space of origin and lack, that which isn't the word. the myth of origin- blank space, cultural vacancy, waiting raw-appears to contrast with civilized world, and civilising Word. Neither, however, is in contrast to the other, they contaminate the existence of each other. Yet they give each other the illusion of being a pure identity through exclusion and opposition. Antarctica is renegaded to the underneath which is the incoherence in opposition to the coherence of society, but of course it is not findable as a secret of what is hidden by society, it acts as a signifier of unreason, what baudrillard might call a "deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real".19 the other side of antarctica does not look like the city/word/culture.

Derrida shows no nostalgia for a lost presence or Being. All conclusions are provisional and all origins are similarly unoriginal. He sees two distinct reactions to the absence of the trace, one nostalgic and one affirming active play..."turned toward the presence, lost or impossible of the absent origin, [the] structuralist thematic of broken immediateness is thus the sad, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauist aspect of the thought of play of which the Nietzschean affirmation...would be the other side."20the affirmation of nietzsche's is shared by derrida, that things exist in process of freeplay "-the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation." derrida is not nostalgic for origin of self in the word, logic of identity, purity of presence, ethic of archaic or natural essence/innocence. the rousseauist feeling of guilt and nostalgia could be seen as a sense of lack or loss.. With the possibility of a pure presence that could fill the lack and complete the being. The desire for wholeness looks for the absence/lack to be filled. Once found, elsewhere, the possibility of a trace is denied in the final totality of desire for presence. Victor Burgin says"We can think of objects of desire as the distorted reflection in a rare-view mirror, of things which lie behind us. The more desire presses forward the more, in a sense, it leaves the object behind"21 This denies an absence in presence. derrida and nietzsche prefer to see things in a perpetual process of becoming, never arrived at, and offered to active interpretation, never fixed.

Natural history provides "the possibility of a constant order into a totality of representation" similarly, topology is logocentric, a place is found there or not there, inside a boundary or outside, never in more places than one at once. (miller sees) there is an invitation to the derrida reader to place things in an imaginary space. ...... Some definite place with geographical and social particularity, yet, a place that can not be mapped. Not just a complex domain, it will be impossible to uncover all the complexities of the place,and thus find the place in totality, it is unknowable22. Miller says there is a secret place somewhere and nowhere in derrida's topographies,that exceeds any topological placement. A hidden place-without-place', a non-site. derrida names an ideal literary object' ("L'Idealite de l'Objet Litteraire"23), that wouldn't keep such secrets, everything would be "wholly accessible by way of the words"24. like a triangle or square it would be open (thus finished and essentially closed) and without secrets. the secrets I am talking about (from miller) are not secrets to be found out, told, uncovered or learnt. they are traceable but not revealable. the secret is not hidden underneath some point , it surrounds the text on the surface. the secrets are deferred, place with-out of place and with-in.

Antarctica disrupts topology and mapping. It is inside and outside or both at once, unlocatable, in constant state of flux. it shifts beyond every horizon. It does not present itself for mapping, and even though it seems to only be empirically impossible, it is also theoretically impossible to know. we can read toward what will remain eternally unreadable. Lissa mitchell's vocal recordings are eternally indecipherable, the noise/text is documented and erased from possible readings. Deleuze and guittari say that writing is the act of measuring something else, not signifying but mapping, surveying..as processes rather than as a will to knowledge. Things can become encountered, rather than known, through lines of articulation, also lines of flight and movement25. Like the opening caused by the blank, an opening needs to be found from within language that is in desire for sense of closure. "authority of the text is provisional, the origin is a trace; contradicting logic, we must learn to use and erase our language at the same time"26

antarctica can't be reasoned/read. it is melting and freezing, changing state, unknowable, buried under snow and ice Blankness frees it space and time, suspends knowledge with shifting boundaries and surfaces. It is not the pure origin of itself, it's own truth. It is undefinable and not without of context. It doesn't exist in isolation, it is not contained. It exists in space and time."knowledge is not a systematic tracking down of a truth that is hidden but may be found. It is rather the field of freeplay, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions on the closure of a finite ensemble.'"27 there is a figurative drive in language, an impulse to form metaphors, a will to truth, a "will to power"28 . The drive for knowledge is a drive to appropriate and conquer. the trace' subverts the power held by authoritative speech that relies on the idea of an essential nature of a thing, presence and truth. on the arrival at an understanding differences are ignored. The trace is the presence of the absence in the final solution/meaning/sign. There can be no pure presence and no pure absence because the trace of one exists in the other. "the structure of the sign is determined by the trace or track of that other which is forever absent"29. The ideal literary object fits into sign rule thing, where...Signifier(object)+signified (context)=sign(meaning).the sign can never be a homogenous conveyor of meaning because of the presence of the trace'. We can not find the exact location of a word's meaning because it exists in freeplay, the context shifts. derrida says we need to be reminded of the spaciotemporality of the word

In lissa mitchells vocal recordings we are denied access to a field of knowledge that we readily enter into when presented with text and spoken word. Derrida says that it is a theoretically, not merely empirically, unknowable field. finding the end of knowledge can not coincide with its means. It is in process that the meaning is found, through struggling with noise we experience the frustration and denial of authentic reading noise music disrupts the possibility of there ever being an authentic communication and understanding' as something to be reached. We are luscivious for wild and free nature, yet fear the impending eruption of chaos and resulting madness. Logocentricism assumes the possibilty of containing an object within a locatable space. However, Antarctica's subject is not a self identical or monologic totality. It's shifting boundaries upset the word, making it undefinable, an indecipherable presence, imperfectly known. A blank/gap in text/map. noise music also troubles the word, it is not the pure noise/thought before language, but it upsets the authenticity of the word and it's sign closure in a total meaning. lissa mitchell's articulations attempt the unsaid while acknowledging it's impossibility, they document it's absence. noise/text is documented and erased from possible readings. Both are beyond the word/site, in utterance without meaning, and in shifting edges of melt and freeze.

Lissa Mitchell. Vocal Recordings. Limited release on King records, Geraldine.

1 Julia Kristeva. About Chinese Women. Translated by Anita Barrows. New York and London: M. Boyars,1986. C1977. I Who Want Not To Be. Chapter V. Page 40, on Tsvetaieva's suicide
2 Jaques Derrida. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press,1974. The Written Being/ The Being Written, pg18-26.
3 Oxford Shorter English Dictionary
4 Lyotard. The Postmodern Explained to Children. Sydney: Power,1992. The Sublime and The Avant Garde, Pg20.
5 ibid
6 ibid
7 Derrida. Of Grammatology. Derrida on Nietzsche cited in translator's preface, xxiii.
8 Lisa Bloom. Gender on Ice:American Ideologies of Polar expeditions. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,1993. A Passion for Blankness.
11 Aristotle, De Interpretatione, in Derrida, Differance, cited in Antony Easthope, Kate McGowan (ed.s) A Critical and Critical Theory Reader. Sydney: Allen and Unwin,1992. S4 Difference.
12 Easthope, McGowan, A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. S4 Differance.
13 ibid
14 Derrida. Of Grammatology pg61. Discussed by Spivak in preface,xviii
15 Spivak. Of Grammatology xvii

16 Bloom. Gender on Ice
18 Nietzsche cited by Spivak. Of Grammatology xxiii
19 Jean Baudrillard. Simulations,1983. A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, S6.3
20 Derrida cited by Spivak. Of gramatology xiii
21 Victor Burgin. Between. Basil Blackwell Ltd: New York,1986. pg80
22 J Hillis Miller. Topographies. California: Stanford University Press,1995. Derrida's Topographies pg296
23 Derrida. Ponctuations: Le Temps de la these,1980. Cited by Miller. Topographies pg297
24 Miller. Topologies pg308
25 Deleuze and Guittari. A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis and London:University of Minnesota Press,1987. Introduction:Rhyzome pg3-25
26 Spivak. Of Grammatology xviii
27 Spivak quoting Derrida. Of Grammatology xix
28 Nietzsche cited by Spivak. Of Grammatology xxii
29 Spivak. Of Grammatology xvii
30 Foucault Art and Cartography I've forgotten the details, Auckland City art gallery I think, in the late eighties or early ninetees.