Locating Cultural Activity

Martin Allor
Locating Cultural Activity:
The 'Main' as Chronotope and ~ e t e r o t o ~ i a '
T
of the most important tendential developments within cultural studies over the last ten years have been the growing political and theoretical
concerns with, on the one hand, the politics of place within global capitalism
and, on the other, questions concerning the relative agency of cultural consumers. These fields of inquiry are linked to central tensions within cultural
theory in the current conjuncture. T h e questioning of the politics of place
interrogates the pertinence of neo-Marxist models of the relations between
capitalism and cultural geographies. At the same time, within the rubric of
critiques of post-coloniality, the question of place puts into question the location, or the standpoint, of cultural studies itself as a critique of relations
between centre and periphery (or, as Stuart Hall (1992) puts it, between "The
West and the ~ e s t " ) T. ~h e return to questions of media reception has interrogated the relative determinations offered by media texts and commodity
forms. And the research focus on local practices of media consumption has,
once again, raised the problematic of the social power of media forms within
the enacted practice of everyday life.3
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T h e links between these two fields of inquiry are precisely articulated around
the problematic of space and place within cultural studies. Put in other terms,
this involves the specification (in epistemological and political terms) and the
articulation of the question of the relations between the global and the local,
and the question of the relations between discourse and practice. Thus, rather
than fetishising either the domination of global circuits of capital or the resistant moment of local consumption, the problematic of space and place interrogates both the certainties of abstract categories of social relations (i.e., the
"Global Popular," or the "Audience") and the ways in which we theorise and
analyse the context(s) of the mediation of social life. This is more, therefore,
than just a question of the specification of "context"; these lines of inquiry
demand that we link the relations of text and audience to the relations of context and conjuncture which specify the field of mediations possible in any
domain of cultural activity. This problematic of specification and articulation
then pulls analysis away from the abstract relations of cultural power and
towards a radically conjunctural mode of analysis and theory construction.
In this essay I want to pursue this strategy of analysis in a discussion of the
relations between discursive formations and the enacted practices of cultural
activity. But I will locate the theoretical discussion and analysis in the place
and conjuncture of a singular domain of cultural activity: the "Main" boulevard Saint-Laurent in Montrial. I want to move in and out of a discussion of theoretical issues and an analysis of the complexities of the past and
present of the Main as a singular contextualisation of cultural activity. I want
to read the Main as a kind of limit case in order to better specify the issues at
hand in the politics of place within cultural studies." One of my starting
points for this mode of inquiry is Doreen Massey's arguments around the politics of place, centred in her own inquiry of the relations of locality and mediation in Kilburn High Road in North London.
In this interpretation, what gives a place its specificity is not some long
internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular
constellation of relations, articulated together at a particular locus. If
one moves in from the satellite towards the globe, holding all those networks of social relations and movements and communications in one's
head, then each place can be seen as a particular, unique point of their
intersection. T h e uniqueness of a place, or a locality, in other words is
constructed out of particular interactions and mutual articulations of
social relations, social processes, experiences and understandings, in a
situation of CO-presence, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are actually constructed on a far
larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place
itself ... Instead then, of thinking- of -places as areas with boundaries
around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of
social relations and understandings (1993:68).
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There are two fundamentally important insights about place here. First, rather
than seeing the local and the global as ideal types or polar opposites, Massey
insists that we see locales as always already in a state of imbrication with distant social relations. Second, her perspective both relativises and specifies the
links between the present politics of a place and its past(s) which works to
undercut any unilateral claims to a simple identity or authentic moment for a
locale. As she further argues in her essay "Places and their pasts":
The invention of tradition is here about the invention of the coherence
of a place, about defining it and naming it as a 'place' a t all. It is for this
reason that it may be useful to think of places, not as areas on maps, but
as constantly shiftlng articulations of social relations through time; and
to think of particular attempts to characterize them as attempts to define,
and claim coherence and a particular meaning for, specific envelopes of
space-time (italics in original) (1995: 188).
Thls insistence on the material, cultural mediation of located social relations is
particularly important in interrogating the relations between social discourse,
locations, and the practices of cultural consumption. It provides important
guidelines for opening up and cutting into the singularity of the Main as a
place of and for cultural activity in MontrCal, and as a central location of the
naming and defining of MontrCal within the identitaire que'be'cois.s
The Main's singularity, for my purposes here, resides in the fact that its mediations of here and away, of past and present, and of identity and difference are
articulated across its localisation of different levels of social relations and differential temporalities. In their history of theatre performance, night clubs
and cabarets along boulevard Saint-Laurent between 1891- 1991, AndrC-G.
Bourassa and Jean-Marc Larme (1993) trace the growing centrality of SaintLaurent through the nineteenth century as the principle north-south artery
leading out of Vieux MontrCal; the dividing line between new Anglophone (in
the Golden Mile) and Francophone (in the Quartier Latin) bourgeois neighbourhoods; the principle axe of newer immigrant population settlements; and
the location of sites of cultural performances. Over the last century, then, the
Main has been a kind of liminal zone where the cultural geography of linguistic, ethnic and class differences has intersected with the successive developments of leisure-cultural practices and cultural industry equipment - the
first public projection of cinema in Canada took place on the Main in 1896.
Thus, in addition to its function as the dividing line between the
Francophone east and the Anglophone west in MontrCal's cultural geography,
the Main has served as the vector of settlement for important Jewish,
Chinese, Greek, Italian, Hungarian, Portuguese, and Latin American immigrant communities. And the space of the Main has functioned (and continues
to) as a hybrid space for cultural performances cutting across the distinctions
of high and low (i.e., theatre and burlesque), of the 'majority' culture and
alterities (i.e., Francophone theatre, and Yiddish theatre or Portuguese street
festivals), and between public-sanctioned performance (grand cineinas) and
illicit and policed activities (prostitution).
The historicity of this liminality is complexly articulated across the mediations of the Main as a place within MontrCal's cultural geography and in its
contemporary architecture and political economy. While the Main's hybridity is part of the common sense maps of MontrCalers, specific sites, sectors,
buildings and moments are the material of different and competing affective
memories and official temporalities. For example, Le Monument-National,
built by the Association Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montrial in the 1890s has served
not just as a space of national and cultural affirmation of Francophone
QuCbCcois, but also as the site of Yiddish theatre, Cantonese opera, burlesque, film festivals, and as a current performance space for the National
Theatre School and professional theatre companies. These 'present' pasts are
sedimented into the current landscape of the Main, written into the architecture of the buildings on the street and into the practices of the various taste
and cultural communities who walk its territory.
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More importantly, the history of this liminality is articulated and rearticulated across an ever expanding archive of public texts which tell the stories
of the Main and link them to versions of l'identitaire quibicois. These narrations of the Main are at the centre of the literature of MontrCal - most
notably in some of the novels of Mordecai Richler, in Michel Tremblay's play
Sainte-Carmen de la Main (1979), or in Trevanian's novel The Main (1976).
However, they are articulated, as well, as part of our common sense of place
across a heterogeneous set of texts within current public discourse ranging from
the recent post-Referendum "partition" debate (what to do when Schwartz'
delicatessen is on the 'wrong' side of the Main) to the mise-en-sckne of recent
tClCseries (scenes in the Radio-Canada 1996 production, Omerta, which take
place in Whisky CafC at Saint-Laurent and Bernard as a kind of neutral zone
between the Little Italy of the series' Mafia characters and the home territory of the police to the south). What is most interesting in these narrations is
that they map the Main into different temporalities, different boundaries,
different taste distinctions and different communities. Thus, Richler's novels
tell the Main in relation to the passage of the Jewish community and extend
the Main's reach across to rue Saint-Urbain to the west and up to the north
and the Mile-End neighbourhood. Trevanian's Francophone police officer
protagonist works a beat that extends the length of the Main from SainteCatherine to Mount-Royal and east to the CarrC Saint-Louis. The charac-
ter's trajectory cuts across the ethnic and class differences of the peoples of the
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street in this version of the landscape as the novel tells of the passing of one
time of the Main into another. Trernblayls play centres around the intersection of 'la Main' and 'la Catherine' in the nocturnal social space of Western
Bars, the commerce of petty crime and prostitution, and a community of
prostitutes, burlesque performers, and transvestites. (See Straw, 1992 for an
analysis of the larger mapping of MontrCal in cultural texts).
Placing Cultural Activity
These discursive articulations of the spaces, practices, temporalities, and
communities of the Main are most interesting theoretically in that they foreground the ways in which the contested narrations of zones of space-time that
Doreen Massey focuses our attention on are always already involved in the
production of meaningful place and in the linkage of place and the 'present'
past to the being and becoming of particular communities. I want to read the
Main, then, as a particular embodiment or instance of Bakhtin's notion of the
chronotope as "[a] unit of analysis for studying texts according to the ratio
and nature of the temporal and spatial categories represented ... The chronotope is an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the culture
system from which they spring" (1981:426).
The singularity of the Main for me resides in precisely the ways in which it
can be analysed as both a chronotope of the complexity of cultural space and
cultural communities in MontrCal and, at the same time, as an epistemological chronotope foregrounding the necessity of linking the analysis of the practices of cultural consumption to the location of sites of cultural activity in particular vectors of the local and the global and of the sedimented past and the
becoming of cultural agents. That is to say that the Main can be read as both
a central production of the past and present politics of l'identitaire of
MontrCal and as a way of specifying the questions of the politics of place within cultural ~ t u d i e s . ~
One of the liabilities of much of the research literature of audience and reception studies has been the tendency to locate the practices of cultural consumers within the contextual space of a prefigured arc of cultural mediation.
That is to say that much of this work figures the practices of media consumption within a logic of reaction or appropriation of prefigured texts or commodity relations. Cultural activity in this way is only located within a logic of
the circulation of commodity forms or the circuit of texts and readings. This
is most often notable in works which focus on broadcast forms of cultural
mediation, as if television viewing happened in a virtual space of mediation
located only in a technology of visibility.' The radically conjunctural model
for the analysis of cultural activity that I am considering here, then, takes the
chronotope of the Main as an indice of the space-time of cultural consumption, and of the necessary articulations between sedimented meanings and
uses which locate any practice of cultural consumption. Thus, rather than
thinking of the agency of cultural consumers within a logic of passivity or
activity (i.e., seeing television viewing as more passive than going to a club),
this would be to ask the question of the location of particular forms of cultural activity in places that are already linked to the 'present' past of private experiences, public memories, and local resources.
It is for these reasons that I want to argue that the terms cultural activity or
cultural practices are more appropriate for the analysis of the intersection of
media and social life than abstract and universalising concepts like audience or
reception. Rather than prefiguring the kinds of social mediation in question,
this is to focus first on the discursive and praxical resources which are available
to particular kinds of cultural agency. It is also to insist on the specificity of
particular forms of cultural activity, of their location in strips of space-time
that place cultural agency in relation to pre-existing formations of practice,
and, at times, in relation to the becoming of particular forms of community.
Placing the Main
One key conceptualisation within QuCbCcois cultural criticism is articulated
across the terms me'tissage and transculture. They designate, in slightly different ways, a model of thinking the relations between the dominant cultural
formation and its others that figures the cultural as the region of mixing and
blending difference into the majority. The term me'tissage, literally derived
from racial mixing, is often articulated to a pluralist interpretation of the
incorporation of cultural differences within QuCbec. In this way the development of the majority culture is seen as enriched, but not fundamentally challenged or changed, by the practices of minority cultural communities. The
term transculture was articulated most centrally by a formation of ItaloQuCbCcois writers linked to the trilingual journal Kce Versa. This conceptualisation of the relations between the dominant cultural formation and its others is more challenging to the extent that it is developed from the standpoint
of immigrant intellectuals. Thus, Fulvio Caccia places immigrant cultural
forms as part of the ontological grounding of l'identitaire que'be'cois:
L'incapacitC des QuCbCcois i recrCer la totalit6 de la francit6 perdue
sur le territoire amCricain est paradoxalement leur salut. Car cet Cchec
garde ouverte la blessure originelle qui leur permet de reconnaitre
l'autre, d'&trel'autre. L'inachhement de la francit6 rend possible ce
devinir autre prCsent dans toute culture et dont il est le fondement
vCritable (Caccia 1986).~
Both versions of the conceptualisation attempt to theorise and come to terms
with the Americaness (I'americanite? of Qukbkcois culture. Therefore, they
offer one way of approaching the post-coloniality of QuCbec cultural politics
within the complex of relations between language, race, ethnicity, religion
and class. They offer one particular way of thinking the temporality of migrations and cultural mobility in QuCbec which links different space-times into
one state of becoming. Thus the common commitment they share is to a kind
of 'j%oliche (joyful) postcolonialism' (During 1992) which frames culture and
cultural forms as either the being (mitissage) or the becoming (transmltz~re)of
the people. In this way the 'present' pasts of different groupings, of different
communities are subsumed within more or less foundational or ontological
groundings of one cultural history.
T h e Main figures within this conceptualisation as a central metaphor and
exemplar of this achieved state of cultural becoming. It localises MontrCal as
the place of the becoming-other of QuCbec and thus defers questions of difference that are less resolvable within such a model. One of the public events
which inaugurated the 350th anniversary celebrations of the European settlement of MontrCal was a carnivalesque parade which descended along the
Main from boulevard Saint-Joseph to the Vieux Port. The performance of
cultural differences ('traditional' reels and soca) and of high and low cultural
forms within the parade was a staging, a calling into being, of just such a
wishful model of becoming other. But, as the contested narrations of peoples
and pasts within the literature of the Main suggest, a closer, and less wishful,
attention to the current articulations of space and place of cultural activity
on Saint-Laurent should yield a less foundational view of the relations
between location and cultural identity. This in turn might allow different
conceptualisations of a cultural future less beholden to the story of a single
'national' culture.
On a cursory analysis, the current cultural geography of the Main can easily
fit within the interpretive model of mitissage in that the street and its environs
houses a dizzylng range of businesses, parks, and community spaces associated with a heterogeneous set of ethnic and taste cultures. Along the Main there
are porno cinemas (L'Arnour) and art cinemas (Le Parallkle); dance clubs of
various types and clubs for the Spanish and Portuguese communities; permanent cultural institutional spaces like the Monument-National and L'Espace
Go and temporary 'four-walled' exhibitions. There are sections where street
prostitutes and young punks gather and others where upper-middle class suburbanites come to dine. There are bars that host literary readings and others
continue the traditions of men's taverns. There are heavily advertised public
recreational spaces like the Bacci pool hall and restaurant and there are relatively discrete spaces like the unmarked gay bath just north of Saint-Joseph.
There are spaces that serve as gathering places for primarily Anglophone,
Francophone or Allophone communities from around the city and others that
serve as common ground for the mix of people living in the immediate neighbourhood. There are local cultural sites, like Schwartz Smoked Meat or the
Belmont Dance Club that have been in place for decades and there are new
arrivals bringing newer models of leisure from away, like the Second Cup or
the Gallimard bookstore. And, just as importantly, there are long empty
storefronts which sit side by side with newly designed posmodern architectural achievement^.^
But a closer examination works to undercut the smooth fit of the street into
a single space of mixing and fusion. While one of the characteristics of the
street is the degree to which the heterogeneous sites it hosts are interspersed
in a seeming unorganised mix, a consideration of the space-times of the
Main evinces both more regularity and more segregation in its uses. The
Main is a 24-hour street; its daily cycle encompasses different moments
which involve different peoples and different practices. During the morning
and afternoon it is primarily a shopping street best known for cheap prices
and specialised 'ethnic' goods and foods. In the evening it is a space of
restaurants, coffee shops and bars. At night and into the morning, it is a
space of bars and clubs, of more serious dancing and drinking. The cycle of
the seasons also differentiates the cultural activities on the Main. There are
the biannual ventes de trottoirs which close off the street to automobile traffic
and give it more of a carnivalesque moment, mixing street sales with pony
rides and the sounds of dance music. There are also the moments of cultural festivals when parts of the street are taken over for the Festival du Nouveau
Cine'ma, Les Nuits d'Afiique, the Fringe Festival or la Ftte Nationale. There is
the difference between the summer moments of festivals and the return of
university students during the fall and winter. While the boulevard SaintLaurent extends from the river into the north of the island, the boundaries
of the Main itself are mobile and differently articulated to different communities and uses. Different practices and different namings extend it to different lengths and to more diffuse boundaries. For some it starts north of
Chinatown, for others Chinatown is part of the Main. In some namings its
northern boundary is rue Mont-Royal, for others it extends to the C P rail
lines north of Bernard.
Thus, rather than being seen as a space of mixing and fusion where MontrCal's
different taste and ethnic cultures come together to form the becoming other
of I'identitaire que'be'cois, the spaces of the Main are better seen as the zone
where space-times of different cultural activities come into transient contact
- as Sherry Simon describes it: 'moins un territoire qu'une frontikre, une
zone liminaire ou chacun se reconnalt dans la dCrive et 1'CtrangetC' (1992a).
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Becoming Other Spaces
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Thus I want to argue that the range of spaces, places and practices on the Main
can't, without a certain amount of interpretive foreshortening, be made to fit
into the modes of cultural action figured by concepts like mitissage. And a radically contextual attention to the links between cultural activities, and the discursive and geographic formations which frame them offers a more appropriate
way of linking the analysis of specific cultural practices to the larger politics of
culture and our local version of post-coloniality. The relations between space,
place and practice on the Main fit much more closely with Michel Foucault's
(1986) hypotheses around heterotopias: "(sites) that have the curious property
of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralise or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or
reflect" (24). Foucault's arguments around heterotopic spaces link up with
Massey's in his insistence on the liminality of space-time relations in locales.
His insistence on the incommensurability and heterogeneity of practices, spaces
and sites withm heterotopia describe more clearly the specificity of the spaces
of the Main. Most importantly, Foucault's analysis of heterotopia places the
concept in a mirror relation with the utopia of particular social formations,
and thus he links the analysis of practised space to the dispositiji of social
power at play in a given conjuncture (Cf. Phi10 1992).
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Foucault's analysis of the troubled mirroring of heterotopia and utopia provides the tools necessary to a critique of concepts of mitissage and transculture.
The cultural spaces mapped in these models of cultural interaction are precisely utopic in that they map the differences of cultural activities and spaces
onto a general ontology of culture which can exist only as a virtual space-time
which is only linked abstractly to actual places within the social formation.
Thus, the singularity of the Main opens up a way of thinking cultural difference and cultural agency in QuCbec outside the simple opposition of the local
or the national, or the simple privileging of local practice as carnivalesque
resistance in the face of the domination of cultural capital. The Main can be
seen as heterotopic precisely to the extent that its space-times mirror the cultural otherness of post-colonial MontrCal at the same time as its 'present' pasts
invoke utopic narrations of our American modernity, our becoming other.
Studying Cultural Activity
Lawrence Grossberg (1996) extends Foucault's perspective in a consideration
of the relations between culture and power, and the local and the global. H e
argues for a 'spatial materialism' which insists upon the analysis of the production of place which sees the local as always already produced in relation
to specific general spatial relations:
...What I want to propose is a new theory of context, not as place, but
as the becoming of place and space. This theory - of the production of
culture through a spatial becoming (which is not the empiricist deployment of space as the question of the travelling of culture) - depends
upon a notion of identification and belonging which can disarticulate
place and identity (177).
This theorisation points to a revised way of thinking through and analysing the
politics of cultural activity. Rather than beginning from the assumed articulation between cultural identity (i.e., e h c or taste cultures) and the context of
places of cultural activity, this is to focus instead on the production of local
practices and sites of cultural activity in contingent relations with distant forces,
mediations, and determinations.
the terms of my own questions of the
relations between discursive formations and the practices of cultural activity,
this is to attempt to conjugate the relations between place and movement with
those of the relations between public memory and private practices.
The epistemological chronotope of the Main is useful here in beginning to
specify these questions. This is to view the Main as a liminal zone of discursive and geographic space which is productive of a variable range of cultural
practices. These practices in turn occur withln and across sites which are productive of places and their relations with distant social relations - for example, watching the World Cup football matches in a Portuguese cultural tentre or listening and dancing to Jungle in a dance club near rue Prince-Arthur.
What the singularity of the Main reminds us of is that the identity of places
and communities are always already in a state of development - that cultural identity is precisely a process and not a possession. The relations between
the space-times of the different communities on the Main, thus, are constantly in a state of adjustment and rearticulation. The 'others' that one encounters on the Main then are less the utopic community of communities than
what the French anthropologist Marc AugC calls 'I'alterite' intime' (1992:29).
That is to argue that the places and practices of cultural activity on the Main
can function as an exemplar of the relations between the private and the public, the local and the global, and the discursive and the praxical in cultural
activity more generally. Indeed, AugC's oxymoron of intimate alterity should
ideally sit alongside Raymond Williams' (1975) own oxymoron of mobile privatisation as a naming of the structure of feeling of leisure-cultural activity. To
be engaged in cultural consumption, alone at home or in a public place, is to
bring close to hand texts, commodities, and others. At the same time the practices which make alterity intimate produce the space-times which produce
sites as meaningful places.
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In methodological terms this is to separate the question of sites of cultural
activity from the question of place of cultural identity. The various scenes of
the Main are articulated across different sites and constellations of relations.
Some of them are clustered in close geographic proximity along a stretch of
the boulevard - as in the cluster of upscale restaurants and clubs between rue
Sherbrooke and rue Prince-Arthur. Others are more dispersed, and are
accessed in the mobility of aflineur's walk up or down. Still other scenes are
linked, through satellite dishes and imported commodities, more closely to
Europe or Latin America than to the rest of the Main. The cultural identities
of the people and communities of the Main are neither simply produced in
these places and practices nor are they coterminous with them. This is, following Giorgio Agamben (1995), to insist that there is no vie nue, no simple
collective identity in the singularity of individual experience outside the form
of that experience living - 'la fome-de-vie7. It is to insist, up against the
fioliche postcolonialism of models of cultural me'tissage in QuCbec, that the
communities articulated around leisure-cultural activities are only understandable in and across the differences of theirfomes-de-vie - that a 'general' politics of cultural difference in QuCbec can only ever be utopic.
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Cultural studies research which aims to render visible the politics of the locations of cultural activity then must focus precisely on this coming into being
of forms of life. One possible strategy is to focus on the singularity of particular constellations of relations between private experiences and the public
social relations of cultural forms. Three versions of this approach can be seen
in Joke Hermes' (1993) ethnographic work on private time in everyday media
use; in Elspeth Probyn's (1996) 'sociology of the skin7which offers an alternate mapping of being and belonging in MontrCal; or in Angela McRobbie's
(1995) re-evaluations of Catholic Glasgow. Another strategy, one that I am
following myself, is to focus on the relations between narrations of the identity of places, and the range of practices which produce these sites as the vehicles for the performance of forms of life, and the staging of theatres marking
the politics of collective identity and difference. Both strategies promise to
pull the politics of place within cultural studies away from abstract and universalising concepts as they suggest ways of linking the analysis of cultural
consumption to the conjunctural politics of culture and power in specific
national formations.
Endnotes
I . This essay emerges from ongoing work that I am doing on cultural activity and the politics of culture in Quebec. This project is being done within the Groupe de recherche sur la
citoyennete culturelle (GRECC) at Concordia University and I'Universite de Montreal; it is supported by SSHRC and FCAR. My arguments here have benefited from conversations with
colleagues in the group, especially Elspeth Probyn, Michelle Gagnon and Sherry Simon; in
addition I have benefited from conversations with Will Straw and Line Grenier.
2. See Lawrence Grossberg's essay "The space of culture, the power of space" (1996) for a
political and philosophical critique of the relations between space, place and locality within
cultural studies. And see Meaghan Morris'"0n the Beach" (1992) for an exemplar of discussion of these theoretical issues within a located vernacular cultural inquiry.
3. See Joke Hermes essay "Media, Meaning and Everyday Life" (1993) for one important
intervention into these issues.
4. 1 take the specificity of the Main here t o reside in its articulations of place and the politics of culture in Montreal, not in its exemplarity. N o r do I see it as somehow a more
'authentic' location of cultural activity than other urban sites of cultural activity, for example
rue Saint-Denis in Montreal o r Queen Street West in Toronto.
5. Within Quebecois cultural criticism, the term I'identitaire designates the discursive articulations of the field of cultural identity and alterity. See Simon (1 99 1) for a mapping of this
critical politics.
6. My appropriation of Bakhtin's concept here is indebted t o my reading of Paul Gilroy's The
Black Atlantic (1993) although I take the term into a different terrain and I make it work differently. An equally important extension of Bakhtin's work into the conjunctural analysis of
the politics of culture and urban cultural space is developed by Peter Stallybrass and Allon
White in The Politjcs and Poetics ofTransgression (1986).
7. See Roger Silverstone's Television and Everyday Life (1994) for an explicitly ontological
corrective and re-evaluation of the place of television in specific forms of life.
8. "The incapacity of the Quebecois t o recreate the totality of the frenchness lost in
American territory is paradoxically their salvation. Because this failure keeps open the original wound which allows them t o recognise the other, t o be the other.The incompleteness of
this frenchness makes possible this becoming other present in all culture, of which it is the
veritable foundation." I have analysed some of the functions of the term metissage elsewhere
(Allor 1993). for a key discussion of the term transculture see Nepveu ( 1989).
9. In 1995, in the context of a seminar on popular culture, a group of Concordia
Communication Studies students and I did a mapping of cultural sites on the Main between
boul. Rene Levesque and Bernard.The descriptions here derive from that collective work
and from my own subsequent research.
References
Agamben, G. (1995) "Forme-de-vie", in G.Agamben (ed.) Moyens sans fins, Paris: Rivages.
Allor, M. (1993) "Cultural metissage: national formations and productive discourse in Quebec
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Auge, M. (1 992) Non-Lieux. Introduction a une Anthropologie de la Surmodernite, Paris: du Seuil.
Bahktin M. (1 98 1) The Dialogic Imagination,ed. and transl. M. Holquist, Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Bourassa,A-G. and Larrue, J-M. (1993) Les Nuits de la ((Main)). Cent ans de spectacles sur le
boulevard Saint-Laurent (1 981-199 l), Montreal:VLB.
Caccia, F. ( 1986) "CAltra riva", Vice Versa, no. 16.
During, S. (1 992) "Postcolonialism and globalization", Meanjin 211992.
Foucault, M
( 1 986) "Of other spaces", Diacritics vol. 16, no. I.
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