ISSN: 1705-6411
Volume 15, Number 1 (June 2019)
Author: Laura Smith

“A teacher can help students discover unknown territories, provide them with specialized information, help create for themselves an intellectual discipline, but, above all, he or she must establish for them a space of mental freedom in which they can exercise their imagination and their curiosity, a place in which they can learn to think”.1

Dr. Gerry Coulter taught me sociology during my undergraduate studies at Bishop’s University between 2007 and 2011. Over the course of those years he also became my academic mentor and my friend. To describe Dr. Coulter’s unique enthusiasm for the subjects he taught, and the boundless support that he lent to many of his students, provides only the faintest sketch of the person that he was. For those who knew him, Gerry can be remembered as someone whose metaphorical water-pitcher never ran dry. Put simply, Gerry was exceptionally generous and inspiring. His joyful character could be witnessed in his everyday interactions with his students. Due to his own enthusiasm, curiosity, and confidence, Gerry inspired self-confidence in others. He especially inspired his students to challenge their basic assumptions and to think critically and for themselves. Gerry was the kind of teacher who students never forget; a teacher who made a great impact on a lot of lives; a teacher whom students feel grateful to have encountered and spent time with. It is no surprise that Gerry was the recipient of the William and Nancy Turner Prize in 2006: Bishop’s University’s highest honour for teaching. A Special Posthumous Research and Creativity Award has been given to Gerry by the university, accepted by his wife Dr. Mary Ellen Donnan.2

In what follows, I reflect on Gerry as a professor and a friend. While I take consolation in the fact that I believe Gerry knew how profoundly his teaching and support helped me (and many other students) to become the person I am, I know that to commemorate Gerry in the medium of writing is an action that, for me, needs to be undertaken—as a gesture of thanks. Through this act of writing, I have been able to appreciate more acutely the lessons that Gerry passed on (as Gerry emphasized to his students: it is in writing that one thinks). As such, it is with sadness and joy that I share my experience of knowing Gerry and share, what is for me, his one great professorial lesson; namely, the cultivation of joy. I wish to express my thanks to Dr. Richard G. Smith for taking the initiative to put together this very important Special Issue to commemorate the life and work of Dr. Coulter. I wish to dedicate these memories to Dr. Mary Ellen Donnan.

Writing Loss

To remember my friend and professor in the medium of writing seems perfectly fitting given his love for writing and, what he appreciated about Jean Baudrillard, writing about writing. My own academic writing has been greatly inspired by Gerry. However, writing about Gerry, in the wake of his death, and as the subject of this text, is a profoundly uncanny experience. Anneleen Masschelein notes that while the uncanny can be understood as “‘the familiar which has become strange’”, this ‘(un)concept’ of the uncanny furthermore carries the “alternative translation for unheimlich, namely unhomely”.3 This sense of strangeness, or ‘unhomeliness’ in writing about Gerry both propels me forward with the urgency to commemorate his legacy and simultaneously stunts me in my resistance to the reality of this context: a friend’s death. How to deal with this strangeness? We need only look to the quotation by Jean Baudrillard, selected for Gerry’s IJBS memorial page, that reads: “[The death of a friend] alters the world in such a way that he would no longer have his place in it. Others outlive themselves into a world which is no longer theirs”.4 The personal collides here with this universal phenomenon of strangeness that is to ‘outlive our world’. With Gerry’s death, the worlds of those who knew him have changed; we are, without doubt, remainders in his wake.

While writing is the site of this subjective remembrance of a friend, writing (philosophy, criticism, theory, and Baudrillard’s fatal theory) was explored in Gerry’s seminars as the critical site in which to deal with the inevitable loss that is the human condition. Walter Benjamin, who had his place, together with Adorno, in Gerry’s class syllabuses, is known for theorizing loss in the ‘anthropological diagnostic’ sense; that is, as at the centre of his philosophy of history.5 When Martin Jay describes Benjamin’s “refusal to mourn”, the backdrop was the atrocities of World War I in general and his friend who had committed suicide in protest, in particular.6 Similar to Baudrillard’s strategy of acceleration, Benjamin leaned into historical loss as an object of study, and articulated the phenomenon soberly in writing.7 For Benjamin, dealing with loss at the cross-roads of personal lamentation and the refusal to “seek some sort of equilibrium through a process of collective mourning that would successfully ‘work through’ the grief” of the war, took the form of more than 70 sonnets dedicated to his friend.8 According to this philosophy of historical loss, writing does not cling to events past but rather is the constructed site capable of articulating the transformation required in its processing. Writing, for Benjamin an intellectual philosophical responsibility and, for Baudrillard, a strategy of resistance, is a place of construction; constructions that allowed them to avoid turning away from their shared theory of ‘Progress as catastrophe’ while cultivating a space for what Benjamin called ‘truth’ and for what Baudrillard called ‘the enigmatic’.

The action of writing this personal reflection is, alternatively, to confront the experience of my own grief; an experience—relatively new to me—that I expected to ‘end’ in its famous fifth stage: ‘acceptance’. Isn’t the acceptance of the death of a friend the only viewpoint from which one is truly able to appreciate the gifts of another’s life? While I can and do appreciate with gratitude the gifts of Gerry’s life that I received as his student, uncertainty remains on the very status of ‘acceptance’. It is, in any case, not a destination—a last stage in a linear projection—but a state that seems to appear in flux or, at its extreme, in Baudrillard terms, subject to ‘reversibility’. Gratitude—what lingers without threat of folding in upon itself—is perhaps a better description of grief’s ‘final destination’. In my experience of grief, it was most helpful to read Gerry’s own words, to hear their echo, in the wake of Jean Baudrillard’s death. Gerry reminded us in 2007 that “death” should be understood as a “‘nuance of life’ or as [Baudrillard] preferred it: ‘life is a nuance of death’”.9 Gerry stated and, I think, took solace in the knowledge that: “[Baudrillard] will not finally die until we no longer speak his name”.10 From this perspective, the life of a deceased friend may continue through practices of remembrance, for example, in the medium of writing. To utter one’s name is to remember.

Bishop’s and Beyond

The last time I saw Gerry was at Bishop’s University in 2015. As ever, it was in the capacity of his continual support. Professor Claude Lacroix had asked me to deliver a lecture to his art history students on the topic of Benjamin and Baudrillard on photography. When I emailed Gerry with this news, he and Mary Ellen kindly offered to have me stay with them. I am forever grateful that I said yes to their kind invitation. To my great joy, Gerry attended what was my first experience teaching.

The evening before my lecture, I worked nervously on my presentation in Gerry’s office while he taught an evening class: Sociology of Cinema. I snuck in for the end of the class—he was showing Three Colours: Red, a trilogy by Krzysztof Kieslowski. I had taken this class and remembered Gerry’s response-like lectures after a film viewing. Gerry presented his own thoughtful reflections on a text or artwork and expected the same engaged, thoughtful responses from his students. He challenged us to express ourselves in writing and in discussion with intention and care.

Between this last visit in 2015 and my university graduation in 2011, we kept in touch via email and had met up one spring in Amsterdam. Gerry had invited me to contribute to the IJBS, supported my applications to a Master’s program at Goldsmith’s University and later for my doctoral project, and always encouraged me to continue on—to ‘keep going’—despite my self-doubt. When I considered going back to academia after working outside it, it was Gerry who took my career questions seriously. He ended his advising email to me as he had signed one of his books: with a reminder that he was ‘always in my corner’—generous words that are especially meaningful to a student just beginning in the academic world. These snapshot memories appear now as a montage of images—they emerge voluntarily and involuntarily—they are clear and vivid like the film stills we had studied.

I had met Gerry in what I remember as the gymnasium (my first and only time there) of Bishop’s University. Our meeting was in the context of class sign-up day during my first week as an undergraduate in 2007. I had chosen my art history classes and was looking for some electives. While micro-economics turned out to be a mistake, my decision to sign up for Gerry’s sociology class on Canadian Art (Quebec Society II) changed the course of my life. We soon bonded over a mutual love for Paris and Impressionist painting.

In the course of three years at Bishop’s and one abroad at La Sorbonne, I would take numerous art history classes, many of which inspired and propelled me forward. Gerry’s classes, however, were particularly inspiring due to his ability to link and intersect ideas across disciplines. His classes spanned art history (often looking outside of the canon): painting and film, and social theory ranging from the Frankfurt School to contemporary social thought. This unique mix of resources and the set-up of Gerry’s classes (my favourite were our smaller seminars) made clear that teaching, for Gerry, was profoundly personal. To the benefit of his students, Gerry did not hide behind the material that he taught but, rather, shone through it. This, in turn, inspired his students to cultivate their own interests and passions; there was an urgency to learning and we learned to do this not for grades but for ourselves; the seeds of curiosity were sown.

I took five classes with Gerry and added, with his support, a minor in sociology to my art history degree. Many moments stand out from these classes: Gerry, challenging us in our reading circle, or at his podium, professorial but always approachable. One experience, however, stands out above the rest. In the course Sociology of Art, Gerry gave his students an assignment that taught me about the joys of learning itself. The question was ‘simply’: What is Art? This assignment allowed students to think critically about their conception of art, what we were drawn to, and to look for patterns in our collaging of the artworks or theories of art that we found most powerful. What is Art? was an assignment that we presented to the class. More than remembering exactly what I presented—now a vague selection of film, literature, music, Impressionist paintings and some of my own painting attempts—I remember the experience of feeling filled with enthusiasm, curiosity, and agency. This project gave students the unique opportunity to connect their particular interests to the field and to share their points of view with fellow students. This project was pedagogical in the best sense: it created a space for students to develop their ideas and relate to others. In a student review for the Sociology Department, I wrote the following about this course and this assignment in particular: “Although it was easy to find examples of what I considered ‘art’, the why was the most important factor. I had never encountered the space for such personal reflection in other courses or in other domains.” In this same report, I credited another class of Gerry’s (Contemporary Theory) as solidifying my choice to work for a minor of sociology. I furthermore noted:

The most important skill was the trust I built in my own voice and the confidence to share my views with others. It was Sociology Honours II: Research Strategies that prepared me for graduate studies and inspired me to carve out a specialized place somewhere between art and theory. Professor Coulter taught us to set our standards high and to engage with art that respects us as individual agents of thought and feeling. His courses have truly shaped my academic interests and pushed me to be my best self.

Baudrillard Studies

Of course, the work of Jean Baudrillard was ever-present in the courses that I followed with Gerry. It was Baudrillard’s The Conspiracy of Art—excerpts of which we read in a seminar-style class—in which I discovered a welcome agitation to what I considered a somewhat narrow domain of traditional art history. I was curious about aesthetic theory, art philosophy, and social theory which bolstered and enriched one’s understanding of the cultural-historical implications of artworks. I appreciated Baudrillard’s critique of the notion of Art itself—as Gerry always emphasized, ‘capital “A” Art’. Social theory and post-structural thought provided an analysis of the systems of which I was becoming aware.

As we read Baudrillard—his texts known for their hyperbolic and metaphorical expression—students were confronted with the philosopher’s particular methods of challenge to all systems. While this could lead to a vertiginous experience of cynicism, Gerry understood that Baudrillard had more than this to offer; he read and diffused Baudrillard’s work in a manner that did not simply dissolve into nihilism—an unfortunately common take on Baudrillard’s writing, if this is where an analysis of his work stops. In his critique and distrust of all systems, Baudrillard, as underscored by Gerry, maintained and cultivated his own curiosity and joy for those things that seemed to resist all classification—it was, rather, an opening-up of thought, a resilience. In terms of art, Baudrillard appreciated those artists including, for example, Sophie Calle, who embrace contingency and create empty space as experience rather than superficially claiming mastery of the ineluctable.11

In Gerry’s book Art After the Avant-Garde: Baudrillard’s Challenge (2014) he explores the artists that, for Baudrillard, persist in their ability to invoke the illusion of the world. Some of these artists include: Robert Rauschenberg, Francis Bacon, Joseph Beuys, and Gerhard Richter. What I appreciated most about Baudrillard’s work then—and what Gerry made his mission to highlight and expand upon—was his ability to think critically about our social condition while, at the same time, recognising those objects and experiences that he deemed positively seductive: ‘strange attractors’. These ‘strange attractors’, a term often associated with images or objects, stood to challenge one’s assumptions of what constitutes ‘the real’.12 Baudrillard no longer stacked hope in revolutionary action yet he continued to think and write beyond or ‘trans-’ the limitations of constructed systems of the ‘real’.13 Favouring illusion and the enigmatic, Baudrillard leaned into the challenge of thought through writing and photography. Baudrillard persisted in writing theory and pressed on to create ‘Fatal Theory’ inspired by pataphysics. Gerry appreciated this as Baudrillard’s own particular poetics. “Poïesis—making or crafting”14 encourages an engaged ‘play’ in the world, a joyful appreciation of the non-classifiable, rather than shying away from life’s mysteries or stubbornly demanding an impossible all-encompassing Meaning.

As Gerry underscored in his book Jean Baudrillard: From the Ocean to the Desert, or the Poetics of Radicality (2012), Baudrillard expanded to the practice of photography to challenge the real. “Baudrillard’s thought on photography”, wrote Gerry, “serves to illuminate his work as a whole because a point of richness exists between his writing and his photography—both work to make the world more unintelligible and enigmatic”.15 Gerry outlined what I understand as Baudrillard’s resilient-resistance and he shared with his students this particular aspect of Baudrillard’s work. According to Gerry, Baudrillard was able to move beyond “neo-Marxian and other forms of modern and contemporary ‘critical’ thought” in order to cultivate his own sense of curiosity and joy of experience.16 This is evident, for example, in Baudrillard’s collections entitled—after McLuhan, Cool Memories.

 Gerry’s “One Great Lesson”: Cultivating Joy 17

In my doctoral work I investigate the concept of ‘the image’ in the work of Benjamin. In particular, I explore the concept’s characteristics of ‘violence’ and ‘language’, its relation to notions of ‘the real’ and perception, and more specifically, its ‘hopeful’ capacities. While Benjamin and Baudrillard are very different thinkers, my interest in Benjamin’s unlikely or ‘weak’ hopefulness is investigated alongside what I consider Baudrillard’s ‘unlikely’ joy, his ‘poetic resolution’. I argue that Baudrillard’s oeuvre implicitly develops Benjaminian notions of the image and I explore how this concept of the image in Baudrillard’s work allows for a re-imagining of one’s relation to the real as illusion. The space of illusion for Baudrillard is playful and resilient. “There is always the hope of a new seduction”, he writes.18 Indeed, it was Gerry who detected a subtle but strong current of joy in Baudrillard’s writing:

[Baudrillard] did not allow the difficulty one experiences between meaning and appearances to deter him from the joy of writing. Indeed, playing with the complexity of such problems was part of the paradoxical joy of writing for Baudrillard. In a world where language merely stands in for meaning (in its eternal ephemerality), one should not be deprived of play. The world, including the world of the writer, is a game.19

It was Baudrillard’s notion of poetic resolution, which I discussed with Gerry as resilient, that would remain in mind when I developed my writing on Baudrillard’s metaphor of immunity.20 I argue that Baudrillard’s metaphor serves both the purpose of identifying the ‘promoted and consumed immunity’ at work in society and simultaneously it sets out his strategy of resilience in the constructed site of writing; what I call poetic immunity. I was working on this topic during our last discussions.

When I received news of Gerry’s death, my world became immediately ‘strange’ and certainly ‘unhomely’. I selfishly wondered how I would manage without Gerry’s philosophical guidance and encouragement. I thought of how I still needed him ‘in my corner’. Just as quickly as these fearful thoughts arose, however, another—seemingly external to myself—immediately appeared in their place: Gerry taught me everything I need to keep going. With abundant generosity, Gerry shared what he had to give with so many: “a space of mental freedom”, “a place in which to think”.21 After my lecture at Bishop’s in 2015, I asked Gerry for advice on how to improve my teaching. I asked for his constructive criticism, knowing that I would probably not receive concrete tips such as: ‘try to look up from the podium’ or ‘try not to stand in one spot for an hour’. Indeed, I received a typical Gerry answer that put my questions back to me. He asked if I enjoyed the experience and encouraged me to keep going; I had the tools and the space, it was up to me. Beyond this personal experience, Gerry’s generosity shines through in the unique way he chose to ‘do’ academia. In 2007, Gerry created ‘The Baudrillard Index’ which indexes Baudrillard’s terminology from his 41 books translated into English. This immense index, with its fitting subtitle, ‘An Obscene Project’, was created by Gerry to “assist those writing about Baudrillard”.22 His last book From Achilles to Zarathustra: Jean Baudrillard on Theorists, Artists, Intellectuals & Others (2016), is similarly a valuable gift to scholars and anyone interested in Baudrillard (Theorists, Artists, Intellectuals & Others). Gerry’s writing went beyond dialoguing with Baudrillard’s philosophy; it was meant to diffuse Baudrillard’s work openly and generously with all, it was meant as a strategy of resilient- resistance.

Gerry embodied curiosity and a relentless engagement with the world. Through his overflowing love for learning, Gerry was a natural teacher. His existence taught me that the best teachers lead by example: they show rather than tell. In their confidence and humility, they create space for others. As a writer, Gerry’s joy in the game was displayed. In balance with his incredible productivity, there was a joyful lightness to Gerry, an ease of being, a wondrous, friendly laughter. He managed what is difficult for most of us: to live with eyes wide open and to do things, as Frank would sing, ‘his way’. As I noted in my correspondence with Mary Ellen, Gerry’s teaching allowed students to challenge their own assumptions in ways that pointed them not toward a predetermined end, but toward developing confidence in their own critical thinking ability. This generous, infinite gift—developing one’s inner well of strength—will stay with me my entire life.

With gratitude, I hear the echo of Gerry’s voice, ever-present in his writing. His essay on Baudrillard entitled, “Jean Baudrillard’s Writing About Writing” ends with this question: What would your life be like, if you had never read Jean Baudrillard? There is no doubt that for Gerry, as for many others, Baudrillard’s work has indeed shaped lives. It has changed how readers of Baudrillard see the world; this Baudrillardian lens is a critical yet joyful lens, a particular perception, a seeing ‘other-wise’.23 For myself, and for many students of Gerry’s, another question springs forth in the wake of his: What would our life be like, had we never met Dr. Gerry Coulter—teacher, writer, friend?

References

Bakewell, Sarah. At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2016).

Baudrillard, Jean. Art and Artefact, ed. Nicholas Zurbrugg (London: Sage Publications, 1997).

Baudrillard, Jean. The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, transl. by Ames Hodges (London: Semiotext(e)/Foreign Agents, 2005).

Baudrillard, Jean. Cool Memories IV: 1995-2000, transl. by Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2003).

Benjamin, Walter. Sonnets, transl. and commentary by Carl Skoggard (Quebec: Pilot Editions, 2014).

Calle, Sophie and Jean Baudrillard, Suite Vénitienne/Please Follow Me (Paris: Éditions de L’Étoile, 1983).

Coulter, Gerry. Art After the Avant-Garde: Baudrillard’s Challenge (Skyland: Intertheory Press, 2014).

Coulter, Gerry. From Achilles to Zarathustra: Jean Baudrillard on Theorists, Artists, Intellectuals & Others (Skyland: Intertheory Press, 2016).

Coulter, Gerry. Jean Baudrillard: From the Ocean to the Desert or the Poetics of Radicality (Skyland: Intertheory Press, 2012).

Coulter, Gerry. “Jean Baudrillard’s Writing About Writing”, Special Issue: Remembering Baudrillard, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 4, Number 3 (October 2007).

Coulter, Gerry. ‘Never Travel On An Aeroplane With God’: The Baudrillard Index—An Obscene Project. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (On The Internet) (2007) [http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/book-index.html].

Coulter, Gerry. “Reversibility: Baudrillard’s “One Great Thought” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 1, Number 2 (July 2004).

Coulter, Gerry. “Until We No Longer Speak His Name”, Editorial, Special Issue: Remembering Baudrillard, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 4, Number 3 (October, 2007).

Jay, Martin. “Against Consolation: Walter Benjamin and the Refusal to Mourn”, Refractions of Violence (London: Routledge, 2003).

Jeffries, Stuart. Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (London: Verso, 2017).

Manguel, Alberto. Curiosity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

Masschelein, Anneleen. “A Homeless Concept: Shapes of the Uncanny in Twentieth-Century Theory and Culture”, Issue 5: The Uncanny, Image & Narrative (January 2003).

Smith, Laura Katherine. “Trans-Baudrillard: Towards a Seductive Immunity” Parallax, 22:3, 330-346 (2016).

Endnotes

1 – Alberto Manguel, Curiosity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), p.50.

2 – Dr. Mary Ellen Donnan accepted the award on behalf of Dr. Gerry Coulter on March 30th, 2017. [http://www.ubishops.ca/special-posthumous-research-creativity-award-given-dr-gerry-coulter/].

3 – Anneleen Masschelein, “A Homeless Concept: Shapes of the Uncanny in Twentieth-Century Theory and Culture”, Issue 5: The Uncanny, Image & Narrative (January 2003), §21. See also, Anneleen Masschelein, The Unconcept, The Freudian Uncanny in Late Twentieth-Century Theory (New York: SUNY Press, 2011).

4 – Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories IV: 1995-2000, transl. by Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2003). See the main IJBS page [http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/]. Gerry’s former student, David Lynn Guignion, generously provided Dr. Mary Ellen Donnan with this fitting Baudrillard quotation.

5 – Sylvère Lotringer employed the term “anthropological diagnostic” to describe Baudrillard’s notion of Simulation. See The Conspiracy of Art, p.14. Benjamin develops this idea throughout his oeuvre, especially in his The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928).

6 – Martin Jay, “Against Consolation: Walter Benjamin and the Refusal to Mourn” in Refractions of Violence (London: Routledge, 2003).

7 – See Stuart Jeffries’ Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School, (London: Verso, 2017). Jeffries is discussing Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood: “[Benjamin] is writing about the necessary social irretrievability of the past, by which he means to reflect, as a Marxist historical materialist, on the loss, not just of his, Walter Benjamin’s, privileged childhood, but on the loss of the world that sustained it,” p. 29.

8 – Martin Jay, “Against Consolation: Walter Benjamin and the Refusal to Mourn” in Refractions of Violence (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 14. See further, Sonnets: by Walter Benjamin, trans. and commentary by Carl Skoggard, (Quebec: Pilot Editions 2014).

9 – Gerry Coulter, “Until We No Longer Speak His Name”, Editorial, Special Issue: Remembering Baudrillard, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 4, Number 3 (October, 2007), §2.

10 -Ibid., §2.

11 – See Sophie Calle/Jean Baudrillard, Suite Vénitienne/Please Follow Me (Paris: Éditions de L’Étoile, 1983).

12 – See Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artefact, ed. Nicholas Zurbrugg (London: Sage Publications, 1997).

13 – See Laura Katherine Smith, “Trans-Baudrillard: Towards a Seductive Immunity”, Parallax, 22:3, 330-346 (2016).

14 – Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (Toronto: Penguin Random House Knopf Canada, 2016), p.184.

15 – Gerry Coulter, Jean Baudrillard: From the Ocean to the Desert or the Poetics of Radicality (Skyland: Intertheory Press, 2012), p.137.

16 – Ibid., p.1.

17 – I borrow “One Great Lesson” from Gerry’s notion of Baudrillard’s “One Great Thought”. See Gerry Coulter, “Reversibility: Baudrillard’s ‘One Great Thought’” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 1, Number 2 (July 2004).

18 – Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, transl. by Ames Hodges (London: Semiotext(e)/Foreign Agents, 2005), p.110.

19 – Gerry Coulter, “Jean Baudrillard’s Writing About Writing”, Special Issue: Remembering Baudrillard, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 4, Number 3 (October 2007), §11.

20 – See Laura Katherine Smith, “Trans-Baudrillard: Towards a Seductive Immunity”, Parallax, 22:3, 330-346 (2016).

21 – Alberto Manguel, Curiosity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), p.50.

22 – Gerry Coulter. ‘Never Travel On An Aeroplane With God’: The Baudrillard Index—An Obscene Project. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (On The Internet) (2007) [http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/book-index.html].

23 – This notion of seeing/reading ‘other-wise’ is inspired by Samuel Weber’s use of this concept in his book, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004) and Timothy Bahti’s, Allegories of History (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992).