Mayröcker’s Drama of Association Florian Klinger University of Chicago Abstract: Friederike Mayröcker’s My Mother is a dramatic poem in which the drama consists of transforming the speaker’s natural and conventional association with their mother into a performative association with the reader� The drama staged in the poem between speaker and mother and the drama staged by the poem between speaker and reader are unified in a peculiar way: through an act of transference, the poem’s internal drama is projected toward the reader such that, ultimately, the reader comes to stand in as the recipient toward whom the drama is performed� The drama staged by the poem reaches out to the reader in an action that is indeterminate insofar as it leaves behind the established (natural and conventional) terms of relating that inform the poem’s internal drama. No longer authorized by those terms, the poem projects itself toward novel authorization in a bond with the reader� The poem thus not only turns from a determinate relating to an indeterminate one, but through the act of transference it stages this turn, renders explicit the distinction that lies in it, and establishes itself as the action form through which the turn is achieved� Keywords: aesthetic action, Friederike Mayröcker, phatic communion, indeterminacy, poetic transformation MY MOTHER WITH THE OPEN ARMS when she greeted me when I came to see her my mother with the tender words when I called that I couldn’t come my mother with the face turned away as she still wanted to speak but couldn’t anymore 134 Florian Klinger my mother with the closed eyes as I came too late to embrace her one last time MEINE MUTTER MIT DEN OFFENEN ARMEN wenn sie mich grüszte wenn ich zu ihr kam meine Mutter mit den zärtlichen Worten wenn ich sie anrief dasz ich nicht kommen könne meine Mutter mit dem abgewandten Gesicht als sie noch sprechen wollte aber es nicht mehr konnte meine Mutter mit den geschlossenen Augen als ich zu spät kam sie ein letztes Mal zu umarmen Friederike Mayröcker [drama of association] Friederike Mayröcker’s My Mother (Mayröcker 632; my own translation, F.K.), I argue, is a dramatic poem in which the drama consists of transforming the speaker’s natural and conventional association with their mother into a performative association with the reader� This transformation is brought about, I argue further, as the drama staged in the poem between speaker and mother and the drama staged by the poem between speaker and reader are unified in a peculiar way: trough an act of transference, the poem’s internal drama is projected toward the reader such that, ultimately, the reader comes to stand in as the recipient toward whom the drama is performed� The association in which the reader comes to take the mother’s place visà-vis the speaker is built entirely from the channel of communication, a bond between the performers that is put to work in two different ways. While the drama staged in the poem manifests the bond as an established inventory of determinate formulae or gestures of relating, the drama performed by the poem manifests the bond to reach out to the reader in an action that is indeterminate insofar as it leaves behind the established terms of relating that inform the poem’s internal drama. No longer authorized by those terms, the poem projects itself toward novel authorization in a bond with the reader� The poem thus not only turns from a determinate relating to an indeterminate one (as every poem might), but through the act of transference it stages this turn, renders explicit Mayröcker’s Drama of Association 135 the distinction that lies in it, and establishes itself as the action form through which the turn is achieved� My claim that to account for Mayröcker’s drama of association is to account for the piece’s action form is part of a larger research agenda that conceives the aesthetic in action theoretical terms. I cannot argue this here, but this much should be said to clarify the stakes of the present essay: while non-aesthetic communication relates us determinately, on shared terms, such that the determination says something about who we are, in the aesthetic communication undertaken by Mayröcker’s poem, no shared terms are available, which relates us - speaker and reader, sender and addressee - through an indeterminacy that renders open who we are vis-a-vis one another� This is not given to us (by nature or by convention) but always still to be figured out. What such aesthetic communication offers its reader is something altogether unobtainable elsewhere in the realm of human performance� [the act of the poem] The stanzas of the poem coincide with a sequence of scenes of encounter between a non-gendered first-person speaker and their mother. Syntactically, there is no demarcation or connection between the scenes but a fourfold beginning not separated by interpunction; each scene consists of a main clause that stays incomplete for the lack of an active verb, and a subordinate clause introduced by “when” ( wenn ) or “as” ( als ). Narratively, there is no unifying substrate of interconnected main clause action; each time, “my mother” seems to take the position of the grammatical subject, but then, as the clause is discontinued, comes to be an entity resting in itself - an image of the mother hovering in suspense. In the absence of a grammatical or narrative connection, the scenes appear held together by something simpler and more effective in the display of unity - the form of the series� The second time establishes a series by constituting the previous time as the first time, thus dissociating causality (what constitutes what) from succession (what follows what): there never was a first time as a first time is only retroactively constituted, and there never can be a last time as the series cannot out of itself shut down; initiation or closure are not part of the series as such, its formal makeup. A series of this sort can be considered a single action only if it involves the repeated performance of the same concept� In its fourfold invocation starting with “my mother with” ( meine Mutter mit ), Mayröcker’s poem intimates such a performance; we may say that it calls its structure onto the scene� While the structure is then abandoned in each case, the effect of its initial display is that the temporality of exercise, of prayer, of ritual is brought to bear on the series of invocations, such that this poem, in its brevity, opens up access to an expansiveness without beginning or end as it appears to participate in an indefinite ongo- 136 Florian Klinger ingness of performance. At the same time, however, in each of the invocations the serial structure is broken up by a variation that renders the performances different from each other rather than repetitions of the same. To describe the action form of the poem, we thus need to locate the concept that is constitutive of the whole not on the level of a single stanza and its indefinite reiteration, but on the level of the act that constitutes the internal unity of the stanzas. To focus on this unity concerns the action of the poem, its doing, its pragmatic articulation, which largely is a matter of the relationship between speaker and reader. To focus on the performances that are referenced, talked about, concerns the action in the poem, its saying, its semantic articulation, which largely is a matter of the relationship between speaker and mother� We account for the poem’s form if we can say how these articulations are two sides of the same act. As we seek to understand how both hang together, we first consider the action described in the poem, and later get to the action of describing that is the poem� [speaker-mother: the phatic] Due to the absence of active verbs and acting subjects on the level of main clauses, there is a sense that nothing happens in the poem. At the same time, the poem seems to describe nothing but doings. This is possible as the doings are relegated either to the qualifying actions in the subordinate clauses, or to the implicit actions contained in the images of the mother. As such, the doings function as the qualification of a main clause that never materializes� The result is a manifest contrast between the abundance of doings on the one hand and the lack of action on the other: instead of having subjects perform actions to some consequence, the sequence of scenes focuses on who turns and attends to whom - the open arms, tender words, turned face, closed eyes, the greeting, coming, calling, not being able to come, wanting to speak, not being able to speak, coming too late, embracing. All this refers to what linguists call the phatic function of communication, the establishing of contact between interlocutors ( Jakobson 355—56), which includes inconsequential chit-chat, small talk about the weather, or any behavior that sets performers in touch with one another. Malinowski, the first proponent of the term, speaks of a “pure sociability” in which the aim of the action is not this or that, but the making of the channel as such: a “ phatic communion […] in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words. […] It consists in just […] the fact of the personal communion […] achieved by speech […]. Each utterance is an act serving the direct aim of binding hearer to speaker” (Malinowski 314—15). The phatic offers itself as a category of accounting for Mayröcker’s poem because there are, grammatically speaking, no acting subjects and no actions proper� What we have instead is a pre-agential relating of speaker and mother� Mayröcker’s Drama of Association 137 Perhaps the most important way in which the phatic, while at work in every action, differs from an action is that it is a strictly relational category that concerns what lies between agents, the way sender and addressee are constituted only through one another; it can therefore not plausibly be conceived in terms of individual performances but requires the concept of a shared performance. We cannot develop this here, but only note that it is this stratum of communication, the establishing of a “phatic communion” that in Mayröcker’s poem appears isolated, performed by itself, and submitted to a quasi-experimental exploration in a sequence of scenes with combinatorial character. What such combinatorics selects or deselects is, first of all, a performer’s availability for the phatic relation: mother attending to speaker speaker attending to mother mother attending to speaker speaker not attending to mother mother not attending to speaker speaker attending to mother (implied in the mother’s face being “turned away”) mother not attending to speaker speaker not attending to mother In short + + + - - + - - [phatic dramatization of scenes] Beyond thus marking availability, the phatic attending between speaker and mother is attitudinal in that each time its shape is specifically determined from each side. An attitude in the relevant sense is the shape of attending that manifests the phatic function; joined in a relation, attitudes articulate the terms that establish performers through one another. We therefore note a modulation or qualification of the channel by attitudes - which extends the channel’s linguistic conception beyond a pure relating - and call such a modulation its dramatization (for the phatic as drama, see Klinger 103—10). As we then consider the sequence of scenes of encounter in its full phatic dramatic articulation, we can account for their unity in the act of the poem as a whole� The phatic communion staged by the first scene (++) displays as little drama as such an encounter may ever contain, even as we maintain that a phatic relationship as such is dramatic. The mother’s open arms and greeting, and the speaker’s coming toward the mother may be considered acts of “pure sociabili- 138 Florian Klinger ty” in Malinowski’s sense “in which ties of union are created” to constitute “just […] the fact of the personal communion�” The second scene (+ -) dramatizes this fact by staging the onset of a disappearance of the communion, but it brings this onset late� All of “My mother with the tender words / when I called” can be read as a mutual attending, especially as ‘calling’ ( anrufen means both phoning and calling on someone ) here is strictly parallel to the first stanza’s ‘greeting’ - and it is only with “that I couldn’t come,” tagged on to the end of the stanza, that the encounter starts taking a dramatic turn� The third scene (- +) enacts an overt disruption of the encounter, it shows the communion in full crisis: the speaker’s attending and the mother’s will to speak, on the one hand (fostering communion), are overridden by the mother’s turned face and her inability to speak, on the other (obstructing communion). As the last scene (- -) stages a definitive failing of the communion, it doesn’t dramatize such failing in the form of a last embrace or a last exchange of looks� On the contrary, it dramatizes the fact that a “last time” never happens: the mother’s eyes are closed forever and the speaker’s arrival is too late for a last embrace. The drama of this scene doesn’t lie in a failing relationship, but in one that never even has a chance to begin� As a whole, the sequence of scenes manifests a gradual dissociation of the relating between the protagonists� While initially both are turned toward and present to one another such that a shared actuality is achieved, they become less and less so, until finally both are turned away from each other and absent to one another such that any sense of a shared actuality has been lost� The shift in attitude from open and tender to turned away and closed is based in a shift in temporality of the verb where infinite forms (“when…”) are increasingly replaced with finite ones (“as…”), such that the poem moves from the ongoingness of an actuality shared by speaker and mother to the performance of single conclusive deeds that manifest definitive change: “as I came too late to embrace her one last time�” [interpersonal work of mourning] What thus gets staged by the poem is the drama of the loss of the mother, of the detachment from the mother, of the loss of the phatic communion with the mother� But we must be careful to put this the right way. Surely there is a loss at the center, but the poem is neither about the mother’s death nor about the speaker’s grief� As a series of incapacitations (performances working toward finite ends) is introduced to disrupt the initial phatic communion (a performance working toward an infinite end), what intrudes into the latter’s ongoingness is not the finality of death - the fact that the mother dies and death is a finite performance that disrupts the infinite performance that is life. At stake is the phatic communion between speaker and mother, and what Mayröcker’s Drama of Association 139 in a formally relevant sense gets extinguished is only this communion - even as of course, the mother’s death seems to play a role in this extinction. At the same time, the poem is not about the speaker’s situation either: it doesn’t exhibit grief, voice a lament, express any affect at all. As the speaker remains opaque in a way that doesn’t allow for identification (more about this shortly), we as readers move through these scenes with the mother without being acquainted with her, being prompted to have feelings about her, or taking part in a mourning of her loss. If the sequence of scenes between speaker and mother performs some version of the work of mourning, this work appears transposed from the personal realm to an interpersonal one, the shared register of a phatic communion: instead of gradually severing one’s cathectic ties to the person mourned, the process here is one of gradually severing the ties of communion, sharedness as such. That the work performed here is interpersonal and even impersonal doesn’t mean that somehow it is not performed by persons - clearly there is no attempt at a defamiliarization of this kind - but the personal is not in the focus, it is not that which this communication is about. While the individual scenes, due to their gestural detail and simplicity, may appear basic and perhaps even intimate in their familiarity, together they display a spectrum of attitudinal configurations in which any concern with the mother or the speaker is replaced with the drama of communication as such - the shared actuality we called with Malinowski a “phatic communion” - and the closure toward which it tends� [the channel speaker-reader] But what are we to make of the fact that a “last time” is missed - the last moment is not had together, there is no communion in parting? Of the fact that the finite performance that is supposed to interrupt the communion for good instead fails to do so - and thus inadvertently turns out to be not an incapacitation to establish performance, but an incapacitation to disrupt performance? In whatever way we put this fact, it seems that conclusion is replaced with openness, or rather, that the conclusion produces out of itself an openness. With all its structural tightness, the poem presents itself as an integrated effort of closing, yet it opens up again at the very point where it was meant definitively to close down. We can understand this point as the place of a farewell that never happens, such that something about the parting between speaker and mother remains forever unredeemed� The failure of a last encounter leaves a void of communion precisely at the moment of the completion of its loss� Or we take the fact that a “last time” is missed to manifest the opposite: that the loss itself can never be completed. After all, if the last stanza fails to establish completion, the communion must still be on. What is more, it 140 Florian Klinger can never end, for the failure to build the channel one last time here is a failure to end the channel, and thus establishes the channel indefinitely. Our discussion of the phatic drama, the communication staged in it, has lead us to an impasse marked by the question whether the fact that a “last time” is missed means that communion is definitively shut down or sustained indefinitely. Yet the question hardly manifests itself from within the speaker’s exchange with the mother, but its consideration is ours, the reader’s, as the addressee for whom the drama of communication is performed. In taking up the question, our discussion has crossed the line from accounting for the communication staged in the poem toward an accounting for the communication of the poem, that is, of what the poem itself does or is as a communicative act� The communication we then consider as we seek to move past the impasse is not between the speaker and the mother but between the speaker and the reader� If a voice needs a channel, the staging of the phatic drama by the voice cannot take place in the channel that is therein transformed; the phatic relation between speaker and mother must somehow depend in its rendering on the phatic relation between speaker and reader� Overall, my claim will be that the poem is voiced by performing two operations in one: the address to the mother that starts with an invocation and constitutes a phatic dramatic scene of encounter between speaker and mother in each stanza, and an address to the reader for whom, toward whom, and with the participation of whom this encounter is staged. (Technically, we refer to the speaker in the poem and its implied reader, in distinction from its author and actual reader.) Saying that these operations are one act of the poem, one performance, is not to say that they somehow converge with one another as separate communications: the perhaps common and established idea that the channel between speaker and mother and the other channel between speaker and reader are related orthogonally - the reader overhears the drama, the drama is staged in front of them - will have to be abandoned for the other, more unusual idea that both channels are in an important sense one and the same, such that the reader is addressed as a participant in the drama, and by an act of transference takes the place of the mother� [unity of invocation] To assume the level of analysis that corresponds to this act, we first need to account for the unity of the poem as a whole. Under the semblance of serial organization we described in our opening, such unity consists in a rough homology of its stanzas. To name a first element of such homology, each invocation starting with “My mother” doesn’t merely represent the mother discursively, but calls her onto the stage, makes her present, and therein does something more fundamental that concerns the identity of the speaker, Mayröcker’s Drama of Association 141 the possibility from which having a voice in this situation is conceivable at all: it constitutes the speaker’s phatic relationship with the mother each time, thus performatively establishing the mother in her availability as an addressee� Without such addressee, there is no channel for communication, one is in no position to say anything; invocation is one way to establish such a channel and thus the very possibility of communication� As a second element of homology between the scenes, an epithet is added to “My mother” - “my mother with the open arms,” “my mother with the tender words,” “my mother with her face turned away,” “my mother with her eyes closed.” This turns the invocation into an image, a strangely self-enclosed and inert image due to the lack of an active verb, which lends the first line of each scene, taken by itself, the character of a vignette, of a devotional picture perhaps, that - especially when we think of the serial temporality of the exercise - hovers alongside the others without direction. More importantly, adding a qualifying epithet turns the invocation of the mother into a description: the very moment the mother is invoked, the address turns into a description featuring the particular phatic attitude that characterizes the mother in the respective scene� As a third element of homology, each scene responds to the phatic attitude of the mother presented in the first line with a second line that features the phatic attitude of the speaker. A narrative second line is added to the first image line, such that a phatic dramatic scene of encounter is staged, in which the speaker turns from their role of invoker in the first line (largely connected to a presentational activity) to their role of narrator in the second (largely connected to a representational activity). In adding the second line, the scene is clearly not pronounced toward the mother but toward the reader - about the speaker’s relationship with their mother. Of course, the second line only expands on the character of description we found in the first line’s use of epithet which already turned the mother into a character talked about , thus preparing us for the narrative-representational turn in the second line� It is mostly this toward us by which we as addressees of the piece are projected, in which the channel of the piece’s communication calls for us� [invocation: two sides] As the scenes are strung together by homology in this threefold way, the channel works in two directions at once, manifesting a communicative situation toward the mother and toward the reader simultaneously. Thus, the operation of invocation amounts to a triangulation between the invoking voice, the addressee invoked, and the reader for whom the invocation is performed. If we noted that the scenes of encounter are staged, and if we left it unsaid so far in what medium or on what stage, then it has become clear now 142 Florian Klinger that the medium of the staging, if it is allowed to talk this way, is the channel between the speaker and the reader, which is needed in order for the drama of the phatic to be manifested� Let us now take these two sides of the operation apart� According to its first side, we saw, an invocation is a calling of someone absent onto the scene, the production of a channel, a phatic relation that puts the addressee opposite one and thus enables one to speak� According to its other side, we then observe, an invocation stages the first side for an audience. Whether it is a public speech, a funeral, or a theater play - no invocation can be without an audience that provides the phatic medium in which the establishing of an address comes about. To simplify, we may also say that the discursive action of invocation constitutes a channel with the invoked addressee and in doing so constitutes a channel with the audience for whom this is done� Even as this may remain implicit, it is still an indispensable part of the communication. Mayröcker’s piece renders explicit its address of the audience through a situation of overhearing modified by triangulation. Just as the phrase “My mother” is at no point a mere staging of something for the reader, but genuinely rooted in the mother’s address, it is also at no point only an address to the mother, but always already pronounced for the reader� This means that the involvement of the reader is not casual and external to the communicative situation (the scenes of encounter, the drama) between speaker and mother, but internally its part and in this formal sense constitutive of it� While the dramatic scenes don’t thematically involve or address their reader, they depend on the latter as they perform for them, they are staged, which is another way of saying that they are sustained phatically by the channel cast toward the reader� And the involvement of the reader in turn depends on the drama, as the channel established with the mother is deflected toward us, the watching public, who are - through one and the same act of summoning - summoned to watch the summoning of the mother� [unity of the sides: transference] In this act, the address to the mother and the address to the reader - the performance in the poem and the performance that is the poem - seem to coincide� Does this mean that the phatic communion with the reader is directly a part of the phatic communion with the mother and vice versa? To understand how the channel between speaker and mother and the channel between speaker and reader are constituted in a single unified act of summoning, we cannot keep holding on to the triangulation model of communication proposed to us by the structure of invocation� As long as we conceive of the channels as intersecting orthogonally, they will remain separate, and the reader will merely overhear, not participate in the drama. As a lead to a more productive response, we observe that both channels take their departure from Mayröcker’s Drama of Association 143 the speaker. And we observe further that if the channels cannot coexist in unity, unity may still be found in their successive arrangement� Following these leads, I propose to conceive the unity as an exchange of the mother as addressee with the reader as addressee, through an act of transference in which the reader comes to stand in for the mother: the speaker’s address to the mother is carried over to the reader. In psychoanalysis, the concept means that the analysand projects a primary relationship from their childhood, paradigmatically a parent, onto their present relationship with the therapist (Breuer and Freud 302—03). While the poem enacts such transference as a whole, this whole takes the shape of four discrete acts in each of which the mother is invoked and this invocation is then carried over to the reader. Each time, we have a single operation that involves both the address to the mother and to the reader, as is already highlighted by the initial phrase “My mother” with its irresolvable unity of both: the discursive acts of invoking someone, drawing them onto the scene, and of describing them are irreconcilable operations; performing these in unity is the most succinct formula for transference anywhere in the poem� What does it mean to abandon a triangulation model of poetic communication for a transference model? First, and most importantly, it means that representing is replaced with presenting, accounting with acting out. The content of transference lies first of all in its act, which is either a reliving of features of a past relationship, or the latter’s transformation into something productively different, its recasting in light of the present situation - the emphasis in both cases being on performative constitution, such that the present is not merely remembering, signifying, or even actualizing a past, but the only form in which the latter is available under the circumstances (Freud, “Fragment”; Freud, “Remembering”). In this sense, the speaker’s casting themselves toward the reader is the form their past relationship with the mother takes in the present� Instead of receiving a report, the reader is asked to participate. While every poem can be said to be an action, this poem, qua transference, explicitly presents itself as an action that requires action in response. This action - the action of transference that the poem as a whole performs - gains special saliency against the backdrop of the fact that no action takes place in the poem insofar as there is no active verb on the level of a main clause� That the speaker addresses the reader in the place of the mother means that everything the speaker says is directed toward them� It does not mean that the reader is required to respond the way the mother does - after all, the mother’s response is part of the speaker’s rendering of the relationship which, as a whole, is their own projection� This projection is one side of the channel the speaker endeavors to establish with the reader, while the latter’s response to it, solicited by the poem but cast from outside the poem, is the other side. Not only is 144 Florian Klinger the reader not bound to replicate the mother’s response, which is strictly the speaker’s projection, but they could not even plausibly venture to do so, for the obvious reason that they are not the speaker’s mother. Overall, the communicative situation cast by the poem is the following: as the speaker relates to the mother, so the speaker’s account of this relating relates to the reader - speaker : mother = speaker (speaker : mother) : reader. As the transference is thus cast toward the reader, the latter abandons any sense that the phatic drama is staged and unfolds in front of them, but they are directly addressed by it, are its participant in that it is for them to take up the role of addressee, to constitute and uphold the channel together with the speaker� This says something about their relationship with the speaker� For it implies that responding to the act of transference in which the speaker projects their phatic relationship with the mother as their relationship with the reader is not a matter of identification. The latter belongs to the sphere of an orthogonal relating of the reader’s channel with the channel of the drama the reader watches, in which they might get invested qua identification. They don’t engage with the speaker by sharing in the loss of the mother or empathizing in any other fashion - we noted this already in our analysis of the mourning� What is demanded of the reader is not identification but participation, which is a way of saying that the reader finds themselves not through identification in the place of the speaker but through transference in the place of the mother� This is an important, quite uncommon emphasis. As readers, we don’t relate to the speaker by identifying with them� We are not close to the speaker the way we perhaps are used to empathize with the protagonist of a story; they remain opaque to us in this sense. We relate only and precisely as we stay opposite them, an other juxtaposed to us by means of the channel. Precisely as it formally constitutes our speaker and reader positions through one another, the channel is an in-between that remains external to both of us in the sense that it excludes the sharing of a viewpoint or thought content, affective or psychic states, or any other personal determination� This is why it does not constitute a problem for this operation that the mother is familiar to the speaker whereas the reader is not. This difference - the strangeness of the reader - is built into the original concept of transference that demands that the therapist remain strange, or otherwise the notion of carrying over would hardly have an application: it is not despite the fact that the recipient is strange that something is carried over, but because of it, for carrying over requires that the acting out actually manifests itself in a different context. So, transference is an operation supremely suited to describe the address to a reader who is by default not personally known to the speaker, unpredictable, and in this sense indeterminate. But, considering the premise of such strange- Mayröcker’s Drama of Association 145 ness - what then is it that carries over from the address to the mother to the address to the reader? [from natural/ conventional to performative communion] We can answer this question as we consider the larger point of such transference. In Mayröcker’s poem, I propose, transference is the transition from one order of belonging to another: from a communion based in nature or convention to a communion based in performance� If we conceive of the drama between speaker and mother as a part of a larger drama that involves us readers as addressees, this larger drama consists of transforming the speaker’s natural and conventional association with the mother into a performative association with the reader� We have reason to expand our initial talk of a drama between speaker and mother to this larger arena that involves the participation of the reader, for the operation of transference showed itself to be an acting out, a doing of the poem, that constitutes a deeper or more basic drama articulated in the very language of the first. Without changing a word of the first, this more basic drama recasts the pragmatic stakes of the situation such that, as we will see, nothing less than the identities of both the speaker and the reader are put under construction� The relationship with the mother is commonly understood as a given, a bond genealogical and social at once that one cannot choose to have or not to have� When through transference the reader comes to take the place of the mother, this natural-conventional communion is replaced by a performative one� It is not replaced by a conventional one, as there is no sense yet of which reader is going to be addressed, of novel terms of relating that are to take the place of the established terms that ground the relating with the mother. We find such terms outlined in the phatic drama: practices of greeting, welcoming, talking, calling, hugging, coming to visit - all these, regardless of their phatic qualification to communication for communication’s sake, manifest actions that give the child’s natural relationship with the mother a conventional shape� In the relation of transference, in turn, there are no such established terms, no naturally or conventionally marked preference: whoever the reader happens to be comes to serve as a participant in such performative communion� The address is universal� As the act of transference suspends the established term of association, it opens up a realm the terms of which are yet to be worked out� Having entered this relationship by the plain fact of being a reader of the poem, we participate in the speaker’s exchanging their given affiliation - practical terms of performance (conventional) as well as innate belonging to a life form (natural) - with another affiliation that consists of the performatively constituted belonging in a community of a different kind, one that takes place here and now only, and 146 Florian Klinger that for this reason cannot be anticipated or controlled from the position of the speaker who voices the poem� If in the context of natural and conventional relations, the speaker’s language use was authorized in terms of its affiliation to these orders, in the novel relation underway to be established now, no such authorization can yet be claimed; it is a matter of an order to come� [what carries over] If transference means for the reader the impossibility of identification, then this shuts off access to an inside perspective to the speaker’s relationship with the mother. The repertoire of phatic attitudes, between speaker and mother manifesting a communion based in natural and conventional affiliation, doesn’t open up to the reader as well, it remains impersonal and in this sense mute. To be sure, the poem addresses its reader in the same act in which the drama of phatic attitudes unfolds; the reader, moving through their full spectrum, may consider themselves initiated into the practice of making contact, building a channel, sustaining communion. But precisely as this is so, and by the force of the very address that summons the reader and draws them in, there seems no way they can engage in the drama. This - that the drama launches itself toward the reader in the same act in which it seals itself off from them - receives additional emphasis by the way the speaker introduces themselves. In “My mother,” the speaking subject is present only in the possessive pronoun, by grammatical implication in the mother, as it were; the speaker is present insofar as the mother is theirs� The mother in turn is present only qua filial implication in the child; she is present insofar as the child is hers. While the phrase, as we saw, is part of a narrative projected toward the reader, the fact that speaker and mother are only present through mutual implication makes them appear as a unit from which the reader is excluded� The following drama of the phatic is not an overcoming, but an extension and further manifestation of this initial reciprocal implication of speaker and mother� That is, it is part of the reader’s role cast by the poem that the phatic attitudes are not available to them to build their own relationship with the speaker by whom they are addressed. This, then, is the content of transference: the speaker projects a repertoire of phatic attitudes toward the reader in which the latter cannot recognize themselves� They are alienated in the same act that addresses them and solicits their engagement. The content of transference is negative, or rather, it consists of the negativity of being cut off from established terms of performance. Through such negativity, the transformation of the relationship from a natural and conventional affiliation, established ways of acting, to another relationship the terms of which are still to be worked out, is initiated. If the reader, in being addressed, could somehow make out the terms of relating Mayröcker’s Drama of Association 147 with the speaker by looking at the latter’s relating with the mother, such terms would not initiate but preclude transformation� Still, is the phatic drama really needed to account for transference - would not any established kind of action do just as well? Hardly, as only the phatic is impersonal, and in not allowing for identification excludes the reader, thus actively manifesting the fact that their relating to the speaker is bound to be different in the strong sense of outside established terms. Perhaps this holds for any relationship between a poem and its reader, but in the present case the poem works to actively clarify this fact, to manifest it in performance - which appears to be motivated by the premise that this poem enacts a transformation from an established to a performative affiliation of its speaker. Such clarification is achieved by the phatic drama staging the whole repertoire of performances that transference leaves behind, thus making explicit the negativity involved in the transformation� The poem doesn’t merely cast a channel toward the mother by also casting a channel toward the reader, but, in doing so, it clarifies - by having the reader encounter the fact - that the second channel is nothing like the first. [indeterminacy of speaker and reader] What then is the second channel like? Since the address is universal, the only thing that can be predicted about an encounter with a stranger is this: it must involve contact, an interpersonal relation not yet belonging to anyone in particular; strictly between agents, it cannot be conceived in terms of individual performances but requires the concept of a shared performance that constitutes performers through one another� What the poem thus casts toward the reader is not some action that, by virtue of being an action, involves a channel, but an action of building a channel, a phatic action - which, since we found the phatic to be pre-agential, cannot be an action in the normal sense� Such an action alone can be undertaken without knowing what is to come, for its sole purpose is communication as such. Revolving around its own taking place, it doesn’t require a wider sharing of purpose yet - a concept of what one is doing together - on which any normal action depends� But given that the reader’s response is not determined by established terms of performance - could it not consist of any kind of action, personal or impersonal alike? Here the poem limits the reader’s options� For once access to established terms of performance has been cut off in transference, the reader cannot be sure on what grounds to respond; deprived of an established identity as a performer, there is no personal register available to them at this point. This is not merely the uncertainty with which one encounters something never encountered before, but the more corrosive uncertainty of encountering something 148 Florian Klinger that eradicates - explicitly, by a manifest act of negation - one’s previous ways of encountering, thereby leaving it indeterminate who or what one might be. The same can be observed on the side of the speaker� If identity is constituted by casting a relation with an addressee, the speaker’s indeterminacy must directly reflect the indeterminacy the reader bears in this relation, the former’s lack of personal identity matches the lack on the side of the latter� As the executor of an act of transference that abandons established terms of performance such that natural and conventional affiliation is replaced with a performative affiliation, the speaker doesn’t relate as anyone specific; they carry an indeterminacy that is due to the fact that this is a novel relationship, one that is cast toward someone whose affiliation is not yet established, and is only to be established in this very performance� What thus is offered to the reader is a phatic communion with the speaker, a mutual attending about which nothing is known except that, by virtue of transference, it negates the repertoire of phatic attitudes developed in the drama between speaker and mother� It is a communion in which nothing personal is done or said, featuring no determinate identity on either side - for as much as the position of the addressee is under construction, so is the speaker’s who in their formation depends on the addressee in return� The poem uproots both from their established affiliations and seeks to connect them in a novel affiliation the terms of which are an open project. As the addressee of transference, the reader is a participant in the drama, and in this sense subject to the same transformation as the speaker - same not through identification but through taking part in an emergent communion and the task of a mutual constitution as performers� [transference as action form] If, as we said, our accounting for the drama of association is ultimately an accounting for the poem’s action form, we have yet to say how the sides - the drama speaker-mother and the drama speaker-reader, the action in the poem and the action of the poem, the action described and the action of describing - relate in a single unified act. But we found the unity of the sides a troubled unity, one that appears instable from within. The overall action’s running stable, its proper functioning, would require what we called an orthogonal relating of both sides of action that we also identified as the semantic (the action described) and the pragmatic (the action of describing) side of the performance. In such relating, semantics is the way pragmatics is performed, the phatic drama in the poem is the way the basic drama with the reader is cast - or, highlighting the explanatory priority of pragmatics over semantics: what the poem says can be explained in terms of what it does� Mayröcker’s Drama of Association 149 But transference, in casting the action in the poem as the action of the poem, upsets such stability: instead of performing both levels in mutual inclusiveness - having the semantic fulfill the pragmatic aim such that there is no mutual interference of the sides - there is an exchange of one side for the other, such that the pragmatic appears cast in place of the semantic in a succession of both� For an action to relate its sides qua transference means that its semantic side doesn’t contribute to its pragmatic side in the proper way, that they are detached from each other by the nothingness of the transport: if the carrying over between the sides is negativity, we have here the form of an action the pragmatics of which is not supported by its semantics� The expectation - as old as the Western institution of poetry - that the poem may assist us in engaging with it by having its saying and its doing elaborate one another reciprocally, is frustrated. Instead, pragmatics is built on semantics as it is the latter’s carrying over, its negativity, its casting itself toward an addressee� But of course, since the transfer is negativity, one side is determined whereas the other is not� Rather than having a semantic determination support a pragmatic one, we have a semantic determination to which nothing determinate on the other side yet corresponds, and that for this reason cannot receive its determination through the task of fulfilling a pragmatic aim. On the premise that what language means is determined by what it is doing, the semantic side too is rendered indeterminate. While it seems to present a sequence of familiar scenes of relating - stereotypes drawn from the repertoire of convention - the whole appears without a clear purpose, leaving it indeterminate to what end and on what terms the reader is supposed to take it up� This is to say that we are presented, in the phatic drama, with conventional terms of relating that are at the same time abandoned as they are deprived of their pragmatic support; they are presented as abandoned, for it has become unclear what they mean� But since it is all there is for a resemblance of determination, this is what we have. The only determination of the other side is that it is not this side, which means this side in its being shown serves precisely as it is negated as the only indication of a beyond. In their being presented, the conventional terms indicate their own overcoming together with the other side to which they refer and carry over through negation� In staging the drama in four scenes, the poem in a sense does nothing but dwell on that which is lost. Since it is lost the moment it is presented, the phatic drama bears the nostalgic air of an affiliation with nature and convention that appears under the premise of its bygoneness; that we still inhabit while already having moved past it; that is given to us precisely as it is uprooted not only by everything that’s to come, but already by the staging of its givenness. The relations in which our nature and convention consist are shown to us in the very 150 Florian Klinger act with which they cease to mean anything� As we make out these shapes of attending as our own past ways, they paradoxically unfold in front of us in the directionless present of the poem� Our familiarity with them seems of another time and order, but we are excluded from them not by some distance, but right here and now, in the act of making contact. If the whole performance has a certain weightlessness, this is due to the fact that neither side seems to be working normally: something (the thing described, the only thing presented to us) is given up for the sake of something of which it isn’t clear yet what it is, which in turn renders it impossible to tell what the thing given up was in the first place. While it might seem as if one side was determinate whereas the other side was open but indeterminate, a closer look has revealed that the assumed (semantic) determinateness of the drama is only the form taken by its (pragmatic) indeterminacy - but not in a positive relation of support where the semantic side would be manifesting the pragmatic side, but in a transferential relation where the former’s lack of support for the latter effects the latter’s indeterminacy which in turn puts in suspense the former’s assumed determination� Our established natural and conventional terms of engagement are put in suspense without there being any guarantee that other terms will successfully be worked out� This is to say that the poem is not an action, or rather, it is an action at best in the non-normal sense that through its very performance it undoes itself, renders itself indeterminate� Transference is the determinate operation by which the action constitutes such indeterminacy. While one part appears to hold up, it refers and transfers over to another part that doesn’t hold up and is undone� The effect however is not merely, as we said so far, that the first part is in turn rendered indeterminate. There is also an inverse effect: what originally seemed to hold up (the semantic side) is suspended, and the part that seemed undone (the pragmatic side) is established as the onset of something new� Only as one side is abandoned, as the established ways are left behind, can the other side come to pass. No determination gets from one side to the other, but the carrying over, the referring as such, opens up the other side. [an open form? ] Finally - how would an action form with these features be positioned to manifest the drama of transforming natural and conventional association into a performative association? While the form’s openness to one side (the address to the reader, that is, on as yet non-established terms of engagement), coincides with a closure to its other side (the address to the mother, that is, on established terms of engagement), this closure is characterized by an indeterminacy. This is significant: as one side abandons the terms of the other, it doesn’t relate to the latter by means of determinate negation, by which we Mayröcker’s Drama of Association 151 here understand broadly the leaving behind of something on shared terms� Instead, the closure is an indeterminate negation, which follows from the negativity of transference and the mutual indeterminacy of the sides it involves� Only through such indeterminacy can a transformation indeed take place, for as long as the novel association is on shared terms with the old one, it remains bound to it logically, no matter what empirical shape the negation takes. For the transformation in question to succeed, the poem needs to have this form. Rather than performing the onset of a novel order while leaving behind the old order tacitly, the poem performs the onset of a novel order together with the turning away from the old one this implies� When a patient in transference enacts things that are not explained by reference to the present situation, the communication is not expected to also reveal the situation left behind from which those things come. In the language of psychoanalysis, we might say that Mayröcker’s poem, in turn, presents the otherwise repressed underbelly of transference in plain daylight� It puts on display what would otherwise not be allowed to show, makes explicit the otherwise implicit terms of the natural and conventional alliance that it is in the act of abandoning� It is an act of abandoning that orients us not merely about the things left behind, but also about the terms abandoned� It is a transformation that doesn’t repress but stages and contemplates that which it leaves behind� Instead of stacking the sides on top of each other, as it were, the poem places them next to each other to exhibit their indeterminacy� It is precisely through this indeterminacy in the relating of the sides that the leaving behind doesn’t involve a repressive constraint� If the relating was based not in the negativity that is the content of transference and that connects the sides in mutual indeterminacy, but in determinate negation instead, the side turned to would determinately cancel out, replace, and therefore extinguish the side left behind� Whatever shape this logical relation would take in any given case, the fact that there is a logical relation at all renders the transformation repressive. An indeterminate negation, in turn, involves no such canceling out, which we meant to express by saying that the operation at work is an exchange� This leaves free, as it were, the side that’s left behind; it can be suspended without being logically extinguished; it is abandoned without constraint� Insofar as we relate the action featuring in the drama speaker-mother to the action featuring in the drama speaker-reader, this means that the natural and conventional association of the former is not logically overcome by the latter, but abandoned in such a way that it is not implicated in its own overcoming� Precisely as one association is exchanged for the other without constraint, the former must be part of the picture; as the poem shows, it must appear together with, next to the latter, even as it is not there anymore. Our natural and conven- 152 Florian Klinger tional association are left behind not by engaging them, working to overcome or extinguish them, but only by letting them be - in an act of doing something else that has no logical bearing on them� If the poem is not to obstruct a transformation to performative association, it must be such an act. When we locate these features of transformation in the relating of the sides of the poem’s action form, we arrive at a form that articulates within itself its own transgressive character, and for which this articulation is a constitutive part of its performance� Were the form merely to launch itself against the backdrop of established performance, it might either be overlooked as mere noise, or register as some determinate opposition to that performance, relating to it through a logical constraint in which the new negates the old only in order to be assimilated, in this very act, by the old. However, as the form brings with it that which it leaves behind, and lets it be rather than opposes it, we can neither dismiss the transformation as noise (it already relates to things), nor determine it logically and thus assimilate it to established performance (it offers no terms for such assimilation)� Can this performance the sides of which relate indeterminately still be called an action? Can it indeed, by negating one side without constraint, be considered to turn the other into an openness? Can it, as it outruns authorization by natural or conventional association, nevertheless be thought to be anything at all? The answer to these and related questions - questions that concern the improper and therefore instable makeup of the form under consideration - is clear, and it is that none of this can be said in advance� As an indeterminate negation of established terms of performance, the act of the poem gains authorization to the extent to which we as readers draw on it, make sense of it, take it up productively and work our way toward establishing it as an action on novel terms� The poem cannot bring about the transformation by itself, but it gets it underway and summons us to take part in it� Works Cited Breuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud. Studies on Hysteria � The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud� Trans� James Strachey� Vol� 2� London: Hogarth Press, 1955. Freud, Sigmund. “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud� Vol� 7� London: Hogarth Press, 1953. 1—122. ---. “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 12. London: Hogarth Press, 1958. 145—57. Mayröcker’s Drama of Association 153 Jakobson, Roman. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” Style in Language � Ed� Thomas A. Sebeok. New York: MIT Press/ John Wiley & Sons, 1960. 350—77. Klinger, Florian. “Kleist phatisch-dramatisch.” Kleist revisited � Ed� Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Friederike Knüpling. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2014. 103—10. Malinowski, Bronisław. “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages.” The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism . Ed. C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards. London: Routledge/ Kegan Paul, 1923. 296—336. Mayröcker, Friederike. 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