BEING NOWHERE:

Sarah Palin on Kazimir Malevich

Steve Kemple

The World Is Everything That Is The Case.1

Rule 1: You are playing The Game.

Rule 2: Whenever you think about The Game, you lose.
Rule 3: Loss must be announced.2

A maker-of-things, in a certain respect, is necessarily delusional. In making our various

utterances (to use the term in its broadest sense), we, willingly or not, regard our utterances as
capable of taking on a quality that is, so far as the conventions of logic and reason are concerned,
self-refuting. The fact of the utterance that occurs is in defiance of our most sacred axiom, on
which rests the criteria whereby we define the real from the not. The moment of utterance, the
only moment a maker-of-things can truly be aware of, hangs contingent on suspending the
principle of contradiction, which generally states that some thing cannot simultaneously be and
not be the case. Is/isn't is the paradigmatic dichotomy wherein the possibility of coherence is
projected onto the world. That we can talk or even think about a thing is contingent upon our
being able to distinguish between what is the thing and what isn't the thing.

Would You Want A Revolution Without A Revolution?

I am going to argue that Sarah Palin’s remarks3 regarding the Gravina Island Bridge (commonly

1
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C.K. Ogden. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 2003.
Print.
22
Boyle, Andy. "Mind game enlivens students across U.S." The Daily Nebraskan. Lincoln, NE. 19 Mar 2007. Print.
33
In 2006: “‘We need to come to the defense of Southeast Alaska when proposals are on the table like the [Gravina
Island] bridge, and not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that's so negative,’
Palin said in August 2006, according to the Ketchikan Daily News.” In 2008: “‘I told Congress, 'Thanks, but no
thanks,' on that bridge to nowhere,’ Palin said Friday in Ohio, using the critics' dismissive name of the project. ‘'If
our state wanted a bridge,' I said, 'we'd build it ourselves.'’ (Dilanian, Ken. “Palin backed ‘bridge to nowhere’ in
2006.” USA Today. 31 Aug 2008. Print.)

1
known as the “Bridge to Nowhere”) at heart culminate a profoundly contemporary
reinterpretation of Kazimir Malevich's 1915 painting “Black Square on White Square” insofar as
the conceptual space4 defined by her statements materially subvert a dominantly assumed ends
as an instance of an established category. In doing so, Palin established the “Bridge to
Nowhere” as an updated model for effective contemporary post-political activism, especially in
regards to the creative class.5

By establishing a particular thing as a member of some category, it is generally implied that

some criteria of that category is, or can be reasonably argued to be, satisfied by attributes of that
particular thing. Although the bridge was never constructed, it nonetheless is a bridge insofar as
it satisfies the established criteria for the category “bridge.” Taken at face value, the phrase
conjures imagery of a vast deserted bridge, arcing pale, disappearing into a grey Alaskan mist. If
a bridge can be most fundamentally understood as something whose presence enables going
between two disparate points, then, in order for a thing to be a bridge, there must be at
minimum two nonidentical points between which the bridge can traverse. In other words, the
general criteria for calling something a bridge is twofold: (1) there must exist two (or more)
points, and (2) the thing in question must, at minimum, materially capacitate the possibility of
going from one of those points to another.

Considering the first criterion, we can reasonably infer that the presence of the “Bridge to
Nowhere” signifies the existence of disparate points between which it traverses. In other words,
because there is a “Bridge to Nowhere”, it must be the case that there is one end of the bridge
that is somewhere and somewhere else another place at the other end of the bridge. Of the first
place-that-exists we know almost nothing except that it exists somewhere, that it is a place, and
that it is situated at one end of the bridge. Of the second place-that-exists, we know only that it
exists somewhere, that it is situated at the opposite end of the bridge from the first place-that-
exists, and that it is “Nowhere.” Thus far we have ascertained that one end of the bridge is
somewhere and the other end is somewhere else. Assuming it is a literal, physical bridge, whose
geographic whereabouts are unknown, we cannot say anything regarding the somewhere on one
end other than that it is, generally speaking, somewhere. Regarding the second end of the
bridge, which is somewhere else, we are by way of the term “nowhere”, granted more specific
information regarding its whereabouts: The second end of the bridge is nowhere, which we
have already established is somewhere else in relation to the somewhere at the opposite end of
the bridge. As with any place, it can be talked about in relation to any other place(s). For the
sake of clarity, we will consider these locations in relation to wherever this essay is being read;
this place we will generally refer to as the variable here, whereby it is unnecessary to relate
either ends of the bridge to each other; we may simply say they are both somewhere. One end of
the bridge is somewhere. The other end of the bridge is also somewhere. Because one of the
ends of the bridge is nowhere, then it must be true that somewhere is nowhere.

44
For an interesting (but somewhat technical) discussion on the topic of conceptual spaces from the perspective of
cognitive science, see Peter Gardenfors’ Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry of Thought (MIT Press, 2000).
55
In A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press, 2004), McKenzie Wark observes an emerging class scheme
within the information economy, wherein the creative class (alternately the “hacker class”; he uses the term “hack” to
broadly signify a method of engaging with information), are assigned significant responsibility to relentlessly
instigate social change: The hacker class, producer of new abstractions, becomes more important to each
successive ruling class, as each depends more and more on information as a resource. The hacker class arises out
of the transformation of information into property, in the form of intellectual property, including patents,
trademarks, copyright and the moral right of authors. The hacker class is the class with the capacity to create not
only new kinds of object and subject in the world, not only new kinds of property form in which they may be
represented, but new kinds of relation beyond the property form. The formation of the hacker class as a class
comes at just this moment when freedom from necessity and from class domination appears on the horizon as a
possibility. (Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto [v5.1: transitional version]. MIT U, 22 May 2002. Web.
<web.mit.edu/cms/Events/mit2/Abstracts/mckenziewark.pdf>).

2
We have arrived at a very interesting statement: somewhere is nowhere, wherein the
relationship signified by the word “is” is obscure, in that it is unclear which term modifies the
other. On the one hand, the statement could read: “There is somewhere that is nowhere,” or, on
the other hand: “There is nowhere that is somewhere.” This can be partly resolved with the
observation that the nonspecific existential signifier “nowhere” is the negation of “somewhere”:
saying something is “nowhere” is the same as saying it is “not somewhere.” With this in mind,
we can restate the statement as: somewhere is not somewhere.

But we can reduce this further by looking at the meaning of “somewhere.” To say something is
somewhere is to say that it is located at a non-specific place. Generally speaking, “somewhere”
is used in relation to some point of reference, e.g. “I left it somewhere over there” or “The coffee
shop is somewhere near the bakery.” Even when a context is not explicitly made, there is often
an implicit one: “I'm sure your glasses are somewhere” does not (typically) mean to say: “I am
confident that your glasses do exist.” If someone's glasses are already the topic of a
conversation, it is probable that the parties involved agree that the glasses in question do, in
fact, exist somewhere. “Somewhere” needs a context in order to be meaningful; this context is
usually provided by the subject of the sentence or the implicit topic of the conversation. In the
case of the missing glasses, the implied context most likely involves the general whereabouts
they last recall having them. In the statement somewhere is not somewhere, the subject is
conceptually identical, but inverse to, the modifier. Without a negation, the statement would be
empty of information, i.e. resembling the form A is A, and therefore static and without new
content. Rather, the simple addition of “not” creates a self-perpetuating dynamic relationship
between the otherwise identical subject and modifier.

Because of the existential claim of the word “somewhere,” this dynamic relationship latches
onto itself, establishing a continual feedback loop by way of conceptual self-representation. We
have arrived at a statement whose recursive structure is formally very similar to the most basic
formulation of the infamous liar's paradox, which reads: “This sentence is false”.6

There is a second criteria that should be addressed: a bridge must materially capacitate the
possibility of movement between two points. Since we have already done the hard work of
establishing the existence of somewhere and nowhere, it is relatively easy to point out that the
“Bridge to Nowhere” must materialize the possibility of going from a place somewhere to a place
nowhere (that is also somewhere).7 It is important that when I engage with the idea of a “Bridge
to Nowhere,” I can place myself on an imaginary “Bridge to Nowhere.” That is, until I have had
a literal interaction with the physical structure of the bridge (which would be impossible because
it was never built), my engagement with it is purely mental. The phrase “Bridge to Nowhere”
has provided clues as to what it is like and I thereby find myself with crude expectations: Sarah
Palin's utterances represent the possibility of traversing from somewhere to somewhere that is
not somewhere.

66
A more devilish formulation of this same paradox was discovered in 1962 by W.V.O. Quine: “Yields falsehood when
preceded by its quotation” yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.
77
In imagining this possibility, it would be extraneous, if not counterproductive, to consider practicality. All that is
really necessary is for the possibility to exist at some time for someone or something in some regards. By this token
we can rightly call something a bridge even when it is not possible for us to cross it, as in the case of a bridge built for
nonhuman traffic, or a metaphorical or non-literal bridge, such as are commonplace in Western pop song structure,
being in some way conceptually identical to the structure and function of a literal bridge.

3
In “Seeing the Revolution, Seeing the Subject,” the Slovenian philosopher (and, interestingly,
ex-communist) Rado Riha discusses the abstract conditions for a contemporary political
revolution. Invoking Robespierre’s infamous proclamation: “Citizens, would you want a
revolution without a revolution?” in tandem with Lacanian psychoanalysis, he suggests desire
precludes the possibility of a revolutionary politics. According to Riha, in order for a revolution
to take place, its proponent must not merely desire the effects brought about by a revolution, but
that they must have a desire for desire itself as an actual ends:

But the fact that desire, ultimately, is desire of nothing in particular, signals that
all objects of desire are related metonymically to that which animates desire and
which desire tries to avoid: the cause of desire. What sets desire in motion is, no
doubt, the nothing, but the embodied nothing, the nothing as something, which I
propose to call the real of desire. [...] The introduction of the category of desire is
thus a precondition for theorizing the possibility of politics today, a politics which
is neither positive nor negative, but which is, as phrased by H. Arendt, the politics
of ‘a capacity for beginning’, the politics of the interruption of a given situation,
by operating in the nothingness or, more precisely, by producing the absence.8
88
Riha, Rado. "Seeing the Revolution, Seeing the Subject." Parallax 9.2 (2003): 27-42. Academic Search Premier.
EBSCO. Web. <http://research.cincinnatilibrary.org:2051/login.aspx?

4
That in itself, the “Bridge to Nowhere” embodies the form Riha discusses and is in this light
proto-revolutionary there is no question. But in itself, the “Bridge to Nowhere” does not
warrant much discussion outside the discourse of politics. Yet there is another crucial aspect to
understanding the profundity of Sarah Palin’s statements: The Bridge to Nowhere was never
built. So why are we even talking about it, much less comparing it to a nearly century-old
painting?

Riha goes on to “show an affinity which in my view exists between the subject that emerges
literally from the painting with the subject appropriate to an event such as the revolution.
Crudely put, Malevich’s painting opens our eyes so that they may see the revolutionary
subjectivity.”9 As an object, there is nothing remarkable about the painting. It’s title is as clear a
description as can be given: “Black Square on White Square”. Seeing what is remarkable about
the painting involves seeing that there is nothing to be seen, that looking at the painting is, in a
sense, looking at something that is nothing. It “enables us to simultaneously see the signifier
and the place of its inscription, the empty place of its absence, that is to say, it enables us to
contemplate simultaneously the two ‘normally’ exclusive elements whose presence is ruled by
the alternation of the absolute ‘either/or’.”10

Though his arguments are nonetheless satisfactory to his point, what Riha seems to take for
granted are the factors that preclude the situation in which anyone would arrive at the point of
radical subjectivation, realizing they are beholding nothingness materialized. By establishing a
particular thing as a member of some category, it is generally implied that some criteria of that
category is, or can be reasonably argued to be, satisfied by attributes of that particular thing. In
establishing the painting as a painting, it was understood that it was something to be looked at.
Whereas it would be hardly problematic today, a basic expectation of a thing established as
being a painting in 1915 was that there be some sort of depicted subject. Prior to any kind of
revelation, the painting had to have been established as a material subversion of its category. Its
physical form, the fact that it had been painted on, its hanging on the wall, were just enough to
establish the effect. This form creates a self-perpetuating feedback loop between the otherwise
identical subject and modifier.

As the painting is not what is remarkable but its situation that exalts it to remarkability, so
nothing is remarkable about the Gravina Island Bridge. But when Sarah Palin made
contradictory claims regarding her relationship to the Gravina Island Bridge, she established a
synthesis between the bridge and her relationship to it. In 2006, she made a positive statement.
In 2008 she made a negative statement regarding the same state of affairs. This mirrors,
exactly, the form of the “Bridge to Nowhere” in that she began somewhere and ended up
somewhere that is not somewhere. In contemplating this traversal, we are faced with the
presence of the “alternation of the absolute ‘either/or’.”

Thus, I find myself entertaining the idea of being nowhere, of being somewhere that is not
somewhere, an augmented formulation of the previously discussed statement “somewhere is
not somewhere.” Herein lies the profundity of Sarah Palin's interpretation of Kazimir Malevich:
In engaging with the “Bridge to Nowhere,” we are actually confronted with the very possibility of
our own experience and thereby the possibility of our own existence. By integrating our selves
into the recursive somewhere that is not somewhere, we are faced with the bewildering,
paradoxical nothingness materialized, and are forced to confront this paradox within ourselves.

direct=true&AuthType=cookie,ip,cpid&custid=cincy&db=aph&AN=9757206&site=ehost-live>
99
Riha, Rado. (ibid).
1010
Riha, Rado. (ibid).

5
 “Politics can become expressive only when it is a politics of freeing the virtuality
of information. In liberating information from its objectification as a
commodity, it liberates also the subjective force of statement. Subject and object
meet each other outside of their mere lack of each other, by their desire merely
for each other. Expressive politics does not seek to overthrow the existing
society, or to reform its larger structures, or to preserve its structure so as to
maintain an existing coalition of interests. It seeks to permeate existing states
with a new state of existence, spreading the seeds of an alternative practice of
everyday life.” - McKenzie Wark11

1111
Wark, McKenzie (ibid).