In this piece of writing, I have attempted to deal with some thoughts on mortification and decadence and what it is to fall away, to fall or be fallen. So this paper is about distance: the distance that is created by the fall and its melancholy. "What is the opening step of the Dis-tanz!", Derrida asks creating an etymological break in the word Distanz which is purely stylistic. ".....The play of silhouettes which is created here by the hyphen's pirouette serves as a sort of warning to us to keep our distance from these multifarious veils and their shadowy dream of death" (Derrida, 1978: 49). Distance according to this line of argument, "is the very element of" a woman's power (here used as a cipher for nurture, for the maternal body), (1978: 49).

1. DECADENCE

The paper examines the threat of disintegration, collapse and decadence on three levels. First, the level of things: of edifices and ruins. Second, on the level of the sublime: of desire and melancholy. Third, on the level of phallogocentrism: of male discourse and its deficiencies. In order to pursue these ideas, it is necessary to give some attention to the defences which preserve such "erections". Broadly, the acropolis, the fortress, the stronghold - the fortifications which defend the site from invasion. Secondly, the psychological structures which defend the ego from threat, from the lack in the Other and from the threat of the commonplace. Finally, the defences which protect phallocentric language from failure and subversion by woman and the language of experience; regulation by category which credits itself with the initiative and defends its position by either relegating women to its borders or making "them homologues of men when it educates them" (Lyotard, 1989: 114). Part of this defence rests on power over the rules of transmission, the control of the discourse, control of categories and their meanings. Lyotard argues that this desire to control women and to neutralize difference is exercised by making women into men, "....let her confront death, or castration, the law of the signifier. Otherwise, she will always lack the sense of lack" (1989: 113). Woman must, by this argument, be construed as deficient in order to be subjugated. Moreover, the basis of control - the lack of a penis - allows for a redemption which is always and only abstract. However, to recognise that the notion of "lack" is manufactured, occasions a realisation that "the margin" itself is only the product of the construction of a category as one of many such devices of regulation and categorisation.

II ON FALLEN WOMEN

In medieval times in Europe, all women were regarded as sexually promiscuous by their very nature but some women were able to bring their appetites under control. However, the model of womanhood upheld by the Church was of Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene was second only to the Virgin Mary in importance as a female role model and that was because she reformed and Magdalene houses were set up for the reform of fallen women who chose to give up their life of sin and enter the church. In England, some cities including Bristol, Cambridge and Leicester tried to ban prostitution from the city walls and others tried to keep it in bounds. The siren pervades medieval imagery of temptation and the dangers of pleasure seeking. The imagery of medieval bestiaries represents woman as the devil's gateway and the cause of the Fall. She is usually depicted naked not only to draw attention to her allurements but also to reveal her low social status as a woman and a whore. In allegory she represents the devil and all wordly pleasures, (Hassig, 1995: 114/5). "Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things" (Benjamin, 1977: 178).

III IN THE REALM OF THINGS

"The hill of the Capital, on which we sit, was formerly the head of the Roman empire, the citadel of the earth, the terror of kings..... This spectacle of the world, how is it fallen! how changed! how defaced! the path of victory is obliterated by vines, and the benches of the senators are concealed by a dunghill. (......) The forum of the Roman people, where they assembled to enact their laws and elect their magistrates, is now enclosed for the cultivation of pot-herbs, or thrown open for the reception of swine and buffaloes. The public and private edifices, that were founded for eternity, lie prostrate, naked, and broken, like the limbs of a mighty giant; and the ruin is the more visible, from the stupendous relics that have survived the injuries of time and fortune". Poggio's discourse on the ruins of Rome in the fifteenth century in Gibbon E, 1960 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

IV IN THE REALM OF THOUGHT

In the film Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1957), the notion and action of falling forms the essential motif. The story concerns the fascination of the sublime object (Zizek, 1991), desire and mortification. In Vertigo, the motif of falling makes precarious the sublime object. In the film, this is the character Madeleine who is enigmatic, beautiful, elegant and desirable. Madeleine is the object of fascination, who, as the story reveals, derives part of her fascination from the context in which she is set, the elusive and mysterious story which is constructed around her. She is an emblem of inevitable mortification. The first part of the story concerns the obsessive pursuit of Madeleine as the object of desire which culminates with her (apparent) suicide. The hero is unable to reconcile himself to this loss and is paralysed by melancholia. So far so good and in psycho-analytical terms at this point the hero might be seen as pursuing the sublime object to the point where death is the inevitable outcome for Madeleine. In other words, she has to die bodily because she does not exist corporeally but only as an object of consciousness.

V VERTIGO

Everything is falling. Judy falls to her death from the bell tower, the fantasy figure of Madeleine falls apart and in so doing brings about the disintegration of Scottie's cause and being. The tragic loss of Madeleine is romantic and heroic. It is a death which increases the hold of the ideal on Scottie. He is consumed by a tragic and poetic melancholy which elevates his own experience and transforms the lost object into a narcissistic emblem of lost beauty and innocence. The loss of Judy is both inevitable and cathartic. Scottie loses not only Madeleine but also the realisation that his memories are distortions, his romantic ideals, illusions and his heroic suffering without meaning or object. The object of his desire is transformed into a source of revulsion. That he can have that which he desires, brings him no satisfaction. He is cured of his vertigo. He can look down from the bell tower. Having fallen, he has no fear of falling. He can look down into the abyss of the Other. His fear has been that of the abyss of the lack in the Other (Zizek, 1991: 87), of the world itself and, he finds it was nothing, with all connotations of the word in play.

The sublime is never attained. The individual is always constituted in unworthiness, always deficient in relation to the constructed sublime. This means that to continue, an allegorical representation of the loss is constructed. This melancholic gesture restores the illusion of completion but, of course, cannot satisfy and is not intended to satisfy. It is intended to console and reassure. The emblem functions as an anamnesis to register the loss in representational form. For this reason alone the emblem of loss is melancholic and is redolent with melancholy. It cannot offer consolation because ironically it can only recall the loss. So, the emblem of the lost object provides a false reassurance that completion can also arise from a construction. Let me say this more precisely. It cannot reassure because it arises from an erection. It arises from the constructed feminine and it is a travesty. It is the feminine constructed in the image of masculine desire to meet the needs of sterile perfectionism. It is a feminine which is tidy, logical, entirely representation and without power, ambivalence and sexuality. Indeed, it is merely the speculum of the feminine (Irigaray, 1974).

VI ASSUMPTIONS

This is precisely the argument used by Kristeva to explain the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Assumption which became dogma of the Church where parallels the homologation of the "other"/ "the feminine" into the symbolic order (Kristeva, in Moi, 1986:175). The Doctrine of the Assumption is, hence, an Aufhebung, simultaneously an elevation and a cancellation. The Virgin Mother is a contradiction in terms and constructed as a steril-ised representation of the body of the Mother now made safe and deprived of power. In other words, the Virgin Mother, as representation, is the Law and, as Eagleton argues, "The law is male, but hegemony is a woman; this transvestite law, which decks itself out in female drapery is in danger of having its phallus exposed", (Eagleton, 1990: 58). This is apparent in the ways in which organisations, for example, seek to create the feminine in notions of care and satisfaction: customer care, client satisfaction, and emotional intelligence. So, the organisation constructs itself in diagrams and charts, texts and metrics which seek to uphold the representation of the body but which inevitably achieve a cancellation. It is little wonder, therefore, that notions of quality and care, the ubiquitous valorisation of staff have more in them of melancholy than of matter. These are Eagleton's transvestite manifestations of the Law attempting to present themselves as concerns of the Body: the phallus under the skirt. These are gross substitutes for the power of the feminine in the structure of consciousness.

VII THE PHALLUS EXPOSED

The expression of the embodied feminine cannot be excluded by caricatures of experience, nor by imitations which seek to mimic the body. The desire for pleasure, therefore, can be seen as a desire for the recovery of the body in the union of body and mind, the pleasure principle and the reality principle (Freud, 1986). As Eagleton puts it, "a fantasy of mother and father in one, of love and law commingled" (Eagleton, 1990: 263). Having said this, my purpose in writing this paper is two-fold. First, to give attention to the loss of humanity qua compassion in favour of the veneration of representations and, secondly, to expose the phallus of the representation which is erected to reassure that desire is satisfied and that this humanity is still there. That I have chosen to equate humanity with the feminine is largely to do with more familiar arguments about the relationship between the Body and the Law (Kristeva, 1983). From the melancholy of the various simulacra comes a move to restore the body. However, this can mean that the body is simply re-presented as a further substitution of bodily reproduction with textual reproduction, elevated in order to be cancelled. As the vessel or repository of wisdom, nouV , the feminine then might be seen as the possibility of the "ideal of compassionate community, of altruism and natural affection, … which represents a threat to rationalism….(but where) the political consequences … are ambivalent", (Eagleton, 1990: 60). This is not simply a idealistic view of re-union of Body and Law which still makes the body subject to the law. It is a device to explore the nature of what is excluded, to give emphasis to Otherness since, "What we designate as "feminine", far from being a primeval essence, (is the) "other" without a name, (Kristeva, 1982: 58).

VIII CATEGORIES AND ENCRYPTIONS

"Gentlemen", he said, "I invite you to go and measure that kiosk. You will see that the length of the counter is one hundred and forty-nine centimeters - in other words, one hundred-billionth of the distance between the earth and the sun. The height at the rear, one hundred and seventy-six centimeters, divided by the width of the window, fifty-six centimeters, is 3.14. The height at the front is nineteen decimeters, equal, in other words to the number of years of the Greek lunar cycle. The sum of the heights of the two front corners and the two rear corners is one hundred and ninety times two plus one hundred and seventy-six times two, which equals seven hundred and thirty-two, the date of the victory at Poitiers. The thickness of the counter is 3.10 centimeters, and the width of the cornice of the window is 8.8 centimeters. Replacing the numbers before the decimals by the corresponding letters of the alphabet, we obtain C for ten and H for eight, or C10 H8 which is the formula for naphthalene" (Eco, 1988: 288).

IX DECLINE AND FALL

So, this writing succumbs to entropy, gives way to the falling apart of its parts, fails to defend against disintegration, as edifice, l'erection tombe and as edification, l'erection tombe. Meaning is posited in the fragments. The pieces of the text reveal their melancholy in their nature and composition. The lack is explicit and intentional. The piece is founded on the relationship between allegory and irony which, according to De Man, share an identical structure, "in both cases, the relationship between sign and meaning is discontinuous" (De Man, 1983: 209). "Allegory supplies the necessary structure for its ironic subversion", (Hart, 1989: 158) a movement which is both violent and minuscule. Irony is the device which causes the erection to fall, which reveals what is behind the defences, which shows constructions to be constructions. Kierkegaard speaks of the ironists as concealing jest in seriousness and seriousness in jest, the actuality is destroyed by the actuality itself (Kierkegaard, cited in Hart, 1989: 158). From the transience of my biographical standpoint, I see ruins and ruination and, from the distance, I regard it with an ironic smile.

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Zizek, S. Looking Awry, An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culure, Cambridge Mass: An October Book, MIT Press. 1991.